Joementum posted:

The DSCC, citing a poll that shows they might actually beat McConnell without creating a circus, is now trying to dragoon Alison Grimes into running instead of Judd.

OAquinas posted:

Speaking of, how hosed is Begich?

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The easy attacks may severely backfire: Judd's a pretty girl, and most of the easy attacks either have easy retorts (i.e., all those photos of her in Kentucky jerseys) or might just make her even more popular (I'm not sure nude scenes are going to be a negative for the Palin demographic).

Brigadier Sockface posted:

Here's a liberal wishlist of awful Republican Senate nominees likely to go full Akin.

GA: Karen Handel
IA: Steve King

FlamingLiberal posted:

Good riddance. There's no better example of a corporate whore Democrat than Baucus. He also ruined any chance of a public option, since he and his buddies in the insurance industry wouldn't be having any of that.

Brigadier Sockface posted:

So how about this: Charlie Crist steps aside on the understanding that if Nelson beats Scott and wins, he appoints Crist to replace him in the senate?

dorkasaurus_rex posted:

So maybe it's a tad early for this, but what's the math looking like for 2014? Are the Dems or Republicans more likely to gain seats? Where will they be gained? What are the margins? I'm curious if Nate Silver or anyone like him has gotten around to running the numbers yet.

Joementum posted:

Plastic Megaphone posted:

There seems to be a schism forming between the more moderate GOP old guard and the batshit elements

cbservo posted:

It's sad when she disagrees with her father, lord of darkness, about the qualifications and amazing-ness of one Sarah Palin.

quote:

I'm pleased to endorse Liz Cheney for the United States Senate.

quote:

Going into the Spring of 2009, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson was a favorite local son. That year, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader and the state’s political godfather, persuaded Senator Jim Bunning to make way for a more dynamic candidate and urged Grayson to run for the seat. Grayson seemed to be a lock for the Republican nomination—his main competition was an ophthalmologist in the western part of the state.

...

Grayson and his team assumed that Rand was just a younger Ron, and, accordingly, ignored him. “We made a huge mistake,” says Les Fugate, then Grayson’s chief political aide. “That gave him five months to define himself.”

The magnitude of that miscalculation soon became clear. Paul tapped into his father’s national grassroots network, raising half a million dollars in a one-day “money bomb.” Thanks to his work on his father’s campaigns, he had relationships with national conservative media that Grayson lacked. Most important, he proved adept at harnessing the anti-establishment anger that had just spawned the Tea Party. Paul unleashed ads linking Grayson to the mess in Washington—“a message that stuck,” Fugate says. Two weeks before the primary, Grayson ran an ad in which McConnell, who is more feared than loved in Kentucky, declared that he needed Trey Grayson at his side in Congress. “We never will know this for sure, but that ad goes up, it’s our final ad, and then, boom, Rand goes through the roof and beats me by twenty points,” Grayson says. “We underestimated him.”

De Nomolos posted:

However, with new Super Double Stuffd Voter Suppression Laws in NC, I have no clue what the electorate there will look like.

quote:

With his wife at his side, New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner appeared at a hastily scheduled press conference Tuesday evening to address lewd photos and explicit online chats between him and a young woman that were released last night. Weiner stressed his past behavior was “behind” him and his wife even though the new batch of photos and chats occurred in 2012, over a year after he resigned from the House of Representatives due to other explicit online exchanges that became public.

De Nomolos posted:

The only way to make some sort of dent would be to end the supermajority and elect a Democratic gov. in 2016. The former requires winning back more than the Obama Coalition, so they're going to kinda be forced to go beyond that black/college alliance anyway.

Willa Rogers posted:

He's asking for "a second chance" but he's way beyond that point now. The actual tweets from 2012 are vulgar enough that he'd better go find a nice non-profit to work for and abandon the idea of resurrecting his political career until he's aged out of being a crazed horndog.

evilweasel posted:

Yeah...but you'd think getting caught once would have punctured that.

axeil posted:

That said, if the voting population is in fact older and whiter than in 2012 and McAuliffe is still up by a fair amount I think it's going to be very difficult for Cuccinelli to win.

quote:

—In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent). Among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.)

—When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives at the beginning of 2011, 43 percent of seniors gave the Republican Party a favorable rating. Last month, just 28 percent of seniors rated the GOP favorably. This is not an equal-opportunity rejection of parties or government — over the same period, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating among seniors has increased 3 points, from 37 percent favorable to 40 percent favorable.

—When the Republican congress took office in early 2011, 45 percent of seniors approved of their job performance. That number has dropped to just 22 percent — with 71 percent disapproving.

—Seniors are now much less likely to identify with the Republican Party. On Election Day in 2010, the Republican Party enjoyed a net 10 point party identification advantage among seniors (29 percent identified as Democrats, 39 percent as Republicans). As of last month, Democrats now had a net 6 point advantage in party identification among seniors (39 percent to 33 percent).

quote:

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's run for U.S. Senate could be a tight one if Secretary of State Natalie Tennant were to enter the race, according to the latest edition of the West Virginia Poll.

The phone survey, conducted earlier this month, found 45 percent of respondents said they would pick Capito, R-W.Va., to replace retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller.

Forty percent said they would choose Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, a Democrat. Fifteen percent weren't sure.

notthegoatseguy posted:

The total number of House seats Dems need isn't impossible, but it would require a Democratic wave to fight REALLY hard. I think I read recently that of the GOP House majority, only 10 live in districts that Obama won in 2012.

quote:

A new NBC4/NBC News/Marist poll finds Republican Ken Cuccinelli slipping further behind Democrat Terry McAuliffe, 46 to 38 percent in the race for Virginia governor among likely voters. That’s 3 points wider than McAuliffe’s 43 to 38 percent lead a month ago -- before the shutdown. Libertarian Robert Sarvis gets 9 percent.

Virginia was one of the top states impacted by the shutdown -- with hundreds of thousands of federal workers, contractors, and military service members and retirees in the state. And a majority (54 percent) in the poll blames Republicans for the shutdown. Just 31 percent of likely voters blame President Barack Obama.

...

The Republican Party brand appears to be badly damaged in the commonwealth – 62 percent said they had an unfavorable view of the party, while just 33 percent said they viewed the party favorably. Among independents, it was even worse. By a 71-23 percent margin, the GOP was viewed negatively.

The Democratic Party and President Obama get better scores – 45-50 percent unfavorable for the party, 50-48 percent favorable for Obama.

Cuccinelli, the Tea Party-aligned attorney general, has been outspent on the airwaves 2-to-1 since the shutdown, and he has seen his likability rating take a hit. A majority now say they view him negatively (37-54 percent) up from 49 percent a month ago. By contrast, McAuliffe is 44-43 percent favorable. (His negative rating, however, is also up 7 points from last month.)

...

“When you have a majority viewing you negatively, it’s hard to win an election,” said Barbara Caravalho, who also helped conduct the poll. “It’s not that McAuliffe has closed the deal, it’s that he’s the lesser of two evils.”

fade5 posted:

Honestly, this is why social issues are such a good winning strategy for Democrats: Cuccinelli has ran a pretty explicitly conservative campaign, full of anti-abortion and anti-sex stuff, and he's now losing very loving badly to McAuliffe at least partially because of that.

quote:

The first federal government shutdown in 17 years wreaked havoc over the GOP brand last month, sinking Republican approval and boosting Democrats ahead of the 2014 mid-term elections.

A new Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday showed Democratic momentum all but reversed amid the embarassing fiasco that has been the Obamacare rollout, with both parties now tied on the generic ballot at 39 percent. As a measure of the public's record-low disapproval of Congress, another 23 percent of registered voters said they would prefer another candidate or abstain entirely.

Gygaxian posted:

Apparently we'll have another "accidental Congressman" in Stockman's seat (at least if you trust DailyKos), since the only Republicans that filed are no name types.

Joementum posted:

But I'm betting Walsh will get the appointment.

quote:

Bullock will pick Lt. Gov. John Walsh (D), currently running in the Democratic primary for Senate, to finish Baucus' term, according to a Democratic official.

Sad Banana posted:

And the only winner of these debates is..... Michelle Nunn.

Ballz posted:

Two polls now show David Jolly defeating Alex Sink in the FL-13 special election.

Ammat The Ankh posted:

Besides presumably the ability to win over the Tea Partiers, what does Bevin have going for him?

quote:

When FiveThirtyEight last issued a U.S. Senate forecast — way back in July — we concluded the race for Senate control was a toss-up. That was a little ahead of the conventional wisdom at the time, which characterized the Democrats as vulnerable but more likely than not to retain the chamber.

Our new forecast goes a half-step further: We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber. The Democrats’ position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President Obama’s approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before. Furthermore, as compared with 2010 or 2012, the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.

dorkasaurus_rex posted:

insuring inaction and gridlock for the next two years.

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

And here the establishment Republicans were crowing a couple of short weeks ago about how they were shutting out tea party primary candidates. Yeaaah baby, The GOP is back!

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

This video is from 2010, so it seems like some sort of figure got passed around the think-tank circle as a talking point.