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8:00 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Radio: Jeff Singer was a guest on this Sunday's edition of The Kudzu Vine, discussing the aftermath of the 2014 elections, the future of the Democratic Party in the South, as well as 2015's gubernatorial contests. You can listen to the show here. A big thanks as always to hosts David McLaughlin and Catherine Smith!
11:59 AM PT: PA-Sen: How quickly Kathleen Kane's star has fallen. In 2012, she scored a resounding victory as the first Democrat to win a race for attorney general since Pennsylvania made it an elected position in the early 1980s, pulling in more votes than any other statewide candidate. As a woman with a law-and-order profile, she had "rising star" written all over her—except it turned out to be written in disappearing ink.
That's because Kane, a former prosecutor, is now on the wrong end of an investigation herself. A grand jury has been looking into whether Kane's office improperly leaked information from another grand jury to undermine a former deputy attorney general who worked for her Republican predecessor (none other than outgoing Gov. Tom Corbett) and has frequently been critical of Kane. Kane has insisted she's done nothing wrong, but the ongoing revelations stemming from this inquiry have been ugly and damaging.
In fact, they've hurt her enough that she's now taken herself out of the running as a possible challenger to Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in 2016. Instead, she announced over the weekend that she'll seek a second term as attorney general, but the headlines she earned were not positive: "Kane vows to fight for her office" read one and "Kathleen Kane, facing grand jury investigation, announces 2016 re-election bid" read another. It's possible Kane can turn things around for herself, but at this point, Republicans are probably quite eager to target her and win back the AG post.
12:08 PM PT (David Jarman): Votes: Last Friday, we discussed how the "cromnibus" vote wasn't a party-line vote, but it wasn't an establishment-vs.-outsider vote either (or a "second dimension" vote, if you're into the jargon associated with the DW-Nominate vote aggregation system); it was more of a left-and-right-flanks against the middle vote. Keith Poole's VoteView blog finally graphed the cromnibus vote on Monday, and they seem to agree. If it were a strict party-line vote, the cutline would be horizontal, but if it were a "second dimension" vote like the Amash amendments to the NSA, it'd be a vertical cutline. Instead, here we have a diagonal cutline, reflecting how it's kind of a hybrid between the two.
If you're into really hair-splitting major votes like this, there's a terrific new tool called VoteCruncher that does all that for you. No more combing the roll call list by hand for Ds and Rs, or progressives and Blue Dogs, or southerners and northeasterners, or even by committee membership (important, because Appropriators tend to vote differently than everybody else): they do all that for you in the crosstabs. Each vote comes with graphics for the geographical and ideological breakdown of each vote, with the "ideology bar" providing a great at-a-glance summary of what a vote looks like.
1:09 PM PT: IL-Sen: Rep. Bill Foster, who'd be one of the strongest Democratic challengers to Republican Sen. Mark Kirk in 2016, has offered his first comments on the record about the race, though all he's doing at this point is not ruling out a run ("At this point I am just focused on getting the end of year business done"). Columnist Lynn Sweet previously claimed that Foster was "very, very interested" in a bid, though that statement was completely unsourced.
1:18 PM PT (Jeff Singer): Houston Mayor: We recently took a look at next year's open seat race for America's fourth largest city, and Theodore Schleifer of the Houston Chronicle gives us more information about where things stand.
Right now, Democratic state Rep. Sylvester Turner looks like the frontrunner, holding a critical base of support among the city's African American electorate. However, with so many other contenders running or seriously considering jumping in, this looks like it will be a very unpredictable contest. Fellow Democrat and Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia is contemplating a campaign, and he would emerge as a formidable contender. However, Garcia would need to resign from office to run, and he would likely be replaced with a Republican. The entire article is very worth reading for an early look at this contest.
1:27 PM PT: CA-Sen: Here's a new name to add to the giant bucket of Democrats that'll get poured over California's Senate race if Barbara Boxer decides to retire (as she reportedly might): Los Angeles-area Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who says that "nothing is off the table" when it comes to a potential bid. That's a tune she's whistled before, though. Sanchez was reportedly interested in replacing Boxer back in 2010, too (though Boxer wound up running for another term), and long ago, she considered a run for governor that same year as well.
1:38 PM PT: Oglala Lakota County, SD: It's not often that counties get renamed, but when they do, there's usually an interesting story behind the decision. Shannon County, South Dakota had the distinction of being the most heavily Indian county in the entire nation, but the county's very name was an insult in and of itself, since it was named after Peter Shannon, a 19th century judge who was instrumental in seizing lands from the Sioux.
Shannon's history was not well-known, but after a local leader uncovered and publicized his back story, Democratic state Rep. Kevin Killer succeeded in putting a measure on the ballot to change the jurisdiction's name to Oglala Lakota County. Over 80 percent of voters approved the change last month, which will take effect soon.
2:02 PM PT: UT-Sen: As we wrote recently, a new law may change the way Utah nominates candidates for office by requiring Democrats and Republicans to allow anyone to petition their way on to the primary ballot. Under current rules, only hopefuls who earn at least 40 percent of the vote at party conventions are permitted to advance to the primary.
The state GOP is trying to block the law in court, but if they're unsuccessful, the person at greatest risk may be Sen. Mike Lee. Lee is an incendiary ally of Firebreather in Chief Ted Cruz, and even if he has to deal with primary voters instead of convention-goers, he'll still be heavily favored—he's signaled his conservative tribal belonging loud and clear. But Lee may yet be concerned, since he only narrowly defeated Tim Bridgewater in the 2010 primary, 51-49, after the two succeeded in keeping Sen. Bob Bennett below the 40 percent mark at the convention. (Bridgewater also beat him 57-43 among delegates.)
That probably explains why the Club for Growth, which loves itself some Mike Lee, has put out some polling from Basswood Research showing the incumbent with gaudy favorables among a hypothetical Republican primary electorate. Lee has a 76-11 score, compared with a 72-23 rating for fellow Sen. Orrin Hatch, who faced a primary himself in 2012 but stared his challenger down quite handily. Those are some strong numbers, but presumably the Club wouldn't even bother putting them out unless there were rumblings of a possible challenge in some corners.