Leading Off:
● CO-Sen: Maybe there's some reality out there where Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is struggling to win re-election. Maybe in alternate Colorado, Republican Rep. Mike Coffman succumbed to the NRSC's pleas and entered the race, or suburban Denver District Attorney George Brauchler jumped in. Maybe Hillary Clinton is also facing a 4-point deficit in Colorado against GOP presidential nominee Brian Sandoval, and Bennet is hunting for every single possible crossover vote. Maybe this Bennet also has a beard and throws his campaign manager in the Agony Booth whenever he brings the senator more bad numbers from Gravis Marketing, the gold standard in polling.
But here in the Prime Universe, Bennet's looking just fine. Quinnipiac, which has hardly been bullish for Democrats this cycle, gives him a 54-38 edge against Republican Darryl Glenn, which is even larger than Clinton's 41-33 lead over Donald Trump. A number of other pollsters have shown double-digit leads for Bennet, and the HuffPost Pollster average has the incumbent up 51-38. While NRSC chair Roger Wicker said in mid-July that his committee would endorse the underfunded Glenn at some point in the future, the only thing they appear to have actually done for Glenn is to assign him a staffer who is splitting his time between several other states.
Senate:
● IA-Sen: We have another poll of the Iowa Senate race, and Quinnipiac gives Republican incumbent Chuck Grassley a 51-42 edge over Democrat Patty Judge. Several other recent polls also show Grassley with a similar lead, and the HuffPost Pollster average has him up 50-42. Quinnipiac's sample has Hillary Clinton leading 47-44, also not much different than her 41-39 average in the Hawkeye State.
At the end of June, Judge faced a massive $6 million to $228,000 cash-on-hand deficit, and major Democratic groups haven't spent much money on ads to help her make up ground. In Iowa, early voting begins at the end of September, so if Team Blue wants to wage a serious campaign against Grassley, they can't afford to wait until the fall.
● IN-Sen: The NRSC is out with their second commercial against Democrat Evan Bayh, and they're once again painting his as a henchman for Obama and Hillary Clinton. After reminding viewers right away that Bayh backed Obamacare, the narrator accuses him of voting with Clinton 85 percent of the time, and backing "Social Security benefits for illegal immigrants, while pushing higher taxes on Social Security on Hoosier seniors."
● NH-Sen: Michael Bloomberg's super PAC Independence USA says they're spending a hefty $2 million on a new ad tying Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte to Donald Trump. The commercial features Ayotte bragging that she's been "an independent strong voice for New Hampshire." The narrator then asks why she's still backing Trump even when "[i]ndependent minded Republicans across America put principle ahead of party and said no to Trump."
The ad would have been better if they actually featured some clips of Ayotte supporting Trump or some of Trump's grotesque statements, like Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick recently did in Arizona's Senate race. Still, Democrat Maggie Hassan will only benefit if more voters associate Ayotte with Trump: The HuffPost Pollster average shows Hillary Clinton leading Trump 42-36 in New Hampshire, but has the Senate race tied 43-43.
● NV-Sen: Suffolk takes a look at the rarely polled Nevada Senate race, and they have Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Joe Heck deadlocked 37-37. This same sample shows Hillary Clinton edging Donald Trump by a 44-42 margin. Only five pollsters have surveyed the Senate race in the last two months, and the HuffPost Pollster average gives Heck a 40-38 edge while putting Trump up 43-42.
Nevada has been a difficult state to get a handle on this cycle. Obama won it 52-46 four years ago, and it seems unlikely that Trump will be able to make up the ground in a state where Hispanics make up 28 percent of the population. Part of the difficulty here is that Silver State has for years frustrated pollsters, who've consistently underestimated Democrats. In 2008, polls gave Barack Obama a 51-44 lead over John McCain, quite a bit smaller than his 55-43 win. Similarly, in the 2010 Senate race, Republican Sharron Angle led Sen. Harry Reid 49-46, but Reid turned in a 50-45 win on election night.
Things weren't so off in 2012, but both Obama and unsuccessful Senate nominee Shelley Berkley outperformed their polling averages by about 3 points. (Few firms bothered with Nevada in 2014, when Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval had an uncompetitive re-election campaign.) One possibility is that pollsters are having a tough time reaching voters whose primary language is Spanish, but that's just speculative. Whatever the reason, it's very possible that the numbers are once again underestimating Team Blue, and it doesn't help that we don't have much data to work with.
However, outside groups from both sides are pouring money into this Senate race, so they're certainly convinced that Heck can win here. It's also worth noting that, while Hillary Clinton and her allies have cut back their spending in Colorado and Virginia after a string of good polls, they're still treating Nevada like it's very much in play. Maybe they're just being cautious, but Democrats aren't acting like the state is off the table. As Nate Cohn points out, one possible reason Trump might be doing relatively well here is that relatively few of Mitt Romney's supporters were white voters with a college degree, an unfriendly demographic for Trump.
Still, Heck's best bet is to convince a significant number of Clinton supporters to back him rather than to hope Trump's coattails will sweep him to the Senate, something Masto's naturally trying to prevent. To that end, she's launching a new ad on a theme she's hit before, reproductive rights. The spot isn't online yet, but Bloomberg reports that it features a breast cancer survivor accusing Heck of voting to defund Planned Parenthood and threatening to shut down the government over it.
Gubernatorial:
● IN-Gov: The RGA is continuing their strategy to link Democrat John Gregg to Hillary Clinton. Their new spot argues that, while Clinton made millions through speaking fees and had foreign governments give the Clinton Foundation plenty of cash, "Gregg did side work for scandal-ridden Enron. Enron even got a special tax break." The narrator goes on to say that Gregg became a lobbyist and concludes, "Gregg and Hillary: They love elected office because they love making money from it."
House:
● CA-07: Bob Bera, the father of Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, was sentenced to a year in prison Thursday for illegally soliciting $270,000 in contributions for his son's congressional campaigns and then reimbursing donors in an effort to circumvent campaign finance limits. In May, the elder Bera pleaded guilty in federal court, and the congressman gave an amount equal to the ill-gotten donations to the federal treasury.
From the start, Ami Bera has said he had no knowledge of his father's schemes, and prosecutors have uncovered no evidence to the contrary. Republicans have tried to make an issue of the scandal, but Bera's opponent, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, has problems of his own—and they're much closer to home: Last month, documents in a lawsuit brought against the sheriff's office showed that a former subordinate of Jones' named Tosca Olives had accused him of sexual harassment, including unwanted touching. So every time Republicans bring up Bob Bera, Democrats counter with Olives. Once both sides hit the airwaves in earnest, we'll see who produces the more damaging attack ads.
● FL-05: Ex-state Senate Minority Leader Al Lawson, who is challenging indicted Rep. Corrine Brown in the Aug. 30 Democratic primary, is out with his first spot, and it certainly has a memorable opening. The narrator declares that, "Al Lawson escaped with his mother as their house exploded into flames." She goes on to say that the family lost everything, and he "had to work the fields at 8," and needed to do extra work in 7th grade to catch up.
But, as the narrator continues, Lawson went on to become his high school class president, achieve his college basketball dreams (Lawson played for Florida A&M University, and their basketball arena is named for him), and he created jobs as a small businessman. This commercial was uploaded to YouTube in the fall of 2012 when Lawson was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in the old version of Florida's 2nd District.
Brown only represents about 38 percent of the new seat, and she has little name recognition in Lawson's Tallahassee base. Brown had trouble fundraising even before she was indicted for allegedly using her "official position to solicit over $800,000 in donations to a supposed charitable organization, only to use that organization as a personal slush fund." Lawson outspent Brown $100,000 to $89,000 from July 1 to Aug. 10, and he has a $120,000 to $25,000 cash-on-hand edge. This seat is safely blue.
● NY-03: In a truly insane development, a federal judge just ordered that a Republican primary be held for New York's open 3rd Congressional District in October, after Some Dude Philip Pidot successfully argued that election officials had wrongly bounced him from the normal June primary, saying he had submitted an insufficient number of signatures to get on the ballot. It's a pretty hollow victory for Pidot, though, since he stands little chance of an upset against the guy who got him knocked off the ballot in the first place, state Sen. Jack Martins, who has 20 times as much money and the support of the entire GOP establishment.
But this extraordinarily late do-over will please Democrats, since it can only serve as a distraction to Martins, and one that he can ill afford. A new poll from the Global Strategy Group on behalf of the DCCC finds Martins badly trailing the Democratic nominee, former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, by a 52-36 margin. And just as painful are the presidential toplines, which show Hillary Clinton swamping Donald Trump by an almost identical 51-35 spread. Barack Obama only won this suburban Long Island district 51-48, so if these numbers are accurate, support for the top of the Republican ticket has truly cratered here.
The key thing to watch for, of course, is whether the GOP releases a contradictory internal poll of its own. So far, though, House Democrats have been putting out a lot of polls without seeing many responsive surveys. It could be that Republicans are simply playing their cards close to the proverbial vest, but that always comes with a downside, since GOP donors will worry if they think their candidates are getting crushed. And with the Trumpocalypse looming, reassuring the donor class is more important than ever for Republicans. So it may well be that they just don't have positive data to share.
Legislative:
● NY State Senate: Retaking New York's state Senate has felt like a Sisyphean task for Democrats: Every time they get close, the turncoats of the so-called "Independent Democratic Conference" manage to yank the goalposts further away. The latest potential setback is brewing in Upper Manhattan, where state Sen. Adriano Espaillat recently won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Charlie Rangel and is thus leaving his seat in the legislature open. The 31st Senate District is as blue as they come, but one of the three main Democrats running to replace Espaillat, Marisol Alcantara, has now been endorsed by the IDC, a five-member breakaway faction that has long sided with Republicans, giving the GOP control of the chamber even though it holds only a minority of seats.
Alcantara, an organizer for the New York State Nurses Association and a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders, faces two opponents: former City Councilman Robert Jackson, who has the backing of the state's 600,000-strong teachers union, and Micah Lasher, who is close to charter school supporters and was a former top lobbyist for ex-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Alcantara claims she hasn't decided whether she'd caucus with the IDC if she wins, but reporter Nick Reisman, relying on unnamed sources, says she would—and why would the IDC back her if she wouldn't?
The problem for mainstream Democrats is that Alcantara could win the Sept. 13 primary as the only woman and, more importantly, the only Dominican-American running. (Jackson is black and Lasher is white.) During Espaillat's congressional run, Lasher was extremely supplicative toward the senator, saying that "in the unlikely event" Espaillat lost, he'd "enthusiastically" back him for re-election. But Espaillat hasn't returned the favor, and if Dominican leaders like him rally around Alcantara, that could pave her path to victory. That would be a revolting result, but an all too typical one for New York.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and Stephen Wolf.
