On Tuesday, June 8, there will be ten states holding primaries, with a runoff in an eleventh, and a special election runoff in a twelfth. There will be lots to talk about tomorrow morning and night, but it’s worth noting today that several contests which earlier looked very close have now become laughers.
This is most obvious in California, where it appears that the once-torrid Republican gubernatorial and Senate primaries are turning into victory laps for (respectively) Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina.
Whitman appears to have finally spent rival Steve Poizner into submission, and according to every recent poll, Poizner’s obsessive focus on immigration in the stretch drive hasn’t done him much good. Sorry if I seem to keep harping on this, but total spending in this race has gone well over $100 million. Meanwhile, Democrat Jerry Brown didn’t have to campaign to win the Democratic nomination, and has been able to sit back, raise money, and watch Whitman screw up her early “centrist” positioning.
Money was also a factor in Fiorina’s late surge into the lead in the Senate primary: she had enough to run TV ads, while onetime front-runner Tom Cambpell had to put everything into a too-late effort to convince Republicans he had a better chance of beating Barbara Boxer. But Fiorina also benefitted from a consolidation of conservative voters who didn’t want to see Campbell–who is both pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage–win.
Another barburner that seems to have fizzled out is the Iowa Republican gubernatorial primary, which former Governor For Life (a joke: he only served for 16 years) Terry Branstand should win easily over arch-conservative Mike Huckabee surrogate Bob Vander Plaats, if the authoritative Des Moines Register poll is right. Sarah Palin’s late endorsement of Branstad was probably a reflection of that reality more than a contributor to it.
And finally, another race that seems to be generating a runaway winner is creating its very own kind of drama: the SC Republican gubernatorial contest, where Nikki Haley’s surge has continued despite, or perhaps partially because of, poorly documented allegations of marital infidelity against her. At this point, the big questions are whether (1) she can reach the 50% threshold necessary to win without a runoff, and (2) subsequent evidence of infidelity emerges that could, given her vow to give up her candidacy or even resign the governorship in this contingency, blow up her campaign, and the SC GOP, down the road.

In a move that startled Iowa Republicans and may have even come as a surprise to its beneficiary, Sarah Palin endorsed Terry Branstad, the ultimate Establishment Republican, for governor in next Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial primary.
Palin’s endorsement of the former four-term governor came as a rude shock to supporters of his main rival, social conservative ultra Bob Vander Plaats, who recently harvested an endorsement from James Dobson, and had labored hard to frame the primary as a choice between a “true conservative” and a quasi-RINO.
Many observers immediately framed Palin’s surprise gambit as an insult to the Tea Party Movement, much like her endorsements of Carly Fiorina in California and Vaughan Ward in Idaho.
But I’m one who has always maintained that Palin’s true base (long before there was any such thing as a Tea Party Movement) is social conservatives focused on abortion and gay marriage, and that’s what makes the Branstand endorsement surprising. The religious right in Iowa deeply mistrusts Branstad for choosing a pro-choice Lieutenant Governor (Joy Corning, who served in Branstad’s third and fourth terms), for appointing two of the state Supreme Court judges who legalized same-sex marriage last year, and in general, for not seeming to care about their priorities. One major social conservative group, the Iowa Family PAC, has gone so far as to say it would refuse to support Branstad if he won the Republican nomination.
So what’s Palin up to, particularly if, as it appears, Branstad wasn’t exactly hanging around Wasilla begging for her support?
Nobody knows for sure, but I think Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic‘s entirely logical in guessing that Palin thinks Branstad’s going to win anyway, and would like to have a special friend in Des Moines in case she does decide to run for president in 2012. I might add that Vander Plaats is very closely associated with Mike Huckabee, Palin’s potential rival for the hard-core conservative vote. Moreover, Branstad’s prior Big Dog Republican backer is Mitt Romney, and Palin would probably have some grounds for asking Branstad to stay neutral if both of them are running around Iowa next year.
Never a dull moment for Palin watchers, eh?

It appears that the Republican Party and the conservative chattering classes are determined to identify Barack Obama with every famous conservative disaster of recent history. BP’s Gulf Oil spill, we are told incessantly, is “Obama’s Katrina,” presumably because of the common geographic location, and now we hear that the silly, contrived “scandal” over alleged job offers to Democratic primary candidates will be “Obama’s Watergate.” What’s next: Obama’s Iraq? Obama’s U.S. Attorney Scandal? Obama’s Plamegate? Obama’s Illegitimate Election? (Oh, sorry, I forgot, Republicans have already used that one!).
In any event, the “Watergate” analogy is insane, unless maybe you are too young or too poorly read to remember what Watergate entailed. As Joe Conason explains at Salon:

“Watergate” was the place where the president’s henchmen staged a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on a June night in 1972, but its historical definition is the vast gangsterism of the Nixon regime. Watergate involved no political job offers, but a series of burglaries, warrantless domestic wiretaps, illegal spying, campaign dirty tricks, and assorted acts of thuggery by a group of goons whose leaders included G. Gordon Liddy and the late E. Howard Hunt. Watergate meant a coverup of those felonies with more felonies, set up by lawyers and bureaucrats who collected cash payoffs from major corporations and then handed out hush money and secret campaign slush funds. Watergate implicated dozens of perps, from Hunt and Liddy all the way up to the president, his palace guard, and his crooked minions at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA.

A new poll from Suffolk of the Nevada Republican Senate primary bears the topline finding that onetime frontrunner Sue “Chickens for Checkups” Lowden has now slipped into third place behind Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle and the more conventional conservative Danny Tarkanian. Since Lowden has continuously performed very well in general election tests against Harry Reid, her falling fortunes in the primary are good news for the embattled incumbent.
But below the toplines, the Suffolk provides an interesting glimpse into the psyches of Nevada Republicans. And two findings are of particular interest. First, there’s this eyebrow-raiser:

The next question concerns the oil leak which has continued to flow into the Gulf of Mexico for the last 7 weeks. Would you support a moratorium on all U.S. offshore drilling until appropriate safety measures have been designed and tested?

If you’ve been following the bizarre saga of front-running Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley of SC, you may have noticed things quiet down over the weekend. There was no new evidence from blogger Will Folks to support his allegations of an illicit affair with the candidate, and news coverage in the Palmetto State moved on to other subjects.
Then today Lt. Gov. Andre “Stray Animals” Bauer, who was running second to Haley in the most recent poll of the gubernatorial race (from Insider Advantage), fired one of his top political advisors, a consultant named Larry Marchant, for “inappropriate conduct,” and immediately the conservative blogosphere lit up with “ah-hah” claims that Marchant was dumped for complicity in a conspiracy to threaten or bribe Folks into making his allegations against Haley.
But no, according to Marchant, the “inappropriate conduct” was a one-night stand with Nikki Haley back in 2008!
Gaze in awe.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
If this can all get more byzantine, I’m sure it will.