Leading Off:
● House: Daily Kos Elections is pleased to present our initial House race ratings for the 2016 election cycle. Mid-decade redistricting has made two GOP-held seats (FL-10 and VA-04) safely Democratic, while it has turned the Democratic-held Florida 2nd District safely red, so we have Team Blue automatically netting one district. Unfortunately for Democrats, who need to net another 29 seats to regain the majority, pro-GOP gerrymanders and weak Democratic recruitment have made for a very small playing field. We rate just 52 seats as potentially competitive as of today, and the Democrats hold 16 of them. In other words, if Democrats hold all their vulnerable seats, they'll need to sweep 29 of the 36 GOP-held districts we have on the big board to retake the House. Needless to say, this is an extremely tough task.
However, a Donald Trump nomination could scramble the general election outlook in unexpected ways—just as he's upended the Republican primary—so we could see more revisions to our ratings than we would in a typical election year. Click through for our complete ratings chart, along with our one-of-a-kind hexmap visualizing our ratings.
Senate:
● FL-Sen: Well whaddya know? A third poll in a row, this one from Mason-Dixon, finds Rep. Patrick Murphy leading fellow Rep. Alan Grayson in the Democratic primary, in this case by a 33-19 margin. That follows surveys from Univision and SurveyUSA, which put Murphy up 7 and 11 points respectively. Of course, there's still plenty of game left to play, as emphasized by Mason-Dixon's almost absurd GOP primary numbers, which have the "frontrunner," Rep. David Jolly, garnering all of 9 percent. That's stellar compared to Univision, though, which had him at just 5—a solid 1 percent behind that poll's co-leaders, Rep. Ron DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera.
● MD-Sen: The April 26 Democratic primary isn't too far away, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen is returning to the Baltimore airwaves. His new ad is almost identical to his opening October spot, except this one notes that he's been endorsed by the Baltimore Sun. The FEC reports say that this buy is only for five-figures, but Van Hollen is capable of spending a whole lot more. Van Hollen faces fellow Rep. Donna Edwards, who is backed by EMILY's List, in the primary.
● NC-Sen, Gov: On behalf of High Point University, SurveyUSA takes a look at both parties' Tuesday primaries, and it looks like it will be a dull affair downballot. Ex-state House Majority Whip Deborah Ross is the Democratic establishment's preferred candidate for Senate, and she's grabbed a massive 52-9 lead over businessman Kevin Griffin. Republican Sen. Richard Burr dispatches primary foe Greg Bannon 56-20, while GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and Democratic challenger Roy Cooper also face weak intra-party opponents. The general elections are a lot more interesting: Burr starts out with a strong but not insurmountable 48-41 lead over Ross, while McCrory edges Cooper 47-45.
House:
● CA-08: Former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, an ultra-extremist whom Democrats had hoped would be the GOP's choice for governor in 2014, is unexpectedly back this year, with a surprise intra-party challenge to sophomore Rep. Paul Cook. Donnelly, an uncompromising true believer, says he's pissed that Cook voted for an omnibus spending bill "that would allow more unchecked, unvetted refugees and potential terrorists from the Middle East into our country just weeks after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino," which is located right next to the 8th District.
But thanks to California's top-two primary system, even if Donnelly can secure the second spot in the June primary, Cook would remain the overwhelming favorite in November. While this district is solidly red (it went 56-42 for Mitt Romney), Cook would almost certainly pick up most of the Democratic vote in the general election; indeed, in 2012, he handily beat a fellow Republican that way. One of the many negatives consequences that the goo-goo reformers who pushed top-two neglected to anticipate was that their new system has greatly aided incumbents by making it almost impossible for them to lose primaries. Good work, guys.
● FL-01: GOP state Sen. Don Gaetz sounded eager to run for Rep. Jeff Miller's House seat last year, back when Miller looked dead-set to enter Florida's Senate race. But Miller eventually demurred, and now that he's decided to retire (the better part of a year later), Gaetz no longer seems very interested. Instead, he appears quite supportive of his son, state Rep. Matt Gaetz, saying he'd "knock on doors and give him his first check" if Matt does indeed run. But the elder Gaetz refused to say whether the younger would actually make a congressional bid, nor did he say anything that would rule out one of his own.
Several other Republicans are also in the mix for this safely red seat, though as with Matt Gaetz, we haven't heard from anyone directly. State Sen. Greg Evers was another candidate who geared up for a run last year in anticipation of a Miller Senate campaign, and Florida Politics suggests that Escambia Supervisor of Elections David Stafford and Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward are also possibilities.
● FL-13: It's hard to understand what Eric Lynn is hoping to accomplish with his bid for Florida's open 13th Congressional District. After redistricting pulled Charlie Crist's home into this seat (and made it several points bluer), every Democrat cleared the way for the former governor—everyone, that is, except for Lynn, a former Defense Dept. official. And Crist is no ordinary candidate, of course: Not only is he exceptionally well-known and well-connected, he also performed well in the redrawn 13th despite narrowly losing his gubernatorial comeback bid in 2014. He is, in short, not the kind of opponent mere mortals have a shot against in a primary.
Confirmation of that comes in the form of a new PPP poll on behalf of an unknown client, where Crist pounds Lynn 71-11 while sporting a 61-17 favorability rating. Lynn, by contrast, is unknown to nearly three quarters of voters, but with Crist so far above the 50 percent mark, it's impossible to say that Lynn has any proverbial "room to grow." And Crist has already had tens of millions of dollars worth of mud thrown at him in prior campaigns, so even the scorchiest of scorched-earth assaults would barely singe him.
Yes, there are some Democrats who despise Crist, a former Republican, as a party-switching opportunist, but there are not nearly enough of them to derail his congressional bid. Lynn has earned the support of one very prominent local endorser, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, and he has half a million bucks in the bank, so he's no Some Dude, but he didn't dispute these poll numbers. Some peaks are just too high to climb, and Mt. Charlie looks like one of them.
● FL-23: A group called Allied Progress is hammering Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a new television ad that attacks her for opposing President Obama and "joining Republicans in standing up for payday lenders," saying she "received over $68,000 in campaign cash" from the industry. According to Politico, Allied Progress is spending "nearly $100,000" on cable and digital ads. This campaign really isn't targeted at Wasserman Schultz's re-election—part of the buy will air in Washington, DC—but she does face a primary challenge from law professor Tim Canova, and this message dovetails with his own.
● NC-13: Time to fire up the Random Rich Guy Signal? State Rep. Cecil Brockman, the one Democrat to express any interest in North Carolina's redrawn 13th Congressional District, has taken his name out of contention, saying he does not "want to run on a map that was purposefully gerrymandered in a partisan manner." He's not wrong about that, though the 13th would still actually be North Carolina's most competitive seat, having gone for Mitt Romney by about 7 points. But that's still far from great for Democrats, so you can understand why Brockman was cool on the idea.
The map, however, could yet change again, as the new GOP-crafted lines have yet to receive court approval. But in the meantime, since the current iteration of the 13th lacks an incumbent, several Republicans are already up and running, including Iredell County Register of Deeds Matt McCall, state Rep. John Blust, and state Sen. Andrew Brock. Several others are still considering.
● OH-08: There's a final burst of ad spending in the special election to fill John Boehner's seat ahead of Tuesday's all-important GOP primary. The establishment-backed group Defending Main Street is shelling out $60,000 on a spot attacking businessman Warren Davidson, who's been supported by the Club for Growth, saying he's had "high praise for Barack Obama's jobs plan" and "shipped jobs to China … just to boost his profits." (It's funny when "profits" become a bad thing in a Republican primary.)
Meanwhile, the Credit Union National Association's PAC (known as CULAC) is spending $50,000 on an ad to boost state Rep. Tim Derickson. The narrator lauds Derickson for his fiscal conservatism and says he's put "people ahead of big banks."
Grab Bag:
● Demographics: Pew Research's impressive study on the shrinking middle class from late last year did have one hole in it: it didn't really do anything to account for regional differences in America, which is important because the economy has, especially in recent years, become increasingly spiky. The Brookings Institution, however, has picked up that ball and run with it, using Pew's criteria to look at the percentage of the middle class in each of the nation's major metropolitan areas. (Though, unfortunately, it's not a time-series since the 1970s like with Pew's original study; it looks only at 2014 data.)
The middle class tends to be largest in the nation's heartland (which isn't that surprising; you're probably already aware that the most affluent metro areas, mostly on the coasts, tend to also have the highest levels of inequality): places like Omaha, Grand Rapids, and Des Moines, though the top 3 slots all go to cities in Utah. The middle class makes up 60 percent of the population in Ogden, for instance, followed by Provo and Salt Lake City. The smallest middle classes are either in metros with a large underclass (usually places with a large Latino population, like Fresno, El Paso, and McAllen) or a large upper class (the Bay Area, Washington DC, and Stamford, Connecticut).
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.
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