Leading Off:
• TX-AG: Who would have thought that Ken Paxton would get indicted before Kathleen Kane? Paxton, Texas' Republican attorney general, was indicted by a grand jury last week on charges of securities fraud; the indictment was unsealed Monday, when he was arrested and later released on bail. Prosecutors allege that Paxton, back when he was a state legislator, encouraged investors to put money into a tech company he was touting without revealing he was making a commission on their investments, or that he'd received 100,000 shares of the firm's stock.
Because this is Texas, convictions for a first-degree felony such as those Paxton is accused of can carry a sentence of life in prison. Paxton is refusing to step down so far, but it's hard for a state's top law enforcement official to continue serving when he's accused of breaking his own state's laws. In that sense, Paxton's case is superficially similar to that of Kane, his Democratic counterpart in Pennsylvania, though she's accused of very different crimes. She hasn't been indicted yet, though, so we'll see which one lasts in office longer.
Senate:
• IL-Sen: The National Journal's Alex Roarty deserves major credit for taking on a difficult question that few want to ask aloud and handling it both intelligently and sensitively: How has Mark Kirk changed since he suffered a stroke in 2012, and has it affected his ability to campaign for and serve in public office? The real answer, as one stroke specialist says, is that it's "impossible to say" for sure either way.
But rather interestingly, several Republicans Roarty spoke with did not rule out the possibility that Kirk's stroke has hampered him and perhaps has left him with less of a filter. For those willing to "go there," that could conceivably explain Kirk's recent string of offensive and/or absurd public statements, but again, there's just absolutely no way to know. The only question is how voters will treat the matter of Kirk's health as he seeks a second term in the Senate, if it even persists as an issue at all.
Gubernatorial:
• NC-Gov: Campaign finance reports covering the first six months of the year show that state Attorney General Roy Cooper outraised GOP Gov. Pat McCrory, making him the second Democrat challenging a sitting Republican governor this cycle to do so. (John Gregg, who's running against Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, also pulled off the same feat.) Cooper took in $2.1 million, beating McCrory's $1.3 million by a wide margin. Indeed, Cooper's haul was the biggest ever for the first half-year of a two-year gubernatorial race in North Carolina history.
What's even more unusual is that Cooper also has more cash in the bank: $3 million versus $2.4 million. Polls have shown a tight race all year, and PPP's last survey even had Cooper leading McCrory 43-41. Democrats have a real shot at a pickup here.
• NJ-Gov: New Jersey's next gubernatorial election is not until 2017, but we already have our first declared candidate, Democratic state Sen. Ray Lesniak. Who he'll face off against in the primary, though, remains a very open question. PolitickerNJ mentions state Senate President Steve Sweeney, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Phil Murphy, and Assemblyman John Wisniewski as possibilities. Gov. Chris Christie is term-limited, so Democrats will be eager for a shot at reclaiming Drumthwacket, the governor's delightfully named official residence.
House:
• CA-46: The race for Loretta Sanchez's open House seat is getting busier. Two new Democrats are moving forward with bids: Garden Grove Mayor Bao Nguyen expressed interest a few weeks ago and he just filed FEC papers, while former state Sen. Joe Dunn is reportedly trying to solicit support for a run. Nguyen is tight with labor and is openly gay, which sets up a real contrast with one of the Democrats already in the race, ex-state Sen. Lou Correa, who has a weak relationship with unions and has always dragged his heels on recognizing gay rights. However, most of Garden Grove is in the neighboring 47th District, while Correa represented over three-fourths of CA-46 in the legislature until late last year.
For his part, Dunn (whom Correa succeeded in the state Senate in 2006) is well-connected: He was the CEO of the California Medical Association and later ran the state bar. However, he's also in the midst of a messy lawsuit with the bar association, which he sued after it fired him last year. And another Democrat who got in not long ago, Anaheim Councilman Jordan Brandman, also has his own baggage: A new report alleges that he used school district resources for his city council campaign, which comes on top of earlier accusations that he plagiarized a study that Orange County had paid him $24,000 to prepare.
Correa was the only contender who filed a second-quarter fundraising report, and he pulled in just $104,000. So the race for this solidly blue seat remains wide open, especially as the field continues to grow.
• FL-26: Though it's largely buried in a longer story about how Miami Democrats are furious that a local operative and former Obama finance chair named Freddy Balsera has endorsed Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo for re-election, Marc Caputo also gets ex-Rep. Joe Garcia on the record to say he's not ruling out a comeback bid next year. That's a bit of a shocker to us, seeing as earlier this year, Garcia insisted he's "not running for any public office." It's also apparently news to Democrat Annette Taddeo, whom Caputo says "sounded surprised" when he relayed Garcia's thoughts to her.
Meanwhile, Balsera, in firing back against the broader forces arrayed against him (the DCCC even complained about him to Hillary Clinton's political director), has been trying to poor-mouth Taddeo's fundraising. But while her $235,000 haul in the second quarter wasn't great, it wasn't awful, and Curbelo, by comparison, only raised $100,000 more, though he does have almost a million in the bank. Still, Garcia has an incredibly flawed record, and few Democrats would welcome him back, no matter how much Balsera attempts to undermine Taddeo.
• IL-12: St. Clair County Sheriff Rick Watson, who recently went to Washington to meet with the DCCC, has decided not to run for Congress. Democrats had been hoping he'd challenge freshman GOP Rep. Mike Bost, but right now, the party has no credible candidates in this seat that Obama carried by a 50-48 margin in 2012.
• OH-02: Sunday marked the tenth anniversary of one of the most remarkable elections we've ever witnessed first-hand: the Ohio 2nd special between Democrat Paul Hackett and Republican Jean Schmidt, which put the nascent netroots permanently on the map. It certainly didn't seem like a promising opportunity at the start, though. The district, which stretched eastward from the Cincinnati suburbs along the Ohio River, had become vacant in April of 2005 when Republican Rob Portman (now a U.S. senator) resigned to become George W. Bush's trade representative, but Bush had carried it by a punishing 64-36 margin the year before.
However, Hackett was a straight-talking Marine vet who had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, at a time when voters were growing increasingly distressed with Bush's handling of the war and the claims he'd made to lead us into it. His fearlessly blunt approach and his picture-perfect profile offered a sharp contrast to the weak-kneed Democrats who'd been too timid to challenge Republicans (and the D.C. establishment) over America's foreign policy. Hackett emerged as the first of many "Fighting Dems": Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who came home to run for office and share their first-hand experiences of our overseas misadventures.
Schmidt, meanwhile, was a hot mess. She won a bloody GOP primary with just 31 percent of the vote and later got in big trouble when she falsely claimed never to have met Tom Noe, the scumbag at the center of an investment scandal that went on to level the Ohio Republican Party. Schmidt was good for laughs, too: She once declared, "We need to keep our eye on the ball, because if we don't keep it on the ball, that ball will come back and attack us."
Liberal bloggers sensed something was afoot here and started raising money in bushels for Hackett, who set the blogosphere on fire with his passion. Republicans grew visibly nervous and started swiftboating Hackett, questioning whether he'd ever been in combat (he had), but unlike John Kerry, he fought back. We parachuted one of our own, Tim Tagaris, a Marine who was on his way to becoming a master political operative, into the campaign to give us the latest scoops close up. The Swing State Project became an intense hub of OH-02 activity, and we loved every minute of it.
Unfortunately, Hackett fell short, agonizingly so, and Schmidt won by a 51.6 to 48.4 margin. It was an amazing result, though, considering both the seat's overwhelmingly conservative nature and the fact that Hackett was outspent widely, despite the hundreds of thousands we raised for him. There was also the matter of 2006. While lazy pundits often over-read the significance of special elections, there was no doubt in our minds that what happened in Ohio's 2nd was a harbinger of things to come—and boy was it ever. Republicans got crushed in the 2006 midterms, losing both the House and the Senate, and the themes Hackett hit about the Iraq war were front and center.
Not long after the special election, Charlie Cook, one of the top election observers in the country, told me that he'd been very skeptical of any notion that Democrats might have a shot. But after bloggers like those of us at SSP correctly identified this as a winnable race, he felt he had to take notice of what we were talking about. And the sums of money we brought in for Hackett were significant, too: Not only could we make a difference for a targeted candidate, but our efforts convinced the DCCC to pour resources in, too. While we didn't win the race, we made our mark as both analysts and activists—and the netroots showed it had become a force to be reckoned with.
Other Races:
• Charlotte Mayor: Campaign finance reports were due last week for this fall's mayoral contest. On the Democratic side, former Mecklenburg County Commissioner Jennifer Roberts' early start is paying off financially so far. As of June 30, Roberts leads interim Mayor Dan Clodfelter in cash on hand $205,000 to $64,000. Councilor David Howard has $114,000 in the bank, while Councilor Michael Barnes only has $48,000 available. The primary is Sept. 15, with an Oct. 6 runoff if no one takes more than 40 percent of the vote. (Update: This post has been edited to correct Clodfelter and Howard's cash on hand figures.)
On the GOP side, 2013 nominee Edwin Peacock leads 2011 nominee Scott Stone in cash on hand $113,000 to $80,000. Peacock came relatively close to beating Democrat Patrick Cannon (who resigned in disgrace a few months later) while Stone was easily defeated by then-Mayor Anthony Foxx, so there's little doubt who the local GOP would rather have as their standard bearer.
• Kentucky: SurveyUSA's new Kentucky poll—the one that had Democrat Jack Conway beating Republican Matt Bevin 45-42 in the gubernatorial race—also finds Democrats leading in four of the state's five downballot contests this fall. Team Blue has leads of 3 to 7 points in the races for attorney general, treasurer, auditor, and secretary of state, though there's a large proportion of undecideds in all but the last matchup. Republicans also have just a 1-point edge for the only post they currently hold, agriculture commissioner, but again, many voters have not made up their minds.
These results are very different from PPP's late June survey, which had Conway trailing Bevin by 3 and also saw Democrats losing every down-ticket race. Whom to believe? PPP found local boy Rand Paul leading Hillary Clinton 49-39; SurveyUSA has him up just 44-42. Much as it would be nice for Democrats if SurveyUSA were right, PPP's presidential numbers make more sense.
• Special Elections: Heeere's Johnny Longtorso:
Pennsylvania HD-87: This is an open Republican seat in Cumberland County, across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg. The candidates are Democrat Bob Charles, a member of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, and Republican Greg Rothman, a realtor. This seat went 57-41 for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Pennsylvania HD-161: This is an open Republican seat in Delaware County. The Democratic nominee is Leanne Krueger-Braneky, who ran for this seat in 2014 and lost by a 56-44 margin. The Republicans nominated a moderate local union leader, Paul Mullen, over a conservative local school board member, Lisa Esler. In response, Esler decided to wage a write-in bid for this seat.
This is much like what happened last year in York County, where write-in candidate Scott Wagner defeated the Republican and Democratic nominees to win a special election to the state Senate. (Indeed, Esler is being supported by some of the same people who supported Wagner.) However, that was a Republican district, whereas this is a 56-43 Obama seat that was represented by Democrat Bryan Lentz until he unsuccessfully ran for PA-07 in 2010. If Ensler can draw enough votes as a spoiler, Democrats should have a real shot at retaking this seat.
Grab Bag:
• Demographics: David Wasserman (usually from the Cook Report, but here writing for FiveThirtyEight) is out with a good analysis of a problem that most Daily Kos Elections readers are well-familiar with. In short, the demographic trends that are helping Democrats at the Electoral College level are less helpful at the state level and especially at the House level, because so much of the growth among Dem-friendly constituencies is disproportionately concentrated in major cities, rather than being distributed helpfully throughout the land.
While it's a familiar refrain, the article contains two graphs that are worth several thousand words that each show the processes by which the urban/rural disparity keeps widening. One breaks the nation's population down into urban, suburban, and rural thirds, and finds that all the annualized growth in the last decade has been in the urban counties.
The other graph shows the 1988 through 2012 elections, with the Dem percentage among the urban, suburban, and rural counties. The approximately 7 percent gap between urban and rural in 1988 has turned into a gap of nearly over 20 percent now. (One neat side-effect of the graph is watching how the suburbs were more conservative than the rural areas in 1988 and 1992. While we keep pushing the percentage even higher in the urban areas, the percentage in suburban areas has been mostly stalled since the Bill Clinton era, though.)
• Radio: On Sunday night, Jeff Singer appeared on Kudzu Vine to discuss a whole variety of topics, from the Louisiana gubernatorial race to both parties presidential primaries. Click here to listen to a recording.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, and Daniel Donner.
