But not before I got me a piece of that action.
the ben nelson/pete ricketts race in nebraska has been pretty nasty. ben nelson(d) will win.
no real campaigning going on for the second district house seat. lee terry® will retain the seat.
The political prognosticators are still showing bias. You can get a real analysis starting 2 days before the election. They are then trying to save their credibility.After its over they can say how they got it right after having it wrong for weeks.
But will it lose him more votes than it wins him?
The sad, sad thing is that this is a legitimate question with an uncertain answer instead of being an absurd and shocking question with an obvious answer.
And not only in Congressional races. See this thread. And this one. And watch out for the convoluted racial dynamics of the Condi in '08 candidacy (assuming it happens, you know).
This is my prediction as well.
[Shaking my fist]
Good for you! I wanted in on that bet, too, but didn’t see where it was being offered.
They’re working on one - I had a lovely scripted phone conversation with a young lady from Quinnipiac the other night about both the Lieberman/Lamont race as well as the race for governor. The last one that I’ve seen released, though, was the one from the middle of August that gave Lieberman a 12 point lead. It’s been all attack ads over the past couple of weeks - if you’re an incumbent representative in CT, you’ve been voting for Bush too much/you hate minorities/you’re corrupt, and if you’re a challenger, you don’t have experience/you hate the people working at the sub base/your perfectly normal past makes you inappropriate for the job. So really, it’s a pretty typical Congressional election season. I expect that the incumbents are all going to win close races (well, other than the governor’s race - as it turns out, EVERYONE loves M. Jodi Rell).
It’s still too early to handicap the Senate race in Pennsylvania as the [del]second Republican[/del] Green party candidate may still get onto the ballot via an appeal to the Penn. supremes.
And that would be better for the Dems than if they won by 2-3 seats. A majority isn’t worth having unless it’s stong enough to effictively control the House. As for the Senate, 48-9 Dems, 50 Repubs, 1-2 Indenpendents.
Changing requires first admitting to the past and rejecting it, which Byrd has done. Allen has sort of made overtures in this direction, but half-hearted and in a very immediate response to scandal. I mean, the “macaca” controversy was bourne in part out of his “this (coincidentally overwhelmingly white) crowd is the REAL virginia” attitude.
These latest charges are coming on top of a long pattern of behavior that’s becoming increasingly hard to explain as anything other than a consistent picture. Put this together with his own sisters portrayal of him as a sadistic bully who wanted to become a dentist because he liked the idea of inflicting pain, one of the highest staff turnover rates on Congress due to dissatisfaction, his love for the grossest caricatures of the South, the noose hanging from a tree in his law office, his photo-op with the CCC (the richy rich KKK), his defense of Trent Lott, the low number of minorities in his staff, his bizarre “ethnic rally,” his attempts to hide passing mentions of his jewish ancestry and his apparent lying about when he found out about it, the macaca controversy along with his several mutually contradictory explanations for it (including that it meant “shithead”), and now this: that he referred to African Americans as n***ers, bragged that he came to UVA because they knew their place here, and most bizarrely of all, shoved a dead deer head into the mailbox of a black family picked at random…
Well, any one of those things you could say is unfounded or irrelevant, but put it all together and you have a pretty unhappy portrait of a guy who, at the very least, is probably never going to be President, no matter how many times he praises his own Jeffersonian conservatism.
Will he be a Senator again? Maybe. Webb is not a powerful candidate. A first time politician, even a past Republican, can’t easily draw huge ammounts of crossover appeal. He’s not great at raising money: Allen can blanket the airwaves while Webb simply cannot keep up on that score or on the level of direct mail (both very important). And his campaign seems highly disorganized: his web people are loose cannon liabilities, and he doesn’t seem to have a consistent single message.
So, we’ll see. If Allen really crumbles in the face of this new story, maybe. But I’d still rate this as leaning Allen’s way. Xenu help us.
Phil Kellam looks to be in position to school Thelma Drake though, as far as Congress in VA goes.
Me? I’m still hot and happy from being a part of Tim Kaine’s win. The State House will take many many more cycles to turn over (in part because VA is one of the most gerrymandered states in the union), but VA is ever so slowly turning towards the Dems. Seeing that it’s one of the most expensive media markets in the nation, putting it in play for 2008 would be a HUGE loss for Republicans, who are used to not having to spend much of any money there.
Senator Byrd will leave the capitol in a coffin, and not before. He’s a damn folk hero in this State.
I mean, if someone produced evidence that he buried a body in a bridge foundation, he’d probably be lauded for his contributions to highway development.
Rep. Mollahan, however - I don’t know how he’s doing, but I’ve been getting 2-3 pieces of junk mail a week slandering his voting record and trying to hammer home the fact he’s being investigated for misconduct.
The new stories about Sen. Allen’s racist past might give him some trouble, given that he recently flatly denied, on tape, that he had ever used the word “nigger”.
People can probably look past the racism, at least the ones who were going to vote for him anyway. The casual relationship with the truth, as exemplified by this and the ridiculous early attempts to explain away the “Macaca” remark, might be a little more damaging in a close race.
I’m saying the Dems take the House by a comfortable margin, and either tie up the Senate or fall just short (like 51-49).
I don’t trust most media democratic media polls like the New York Times. They seem to be baised towards the democrats within the margin or error, or slightly beyond the margin of error in almost all cases.
As for who will win in November, I think the Democrats will win the house, but the Republicans will hold on to the senate. I predict the Iraq issue will mean very little on Election Day.
As far as the Executive Branch and Judiciary branch, they will be overwhelmingly Republicans.
If people are still looking to spread some donations this cycle, let me just pimp the race I think it will do the most good in: Pat Murphy in PA08. He’s a Iraq war vet Dem who is in striking distance against a 1 term Republican incumbent, and my favorite pickup: it’s all going to come down to whether he can raise enough money to raise his name ID and GOTV Dems (it’s a district that went for Kerry in 04, but only just). Basically, given that his profile has polled with such a positive impact, it’s a race in which all you have to do to win is get him known to the voters, and they’ll like him more than the other guy.
You’ll find my real name among his list of donors, but I’m not telling. 
Sadly, I live in Ohio now, where the Senate and Governor races are both leaning Democrat, but are too much of an annoying mess for me to get involved in.
As a Virginian I disagree with this entire characterization.
The first Republican to be Governor in Virginia since reconstruction was in 1970. For every President since Nixon in 68 we’ve voted GOP in the presidential election. Bush actually increased his percentage of the vote in Virginia in 2004 versus his 2000 outcome (52% jumping to 54%.) What’s significant though is unlike a state that I would classify as a “GOP” or “Democratic” stronghold, Virginia’s electoral votes are rarely decided by an overwhelming majority. I think the state is more diverse politically than people imagine. And there have been several elections since 1968 where the Democratic candidate was very poor and many states didn’t vote for them including ones that traditionally vote Dem (Carter in '80, Mondale in '84, Dukakis in '88.)
Kaine was replacing an incumbent Democrat Governor. We had two Republican Governors before that, then 3 Democrats preceding that (including the first black Governor in American history amongst the three.)
Our long term Senator John Warner, while a Republican, is moderate even by national standards. And even butted heads strongly with the GOP in 1996 (to the point the GOP tried to dump him) and he sided with Democrats to prevent the removal of the filibuster last year.
George Allen is a one term Senator who was preceded by a Democrat.
In general I think Virginia is a more moderate state than most people recognize, which explains the mischaracterization above. At least on national party issues, both Democrats and Republicans are competitive here for Senate seats and the electoral votes (eventhough no Democrat has actually won them since 1968, the margins have always been close enough the GOP would be foolish not to pay attention to Virginia.) The Governor’s mansion is likewise, always competitive.
Cite?
Why not?
Does anyone else here agree?
Do you also disagree with Apos’ characterization of Virginia as “one of the most gerrymandered states in the Union”?