Kentucky Governor-elect Matt Bevin (R), flanked by Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis and her husband, Joe Davis
Leading Off:
• Election Night 2015: Despite running the worst campaign imaginable, Republican businessman Matt Bevin has recaptured the Kentucky governor's mansion for the GOP, defeating Democratic state Attorney General Jack Conway. With the entire state reporting, Bevin crushed Conway by a 53-44 margin, while independent Drew Curtis took less than 4 percent. Conway's performance was the worst by a Kentucky Democrat since 1863, and Bevin's victory will make him just the second Republican governor the state's had since 1971.
But given the sharp rightward trend in the Bluegrass State in recent years, Republicans always had an excellent chance to pick up this seat, particularly because popular Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear was forced out by term limits. Bevin, however, did everything he could to piss away his chances. A lazy fundraiser with a thin skin, even the Republican Governors Association temporarily abandoned him an effort to whip him into shape with some "tough love." Perhaps it worked, or perhaps Kentucky's long march toward the GOP was just too much for Conway to overcome—and enough to help carry Bevin over the top.
Detractors also criticized Conway for running a weak campaign, and he's often been viewed as too-slick candidate who doesn't connect well with voters. But his failings were never as obvious as those of Bevin, who excelled at pissing off members of his own party in dramatic fashion. Still, the final results were nevertheless at least somewhat surprising, since not a single recent poll had found Bevin with the lead. Was this yet another polling fail, or did Bevin simply surge too late for surveys (the last of which was conducted a week ago) to detect? It's something we'll have to ponder.
Most distressingly, Bevin's win puts Kentucky's lauded Medicaid expansion program (known as Kynect) in grave jeopardy, since Beshear established it by executive order. If Bevin is truly willing to roll back the Medicaid coverage of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, the human cost will be exceptional, and we'll see a vision of the GOP's heartless dystopia more starkly than ever before.
In a small consolation for Kentucky Democrats, they appeared to narrowly hold on in a couple of other statewide offices: attorney general (won by Andy Beshear, son of the outgoing governor) and secretary of state (retained by Alison Lundergan Grimes, who lost last year's Senate race badly). However, Auditor Adam Edelen, who'd been talked up as a possible challenger to GOP Sen. Rand Paul next year, lost his bid for re-election. And whatever worries Republicans had about Paul jeopardizing his Senate seat with his desultory presidential campaign now seem pretty moot.
In Virginia, the other marquee state with elections on Tuesday night, the news was poor for Democrats as well. They failed to retake the state Senate, where they needed a net gain of just one seat, and they made barely a dent in the state House. Once again, weak off-year election turnout proved devastating to the party and remains the Democrats' number one electoral problem.
Senate:
• LA-Sen: Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle came surprisingly close to defeating fellow Republican David Vitter in last month's jungle primary, and it sounds like we haven't heard the last from him. State Sen. Fred Mills, whom The News-Star describes as Angelle's best friend, says that Angelle is considering running for Vitter's Senate seat next year. Mills told the paper, "I think he's going to run — keep it going." While Angelle hasn't said anything publicly, he had Mills serve as his spokesman in his place in an interview with The News-Star, so Angelle probably wants Mills to get his name out there.
It's far from clear what will happen to Vitter's Senate seat next year. Vitter would be able to appoint a replacement for the final year of his term if he becomes governor, and there's no way he would select Angelle. (Angelle hasn't endorsed Vitter, and he doesn't seem likely to.) If Vitter loses and runs for re-election, it would make sense for Angelle to challenge him; if Vitter just called it quits, Angelle could also campaign for the open seat. Rep. Charles Boustany is also interested in a Senate bid, and Angelle could run for his House seat instead if Boustany bails.
• NC-Sen: After UNC System President Tom Ross was forced to resign by the Board of Governors in a controversial move that appears to have been motivated by partisanship, he was mentioned as a possible Democratic Senate candidate. Ross never publicly expressed interest in challenging Sen. Richard Burr, and he just told Wake Forest students that he won't be running.
• UT-Sen: One year ago, it looked like tea partying Sen. Mike Lee was in for a competitive primary battle. Powerful businessmen were still pissed at Lee for his role in the 2013 shutdown, and Jon Huntsman Sr. and prominent bank president Scott Anderson were actively searching for a candidate to challenge Lee. Well, that hasn't happened: Anderson is co-chairing Lee's campaign, Huntsman hasn't made any obvious moves to unseat the senator he once called an "embarrassment," and no notable Republicans are running against Lee.
The National Journal's Andrea Drusch tells us how Lee's political fortunes improved so quickly. Unlike other tea partiers who delight in picking fights with the establishment, Lee decided to extend an olive branch to his powerful detractors. Lee's allies in the business community set up meetings between the senator and Anderson and Huntsman, where Lee was able to win them over and, in the words of another moderate businessman, convince them he was "more than just a bomb-thrower." Lee also picked a chief of staff who was close to the Huntsman family. Utah has a small and powerful business elite, and Lee's personal tactics may not have worked nearly as well in a larger state, but they did what they needed to do here.
• WI-Sen: A new conservative group called Wisconsin Alliance is out with a TV spot, which Politico says is running for "six figures on a digital, cable and broadcast buy." The ad depicts three contestants on what's supposed to be Jeopardy! answering "Who is Russ Feingold" in response to statements like, "He voted against pay raises for the military 15 times." The spot tries to portray Feingold as too liberal, but it feels like this commercial is meant for a much more conservative state than light blue Wisconsin.
Gubernatorial:
• LA-Gov, LG: We have less than three weeks to go before the Nov. 21 runoff, and a pair of polls show Republican David Vitter losing to Democrat John Bel Edwards by double-digits. JMC Analytics, on behalf of the Baton Rouge station WVLA, gives Edwards an insane 52-32 lead. To make things even better for Edwards, the 16 percent of undecideds say they're leaning towards Edwards by a 54-35 margin.
JMC also surveys the lieutenant governor's race and gives Republican Billy Nungesser a surprisingly tiny 40-39 edge over Democrat Kip Holden. While Holden has some name recognition as the head of East Baton Rouge Parish, he has little money and hasn't been running a particularly active campaign. It's possible this is a sign that the entire sample is too Democratic but even so, Edwards' lead is so huge that it should hold up.
On Tuesday, Market Research Insight gave Edwards a 54-38 edge. MRI did not identify a client, but it's worth noting that they were the only pollster to correctly show Scott Angelle running close to Vitter during the October jungle primary. A post-primary Anzalone Liszt Grove for the Democratic-backed group Gumbo PAC gave Edwards a 52-40 lead: If there are polls out there showing Vitter within striking distance or even winning, they haven't been released yet. Still, after Tuesday's polling debacle in Kentucky, Democrats should be careful about relying on just a small group of pollsters to give them an accurate picture of this contest.
Louisiana is a dark red state, and we expected Edwards to fall behind after the GOP began attacking him for the first time. So far, these polls say that's just not happening. Team Red is going to keep trying, and Louisiana airwaves will be saturated over the next three weeks with spots portraying Edwards as a crony for the unpopular Obama administration. We'll see if Edwards can stand the heat once the furnace is set to full blast, but Democrats should be very happy to see that he's held his ground so far.
House:
• CA-21: Team Blue's streak of bad luck here continues. Some Democrats were interested when Connie Perez, who served as regional representative to the State Lottery Commission Audit Committee, announced that she would challenge Republican Rep. David Valadao, but Perez dropped out of the race on Tuesday. Daniel Parra is the only Democrat left in the race, but he's raised very little money. Obama carried this Central Valley seat 55-44, but Valadao easily won in 2012 after Team Blue nominated a weak candidate. Unless something changes, history will repeat itself.
• FL-11: Justin Grabelle, the chief of staff to Republican Richard Nugent, quickly kicked off a bid for this seat after his boss announced his retirement on Monday, and Nugent wasted no time endorsing him.
However, Grabelle shouldn't expect a smooth path to the GOP nomination. Rep. Dan Webster has been looking for a way to stay in the House ever since he learned that his seat would become safely Democratic, and he acknowledged that he is considering running here. Webster doesn't live in the new version of the 11th but he does have a home in the seat, and Webster currently represents about half of what will be the 11th.
Romney won this seat 58-40, and it's very tough to see Team Red losing it. Ex-GOP state Sen. Nancy Argenziano did muse on Facebook that she used to represent some of this seat, so maybe she's interested. Argenziano left the GOP to become an independent, and she wanted to run in the 2nd District as a Democrat in 2012. However, a recently passed Florida law prevented candidates from running under a party's banner if they weren't registered with that party a year before the filing deadline.
Argenziano ended up running as an independent for the state House, and she lost to a Republican incumbent 58-42. It sounds like Argenziano is a Democrat now but while she'd have more name recognition than almost anyone else Team Blue could field, she'd still face long odds in a general election.
• MO-01: This is definitely one of the most unusual arguments for sending a candidate to Congress pretty much ever:
There is not one woman in Congress with an Afro! If you think there should be a woman with an Afro in Congress, perhaps you should do something about it!
That remarkable plea for support (posted on Facebook, along with a donation link) comes from state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, who is challenging Rep. Lacy Clay in next year's Democratic primary and
now sports a traditional African-American hairstyle—
though she didn't always. (Also, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee
might take exception to Chappelle-Nadal's claim.)
A coiffure-based appeal might seem frivolous and even a little bizarre (after all, people can always change hairstyles, like the senator herself has), but there's something more at work here. While both Chappelle-Nadal and Clay are black—and so is a majority of the St. Louis-based 1st Congressional District—the centerpiece of Chapelle-Nadal's campaign is her charge that Clay was invisible during last year's unrest in Ferguson following the death of Mike Brown at the hands of police.
But while Chapelle-Nadal is now positioning herself as the spokesperson for African Americans in the 1st District, the racial politics of her latest race are by no means straightforward. In her 2010 bid for state Senate, a columnist for the St. Louis American, an African-American newspaper, noted that all four candidates in the primary had been "challenged for their degree of 'blackness'" and averred that Chappelle-Nadal "is often said to see herself as more Hispanic or multicultural than black." Local observers attributed her narrow plurality victory to her strong support from white voters and a late $30,000 donation from an Asian-American businesswoman.
It may not make a whole lot of sense to outsider, or even seem fair—as the American put it, Chappelle-Nadal is certainly black "in the sense that matters to a Ladue cop watching the traffic pass by"—but Chappelle-Nadal faces a real struggle to claim the mantle of black authenticity. That's why she's hammered Clay over Ferguson, and that's why she's touting her Afro. Will this approach work, though, or will voters view it as transparent ploy? We don't know yet, but it's worth noting that Chappelle-Nadal's official Senate page still shows her with straight hair.
Other Races:
• LA-AG: Attorney General Buddy Caldwell narrowly outpolled ex-Rep. and fellow Republican Jeff Landry 35-33 in the jungle primary, but a new poll from JMC Analytics gives Landry a 38-34 edge in the runoff. Both candidates are very conservative, but the tea partying Landry is the favorite of the state party. As the least right-wing candidate, Caldwell may be able to consolidate Democratic voters, but they may also decide to just vote against the well-known Republican incumbent. Landry also received an endorsement from Democrat Geri Broussard Baloney, who took 18 percent in the primary, so he may have an easier time making inroads with Democrats who aren't familiar with his record.
Grab Bag:
• Census: While we're still in the thick of the 2016 cycle, it's never too early to start thinking about 2022, and the University of North Carolina's Population Center is out with some new models looking ahead to House reapportionment after the 2020 Census. They offer four different models based on different population trajectories, and it's a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure, but some states are consistent across the models.
The likeliest gainers are Texas (which could gain anywhere from one to three seats), North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia; other potential gains include Arizona, California, Colorado, and Oregon. The likeliest losses are Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with New York, Rhode Island, and West Virginia potential losses too. States likely to stay put, but that are close to the bubble, are Georgia and Montana (which could gain), and Alabama (which could lose).
• Demographics: Pew Research has just released a sprawling study about religion, politics, and culture in America, which we'll talk about in more detail in the near future. But they've also released an interesting sidebar, focusing specifically on Seventh-Day Adventists, a relatively small (only 0.5 percent of the overall population) evangelical denomination that most people aren't familiar with—but one that's temporarily getting its moment in the spotlight, so long as its best-known member, Ben Carson, is leading the Republican presidential primary field.
This may be surprising, but Seventh-Day Adventists—very much unlike evangelicals as a whole -- are likelier to consider themselves Democrats rather than Republicans: 45 to 35, with 19 as independents. That may have more to do with the racial composition of the church, though, rather than any doctrinal liberalism (for instance, 63 percent are opposed to same-sex marriage and 54 percent say abortion should be entirely or mostly illegal). Seventh-Day Adventists are actually one of the most racially-diverse denominations in the country, with 37 percent white, 32 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent Asian. They also aren't as heavily concentrated in the South as other evangelical denominations: Only 40 percent are in the South, with 31 percent in the West.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and Stephen Wolf.