“You look at her book rollout — it was a disaster. She talks off the cuff; it doesn’t work. She makes one mistake after the next.”
— RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, quoted by The Hill, arguing that Hillary Clinton isn’t good at politics.
“You look at her book rollout — it was a disaster. She talks off the cuff; it doesn’t work. She makes one mistake after the next.”
— RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, quoted by The Hill, arguing that Hillary Clinton isn’t good at politics.
South Dakota U.S. Senate candidate Rick Weiland (D) “accused his own political party of trying to undermine his campaign in a striking news conference Monday,” the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports.
“Weiland said the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s ads attacking Republican incumbent Mike Rounds have backfired and hurt him… But Weiland went a step further and said this wasn’t just an inadvertent side effect of the negative ads. He said it was deliberate — an attempt to sabotage him and boost independent Larry Pressler.”
Said Weiland: “My national party — that I’m a member of — (was) trying to drive votes to Larry Pressler and trying to drive up my negatives.”
A new CNN/ORC poll finds that 68% of Americans are angry at the direction the country is headed and 53% of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s job performance, two troubling signs for Democrats one week before the midterm elections.
Key finding: “In next week’s election, the emotion of anger could be a motivating factor in driving out GOP voters. While 36% of Republican voters said they are ‘extremely’ or ‘very enthusiastic,’ about voting this year, only 26% of Democrats use that language to describe themselves.”
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A new Public Policy Polling survey in Georgia finds David Perdue (R) and Michelle Nunn (D) locked in a tie for U.S. Senate, 47% to 47%.
A new Magellan Strategies poll in Maine finds Gov. Paul LePage (R) tied with Mike Michaud (D) for governor, 42% to 42%, with Eliot Cutler (I) way behind at 13%.
Florida Republicans tie Charlie Crist’s (D) campaign donations to sex trafficking in a tough new attack ad.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) “decision to avoid tough votes this year has backfired in one respect — it gave his vulnerable incumbents few opportunities to show off any independence from President Obama,” Roll Call reports.
“A new CQ vote study shows vulnerable Senate Democrats almost always voted to support the president in 2014 — a fact that has been instantly seized upon by Republicans, given that Obama’s approval rating is languishing in the low 40s nationally and lower still in several battleground states.”
A new Brigham Young University poll in Utah’s 4th congressional district shows Doug Owens (D) leading Mia Love (R), 46% to 42%.
A new High Point University/SurveyUSA poll in North Carolina finds Sen. Kay Hagan (D) locked in a dead heat with challenger Thom Tillis (R), 44% to 44%.
A new Monmouth University survey shows the race has tightened but Hagan still leads 48% to 46%.
A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll in Louisiana finds no candidate reaching the 50% required to avoid a runoff in the crowded November 4 election. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) gets 36%, Bill Cassidy (R) gets 35%, Rob Maness (R) gets 11% and other candidates and undecided split 18%.
However, in a a head-to-head matchup, Cassidy has a solid 48% to 41% lead over Landrieu with 11% undecided.
Said pollster David Paleologos: “Maness supporters are basically a holding place for Cassidy … the unfavorables are 89% for Landrieu among the Maness voters.“
Foster’s Daily Democrat published a blistering op-ed piece attacking Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) by former House Speaker Marshall Cobleigh but TPM notes there “was an unusual wrinkle: Cobleigh died in February 2009. The op-ed was actually a reprint of when it was first published in July 3, 2008.”
Smart Politics examined the more than 1,600 gubernatorial elections conducted during midterm and presidential election cycles since 1900 and found that only three cycles have produced as many as five contests with a victory margin of less than one percentage point; at least eight races are in the mix to do so in 2014.
The eight states to watch: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia and Maine.
Some great clicks over at Wonk Wire:
A bonus link from Working Capital Review:
A new Mason-Dixon poll in South Dakota finds Mike Rounds (R) with a comfortable lead over Rick Weiland (D) in the U.S. Senate race, 42% to 33%, with Larry Pressler (I) far behind at 13%.
Brad Phillips notes the GOP training class “is doing everything right in its effort to improve external communications” and there’s “good advice here for everyone involved in politics, regardless of party or cause.”
“Political scientists from two of the nation’s most highly respected universities, usually impartial observers of political firestorms, now find themselves at the center of an electoral drama with tens of thousands of dollars and the election of two state supreme court justices at stake,” TPM reports.
“Their research experiment, which involved sending official-looking flyers to 100,000 Montana voters just weeks before Election Day, is now the subject of an official state inquiry that could lead to substantial fines against them or their schools.”
“In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show,” the New York Times reports.
“At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet ‘assets,’ declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called ‘moral lapses’ in their service to the Third Reich.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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