The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
● PA-Sen: Sometimes, it just feels like the GOP never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity—not that Pennsylvania's Senate race had presented them with an especially good one, but now it looks even worse. On Thursday, CNN reported that GOP Rep. Lou Barletta, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Sen. Bob Casey this fall, conducted an interview in 2006 with a publication called the American Free Press that calls Holocaust a hoax and 9/11 a "Jewish plot." The following year, Barletta headlined a rally where one of the speakers and musical performers was a "patriot rock" singer named Paul Topete, whom the Anti-Defamation League says is a Holocaust denier.
Campaign Action
Barletta fell in with such lovely folks because, at the time, he'd become notorious in his harsh crackdown on undocumented immigration as mayor of the small city of Hazelton, making him very much a proto-Trump xenophobe. As such, Barletta became something of a sought-after celebrity in nativist circles, which a spokesman, Jon Anzur, pointed to as he tried to explain away these deeply unpleasant associations. "As the mayor of a small city, Lou didn't have the resources or staff to screen everyone who asked him questions," said Anzur.
Those two examples, though, are just the worst of the worst. Barletta's palled around with lots of other scuzz, reports CNN, including after he was elected to Congress in 2010—and therefore had sufficient staff to vet anyone who wanted to talk to him. Yet that didn't stop him, for instance, from speaking at a 2011 workshop held by a journal called The Social Contract, whose editor once declared that "Islam itself is the problem" and "called for the end of all Muslim immigration to the U.S."
Barletta doesn't appear to have issued any sort of apology for involving himself with people and groups like these, nor has he even said he was wrong to do so. Anzur, the spokesman, would only say that Barletta condemns "hate, bigotry, and racial supremacy in all its forms." He sure has a funny way of condemning such things, though.
4Q Fundraising
Click here for our chart rounding up all Senate fundraising numbers. As per usual, we'll have a chart of House numbers after the reporting deadline, which is Jan. 31. Note that this is the last day we'll list out individual House numbers for the fourth quarter; after that, they'll all go in our big roundup. So if you're working for a congressional campaign and want to see your haul listed here, get it to us, stat!
● FL-16: David Shapiro (D): $250,000 raised
● IL-06: Peter Roskam (R-inc): $576,000 raised, $1.6 million cash-on-hand
● MA-03: Juana Matias (D): $212,000 raised
● NH-01: Eddie Edwards (R): $60,000 raised, additional $20,000 self-funded, $130,000 cash-on-hand
● TX-06: Jake Ellzey (R): $69,000 raised (in one month), additional $3,000 self-funded, $66,000 cash-on-hand
● WV-03: Richard Ojeda (D): $30,000 raised
Senate
● UT-Sen: Utah Policy's Bob Bernick writes that sources close to Mitt Romney say he'll announce his bid for this open seat next week. They also add that Romney will petition his way onto the June primary ballot rather than just try to gain enough support at the party convention to advance. If Romney runs, it's tough to see anyone beating him in the GOP primary, though state Rep. Dan McCay reportedly is considering taking him on.
Gubernatorial
● CT-Gov: New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart has been talking about seeking the GOP nomination to run for statewide office for a while, and the Hartford Courant's Daniela Altimari writes that she's expected to announce a possible bid for governor or lieutenant governor next week. Stewart's chief of staff only said "stay tuned" when asked about Stewart's plans.
Both parties have very crowded August primaries to succeed retiring Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy, and there's no frontrunner on either side. Former financial executive Bob Stefanowski, a Republican who has been doing some self-funding, is hoping to stand out by advertising early, and he's up with the first TV ad of the campaign; his camp says it is airing in the Hartford-New Haven and New York markets, but they did not reveal the size of the buy. The spot argues that Malloy, who is very unpopular, "broke our economy," and argues that Stefanowski has the business experience to fix things.
● IL-Gov: State Sen. Daniel Biss is up with another spot ahead of the March 20 Democratic primary, and he goes after both of his rivals. The narrator accuses both Donald Trump and GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner of being "rich guys who scammed the system to avoid taxes," before saying that Democrats Chris Kennedy and J.B. Pritzker "got caught copying them with tax scams of their own." The narrator then says Biss is the one candidate who "will make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes."
● KS-Gov: Termed-out Gov. Sam Brownback was finally confirmed by the Senate to serve as Trump's ambassador for religious freedom on Wednesday, and he's announced he will be resigning on Jan. 31. Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, a fellow Republican, will then become governor. Colyer will have six months of incumbency before he has to face the voters in the crowded August primary. Brownback was first nominated for the ambassadorship all the way back in July, so Colyer certainly was counting on more time in the governor's office, but this will have to do.
Colyer is close to Brownback, and the outgoing governor had already handed him several responsibilities during the long transition, including tasking him with preparing the next budget. However, this may have done Colyer more harm than good, since legislative Republicans publicly admitted they had no idea which man was really in charge of the state. Colyer will at last be the governor on Wednesday, and he'll very quickly be in the hot seat. Brownback's huge tax breaks has left the state's economy in horrible shape, and Colyer will quickly need to respond to a state Supreme Court decision that ruled that schools are inadequately funded.
Brownback is leaving Kansas with awful approval ratings and without many friends left in the GOP-dominated legislature. But Colyer, a wealthy plastic surgeon who served in the legislature for four years before being elected lieutenant governor in 2010, has been pretty anonymous over the last seven years. It's anyone's guess if voters and the legislature will give Colyer the benefit of the doubt in his first months in office, or if his Brownback ties and the state's problems will immediately drag him down.
But no matter what, Colyer won't have much time to prepare for a tough GOP primary. Notably, no major Republicans exited the race after Brownback's nomination was announced last year and it became clear Colyer would be governor on Election Day, a sign they weren't intimidated by him.
Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a close Trump ally, is the presumptive frontrunner, though his fundraising has been remarkably weak so far. It's also possible that the demise of Kobach's bogus voter-fraud commission has harmed his standing at home, or that Kobach just isn't as well-known among Kansas primary voters as he is nationally. (There has been no public polling here.) A number of other Republicans, including businessman Wink Hartman and state Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer, also have the resources to put up a serious fight. Democrats are hoping Brownback's awful legacy will give them an opening in this conservative state, though independent Greg Orman may cost them their shot.
● OH-Gov: Fallon Research, a group that we hadn't previously heard from, is out with a poll for the 1984 Society, which the Cleveland Plain Dealer describes as "a nonprofit, bipartisan group of former Ohio Senate employees and senators who wanted good independent polling for the political community." The survey tests a hypothetical general election between GOP Attorney General Mike DeWine and former federal consumer watchdog Richard Cordray, and gives DeWine a massive 49-28 lead.
It does make sense that DeWine, a former U.S. senator, has more name recognition and initial support than Cordray, whom DeWine beat in 2010 and has been working in D.C. for years. Still, that's a very lopsided showing, and while Ohio did swerve far to the right in 2016, it seems unlikely Team Blue would start with that little support: Even Ed FitzGerald, whose 2014 campaign for governor self-destructed, mustered up 33 percent of the vote. However, we don't have any other recent polls to compare this to. The poll also included questions about both primaries. However, both samples have fewer than 300 respondents, which is the minimum Daily Kos Elections requires for a poll to make it to the Digest. (We explain why here.)
● MN-Gov: On Thursday, state Rep. Matt Dean announced he was leaving the August GOP primary and endorsing Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson. Dean had little name recognition, and he was trying to win the important June party endorsement. Johnson himself won the party endorsement four years ago and went on to win the primary afterwards, before losing to Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton 50-45. Local Republicans seem to regard Johnson's showing against Dayton as respectable, and he appears to be the early primary frontrunner.
So far, Johnson faces former state GOP chair Keith Downey, who has made his share of intra-party enemies, and Woodbury Mayor Mary Giuliani Stephens. State House Speaker Kurt Daudt is considering getting in as well, though he keeps procrastinating on his decision. Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty also reportedly was privately mulling a comeback bid last fall, and while Pawlenty recently ruled out a Senate bid, he didn't say anything about not running for governor. The Democrats have a much larger field in their primary to succeed the retiring Dayton.
House
● CA-25: Rep. Judy Chu, who represents a neighboring Southern California seat, has endorsed nonprofit director Katie Hill's campaign to take on GOP Rep. Steve Knight. Hill and 2016 nominee Bryan Caforio appear to be the Democratic frontrunners in the June top-two primary to face Knight.
● IL-04: Cook County Commissioner Chuy Garcia has dropped a second poll showing him dominating the March 20 primary for this safely blue Chicago seat. The Garin-Hart-Yang survey gives him the lead with 59 percent of the vote, while Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno and nonprofit director Sol Flores are far behind with 8 and 6, respectively. The poll memo says that Garcia still leads Moreno 45-11 "even after we read critical information about him with NOTHING else read to voters." Garcia's team released a PPP survey last month that gave him a similar 53 percent of the vote while finding none of his opponents breaking 10 percent, and no one has released contradictory numbers so far.
● IL-14: EMILY's List has endorsed Lauren Underwood, a former senior adviser at the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, in the March 20 Democratic primary to face GOP Rep. Randy Hultgren. This exurban Chicago seat went from 54-44 Romney to 49-45 Trump, and it could be a Democratic target in a good year. However, neither Underwood nor her two primary foes had raised much money by the end of September.
● NV-04: On Thursday, former Rep. Steven Horsford announced he would seek the Democratic nomination to regain Nevada's open 4th Congressional District. Horsford, who represented this seat in Las Vegas' northern suburbs for one term, is the second noteworthy Democrat to kick off a bid to succeed freshman Democratic Rep. Ruben Kihuen, who is retiring after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment. State Sen. Pat Spearman jumped in weeks ago, and don't expect her to defer to Horsford: She has said she's willing to compete with the former congressman in the June primary. But if Horsford wins, he will likely face a rematch with Republican Cresent Hardy, who unseated him in 2014 before losing to Kihuen two years later.
Still, Horsford is well-connected in the world of Nevada Democratic politics, and he may be able to scare away some other potential primary candidates. Horsford was state Senate majority leader when Nevada gained a new congressional district in 2012, and he faced no opposition in the primary that year when he sought this newly created seat. Horsford ended up beating wealthy perennial candidate Danny Tarkanian 50-42 as Obama was carrying the seat 54-44, and it looked like he'd be in the House for a while to come.
But the 2014 GOP wave hit Nevada hard, and with a sacrificial lamb leading Team Blue's statewide ticket in that year's gubernatorial race, Democratic turnout was awful. The 4th District hadn't looked competitive, though, until late in the cycle, when both national parties started spending heavily here in the final month of the campaign. It was still a bit of a surprise, however, when Assemblyman Cresent Hardy unseated Horsford 49-46.
National Democrats tried to convince Horsford to seek a rematch with Hardy just weeks after his defeat, but he announced in early 2015 that he'd stay out and partner up with an advertising firm he used to work for. A number of Democrats had been waiting to see what Horsford would do, and his decision opened up the floodgates. Kihuen ended up winning a hotly contested primary, then beat Hardy 49-45 as Clinton was carrying the seat by a similar 50-45 margin.
Neither Horsford nor Hardy had planned to run again this year, but Kihuen's self-immolation changed the calculus. Hardy set up an account with the FEC last week, and while he doesn't appear to have publicly announced he's in yet, his spokesman wasted no time attacking Horsford, so there's little question that Hardy's committed.
In a familiar argument, Hardy's team is trying to claim that Horsford left Nevada behind after his loss and settled in D.C. Horsford did acknowledge to the Nevada Independent's Michelle Rindels that his immediate family lives in Northern Virginia, and that he knows he'll be criticized for that. However, Horsford went on to say that he still owns a home in Nevada, adding, "I live in the district. This is always home for me."
Still, it's unlikely this is the last we'll hear about this. A few weeks ago, Democratic Rep. Dina Titus, who represents a neighboring seat, made it clear she doesn't want Horsford to run again. Titus both argued that Horsford shouldn't have lost in 2014 and criticized him because he "stayed back here in Washington and went to work as a lobbyist." Continued Titus, "You can kind of see the ads writing themselves." Jon Ralston notes that Horsford never registered as a lobbyist (Rindels describes Horsford's business as providing "public relations and consulting on workforce development strategies"), but his rivals are unlikely to care about such nuances. Nevada's filing deadline is in mid-March, so we'll know soon if other Democrats decide to run here with Horsford in.
● NY-24, NY-Gov: Former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner has once again ruled out a bid against GOP Rep. John Katko in upstate New York's 24th Congressional District, though she said she's still "seriously considering" taking on Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year's Democratic primary. Miner said the same thing back in October, but a month later, she reversed course and announced she was reconsidering a House bid in light of Katko's vote for the GOP's tax bill. So much for that.
This seat, which includes Syracuse and nearby communities, went from 57-41 Obama win to a small 49-45 margin for Clinton, but it should still be a Democratic target in a good year. However, Team Blue has had a strange amount of trouble finding a viable candidate, which is all the more notable given how strong candidate recruitment has been almost everywhere else.
National Democrats reportedly tried to land Miner in the fall, though Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who's the DCCC's recruitment chair, said in late December that his committee was looking at a potential candidate who might challenge Katko if Miner didn't. Heck didn't name anyone, but Juanita Perez Williams, the former top attorney for Syracuse, announced last week that she wouldn't run. Perez Williams was the Democratic nominee for mayor last year but lost 54-38 to independent Ben Walsh, and she says the DCCC tried to recruit her right after Election Day. Obviously that effort wasn't successful either.
New York's filing deadline isn't until the end of April, but local Democrats want to find a candidate before that. Onondaga County Democratic Committee Chairman Mark English, whose county makes up two-thirds of this seat (and an even larger proportion of its Democratic primary voters), announced late last month that his local party organization had set a Feb. 1 deadline for candidates to declare in order to be eligible for an endorsement by the end of that month. That doesn't leave much time for new candidates if they want the Onondaga Democrats' seal of approval.
A few Democrats have announced they're in, but none of them have generated much attention. Small business owner Anne Messenger took in only $52,000 during her opening quarter, while local activist Dana Balter took in even less. And two other Democrats have kicked off campaigns in recent days, though they have a lot to prove. William Bass recently moved to Syracuse after spending five years working as a scientist in Saudi Arabia for the oil company Saudi Aramco; Bass is originally from Herkimer County, which is just outside this seat.
Meanwhile, Scott Comegys, who is an alpaca farmer in Wayne County (which is, in fact, in the 24th) filed to raise money in mid-November, though he only declared this week that he was running. Maybe one of these candidates will catch fire, or someone else will get in now that Miner has once again taken her name out of contention, but for now this looks like a big recruiting hole in a year where Democrats are fielding credible candidates in tough seats.
Even if Democrats do land a big fish, though, no one is under any illusion that Katko will be easy to beat. The former federal prosecutor unseated Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei by an unexpectedly strong 59-41 margin in 2014, and he ran far ahead of the ticket two years later when he beat a touted Democratic opponent 61-39. Still, this is exactly the type of seat that could flip in a wave, and Democrats can't afford to give Katko an easy time.
● NY-25: The 2014 GOP wave and bad Democratic turnout almost allowed unheralded Republican Mark Assini, the supervisor of the small town of Gates, to upset longtime Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter. Assini fell 871 votes short of beating Slaughter in a contest that was on nobody's radar, and he decided to seek a rematch in 2016. Slaughter won 56-44 as Clinton carried this Rochester seat 56-39, but Assini planned to announce another campaign on Wednesday. However, he instead declared he wouldn't run, saying the Monroe County Conservative Party had refused to endorse him.
Right now, neurosurgeon James Maxwell has the GOP primary to himself, and the local Conservative Party has also backed him. This seat is unlikely to be competitive in what's shaping up to be a tough year for the GOP, though after what happened in 2014, Team Blue shouldn't take it for granted.
● PA-07: On Thursday night, GOP Rep. Pat Meehan announced he would not seek re-election. Meehan has been in hot water since Saturday, when the New York Times reported that he had used thousands in taxpayer dollars to settle a misconduct complaint leveled against him by a former staffer. Meehan's attempts to defend his behavior (for one thing, he said he believed the aide was his "soul mate") only made things even worse. Meehan's very gerrymandered suburban Philadelphia seat backed Clinton 49-47, and court-ordered redistricting is likely to make it more Democratic. We'll have a whole lot more to say about this race in our next Morning Digest.
● TX-05: We missed this at the time, but in mid-December, Sen. Ted Cruz endorsed his former aide Jason Wright in the crowded March 6 primary for this safely red seat. Via the Texas Tribune's Patrick Svitek, Cruz will headline a Monday fundraiser for Wright, who used to serve as a city councilor in Tyler outside the district. Wright is one of several Republicans competing to succeed retiring Rep. Jeb Hensarling in a seat that stretched from the Dallas suburbs into rural East Texas. Hensarling is supporting his former campaign manager Bunni Pounds, while former state Rep. Kenneth Sheets and state Rep. Lance Gooden are also in the mix. If no one takes a majority in the primary, there will be a May runoff.
● TX-07: Former cancer researcher Jason Westin is one of several Democrats competing in the March 6 primary to face GOP Rep. John Culberson, and he appears to be the first to air a TV spot. Westin tells the audience that he knows "a little something about cancer, and let me tell you, there's a cancer eating away at America." Westin says that cancer is willful ignorance, and as pictures from last year's devastating floods from Hurricane Harvey appear on the screen, Westin declares that when Trump "denies facts, he's denying the very essence of America." Westin adds that he believes in science and facts, and believes like his patients, America can get better. There is no word on the size of the buy. This historically Republican seat in the Houston suburbs went from 60-39 Romney to 48.5-47.1 Clinton.
● UT-04: On behalf of the Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah, Dan Jones & Associates takes a second look at the likely general election between GOP Rep. Mia Love and Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams. They give Love a 47-42 lead, which is almost identical to the 48-42 Love edge they found three months ago. This seat, which includes many of the Salt Lake City suburbs, backed Trump 39-32, while conservative independent Evan McMullin took 22 percent.
