Republican Rep. Steve Knight
:
• CA-25: Republicans have held California's 25th Congressional District in northern Los Angeles County for ages, but presidential turnout might give Democrats a shot at pulling off an upset next year. And freshman Republican Steve Knight hasn't exactly been doing a good job entrenching himself in this seat, which Mitt Romney only carried by a narrow 50-48 margin.
On Tuesday, Knight made headlines after he was caught on video threatening an anti-immigration protestor, "If you touch me again, I'll drop your ass." It's somewhat surprising that Knight has earned the ire of anti-immigrant zealots, since he first won his seat in Congress last year by presenting himself as the true conservative option—more on that in a bit—but here we are. (Philip Bump explains exactly what these activists were pissed about.)
And it's not just his interactions with the public that showcase Knight's weaknesses. He ended late March with only $29,000 in his campaign account, a pitiful sum anywhere, but especially for a seat located in the very expensive Los Angeles media market. And you can't say this was merely one weak quarter: During the entire 2014 cycle, Knight raised just $400,000.
Democrats know that winning over this ancestrally red seat isn't going to be easy, but Team Blue is looking to put it in play. Head below the fold for more.
Roll Call reports that Santa Clarita Water Board Member Maria Gutzeit has been talking to the DCCC about a possible run, and she says she is considering it. The local water board isn't necessarily the most obvious launching pad for a congressional bid, though the job has recently become much more high-profile now that California is experiencing a severe drought. (Gutzeit also tried running for Santa Clarita's city council in both 2008 and 2014 but lost both times.) The Democratic bench isn't great here and it's unclear who else might step up, but Knight's flaws could give Gutzeit an opening.
However, it's far from clear we'll see a Knight-Gutzeit match even if the Democrat does jump in. Knight's apostasies on immigration—and this high-profile confrontation, which circulated nationally—could earn him a challenge from another Republican, though no one has talked about stepping up yet. But if Knight does earn a credible GOP challenger, that's not necessarily good news for Democrats. Under the state's top-two primary rules, all candidates compete on the same primary ballot, and the two contenders with the most votes advance to November.
While Democrats can expect good turnout in November of next year, they can't for the June primary, seeing as turnout was horrible here in 2012. It was even worse in 2014: Even though four Republicans were on the ballot and 2012 Democratic nominee Lee Rogers only faced a little-known intra-party foe, Knight and fellow Republican Tony Strickland still managed to take both general election spots. (In the end, Knight won 53-47, motivating just enough conservative voters to overcome the better-funded, establishment-backed Strickland.)
So if two Republicans are on the ballot in 2016, there's a real possibility of the same thing happening again, which would give the GOP an automatic hold, even if Knight ultimately lost. However, it's too early to say what will happen here. Knight's problems give Democrats an opening in an area that's become quite competitive in recent presidential cycles. But Democrats will need to work hard to avoid the pitfalls they've experienced in the past to finally turn this seat blue.
Senate:
• IL-Sen: Back in February, rumors circulated that Democratic state Sen. and former NFL linebacker Napoleon Harris was looking at running against Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, but nothing ever came of them. However, Roll Call is reporting that Harris is still considering, and he only offered an evasive answer when he was asked about his plans.
Harris, who owns several pizza franchises, is personally wealthy, but his last bid for federal office didn't go well. Harris ran in the 2013 special election for the state's 2nd District, but he dropped out before the primary after failing to gain traction. Harris also only voted present on the bill that legalized same-sex marriage, which is unlikely to play incredibly well in a primary. Rep. Robin Kelly, another African American from Chicago (who ultimately won the 2013 special with Harris' endorsement), is also contemplating a bid, but if they both ran that could make things easier for Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who so far has the primary field to herself.
You can't count Harris out at this stage: After all, then-state Sen. Barack Obama turned a doomed 2000 House bid into a successful 2004 Senate run. Of course, for every Barack Obama, there are about a trillion other politicians who try for a promotion and lose badly, then proceed to lose badly again.
• UT-Sen: It never seemed very likely that real estate developer Josh Romney, the son of some former one-term governor of Massachusetts, would challenge Sen. Mike Lee in the GOP primary. And sure enough, he's now told the Deseret News that he won't go for it, though he hopes someone else will try to unseat Lee. Romney says he's "talked to a few different people," about running, but he didn't name anyone.
As for Romney, he says he might run for something in the future. Of course, Romney has a long history of being touted for office but never jumping in. Back in 2008, he considered running against then-Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson but passed. In 2009, he was in talks to become Gov. Gary Herbert's lieutenant governor, and later that year, there were rumors that Romney would serve as the running mate on a rival Republican gubernatorial candidate's ticket, but he ultimately never appeared on the ballot in 2010. Romney is relatively young though and he still has time to run, though he'd need to go up against plenty of other Beehive State Republicans.
Gubernatorial:
• IN-Gov: Republican businessman Bill Oesterle can forget about his dream candidate, ex-Gov. Mitch Daniels, making a comeback bid. Oesterle floated the idea earlier this week, but Daniels was as clear as can be about whether he'd run: "No, I'm not. Nope, nope, nope, nope." Daniels added: "I've said this for years: Governor was the only job I was ever running for. I wasn't on the make for anything else. Not for the Senate, president, and all the rest of that." We're guessing he's a no?
Oesterle, who is close to Daniels and who takes credit for convincing him to run for governor the first time back in 2004, had to know all this, so this was probably just a bit of kabuki. Oesterle himself is considering a primary challenge to Gov. Mike Pence, but perhaps he just wanted to play at being modest before jumping in. We'll see what he decides soon enough.
• WV-Gov: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's decision not to seek this open seat in 2016 may have been good news for the DSCC, but it means the state party needs to find a different standard bearer. They may not need to look too far though: On Tuesday, Jim Justice, whom Forbes ranked as the state's richest person last year, said he was "very seriously considering" a bid. Justice, who made his fortune from coal and owns two resorts in the state, says he'll decide "soon," but sounds very much like a candidate, noting that he stayed in the state after striking it rich and has helped it attract sports venues.
House:
• CA-36: On Tuesday, Republican Indio Mayor Lupe Ramos Watson announced that she would challenge Democratic incumbent Raul Ruiz in this swingy Inland Empire seat. Ramos Watson has been meeting with the NRCC and appears to be their preferred candidate, but we'll see if anyone else jumps in. Indio makes up about 11 percent of the 36th District, so Ramos Watson won't start out with a huge level of name recognition. Ruiz easily won a second term during the GOP wave, so she'll also have a lot to prove if she wants to give him a run for his money. Still, even a presidential cycle, Democrats can't take this Obama 51-48 seat for granted.
• NV-04: On Wednesday, former Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, who was the Democrats' 2014 nominee for lieutenant governor, kicked off a bid against freshman Republican Rep. Cresent Hardy. So far, Flores only faces state Sen. Ruben Kihuen in the primary, though several other metro Las Vegas Democrats are eyeing the seat. Hardy lucked into a blue seat Obama won by 10 points, and he's not going to have an easy time holding on next year with presidential turnout likely to boost Democratic fortunes.
Flores badly lost last year's lieutenant governor race by a 59-34 margin, though it might be unfair to blame her for the wide defeat. Democratic turnout was terrible thanks not just to the GOP wave but because Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval was left virtually unopposed at the top of the ticket, leading to a landslide win for him and surprising victories for his party further down the ballot. (These same circumstances contributed to Hardy's unexpected win over Rep. Steven Horsford.)
Flores also has an interesting life story: She grew up poor, join a gang as a teenager, and even served time in a juvenile detention center, but she later turned her life around in dramatic fashion. Even though both Kihuen and Flores are well-liked by retiring Sen. Harry Reid, the Silver State's number-one political power-broker, the primary might very well get crowded, and Flores' background could help her stand out from the pack.
Grab Bag:
• Demographics: The New York Times' Upshot released a fascinating piece of data journalism this week, which you've likely already seen: the case of the "1.5 million missing black men." They aren't actually "missing," to the extent that we know where they are: mostly either dead due to disproportionate mortality rates, or incarcerated, due to disproportionate rates of imprisoned African-Americans. This is especially startling when you look at the ratio of black women to black men who aren't in prison: it's 100 to 83.
While the article doesn't delve into political implications, they aren't difficult to figure out: a sizable piece of the Democratic Party's most reliable population segment (the Democratic vote share among African-Americans often exceeds 90 percent) is left unable to vote. And since many of them are in states that disenfranchise felons, they're still unable to vote even when they're no longer "missing" and returned to public life. Felon disenfranchisement often gets overlooked by focused on voter ID requirements and registration list purges, but, in terms of raw numbers of people affected, ending felon disenfranchisement would likely make the single biggest difference.
The skewed female-to-male ratio in black communities also interferes with family formation, replicating future generations of poverty. Though the NYT article doesn't explore the link, David Jarman has found that the single strongest correlation, at the county level, between demographic data and Democratic vote percentage, isn't based on race, income, or education, but rather on the percentage of women over age 25 who've never married. That's because the counties with the highest percentages in that area include not only large cities, where you have a lot of millennials starting their careers, but also the rural mostly-black counties of the South, where many of the black men are "missing."
An initial worry on reading the article was that their decision to focus only on the Census category of "households" and not people living in "group quarters" was leading them to assign a lot of black men living in dormitories and, especially, military barracks to the ranks of the "missing." However, as they explain on their methodology page, that's not the case. For one thing, their sample is limited to men 25-54, which would probably rule out most college undergraduates and recent military enlistees. Also, the military isn't so disproportionately African-American (around 18 percent overall for active duty) that it would skew the larger numbers much.
In fact, if you dig deeper into Census information on "group quarters," only a small percentage of the military live in barracks at all these days: 339,000 out of 1.4 million active duty, with another approximately 400,000 stationed outside of the country and thus not counted by the Census (per 2011, which is probably lower now). Contrast that with 2.3 million persons in prison, 3.7 million in "other" (mostly dorms), and 1.5 million in, surprisingly, nursing homes.
However, if you factor in the racial breakdowns of the people in group quarters according to the Census, you get the real sickening scale of the impact of incarceration on African-Americans. Only 47,000 blacks (most of whom fall in the 18-24 range anyway) are in military barracks, but 858,000 are incarcerated. (There are also 195,000 in nursing homes, though, given the gender disparity in longevity, probably not too many of them are male.)
Justin Wolfers added an interesting post-script to the larger piece, zooming in on the places where the gender ratios are the largest ... and where they're reversed. As was alluded to earlier, where the overall percentage of the black population is the largest, those tend to the places with the most skewed ratios, especially Southern states where the overall percentages of blacks and overall incarceration rates are both high. Of all cities with more than 10,000 black residents, the worst ratio is one that's been in the news a lot lately: Ferguson, Missouri!
The places where the ratio is reversed -- where there are more black men than women -- on the other hand tend to be the places with the lowest black percentages overall, states like Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, and the Dakotas. Wolfers chalks that up to African-American men going there to work (i.e. extraction industries, he suggests, in Alaska and North Dakota).
But here's where the military might actually be affecting the numbers, after all (especially since, as we learned above, most military now live off-base in private-sector housing, not barracks, so they aren't "missing"). The military picks up hundreds of thousands of black men from big cities and the rural south, and deposits them in places like not just Afghanistan and Germany, but also Alaska and North Dakota (both of which have multiple air force bases) and even San Diego (the only major city that has a ratio that's skewed toward black men).
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 Taniel.
