Mississippi U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel (R) “hasn’t given up, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that he’s still looking into voting irregularities in his runoff election against incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R),” Politico reports.
Said McDaniel: “We’ve found more than a thousand examples of that in one county alone widespread irregularities.”
Oklahoma congressional candidate Tim Murray (R) has announced he plans to contest this week’s primary election of Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) saying “it is widely known” that Lucas “is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike,” KFOR reports.
Murray says on his website that Lucas was executed in Ukraine in 2011.
Lucas responded: “Many things have been said about me, said to me during course of my campaigns. This is the first time I’ve ever been accused of being a body double or a robot.”
A new Rasmussen poll in Mississippi finds Sen. Thad Cochran (R) comfortably ahead of challenger Travis Childers (D) in the U.S. Senate race, 46% to 34%.
You're reading the free version of Political Wire
Upgrade to a paid membership to unlock full access. The process is quick and easy. You can even use Apple Pay.
Sources tell the Jackson Clarion Ledger that Mark Mayfield, vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, has committed suicide.
Mayfield was “one of the three men charged with conspiring with Clayton Kelly to photograph Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) bedridden wife in her nursing home and create a political video against Cochran.”
Carroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press joins us on the Political Wire podcast to review their amazing new study on political polarization. It’s a fascinating conversation and a must-listen for anyone concerned the state of our politics today.
Listen here:
Subscribe via iTunes or RSS to get episodes automatically downloaded.
Special thanks to the Cook Political Report and Brain HQ for sponsoring this episode.
A new InsiderAdvantage poll in Georgia finds Gov. Nathan Deal (R) leading challenger Jason Carter (D) in the race for governor by seven points, 47% to 40%.
“If they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, none of this would be happening. Mr. Cheney has been incredibly adroit for the last six years or so attacking the administration for not doing an adequate job of cleaning up the mess that he made. And I think it’s unseemly. And I give President Bush, by the way, a lot of credit for trying to stay out of this debate and letting other people work through it.”
— Bill Clinton, in an interview with NBC News.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) “wants a problem-solver to run for president in 2016,” National Journal reports.
“Not by chance, that’s how the Tennessee Republican and ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee describes his own role in the Senate.”
Emails obtained by the Washington Post show that the creation of a job for ex-Virginia state Sen. Phillip Puckett (D) was in the works before he quit his seat and handed Republicans control of the evenly divided Senate in the middle of a standoff over the state budget.
“The e-mail messages indicated that the commission was creating the post especially for Puckett, who was asked to help come up with his own job description. The position was to come with state employee benefits, a cell phone and possibly a car, according to the e-mails. The salary was not specified.”
The New York Times runs a must-read profile on Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC).
“Sanford is just one of 435 members of the House of Representatives and, in his new role, a junior one at that. But he has managed something that few people have: returning to public office after an embarrassing, nationally televised — Twitterized and blogged — sex scandal. He was one in a succession of promising politicians who spontaneously combusted over the last few years.”
“Sanford’s successful reboot was at least in part due to the peculiarities of his congressional race. But it was also a result of a slow and sometimes painful dance with his would-be constituents and his colleagues, requiring tremendous political patience and a high threshold for public humiliation.”
“Prodded by a pointedly personal TV ad by Gov. Rick Scott, Charlie Crist released a decade’s worth of tax returns Thursday, but it was old news that mainly reinforced Crist’s frugal reputation,” the Miami Herald reports.
“The Democratic candidate for governor released tax returns for 2001 through 2010 and promised many more years to come, but the first batch held no revelations.”
First Read: “Why it’s fascinating – because Scott is the wealthy one in this contest.”
“I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing.”
— President Obama, in an interview with ABC News, on the lawsuit brought by House Republicans over his use of executive actions.
The Washington Post shows how Bill and Hillary Clinton’s biggest source of income has been speaking fees and how Bill has brought in more than $100 million since leaving the White House.
Wisconsin congressional candidate Karen Mueller (R) said that a recent federal ruling striking down Wisconsin’s same-sex marriage ban could lead to incestuous marriages, the Tomah Journal reports.
Said Mueller: “We’ve got, for instance, two sisters, and these two sisters want to get married. They love each other. They are committed to each other. They want to spend the rest of their life together.”
She said their lawyers could argue, “‘We can just do away with that state law the same way we did away with sodomy laws.’ Once you do away with that, you reveal what is really going on here.”
At the urging of Virginia House Speaker William Howell, “the clerk’s office of the House of Delegates enlisted the help of the Capitol Police to enter Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) unoccupied, secure suite of offices on a Sunday afternoon to deliver the state budget,” the Richmond Times Dispatch reports.
“The highly unusual entry on June 15 took place without the permission of administration officials or the knowledge of the Virginia State Police, which is in charge of protecting the governor. McAuliffe was not in the building.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey in South Carolina finds Gov. Nikki Haley (R) just edging Vincent Sheheen (D) in the race for governor, 49% to 46%.
A new Pew Research survey finds that “just 40% of Americans can correctly identify the partisan balance in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (that Republicans have the majority in the former, and Democrats in the latter). The remaining six-in-ten know only one (33%) or neither (28%) of those facts.”
“Shortly after noon Wednesday, the Republicans of the House Appropriations Committee (plus one Democrat) voted to block the District’s recently passed marijuana decriminalization law. Leading the charge was Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), who said the measure was ‘bad policy’ that would harm children,” the Washington Post reports.
“But District lawyers are now exploring whether he might have actually moved to, in effect, legalize marijuana possession instead.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.