Cook Political Report: “According to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, a dozen women will now be serving as governor, making up nearly a quarter of all state executives.”
“That breaks the previous record of nine, first set after the 2004 election. That was also the number of women governors heading into this midterm cycle, representing a gain of three. The breakdown includes eight Democrats and four Republicans.”
Cook Political Report: “For the first time since tracking this metric, all the most competitive races broke in the same direction. We typically see a majority of the seats going whichever party’s way has the momentum that cycle, but this underscores just how much Democrats ran the table.”
Cook Political Report: “Republicans picked up nine seats to win a 222-213 majority, a mirror image of Democrats’ prior edge. But they wouldn’t be in the majority if not for razor-thin wins by five of their candidates: Lauren Boebert in CO-03 (546 votes), John Duarte in CA-13 (564 votes), John James in MI-10 (1,600 votes), Mike Lawler in NY-17 (1,820 votes) and Zach Nunn in IA-03 (2,145 votes).”
“That’s an effective margin of just 6,675 votes out of 107.6 million votes cast in House races nationwide (0.0062%), about a fifth of the 31,751-vote margin by which Democrats won the House in 2020.”
“A campaign staffer trying to raise money for Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) called up donors last year pretending to be Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff,” the Washington Times reports.
“State GOP operatives found out the scheme by the Santos campaign staffer involved not only impersonating McCarthy Chief of Staff Dan Meyer but sending follow-up emails to the donors from a fake email address.”
“The first day of an evidence trial based on an election-challenge lawsuit by Republican governor candidate Kari Lake raised plentiful suspicions but did not reveal evidence of the misconduct she alleged,” the Arizona Republic reports.
Jennifer McClellan (D) easily won the Democratic nomination to succeed the late Rep. Donald McEachin (D) in Virginia’s 4th congressional district.
McClellan won nearly 85% of the votes cast in a “firehouse primary” and is heavily favored to win a February 21 special election.
Vox: “The story has sparked one of the more bizarre political scandals in American history. Members of Congress have committed murder in office. In fact, a member of Congress has even killed another member of Congress. Even in the present day, we’ve seen every scandal under the sun, from Anthony Weiner tweeting a lewd picture of himself, to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous Facebook post about Jewish space lasers.”
“But it’s hard to think of a precedent for a scandal like this.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Stacey Abrams raised more than $103 million for her failed rematch this year against Gov. Brian Kemp, a record-setting haul for a Georgia gubernatorial race that allowed her to experiment with unconventional ways to promote her candidacy.”
“But her campaign’s expenditures have come under sharper scrutiny as new details emerge about the tight cash crunch she faced before her November defeat to Kemp by nearly 8 points.”
“Many of Mitt Romney’s fellow senators assume his willingness to break from his party — and Donald Trump — means he’s planning for only one term. They may be surprised,” Politico reports.
Whether he could win is “frankly, not a question in my mind,” Romney said in an interview.
Said Romney: “I’ve faced long odds: Getting the nomination in 2012 was a long shot, becoming a Republican governor in one of the most liberal states in America, Massachusetts… So I’m convinced that if I run, I win. But that’s a decision I’ll make.”
“Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona who made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign, is starting a two-day trial on Wednesday as she presses to have her loss overturned,” the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Lake lost by around 17,000 votes to Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, but sued Maricopa County and Ms. Hobbs to overturn the results under Arizona’s election contest statutes. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge is allowing two of her claims of misconduct by election officials to go forward, but eight other claims were dismissed. A ruling is likely soon afterward.”
Arizona Republic: Kari Lake “excited” over election trial but Katie Hobbs won’t have to testify.
Virginia’s 4th congressional district is holding its Democratic “firehouse primary” to replace the late Rep. Donald McEachin (D-VA), the New York Times reports.
The winner will be considered the overwhelming favorite in the February 21, 2023 special election as Joe Biden carried the district 67% to 31% in 2020.
Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Though polls close at 7 p.m., it could take a while to determine the winner. Vote counting won’t begin until Wednesday morning. And there are multiple lawsuits in the works alleging unfairness over the party’s decision to hold the primary on a Tuesday and with limited polling sites.”
Dan McLaughlin: “A major reason why many Republicans and conservatives have increasingly soured on Donald Trump following the underwhelming 2022 election cycle is that Trump played a crucial, often decisive role in picking so many of the bad candidates who lost winnable races.”
“What follows is an examination of exactly how badly Trump harmed Republicans, beginning in this first installment with the big three Senate races in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. All three were eminently winnable with good candidates, and any two would have given the party control of the Senate.”
Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) gave a ranting speech this weekend in which she labeled herself a “proud election-denying deplorable” before urging young supporters to procreate and calling Anthony Fauci an “evil elf,” The Independent reports.
She added: “My pronouns are: I won.”
Arizona Republic: “A judge declined Monday to dismiss Kari Lake’s election challenge after oral arguments by attorneys, giving her a chance to try to prove her claims of misconduct by election officials.”
New York Times: “His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a ‘seasoned Wall Street financier and investor’ with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.”
“But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.”
“Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.”
“After raising more than $100 million in her second bid to be Georgia governor, the Stacey Abrams campaign owes more than $1 million in debt to vendors,” Axios reports.
“Abrams has been heralded for her fundraising prowess and had brought in donations at a presidential level earlier in the year. But money became so tight that most of the 180 full-time staffers were given an abrupt paycheck cutoff date — just a week after the November election.”
Dan Balz: “President Biden and former president Donald Trump are on a path that could lead to a rematch in 2024 of their 2020 election contest. Some past polls have suggested that such a face-off could be close.”
“In 2022, however, the competition between the two politicians was anything but close. It was Biden over Trump decisively.”
Republican pollster David Winston writes in Roll Call that the GOP’s “election problems are strategic more than tactical.”
“Mail-in and early voting, while worth exploring, are convenient scapegoats that miss the bigger problems: an overreliance on outdated, negative messaging when voters want positive solutions to their problems, and campaign strategies based more on personality than policy.”
Amy Walter: “In other words, simply running hundreds of millions of dollars tying Democrats to the unpopular president wasn’t enough to beat them. Republicans needed to give voters a reason to support Republican candidates beyond being a check on an unpopular president.”
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.