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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
● NC-13: Democrat Kathy Manning, who is running against Republican Rep. Ted Budd, says her campaign has succeeded in getting two local TV stations to stop airing an ad from America First Action, a pro-GOP super PAC, that she calls "inaccurate and misleading." The spot, which is still available online, claims Manning and her husband "got nearly $2 million in government money" to help pay for a "luxury hotel." Manning says her family never "received a dime of taxpayer money" for the project and adds that she has no involvement in the hotel (so once again, we’re seeing an ad that tries to hold a woman responsible for something her husband has done).
Campaign Action
Evidently, the lawyers at the two TV stations in question, WXII and FOX 8, agreed with Manning’s take and decided to reject AFA’s ads. We haven’t actually seen this sort of thing transpire all that often this cycle, so this is a good opportunity to explain why third-party ads are vulnerable to getting taken down like this.
Under federal law, broadcasters cannot censor or refuse to air ads from candidates as long as they’re paid for. (Earlier this year, a TV station in New Mexico had to run a spot from a Democrat who started his ad by saying, "Fuck the NRA.") Consequently, because they have no choice, stations have successfully argued that they should not be liable as publishers if they’re ever sued for defamation for anything said in a candidate ad. But they’re under no similar obligation to run ads from outside groups, which means that, in those cases, they are potentially liable for defamation.
Knowing this, campaigns try to hunt down inaccuracies (real or perceived) in third-party ads and demand that broadcasters stop airing them, with the stated or unstated threat that if they fail to comply, they could find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Whether or not such suits would ever succeed, TV and radio stations have to think hard every time as to whether they want to incur legal costs should a campaign ever follow through. WXII and Fox 8 decided the answer was no.
But not all broadcasters immediately roll over every time they get a lawyer letter. No one likes being bullied, but more to the point, these companies want the ad revenue. That’s why they typically have their own legal departments review grievances like these to assess their merit. If they wind up disagreeing with the complainants, then they’ll tell them to get lost and will keep running the ad in question.
It’s also worth noting that sometimes, when a station nukes an ad, the group airing it will edit out or rephrase the offending material and then try to re-air it. But given that AFA’s ad is entirely focused on claims that two TV stations have concluded are false, it may be hard to do that here. If AFA, which recently reported spending $602,000 on airtime for this, still has money left over for its current flight, it might just choose to run a different spot.
Senate
● MT-Sen: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is out with a new spot declaring that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are counting on Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s support for their "big-government takeover of health care," and saying that Tester needs to "stand with Montana" instead of with Sanders and Warren. However, the Washington Post notes that Tester has never supported the Senate’s “Medicare-for-all” bill.
● ND-Sen: Senate Majority PAC’s latest spot hits Republican Kevin Cramer over his support for Donald Trump’s trade war, though it unsurprisingly doesn’t mention Trump. The commercial argues the tariffs are hurting the state economy before it features audio of Cramer declaring "we don’t have a very high pain threshold" and quotes him saying that farmers are hysterical. Recent polls have shown Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp in bad shape, and Democrats seem to be hoping that opposition to the trade war could give her an opening against Cramer.
● Polls: Today’s roundup of Senate polls:
Unusually, Bredesen’s polling from Garin-Hart-Yang is an average of two polls taken Oct. 3-6 and 8-11 that weren’t released separately, and the numbers are the best he’s seen in weeks. However, the result comes on the heels of Siena’s recent survey for the New York Times finding him trailing by a much wider 54-40 margin, and other recent independent surveys have also been more bearish on his chances.
Gubernatorial
● CO-Gov: A dark-money group called Colorado Citizens for Truth is spending $700,000 on a TV spot claiming that Democrat Jared Polis assaulted a female employee 20 years ago. However, as we’ll explain, this spot leaves out some vital context, particularly the fact that Polis was trying to prevent that employee from leaving the office with stolen materials.
The Denver Post provides the actual background to this ad. In 1999, a Boulder Police report said that Polis, whose name was Jared Schutz at the time, received a call from his personal assistant, Patricia Hughes, on what was supposed to be her last day of work. The report says that Hughes told Polis she’d "go after him" if her departure didn’t go smoothly, and Polis soon went back to the office to find Hughes deleting files and trying to steal documents valued between $25,000 and $75,000.
Hughes told the police that as she tried to leave, Polis shoved her into a filing cabinet. She then said that she tried calling 911 three times and succeeded on the third try after Polis had stopped her first attempts. Polis told the police he had called 911 and then tried to block Hughes from leaving. He went on to say that after Hughes hit him with a bag, he then grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her back to stop her from departing.
Police found the documents in Hughes’ bags and required her to leave them, and noted a welt on her thigh that matched her story about Polis shoving her into a filing cabinet. A judge later granted Hughes a temporary restraining order against Polis, but it was vacated. Ultimately, Hughes pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets and was ordered to stay away from Polis. She was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and has since died.
The commercial takes this report and crafts a very misleading story. The spot features text saying "she tried calling 911," and the narrator describes how an "angry CEO" identified as Jared Schutz confronted a departing employee and shoved her into a filing cabinet. It then says the court provided Hughes with a restraining order, before the narrator says, "There’s no good reason to assault a woman." The ad doesn’t mention the documents Hughes stole or any of the legal fallout against her; it just makes it sound like she was the victim of an abusive boss.
The spot goes on to reveal that Jared Schutz is Jared Polis and declares, "Jared Polis changed his name, but he cannot change his past." This makes it sound like Polis altered his name to cover up the incident, but the Post notes he changed it to his mother’s maiden name in her honor. Polis even used the occasion to hold a fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, so he was hardly changing his name to escape attention.
● FL-Gov: Jonathan Martin at the New York TImes reports that "total spending/booking" in Florida’s gubernatorial election is $12.2 million to elect Democrat Andrew Gillum and and $28 million for Republican Ron DeSantis.
● OH-Gov: The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are spending $1 million on a TV and digital buy hitting Republican Mike DeWine on health care.
● Polls: Today’s gubernatorial polls:
PPP’s Alaska survey is its first of the race, but its finding that Dunleavy is easily prevailing over his divided opposition is similar to the result of a recent Alaska Survey Research poll that had Dunleavy up 47-27 over Walker, with Begin in third with 23.
PPP’s Connecticut poll is the latest in a string of surveys showing Lamont with an advantage, although this one notably did not include independent Oz Griebel.
Maine’s gubernatorial contest has seen almost no polling at all, so it’s hard to get a sense of where things stand. However, independent Terry Hayes has access to public funding, and it’s possible that she is indeed polling around 10 percent in a state where neither major party has won with a majority of the vote in decades. However, even her own survey finds her in a distant third place. Inexplicably, given that context, Change Research’s poll excluded Hayes, along with fellow independent Alan Caron.
House
● AZ-08: Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko was forced to backtrack and take down campaign signs that falsely claimed her Democratic opponent, Hiral Tipirneni, was a "fake doctor" after a medical group supporting the congresswoman called them an "insult to the medical profession" and urged her to remove them. Lesko had been claiming that Tipirneni was a phony because she hadn’t been an actively practicing emergency room physician for years, but Tipirneni has maintained her medical license and has been working as a cancer-research advocate in the years since leaving the ER.
● CA-21: Advertising Analytics reports that the DCCC has cut $70,000 from a scheduled ad buy for the final week of the campaign. The NRCC canceled all of its October ad time a few weeks ago in a big sign of confidence in GOP Rep. David Valadao, and the DCCC’s move suggests that Team Blue also feels that the incumbent is in a strong position.
● CA-48, CA-45: National Republicans aren't quite triaging GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, but neither the NRCC nor the Congressional Leadership Fund is giving him much support. The Washington Post recently reported that the NRCC had spent nothing to aid GOP candidates in the 25th District (Rep. Steve Knight), the 39th (Young Kim), and Rohrabacher's 48th. A separate Los Angeles Times article noted that the CLF is spending on expensive broadcast ads for Knight and Kim, but they're only investing in cheaper cable TV ads for Rohrabacher and Rep. Mimi Walters in the 45th.
That means that, at least right now, both major national Republican groups are forcing Rohrabacher to largely fend for himself in a very tough race against Democrat Harley Rouda. Indeed, CNN reports that in the first week of October, 292 Democratic ads ran here while not one GOP spot aired (though that analysis may have only applied to broadcast ads, not cable; it’s not clear).
It's a bit surprising that the GOP isn't doing a lot more to help its incumbent in this coastal Orange County seat, since the two polls we saw in September found a very tight contest between Rohrabacher and Rouda. However, it's possible Team Red just sees worse numbers for Rohrabacher than these few public polls have shown. Rohrabacher also has been a pretty underwhelming fundraiser this cycle (he raised just short of $400,000 in the third quarter), so the GOP may also be reluctant to spend much on an incumbent who isn't pulling his weight when there are more deserving candidates who need the help.
Over in the nearby 45th District, the NRCC has been spending to help Walters against Democrat Katie Porter, but unnamed GOP strategists recently told the New York Times that Walters could get triaged if she didn't "recover quickly." The CLF isn't exactly cutting her off, but its decision to only advertise on cable may also be a sign that she's not looking like a good investment. Still, CLF did recently spend $241,000 here on ads, so at least they haven’t gone entirely dark at the moment.
● CA-50: Indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter had already set up his Islamophobic campaign against Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar 11 weeks ago, and he keeps finding ways to get even worse. Hunter’s campaign is now circulating a letter written by three former Marine officers declaring that Campa-Najjar is a "national security risk" because, as a member of Congress, he’d "have access to classified, secret information on our military ops in the Middle East." The letter declares that Campa-Najjar’s family is involved in terrorism and asks if he "would compromise U.S. operations to protect his relatives, the Najjars?"
The letter references both Campa-Najjar’s late grandfather, who was involved in the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympians, and his father, who served as a Palestinian Liberation Organization ambassador to three countries. Campa-Najjar never knew his grandfather, who died 16 years before the candidate was born, and he has condemned his actions. Campa-Najjar also says that his father left the family when he was just a boy.
Hunter has already hinted that Campa-Najjar is part of a plot by "Islamists" to infiltrate the government, and has run a TV spot making that argument. Campa-Najjar is a practicing Christian who passed FBI background checks to work at the White House and Labor Department, but, as we’ve seen time and time again, Hunter doesn’t care.
Hunter also doesn’t care that anyone thinks he’s running a racist campaign, either. The congressman dismissed that idea at a town hall with the nonsensical argument that he was "born in San Diego. Sorry Southerners, you had some issues back in the day," and "Didn’t happen out here on the West Coast." (It did.) Campa-Najjar was also born in San Diego County, which Hunter probably also doesn’t care about.
● GA-06: Mike Bloomberg’s group Everytown for Gun Safety has launched a $1.8 million buy in support of Democrat Lucy McBath in the first major outside spending we’ve seen in the general election.
● MN-03: Michael Bloomberg’s super PAC Independence USA has spent $365,000 on a TV buy against GOP Rep. Erik Paulsen.
● NM-02: Democrat Xochitl Torres Small’s new spot stars Susie Galea, a Republican former mayor of Alamogordo. Galea tells the audience that she was the mayor of Republican Yvette Harrell’s hometown, but she can’t support her for Congress. Galea describes Harrell as "an insider who can’t be trusted," while extolling Torres Small as someone who will work across party lines.
● PA-01: Democrat Scott Wallace is out with a spot declaring that Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick is using "fake news sources to question Scott Wallace’s patriotism." The ad then features a local Vietnam veteran named Jim Thomson, who says that his unit was mistakenly exposed to Agent Orange, and that Wallace "helped uncover the damage" and got "guys like me the care and benefits we needed." Another Wallace commercial features the Democrat standing with cardboard cutouts of Fitzpatrick and Donald Trump, who he says share the same agenda.
● PA-07: House Majority PAC has launched a $280,000 TV buy against Republican Marty Nothstein, and its spot argues he’s a "typical Republican who will rubber stamp their agenda." The DCCC has also spent close to $700,000 here, while national Republicans still aren’t coming to Nothstein’s aid.
● VA-05: The Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $300,000 on a spot against Democrat Leslie Cockburn, where a narrator with an exaggerated upper-class British accent argues she "chooses to eat with despots and dictators," including "Saddam Hussein’s war criminal sons Uday and Qusay" and "had tea with [former Libyan dictator Muammar] Gaddafi." It also says she "supported giving Iran $100 billion," which is a reference to the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran.
Last year, Cockburn told the Daily Beast that, between the two Gulf Wars, she had gone to Iraq for Vanity Fair, and that while she was at a hotel, "Suddenly everyone in the restaurant got up and left, and Uday and Qusay and their entourage came in and sat at a long table that was very close to our table." She recounted that she was asked if she wanted to join them and went for it. Her memoir also describes how she had tea with Gaddafi while she was a low-level NBC staffer. Of course, the spot makes it sound like Cockburn ate with the three of them because she enjoys hanging out with dictators.
● WV-03: A super PAC called Partnership for an Opioid-Free Appalachia has launched a $205,000 ad buy against Republican Carol Miller. We don’t have a copy of their spot, or any other information about the group, which was formed last month.
● House: With Election Day three weeks away, we’re rolling out our newest tool to help keep tabs on the large playing field that will determine control of the House: a spreadsheet that sums up the independent expenditures made prior to Monday by the four largest groups involved in House races. With this data, you can see which contests the major players think are competitive, and how much money they’ve devoted to each one so far.
Before diving in, there are several important things to be aware of:
- This sheet only covers expenditures made by the DCCC, the House Majority PAC, the NRCC, and the Congressional Leadership Fund (HMP and CLF are both super PACs). Many other organizations have spent millions on House races. However, these other groups are largely focused on the same set of races as the Big Four, so looking at what the top four groups are doing gives us a good sense of the battleground while avoiding information overload—though there can be exceptions, since priorities don’t always sync up perfectly even among entities supporting the same side.
- Even if a district hasn’t seen much or any third-party money come in yet, it could still get added to this list before Election Day. By the same token, seats can change hands even if there’s little or no outside spending—for all their access to polls, analytics, and other data, these groups are by no means infallible in predicting which races will be the most competitive.
- It also only covers past expenditures, which outside groups are required to report to the FEC. It does not account for upcoming spending, including TV ad reservations. Those are generally only available in (often fragmentary) media reports. It’s generally a safe bet, though, that most of these races will see continued spending all the way through Election Day. Some, however, will get triaged (or have already been), which we keep track of separately.
- Not all dollars are created equal. If you spend $1 million in Minneapolis, that will buy a lot more ads than the same amount spent in New York City, where advertising is much more expensive.
- The sheet does not include spending on special elections or primaries, or districts where total outside spending from the Big Four groups is less than five figures.
New independent expenditure reports keep rolling in all the time (groups generally have to file them within 48 or 24 hours of actually spending their money), and the pace will only quicken as we approach Election Day. We’ll therefore update our chart each Monday and note any key developments.
Meanwhile, although we usually only have reports on the amount of money that campaigns and outside groups are spending, CNN reports on new data that shows the actual number of TV ads that have aired in the first week of October in the most competitive House races, graphing the numbers by party (though this analysis may have only applied to broadcast ads, not cable; it’s not clear). One key finding is that in races where both parties were airing TV ads, Democrats ran more than twice as many as Republicans did in 31 districts, yet Republicans doubled up on Democrats in only four districts.
One important contributor to this trend is likely that federal law requires TV stations to give discounted rates to candidates themselves, unlike third party groups such as super PACs, often making it costlier by multiple times over for outside groups to run the same quantity of ads. That could be denting the GOP’s ability to match Democrats on the airwaves, given its reliance on the NRCC and Congressional Leadership Fund, especially when Democratic candidates have been raising far more money than their Republican opponents in the most recent quarter.
● Polls:
- AK-AL: Public Policy Polling (D) for Tech Solidarity: Don Young (R-inc): 46, Alyse Galvin (I): 43
- MN-08: Siena for the New York Times: Pete Stauber (R): 49, Joe Radinovich (D): 34 (Sept.: 44-43 Radinovich)
- NC-13: SurveyUSA for Civitas Institute (R): Ted Budd (R-inc): 44, Kathy Manning (D): 41 (July: 40-35 Budd)
- NJ-03: Stockton University: Tom MacArthur (R-inc): 47, Andy Kim (D): 45
- NY-01: GBA Strategies (D) for Perry Gershon: Lee Zeldin (R-Inc): 50, Perry Gershon (D): 46
- PA-01: Public Opinion Strategies (R) for the NRCC: Brian Fitzpatrick (R-inc): 50, Scott Wallace (D): 42
- PA-01: Siena for the New York Times: Wallace (D): 50, Fitzpatrick (R-inc): 43
- UT-04: University of Utah for the Salt Lake Tribune: Ben McAdams (D): 46, Mia Love (R-inc): 46 (June: 45-39 Love)
- VA-02: Christopher Newport University: Scott Taylor (R-inc): 50, Elaine Luria (D): 43
- WA-03: Lake Research (D) for Carolyn Long: Carolyn Long (D): 45, Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-inc): 43 (June: 42-37 Herrera Beutler)
The Alaska poll was done for Tech Solidarity, which has endorsed several Democrats in House contests, including Galvin. The poll identifies Galvin, who won the Democratic primary even though she isn't registered with either party, as an independent. (Galvin will be listed on the ballot with a U next to her name for undeclared, as well as the phrase "Alaska Democratic Party Nominee" off to the right.) A recent survey from local pollster Alaska Survey Research, which identified Galvin the same way, gave Young a similar 50-46 edge.
Siena finds a massive swing to the right over the last month in Minnesota's 8th, an open and ancestrally blue seat that veered from 52-46 Obama all the way to 54-39 Trump. The only other poll we've seen here was a Radinovich internal from the end of September that gave him a bare 45-44 lead, which is the same margin that the first Siena poll found. One other difference between the two polls was that this time, Siena asked about Independence Party nominee Skip Sandman, who takes 4 percent of the vote; the Times says Sandman, who earned 4 percent when he ran as a Green in 2016, takes almost all of his support from voters who disapprove of Trump.
One other big difference between the two Siena samples is how popular Trump is. In early September, Trump posted just a 47-48 approval rating, while he’s at 54-38 in their new survey. By contrast, the HuffPost Pollster average found Trump going from a 42-53 approval rating on Sept. 9 (when the first Siena poll was finished) to a slightly-better 44-52 score now.
That doesn’t mean we should just dismiss this new result, though, since it's possible that Trump’s numbers just disproportionately improved in this rural seat, or that the first poll’s sample wasn’t conservative enough. The Times’ Nate Cohn also explored Siena’s big shift between polls and suggested that part of the move might be real, but part might be due to the lack of party registration data in Minnesota, which makes it hard to weight a poll like this properly.
In New York’s 1st, Gershon released his poll a few days after Siena found him down 49-41. A mid-September Gershon poll from a different firm (Global Strategy Group) found Zeldin up 47-44, which is similar to what this new poll finds.
In Pennsylvania’s 1st, in an odd move, the Times announced on Saturday afternoon that they'd keep polling there even though they'd hit the 500 sample their polls aim for, with Cohn tweeting that they "didn't successfully execute our game plan and we're going to need more calls to make up for it. Most/all of those calls will go to registered Republicans."
Cohn didn’t specify what that “game plan” was or where it went awry, but Wallace held a 10-point lead when the poll had 500 respondents, and he ended up with a 7-point edge when all was said and done. (While the poll was still running, with Wallace far ahead, the NRCC released its survey.) The only other poll we've seen over the last month was a late-September Monmouth poll that gave Fitzpatrick a 50-46 lead.
This is the second poll of Utah's 4th to show movement toward McAdams. A recent McAdams internal gave him a 47-46 lead after he trailed 46-44 in August.
An early-October Siena poll of Virginia's 2nd found Taylor up 49-41, which is very similar to what Christopher Newport finds now; an early September Luria internal found a very different result, putting her ahead 51-43. This new poll also finds Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine beating Republican Corey Stewart 47-42 in this seat; Trump won 49-45 here as he was losing statewide 50-44, though Gov. Ralph Northam carried this district 51-47 while he was winning 54-45 statewide.
This is the only poll we've seen of Washington's 3rd since Long's last internal in June, though Siena has now begun polling here.
Ad Roundup
