Leading Off:
● IL-Sen: Rep. Tammy Duckworth, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Illinois, has just launched her first TV ad of the race, three weeks ahead of the March 15 primary. In the spot, the narrator talks about Duckworth's difficult upbringing, saying her family "lost everything" after her father lost his job, then describes how Duckworth went on to serve in Congress "after recovering from being shot down in Iraq." The ad doesn't describe her devastating injuries (she lost both legs), but it does pan over some photographs where her prostheses are visible.
The second half offers some feel-good progressive boilerplate ("Tammy will work to make student loans affordable and retirement secure"), which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to discuss Duckworth's singular biography at greater length. The production values also aren't as high as they could be, often relying on still photos rather than moving images. Compare this ad to a recent intro spot from Rep. Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican who is also running for Senate, which draws you into his life story much more intimately.
Politico says the Duckworth ad is only airing outside of the expensive Chicago media market so far, and there's no word on the size of the buy or whether it'll go up in Chicago as well.
Duckworth faces two opponents for the Democratic nomination, Chicago Urban League president Andrea Zopp and state Sen. Napoleon Harris, but a new poll from Southern Illinois University confirms she has a wide lead. Duckworth takes a dominant 52 percent of the vote while Zopp gets just 6 and Harris only 4. That spread is plausible: A PPP poll from last July (before Harris entered the race) had Duckworth ahead of Zopp 59-10.
Meanwhile, as we surmised just the other day, GOP Sen. Mark Kirk has little to fear from his primary challenger, businessman James Marter. Kirk has a huge 53-14 advantage, and Marter has almost no money. This helps explain why Kirk finally felt comfortable in breaking with his party's leadership and saying he thinks that President Obama should nominate someone to the Supreme Court and the Senate should hold a vote.
Senate:
● FL-Sen: Congressman/hedge fund manager Alan Grayson has released a new internal poll from 20/20 Insight showing him with a 41-32 lead over Rep. Patrick Murphy in Florida's Democratic primary for Senate. (The campaign did not provide exact field dates but merely said the survey was conducted "over three weekdays last week.") The numbers aren't surprising, since Grayson has held leads of roughly this size in some earlier polls (others have shown Murphy ahead), but the key thing here is that the primary is not until August.
That's a long ways off, and no one's spent any real money on ads—a necessity for getting your name out there in a state as huge as Florida. And right now, Murphy is set to dominate the paid media portion of the campaign, since he has a massive 20-to-1 cash advantage on Grayson. Of course Grayson, who is a multi-millionaire, could self-fund back to parity, but so far, he hasn't shown much willingness to do so.
● IN-Sen: Last week, Marlin Stutzman and the Indiana Democratic Party each argued that Todd Young, Stutzman's GOP primary rival, did not have enough valid signatures to appear on the ballot. The Indiana Election Commission split along partisan lines and deadlocked in a 2-2 tie, which keeps Young on the ballot: While Democrats are considering challenging the ruling in court, Young is going on the offensive against Stutzman.
Young's new TV spot says that Stutzman "ripped a page out of Obama's playbook and joined the Democrats in resorting to dirty tricks against Todd Young." The narrator doesn't go into any detail about how Stutzman's tactics are "Chicago style politics" at all (during Obama's first state Senate campaign, he successfully challenged his primary opponent's ballot petitions and won the Democratic nod without opposition), and it doesn't even say what Stutzman and the Democrats tried to do. But given how much GOP primary voters hate Obama, maybe just tangentially linking Stutzman to the president will be enough to damage him.
At this point, it's not clear if Stutzman's attempt to knock Young off the ballot backfired. Plenty of Republican establishment figures, most notably retiring Sen. Dan Coats, have blasted Stutzman for joining with Democrats to deprive other Republicans of their choice. But the GOP establishment never liked Stutzman anyway, and other Republicans may agree that Young got lazy and didn't submit enough valid signatures. The primary isn't until May, so it's quite possible that most voters will forget this whole incident by then.
● NC-Sen: SurveyUSA takes a look at the Tar Heel State's Senate race and finds pretty much the same thing that PPP has found for months. Republican incumbent Richard Burr is far from beloved with a 34-41 approval rating, but he has clear leads against his little-known Democratic foes. Burr edges ex-state House Majority Whip Deborah Ross, the favorite of the Democratic establishment, 45-37, which is almost identical to the 43-37 Burr lead PPP saw earlier this month.
Burr beats Spring Lake Mayor Chris Rey and businessman Kevin Griffin 46-34 and 45-35 respectively, but it may not matter much. SurveyUSA gives Ross a 30-7 lead over Griffin in the March 15 primary, with Rey at 5; PPP gave Ross a smaller 22 percent of the vote, with both of her primary foes taking 10 each. Until recently, candidates needed to take more than 40 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. However, after court-ordered redistricting caused North Carolina to move its House primaries to June, the legislature decided to eliminate runoffs altogether this year. Burr himself leads primary foe Richard Brannon 45-14.
Gubernatorial:
● WV-Gov: State Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler doesn't have the money of billionaire Jim Justice or the family connections of ex-US Attorney Booth Goodwin, but he's hoping that West Virginia's outnumbered liberals will help him secure a win in the Democratic primary. This week, Kessler endorsed Bernie Sanders' campaign, and in the short term, it may be a smart strategy. West Virginia's gubernatorial primary is the same day as the presidential contest, and a recent poll gave Sanders a massive lead over Hillary Clinton. If Sanders does well in the Mountain State in May, Kessler might benefit from tying himself to the senator. Even if Sanders fades by then, Kessler could get a boost if this endorsement helps him consolidate liberals.
But if Kessler gets Team Blue's nod, he may very quickly regret getting involved in the presidential contest at all. West Virginia has become solidly red in presidential contests, and successful local Democratic candidates have won by portraying themselves as distinct from the national party. State Senate President Bill Cole, who faces no GOP primary opposition, will undoubtedly do everything he can to tether his eventual foe to Team Blue's presidential ticket. Even if Clinton gets the Democratic nod, Cole would still use the Sanders endorsement to argue that Kessler is no different than the liberals in DC whom West Virginians have come to despise. For their part, Goodwin and Justice have not taken sides in the presidential race.
A recent independent poll gave Justice, who is the only candidate who has been running ads, a 32-25 lead over Goodwin, with Kessler at 23. Several union groups, including the United Mine Workers, have thrown their support behind Justice, and the West Virginia Education Association joined them in his corner on Tuesday.
House:
● FL-11: Republican Rep. Dan Webster spent months considering where to run after court-ordered redistricting turned his old seat safely blue, and on Monday, he announced that he'd campaign for the open 11th District. The 11th only includes about 18 percent of Webster's current seat, though the Tampa Bay Times' Adam Smith says that Webster has represented about 30 percent of this turf over his years in Congress and in the legislature.
The 11th, which includes the infamous mega-retirement community The Villages, backed Romney 59-40, but Webster isn't assured the GOP nomination. Justin Grabelle, the former chief of staff to retiring Rep. Richard Nugent, has been running here for months, and Nugent is supporting him. Webster had a $334,000 to $99,000 cash-on-hand edge over Grabelle at the end of December, but Grabelle may be able to make up the gap. Webster challenged both John Boehner and Paul Ryan for the speakership, and the national GOP establishment has little incentive to help him raise money; Webster was in the legislature for decades and he served as speaker of the state House in the mid-1990s, so he's not exactly the type of guy who can easily rally tea party support either.
However, Grabelle may have his own problems. Grabelle used to work for Nugent's predecessor Ginny Brown-Waite, but she was not impressed with his performance. In December, she said she appointed him to serve as her interim chief of staff but soon "demoted" him. Brown-Waite didn't go into detail about what happened, but said that she was hoping that Grabelle would "grow into the job and it just wasn't there … I know six years have elapsed, but I'm not sure six years is enough." Brown-Waite and state Sen. Wilton Simpson announced two months ago that they would support rancher Kelly Rice if he ran, but Rice still hasn't jumped in. The filing deadline for the August primary is in June, so there's still plenty of time for Rice or other ambitious Republicans to get in.
● IN-05: A little while ago, Republican Rep. Susan Brooks' office refused to deny reports that Brooks was considering applying to lead Ivy Tech Community College, the statewide community college system. But Brooks' spokeswoman now says that the congresswoman has "no intention of applying." That's not exactly an iron clad no, but the March 15 application deadline isn't very far away. The congressional filing deadline has already passed for this safely red seat, and Brooks faces only token primary and general election opposition.
● NC-09: This week, Robin Hayes became the second former House member to endorse ex-CIA agent George Rouco's primary campaign against Republican incumbent Robert Pittenger. While ex-Rep. Sue Myrick probably has more pull with voters than Hayes, who badly lost his seat in 2008, Hayes went on to serve as North Carolina's Republican Party chair, so he may have some connections that could help Rouco raise money. And Rouco desperately needs cash: While Pittenger held just a $73,000 to $19,000 cash-on-hand lead at the end of December, the congressman is wealthy. Pittenger dumped over $2 million of his own money into his 2012 campaign, and he can undoubtedly do more self-funding if need be.
Rouco is a long shot, but there are a few unpredictable elements that make this race worth watching. Back in August, Pittenger acknowledged that his family's real estate company, Pittenger Land Investments, was the target of an FBI investigation, though he claimed he had no idea what it was about. There haven't been any recent developments, and it looked like there wouldn't be before the March primary. But after a federal court ordered North Carolina to redraw its congressional districts, the state moved the primary to June, so there's more time for this story to get back in the news. Pittenger's district was also dramatically redrawn: Under the legislature's plan, the congressman only represents about 39 percent of the new 9th District. If the FBI investigation goes nowhere before June, Pittenger's probably fine against Rouco, but this contest is worth keeping an eye on. Romney carried the new 9th 56-44.
● NJ-03: It's back to square zero for Team Blue, since Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt has announced that she won't challenge freshman Republican Tom MacArthur. Obama carried this South Jersey seat 52-47 and while the area still likes Republicans downballot, Democrats can't cede districts like this if they want any chance to retake the House anytime soon. Unfortunately, this is perhaps the most expensive district in America to advertise in: The seat is split between the pricey New York and Philadelphia media markets, and any viable candidate needs to be either a great fundraiser or personally wealthy. The filing deadline is April 4, so Democrats don't have much time left to find someone.
● PA-02: On Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf endorsed state Rep. Dwight Evans' primary campaign against indicted incumbent Chaka Fattah. Evans was a prominent Wolf supporter during the 2014 Democratic primary, so it's no surprise to see the governor going to bat for him now. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is also in Evans' corner, though much of the local Democratic establishment is supporting Fattah in the April primary.
● PA-08: I feel like we need a catchy acronym we can use each time another union endorses Steve Santarsiero, since it happens so often. (AUESS just sounds weird.) In any case, the National Education Association and its state counterpart are both backing the state representative, who faces businesswoman Shaughnessy Naughton in the April Democratic primary for this swing seat.
Grab Bag:
● Demographics: Pew Research has put out an interesting table showing how Democratic or Republican-leaning various religions are within the United States, and most helpfully, breaks Protestant Christianity down into several dozen different denominations. If you were expecting Mormons to be the most solidly Republican denomination (seeing as how Utah, where they're heavily concentrated, is perhaps our reddest state), well, you're right! What you might not have expected is that the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't come in second. Instead, it's third, behind, the not-widely-known Church of the Nazarene, and only slightly ahead of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (not to be confused with the liberal mainline Lutherans, who even more confusingly, are called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).
You might be expecting atheists or maybe Buddhists to be the most Democratic religious group, but they aren't. Instead, historically black denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Baptist Convention are at the top. Interestingly, one evangelical church is more Democratic than Catholics or most of the mainline denominations: the Seventh Day Adventists, who have a much larger non-white percentage than other evangelical denominations.
Catholics and mainline Protestants are very close to the national political median (with the exception of the very liberal and New England-centric United Church of Christ). Judaism is actually the least Democratic of the non-Christian religions (lagging Islam and Hinduism, for instance), though Jews are still more Dem-leaning than any Christian denomination other than the historically black churches.
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 Stephen Wolf.