Tag: Elections

It’s 8:12 Pacific, and Chris Bowers is calling the election for Lamont.

At 7:47 PDT:

80 percent reporting. Lamont 117K to 103K for Lieberman. That makes around a 6 percent spread. Getting even closer.

From earlier today, on Yahoo News:

But one thing is sure: the Fox News Channel is still campaigning for Lieberman. An Election Day report on the neoconservative cable channel featured an image of the neoconservative senator’s anti-war challenger in today’s contest for Connecticut’s Democratic Senate nomination, Ned Lamont, above the line: “HAVE THE DEMOCRATS FORGOTTEN THE LESSONS OF 9/11.”

The same report featured images of Lamont and Lieberman on a split screen with an image of an Israeli tank, all above the line: A LAMONT WIN, BAD NEWS FOR DEMOCRACY IN MIDEAST?”

Apparently, the network is delivering on Fox personality Sean Hannity’s pledge of support from earlier this year. “If you ever want me to do anything, for you and your re-election,” Hannity told the senator in February, adding that, “I think we ought to have Conservatives for Lieberman, a big fundraiser in Connecticut, and if I could ever do that, I’d make it the biggest blowout celebration ever.”

It’s 6:03 PDT and just saw that Lieberman apparently has lost in his home district:

# Direct word from the campaign: 6,500 vote margin for Lamont with 15% reporting. And Lieberman did lose his home precinct.
# Lamont 56%–Lieberman 44%. 7% reporting. The vote margin is around 2,700 votes. I just heard that Lieberman lost his own precinct. I can’t verify that.

First returns at 5:20 PDT are interesting but in no way indicative of how the evening will go:

Lamont 57 percent– Lieberman 43 percent. 1 percent reporting.

Winds of change: National Journal columnist Charlie Cook says a slew of recent polls all point to a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives and a possible play for control of the Senate. His analysis leads him to predict that we could see another 1994, but in the Dems’ favor this time.

Time is running out for Republicans. Unless something dramatic happens before Election Day, Democrats will take control of the House. And the chances that they’ll seize the Senate are rising toward 50-50.

The electoral hurricane bearing down on the GOP looks likely to be a Category 4 or 5, strong enough to destroy at least one of the party’s majorities. The political climate feels much as it did before previous elections that produced sizable upheavals, such as in 1994, when Democrats lost 52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of both chambers.

In the past two weeks, polling by CBS News/New York Times, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, and The Cook Political Report/RT Strategies found that just 27 to 28 percent of voters think the country is headed in the right direction. Between 60 and 66 percent say we are “on the wrong track.” These are the kinds of “time for a change” numbers associated with tidal-wave elections.

In those same three polls, approval ratings for Congress ranged from 25 to 28 percent, with disapproval ratings of 57 to 60 percent. Keep in mind the Gallup Poll’s rule of thumb: When Congress’s job-approval rating is 40 percent or higher, the average midterm election net change in the House is just five seats; when its approval is below 40 percent, the average net change is 29 seats.
[…]

The situation around Tom DeLay’s House seat in Texas gets curiouser and curiouser. Yesterday, the Supreme Court shocked the world by refusing to hear an appeal about the case that seeks to remove DeLay’s name from the ballot and replace him with another Republican.

The denial of the appeal apparently left the Texas GOP with only two options: Keep DeLay’s name on the ballot or remove it entirely, meaning the Democrat, Nick Lampson, would run unopposed.

But DeLay is considering a third option:

[What] if DeLay steps aside and endorses a write-in candidate?

That’s a possibility, reports Time’s super-scooper Mike Allen.

A Republican official with first-hand knowledge of the deliberations by DeLay said he “more likely than not” will go that route, although he had not made a final decision. “With DeLay, you never know,” the official said.

Maybe — but:

It’s true that the TX GOP and DeLay agreed that a DeLay-less ballot would be less worrisome than a slate with the former congressman. But it’s not clear whether the party would be willing to fork over the money — or help raise the money — to mount a write-in bid.

Disgraceful: Rep. Bob Ney’s abrupt announcement yesterday that he would not seek re-election in Ohio’s 18th District was followed immediately by word that state Sen. Joy Padgett would replace him on the ballot.

Padgett will face Democrat Zack Space, a charismatic young lawyer and city official from Dover, in November.

Ney’s decision comes after months of speculation about his connections with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But Padgett has an unseemly skeleton in her own closet that may follow her onto the national stage, if she wins Ney’s seat in their Republican-leaning district.

In 2004, Padgett won her senate seat in a hotly contested race against former Hezbollah hostage Terry Anderson, a Democrat and ex-Marine. Instead of fighting fair and dealing with facts, of course, Padgett took the GOP’s patented easy way out and attacked Anderson by falsely impugning his character:

During her race against Terry Anderson, Padgett accused Anderson of being a member of the “Blame America crowd”, and campaign fliers showed a photograph of Anderson in a meeting with a leader of Hezbollah.

The photos were taken when Anderson went back to Beirut many years after he’d been freed and confronted his former captors. The fact that he was there to challenge his terrorist abductors did not matter to Padgett, of course. Her campaign used the photos to cast Anderson in the most damaging possible light:

The attack ads against Anderson have been in mailings and on TV and radio. At a League for Women Voters debate last week, Anderson walked off the stage, refusing to participate. “The first time I met Padgett she said, ‘I run a clean campaign,’ and I said, ‘Good, let’s do that.’ I have attacked her votes . . . never attacked her personally. . . . She attacked me, twisting my campaigns. The last piece, I couldn’t accept it.

“The picture,” he continued, referring to the photo of himself shaking hands with the Hezbollah official, “is one of the guys who kidnapped me, who held me for seven years, who chained me and blindfolded me. I went back to Lebanon with a CNN news crew and looked him up and put him on camera and asked him, Why did you do this?

“She now says I am an apologist for terrorists.That’s sheer nonsense. It’s offensive. I’ve just about had enough.”

Anderson was working as an Associated Press reporter in Beirut when he was taken hostage in 1985 by Hezbollah Shiites. He was held for six years and nine months — one of the longest capitivities of the Reagan era.

It is alarming that Republicans like Joy Padgett would deploy such dirty tricks, but it is even more unnerving to think that Ohio voters are stupid enough to fall for them.

• The Stakeholder has more on Padgett’s sleazy associations.

Chris Bowers reports from Connecticut that predictions that Sen. Joe Lieberman might lose to Ned Lamont by double-digits may have been wishful thinking. A number of factors appear to be leading to very tight race on Tuesday:

• Intense media scrutiny tends to increase voting by “low information” voters:

Due to the low information voters factor, analysts have always believed that higher turnout, which will bring in more low-information voters, will help Lieberman. This is similar to the problem Paul Hackett faced in the OH-02 last summer…

A similar phenomenon is happening in Connecticut. The closer Ned Lamont appear to come to victory on August 8th, the more the media pays attention to what could potentially become a major event in recent American political history. The media attention n this race could now barely become any greater… The rather stunning amount of attention that has been paid to this race will drive up turnout. This will increase the number of low-information voters within the electorate, and that will help Joe Lieberman. That fact alone makes the polls less favorable to Ned Lamont that they currently appear to be.

• Remarkably high new voter registrations among Connecticut Dems:

Only around 130,000 Democrats voted in the 2004 presidential primary in Connecticut, so for roughly 22,000 people to register as Democrats since May 8th (the last day Republicans could switch to Dem), is astonishing.

Bowers concludes:

Combine new voter registrations with low information voters with what is clearly a still massive Lieberman ground game–a ground game that analysts have said can add up to five point for Lieberman in this election–and suddenly you have an election within the margin of error. Throw in both public and internal polls that show the race closer than the 13 point Lamont lead from the Q-poll, and you have an election teetering on a knife edge. For Lamont backers, our concern right now should not be with blowing Lieberman out, but rather with winning this election at all.

Rapprochement?

Former President Bill Clinton wasn’t just supporting current Democratic candidates at a Tennessee political rally Thursday night.

Speaking to supporters of Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Harold Ford Jr., Clinton also praised Al Gore, his former vice president. Gore did not attend.

“I ran a partnership, not a one-man show,” Clinton said about his presidency. “And if it hadn’t been for Al Gore, a lot of those things wouldn’t have happened.”

Clinton said he has been “tickled” to see the global response to Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“I called him the other day and told him: ‘You know Hillary and I went to see your movie at our local theater. The first time, we couldn’t get in, it was full,”‘ he said. “We had to just walk away and walk on home.”

Rasmussen via Kos:

Our latest numbers from Minnesota (Klobuchar +12), Washington (Cantwell +11), and New Jersey (Menendez +6) provide Democrats with breathing room in the three Senate races deemed by the conventional wisdom and polling data as the GOP’s best pick-up opportunities of the cycle. In all three cases, polls earlier in the year gave Republicans hope but the trends are moving against them. With all the usual cavaets about a long time until Election Day, it is now hard to see the Republicans picking up any Democratic Senate seats.

GOP scandal figure Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, is trying desperately to get his name off the ballot in the contest over the House seat he resigned earlier this year. But yesterday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge’s prior decision that DeLay must stay on the ballot in Texas — even though he has moved his residence to Virginia.

Now the Republicans have announced that they will appeal the case to the safest, most conservative activist court in the land: The U.S. Supreme Court.

We all know what the outcome will be. The same court that handed the presidency to George W. Bush — -now made even more Republican-friendly with the addition of two Bush appointees — will allow the GOP to place their hand-picked replacement for DeLay on the ballot.

How elections are stolen:

[Every] single donor to the Luzerne Co, PA Green Party’s effort to secure a ballot spot for candidate Carl Romanelli — every single one — was a conservative Republican. Sorry — all but one. Romanelli wrote himself a check. For $30.00.