Day: July 18, 2006

At 9:41 PM, Georgia time, Ralph Reed, the scandal-plagued rightwing Christian operative, is tanking in his bid for lieutenant governor, according to the Hotline:

LG (R) 33% in
Casey CAGLE: 55.2% 59,623
Ralph REED: 44.8% 48,344

Mood Dampens at Reed Headquarters:

At 9:15 p.m., Reed still had not come down to greet supporters at the InterContinental Buckhead Hotel, but was huddled with close friends watching returns come in. On his cell phone, Cobb County GOP chairman Anthony-Scott Hobbs got word that Reed was losing Cobb County by 10 percentage points, 11,000 votes to 9,000 votes. “You can’t win without Cobb,” he said.

Update: Reed conceded at 6:55 Pacific.

Tussling toward midterms: National Journal’s PollTrack notes that as we move into the last of the midterm primaries, several races are making for interesting political drama — if you like that kind of stuff — and we do.

PollTrack analyzed recent poll numbers for four of the more hotly contested races with upcoming primaries:

• Connecticut Senate: In perhaps the most closely watched primary race of the cycle, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman is enjoying a 25-point lead among state Democrats over his anti-war primary challenger Ned Lamont, according to a Quinnipiac University survey conducted a little over a month ago. The results dovetail with Lieberman’s approval ratings among likely Democratic voters; about the same percentage — 56 percent — who would vote for Lieberman in the Aug. 8 primary said they approved of the job he is doing.

  Pollsters also tested a hypothetical three-way matchup with Lamont as the Democratic nominee and Lieberman running as an independent. In that scenario, pollsters found Lieberman would win with 56 percent — but Lamont would garner about a third of the Democratic vote.

• Florida Senate: Despite the recent turmoil surrounding her campaign, Republican Rep. Katherine Harris remains the front-runner for her party’s nomination in the latest Quinnipiac University survey. A plurality of the likely voters surveyed, however, said they were still undecided when presented with Harris and three other GOP candidates. In a general election matchup, incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D) leads all the GOP hopefuls with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Another poll from Strategic Vision (R) also favors Harris for the GOP nomination and Nelson in the general.
• Georgia Governor: Today’s Democratic primary, which will decide whether Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor or Secretary of State Cathy Cox will face incumbent first-term Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) in the general, promises to be a nail-biter. In a dramatic turnaround from the earliest days of the race, Taylor has steadily inched his way up the polls and now leads Cox, 49 percent to 41 percent, in the latest Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion survey. But Cox has also experienced a bump in support over the past month as the number of undecided voters in the Peach State has dwindled.
• Missouri Senate: With state auditor Claire McCaskill running solo in the Aug. 8 Democratic primary, the real story in Missouri — ranked the No. 3 Senate race in the nation by Hotline’s Chuck Todd — is the general election. The latest Research 2000 poll shows the candidates in close competition, with McCaskill edging out incumbent Sen. Jim Talent (R) by just 6 points.

Gullible Georgia Gops: Voters vote in the primary election today in Georgia, and if more evidence were needed that conservatives are as deluded as they are corrupt, you’ll find it in a last-minute poll on the lieutenant governor’s race:

Republican lieutenant governor candidates Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle are locked in a statistical dead heat, with each holding 43 percent of the responders in the survey. Voters who were undecided made up the remaining 14 percent of respondents.

“This race has been within the margin of error the entire week. We’ve seen a slight shift back in favor of Reed over the past two days,” Towery said. “This may well be because Reed has new ads on TV, and voters who are interested are hyper-sensitive to any new information concerning the race.”

What more information do Republican voters in Georgia need about Ralph Reed? He represents the Christian Nationalist wing of their party, and yet he was paid millions of dollars from gambling interests tied to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who hired Reed to convince his Christian followers to lobby their political leaders against a gambling enterprise that would have harmed the business of the people who paid him millions.