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.
Ed Kilgore
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.
The allegations against the White House today involve alleged discussions of administration jobs for Democrats running in two Democratic primaries, who turned them down without consequences. Does that sound like Watergate in any way, shape or form?
But that even assumes there was anything wrong with the discussions, other than their political clumsiness. Yes, one defense is that the same thing has been done by federal, state and local executives from time immemorial, but even that concedes too much to the critics. The federal statute being invoked by conservatives in this situation makes it a crime to offer a job in exchange for “a political act.” But in this case, “the political act” is simply taking the job. If that’s illegal, then it’s illegal to offer appointments to anyone who is or might be running for office.
It’s not surprising that Republicans are seizing on this silliness, enabled by a bored press corps; not only does it contribute to the constant drumbeat of charges that Obama’s imploding politically and doomed to disaster in 2010 and/or 2012, but it’s also a handy weapon to use against Joe Sestak, who is well-positioned to beat one of the Right’s true heartthrobs, Pat Toomey, in November.
That’s all politics-as-usual, of course. But let’s not get hallucinogenic by comparing this to the wide-ranging use of federal power to raise money illegally and intimidate “enemies” characterized by Watergate.
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?
The question is worded in a way that makes a “yes” answer really easy; it mentions the leak and its duration; calls for a “moratorium” on drilling, not a ban; and keys the moratorium to “approrpriate safety measures,” not some sort of ironclad conditions. Yet 62% of Nevada Republicans answered that question with a “no.” This is a constituency that should warm the hearts of BP execs.
Second, the poll predictably asks about the Arizona immigration law, a subject on which Republican politicians, in Nevada and elsewhere, have expressed different points of view. Not the Nevada rank-and-file “base”: they support it by a 89-5 margin, and favor the enactment of a similar law in their own state by a 85-9 margin. You may not be surprised to learn that only 4% of these self-identified Republicans are Latino. In the 2008 general election, 15% of Nevada voters were Latino.
It’s hardly news that the self-conscious conservative “base” is dominant in the GOP these days. But even on sensitive topics where a bit of discretion or flexibility might be a good idea, rank-and-file fidelity to conservative ideology is a sight to behold.
UPDATE: R2K/DKos just released another NV poll, and the numbers for the Republican Senate primary are very close to Suffolk’s. But the new poll shows Harry Reid ahead of all three major Republican candidates, though with numbers in the low 40s.
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.
This item by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a member of the TDS advisory board, was first published on May 25, 2010.
As Ed Kilgore recently discussed at FiveThirtyEight.com, it has become almost an article of faith in Republican circles that the best way for the GOP to regain the ground it has lost in the last two elections is to nominate candidates who take consistently conservative positions on the issues facing the country. According to the “move right and win” theory, by standing forthrightly for traditional family values, smaller government, and less regulation of business, Republican candidates can energize their party’s base and win back conservative voters who became disillusioned with the free-spending ways of the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans.
But while the move right and win theory is extremely popular among Republican activists, it directly challenges the widely accepted view of American voting behavior among election scholars. According to the median voter theory first proposed by Anthony Downs in his seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, general election candidates in the U.S. who take strongly conservative or strongly liberal positions tend to alienate moderate voters and therefore perform more poorly at the polls than candidates who hew more closely to the center of the ideological spectrum.
Fortunately, there is some readily available evidence that allows us to test these two competing theories. We can compare the performance of moderate and conservative Republican incumbents in recent U.S. Senate elections. If the move right and win theory is correct, we should find that conservative incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while moderate incumbents did worse than expected; if the median voter theory is correct, however, we should find that moderate incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while conservative incumbents did worse than expected.
In order to determine whether Republican incumbents did better or worse than expected based on the normal vote for their party, I measured their vote share compared with that of the current or most recent Republican presidential candidate in their state. I measured the conservatism of Republican senators based on their voting records in previous two years using a modified version of the familiar DW-NOMINATE scale with a range from 0 (moderate) to 8 (very conservative).
I didn’t actually go to Alabama last night, but I felt like it after staring at county returns half the night trying to understand the capricious will of that state’s electorate–or rather the 30% or so of them who voted in statewide primaries.
The shocker of the evening, of course, was Ron Sparks’ landslide 62-38 victory over Artur Davis in the Democratic gubernatorial race. Davis was the prohibitive front-runner for many months, and though there was sparse public polling in the race, he did have an 8-point lead in an R2K/DKos poll done less than two weeks out.
Now some people will look at the phenomenom of a black candidate unexpectedly losing a primary in Alabama and assume it’s all about race. And some progressives who think Artur Davis is a sell-out pseudo-Republican will assume it’s all about ideology. But I think Davis simply deployed a mistaken strategy, and that Sparks ran a smart campaign. Davis clearly tried to position himself for a general election far too early, and in keeping his distance from traditional Democratic groups, he managed to convey the sense that he wasn’t interested in their votes any more than in their public support. In a low-turnout primary, that was fatal.
It also shouldn’t be completely ignored that in an otherwise largely issues-free environment, Sparks had an issue–support for greatly expanded and regulated public gaming–that’s a proven vote-winner among Alabama Democrats.
In any event, Davis managed to lose upwards of half the African-American vote–which is why you can’t chalk up his defeat to some sort of southern-fried Bradley Effect–while getting crushed in heavily-white northern Alabama. It was truly shocking to see the first viable African-American statewide candidate in Alabama lose majority-black counties in his own congressional district like Dallas (Selma), Hale, Marengo, Perry and Wilcox. But it’s possible to over-interpret this election: with the exception of Mobile, Artur Davis didn’t do well much of anywhere. And so, ironically, Ron Sparks enters the general election with the kind of biracial coalition behind him that Davis sought to create, in all the wrong ways.
The Republican gubernatorial primary is going to a recount because only 208 votes separate the second- and third-place finishers, Dr. Robert Bentley and Tim James. Bentley’s performance was nearly as surprising as that of Sparks; he was in single digits in the R2K/DKos poll, while James spent $4.4 million–nearly half of that his own money–and made his constant feuding with Bradley Byrne the central focus of the entire race. And it appears Bentley’s impressive showing was at least partly attributable to voters tired of the Byrne-James slugfest.
Meanwhile, Parker Griffith became the latest and no-so-greatest of party-switchers to go down to ignominous defeat, in his case losing a multi-candidate Republican primary without even making it to a runoff. At the end of a long evening, his fate brought a smile to the face of even the weariest of Democrats.
I try not to react–much less overreact–to every sparrow that falls to the ground from the Gods of Public Opinion, but there is a survey just out today that is really interesting.
From PPP, it represents the first publicly released data from the Iowa Republican gubernatorial contest in many months. As expected, former Gov. Terry Branstad is leading Bob Vander Plaats and Rod Roberts. But unexpectedly, Brantstad is under 50%, and leads Vander Plaats 46-31, with Roberts receiving 13%.
Dean Debnam of PPP had this to say:
It’s going to be very interesting to see if Terry Branstad is the next victim of the Tea Party movement. He’s still ahead but the momentum seems to be on Vander Plaats’ side.
If so, that’s worth noting for two reasons. The first is that Vander Plaats does not look to be a very strong general election candidate against Democrat Chet Culver, one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country. That matters a lot to Iowans.
But for the rest of us, the interesting thing is that the Branstad/Vander Plaats primary is something of a surrogate fight between Republican factions who will face off in the 2012 presidential nominating contest in the same state. Vander Plaats was Mike Huckabee’s Iowa campaign chairman in 2008, and the Romney campaign in Iowa was run by people close to Branstad. Unsurprisingly, Huckabee’s endorsed Vander Plaats this year, and Romney’s endorsed Branstad. Huckabee famously beat Romney in the 2008 caucuses, despite being outspent by about a gazillion to one.
If Vander Plaats were now to beat Branstad, in a primary, not a caucus, and despite being heavily outspent, and despite running a less than impressive campaign, and despite Branstad looking much more electible–then we’d probably be entitled to conclude that hard-core conservatives are really and truly in charge of the Iowa Republican Party these days. This would not be very good news for Mitt Romney, who is pretty much stuck with a 2012 campaign that makes him the mainstream establishment candidate who’s got money and is relatively electible.
Today is primary day in Alabama, Mississippi and New Mexico. Mississippi’s contests of national significance are pretty much limited to the Republican primaries to choose opponents for U.S. House members Travis Childers and Gene Taylor. New Mexico’s Republicans do have a gubernatorial primary in which county D.A. Susana Martinez is favored over self-funding former state party chair Allen Weh. The winner will face popular Democratic Lt. Gov. Diane Denish.
But most of the national focus tonight will probably be on Alabama, which has competitive gubernatorial primaries in both parties, several interesting congressional races, and even a couple of downballot constitutional officer races that have demanded out-of-state attention.
I’ve done a long write-up of the Alabama landscape over at FiveThirtyEight, and you can check it out there if you are interested.
But suffice it to say that there’s quite a constrast between the over-the-top nature of the campaign–particular in the highly competitive multi-candidate Republican gubernatorial primary–and the interest-level of the electorate. It’s revealing that the big moment of excitement was probably the viral rumor that candidate Tim James (an Auburn grad whose father, former governor Fob James, was an all-American football player at Auburn) was threatening to fire or cut the salary of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. When James put out the fire by donning a “Saban Rules” hat at a campaign event, public interest in the race seemed to subside.
Early reports are that voting in Alabama is very light, with some speculation that holding a statewide primary the day after a major holiday weekend might not be the best way to encourage maximum participation.
It’s hard to say who will benefit from low turnout, other than very well known candidates and ideologues. Low turnout is probably good for Judge Roy Moore in the governor’s race; his core vote will show up. Depending on the patterns, it could also represent good news for underdog Ron Sparks in the Democratic gubernatorial primary; very poor African-American turnout is congressman Artur Davis’ potential achilles heel.
Still, the betting going into this election is that Davis will win the Democratic nomination, with Republicans Bradley Byrne and Tim James extending their nasty and expensive grudge match into a six-week runoff campaign.
So if you’ve made it this far through the various recreational activities of this Memorial Day weekend without spending a few moments thinking about the holiday, now’s a good time for some traditional, and perhaps untraditional meditations.
By all means, say a prayer (or simply have a moment of silence) for those Americans who gave up their lives for the blessings of peaceful life we enjoy–blessings which many of them, because they were so very young, scarcely enjoyed themselves.
But also say a word of thanks for all those who have put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf. Modern war is all too often a very random affair in which events over which no combatant has a bit of control, from the direction of a bullet or an explosion, to the wisdom or stupidity of military leaders and politicians, can make the difference between a life cut short and a life lived in gratitude for survival.
And finally, give a moment’s thought to the civilian victims of warfare, for which we do not have any particular day of remembrance. Their numbers are vast, and usually their innocence, if possible, exceeds even that of the fresh-faced young men and women who risk and lose their lives in uniformed service. War is an always-terrible if occasionally necessary thing, and those of us who have managed to escape its horrors owe those who didn’t some homage today–and every day when we reflect on life’s deeper realities.