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
● FL-27: We have dueling internal polls in Florida's GOP-held 27th District, and both of them suggest that Democrats are going to have a tougher time flipping this Miami-area seat than observers thought.
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Republican Maria Elvira Salazar released a mid-September survey from McLaughlin & Associates showing her up 51-42 over Democrat Donna Shalala, who responded with an early-September poll from Bendixen & Amandi International giving herself a 46-42 advantage, with 8 percent going to unheralded pro-Trump candidate Mayra Joli. McLaughlin has a reputation for wildly inaccurate polls and has had no qualms about working as the pollster for far-right Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban in that country's highly flawed spring election. That said, these results aren't exactly reassuring for Shalala.
This heavily Cuban-American district backed Hillary Clinton by 58-38, and although local Republicans have long done better than Trump's awful performance here, even Cuban-American GOP Sen. Marco Rubio lost the 27th by 49.2-48.6 in 2016 despite his 52-44 statewide win. All that should make this open seat one of Democrats' best pickup opportunities nationwide, but a recent Politico profile of Shalala's candidacy gives cause for concern.
Notably, local Democrats expressed worry that Shalala's campaign just doesn’t have its act together. One longtime Shalala critic complained that her campaign is in “sleep mode” and has yet to wake up, and Politico writes that unnamed party insiders agree. Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, also doesn’t speak Spanish, which could be a big obstacle in a district where the census estimates that 65 percent of adult citizens are Hispanic or Latino.
By contrast, Salazar is a Cuban-American who has worked as a journalist for Telemundo and Univision, and she is at ease switching between English and Spanish-language media. Salazar also has the support of retiring GOP Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a vocal Trump critic who has long been popular in this area.
Shalala could also be still hurt from lingering hostilities from the bruising Aug. 28 primary, where her opponents hammered her with more than $1 million in negative TV ads and mailers. Shalala only won by a surprisingly weak 32-27 over state Rep. David Richardson in the primary, while Salazar more comfortably prevailed over a damaged foe who had little money to bombard her with negative ads. Shalala could thus pick up more support as memories of the primary fade.
Shalala's standing may also improve if she begins heavily airing ads promoting her candidacy and tying her opponent to Trump, who almost certainly remains very unpopular here. Shalala, a former head of the Clinton Foundation, is very well-connected and raised plenty of money during the primary, so she at least shouldn’t need to worry about being able to afford ad time. For now at least, major outside party groups are focusing their attention in the neighboring 26th District and haven’t spent here, so it's possible they don’t think Shalala is in as much trouble as even her poll suggests she’s in.
Daily Kos Elections currently rates this contest as Likely Democratic, but we're keeping an eye on all these developments.
Senate
● AZ-Sen: TargetSmart (D) for Progress Now Arizona: Kyrsten Sinema (D): 51, Martha McSally (R): 46
● TX-Sen: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's latest TV ad against Democrat Rep. Beto O'Rourke amps up the xenophobia and takes O'Rourke's words wildly out of context while doing so. The spot plays images of immigrants who were repeatedly deported yet later allegedly committed violent crimes before accusing O'Rourke of saying he's "open to ... abolishing ICE," the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, implying that O'Rourke wants open borders that would allow violent criminals to terrorize Texans.
However, the full context of O'Rourke's statements make it very clear that he is not joining the call from some of those on the left to abolish the agency and have open borders, saying the biggest challenge is to abolish the practices that have led to widespread human rights abuses like the separation of thousands of children from their parents. O'Rourke has furthermore called "abolish ICE" a "slogan on a bumper sticker" that means nothing if the government's abusive practices don't end, arguing instead that America first and foremost needs immigration enforcement that is humane, whether that takes place through ICE or other federal agencies.
● Senate, Gubernatorial: In partnership with Reuters and the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, Ipsos has done its first surveys of five Sun Belt states with Senate and governor's races. However, some caution is warranted because the polls were conducted entirely online and in English, even though each of these states has a substantial Spanish-speaking population and those who may be easier to reach on cell phones. Nevertheless, we're told the surveys did weight to past census estimates of turnout by race, and something like that is a must for states where voters skew much whiter than the total adult population thanks to low Hispanic eligibility and turnout rates. The results are below:
- AZ-Sen: Kyrsten Sinema (D): 47, Martha McSally (R): 44
- AZ-Gov: Doug Ducey (R-inc): 51, David Garcia (D): 39
- CA-Sen: Dianne Feinstein (D-inc): 44, Kevin de Leon (D): 24
- CA-Gov: Gavin Newsom (D): 52, John Cox (R): 40
- FL-Sen: Rick Scott (R): 46, Bill Nelson (D-inc): 45
- FL-Gov: Andrew Gillum (D): 50, Ron DeSantis (R): 44
- NV-Sen: Dean Heller (R-inc): 46, Jacky Rosen (D): 43
- NV-Gov: Adam Laxalt (R): 43, Steve Sisolak (D): 40
- TX-Sen: Beto O'Rourke (D): 47, Ted Cruz (R-inc): 45
- TX-Gov: Greg Abbott (R-inc): 50, Lupe Valdez (D): 41
Most notable among this release is that this is the first poll to ever find O'Rourke beating Cruz. (Correction: A Civiqs poll earlier this month showed O'Rourke up 48-47.) While it could be the first to catch onto a trend, it's also quite possible that the results are out of line with where things stand in a state where Cruz has had an average lead in the mid-single-digits.
Even more surprising, O'Rourke is ahead even though Rosen is narrowly trailing in Nevada, which is widely regarded as one of Team Blue’s best pickup opportunities. Nevada has been a difficult state to survey in the past, and pollsters have often had trouble reaching the state's highly transient population; state polls that are only in English have also often understated Democratic support in the Silver State. It's possible, though far from guaranteed, something similar is happening here.
Gubernatorial
● Polls: The roundup of the latest gubernatorial polls:
Democratic data firm TargetSmart's first publicly available survey isn’t too different from a recent poll for CNN, which gave Ducey a 49-46 edge; a PPP survey for Garcia also had Ducey ahead only 44-43. However, recent polls from Fox, Ipsos, and the local GOP firm Data Orbital had the governor up by 8-12 points. Meanwhile, Goucher is the latest pollster to find Hogan winning re-election in a blowout in Maryland, where he has led every single poll to-date by a sizable margin.
House
● CA-21: The NRCC is canceling their October ad run here, although they still a reservation for the final week of the race. While the 21st District backed Hillary Clinton 55-40, this cancellation is likely a sign of confidence for Republican Rep. David Valadao, who has decisively won three terms in a seat where Democrats have long had enormous problems getting their voters to turn out in non-presidential races.
● NM-02: Siena’s latest poll for the New York Times is one of the most surprising to date, with them giving Democrat Xochitl Torres Small a 46-45 edge over Republican Yvette Herrell in the race for this 50-40 Trump open GOP seat in southern New Mexico. That result is markedly better than the 48-41 Herrell advantage that Research & Polling Inc. found last week, which was the only other poll of this race released in recent months. The NRCC very recently went up on the air to attack Torres Small, a sign that they’re taking her seriously.
Meanwhile, the Democratic opposition group American Ledger recently unearthed a recording where Herrell freely admitted to a group of activists that she viewed her state House seat as a way to "transition into a federal seat." She also bragged about being on the national board of directors for the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a national big money group that creates model ultra-conservative bills and lobbies state legislatures to adopt them.
● NV-03: The conservative Congressional Leadership Fund and Trump-aligned America First Policies are rolling out with large $2.5 million and $1.5 million ad reservations, respectively, on behalf of perennial Republican candidate Danny Tarkanian. The NRCC reportedly decided to cut Tarkanian loose just before Labor Day and focus their money on the neighboring 4th District, but that may have been a signal to its super PAC allies that they should jump in and aid him. In any case, CLF’s involvement shows that national Republicans aren’t triaging this seat, which very narrowly backed both Obama and Trump.
Still, Tarkanian's long list of flaws and election losses nevertheless make him the underdog against Democrat Susie Lee in a race Daily Kos Elections rates as Lean Democratic.
● House: Billionaire Mike Bloomberg's group Everytown for Gun Safety recently unveiled their list of targets as part of Bloomberg's announced $80 million pledge to help Democrats flip the House this fall, and we now know the large sizes of initial digital ad buys in three Republican-held Southern California seats:
- CA-25: $447,000
- CA-48: $238,000
- CA-49: $138,000
Meanwhile, EMILY's List has dropped more funds on TV ads to help Democratic women win three other Republican-held House districts:
- KS-03: $390,000
- TX-23: $535,000
- WA-08: $326,000
● Polls:
Casten's survey is the first one to find him up over Roskam, but a 45-44 Roskam lead in Siena's recent survey and the high level of national party spending confirm the race for this ancestrally Republican seat is indeed highly competitive.
Meanwhile, Stockton University's New Jersey poll shows a race for a Republican seat that is very much not competitive, which is unsurprising in an Obama-Trump seat where Democrats have an exceptionally formidable candidate and national Republicans have disavowed their cash-strapped nominee over his white supremacist associations.
Legislative
● Special Elections: Johnny Longtorso brings us the outcome of our final special election until November:
Texas SD-19: In a rare loss for Democrats (for this year, at least), this was a Republican pickup. Pete Flores defeated former Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego by a 53-47 margin.
This result marks a huge underperformance for Democrats from Hillary Clinton's 54-42 victory in 2016 and even Barack Obama's 55-44 edge in 2012. It’s also a huge shift from the late July all-party primary, where the four Democrats took a combined 59 percent of the vote as the three Republicans took just 40. This San Antonio-area and southwestern Texas seat overlaps considerably with the heavily contested and more evenly divided 23rd Congressional District, which Gallego represented for one term before losing in 2014 to Republican Will Hurd.
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