I've heard Craig call herself gay in a post-election bar party. If you have a statement where she says that she prefers using another term, that would be good to know. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like a problem.
As promised, here's my essay speculating on a 2002 Minnesota Senate race counterfactual, coincidentally on a morning where another Minnesota Senate race is the headline topic of today's page. I welcome alternative opinions challenging my conclusion, and I especially welcome any polling data that backed up Wellstone's reported lead above and beyond what I found.
Simple question: if Paul Wellstone hadn't died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, would he have won a third term?
The conventional wisdom about this election has endured for nearly a quarter century, particularly in the minds of Democrats. The general breakdown of the CW is that Wellstone and Republican challenger Norm Coleman had been effectively tied for most of the year, but when Wellstone cast his vote against the resolution for military force in Iraq in October, Minnesotans respected his integrity and migrated in his direction. Wellstone was poised to win before he died, but when voters perceived his televised memorial service to have turned into a tasteless campaign rally, they recoiled in disgust and censured the Democratic Party by voting for Coleman.
I've never fully bought this conventional wisdom for a number of reasons. Foremost among them, I'm skeptical of the weight of individual events in generating wholesale transformations in voters' decisions. My skepticism about campaign missteps and media-fueled controversies moving voters in meaningful numbers has only hardened in the Trump era, but I suspect it was quite relevant in 2002 as well. The polling suggested Wellstone got a five-point bounce after casting his vote against military action in Iraq....and the election night tally suggested Coleman got a five-point bounce in the closing days of the election. Few people seemed to consider that the common denominator may have been questionable polling samples rather than dithering voters.
And far as I can tell, most of the narrative surrounding the momentum shifts was tied to a single Mason Dixon poll released by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in mid-October. Previous samples had shown Wellstone and Coleman deadlocked, but the poll released after Wellstone's Iraq vote showed him leading by 6 points. It was a relief to those of us on Team Wellstone but there was scant polling data beyond that backing up the premise of Wellstone pulling away.
Following the exasperated responses of local and national media, as well as then-Governor Jesse Ventura, to the tone of Wellstone's October 29 memorial service, Democrats were nervous that there would be fallout. They were relieved when the poll released the Sunday before the election, taken entirely after the memorial, had replacement Democratic nominee Walter Mondale leading by 5 points. The only problem: it was the same pollster (Mason Dixon on behalf of the Star Tribune). If there was additional reliable public polling backing up Mason Dixon's findings, I wasn't aware of it then and am struggling to discover any record of it now. The only other poll on my radar that late in the cycle was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and showed the opposite outcome, with a 6-point lead for Coleman.
So were Minnesota voters really this fickle in October and early November 2002? Did they really flock to Wellstone to reward his courageous vote against invading Iraq only to do a heel turn back to Coleman in response to Wellstone's memorial service? That seems less likely to me than Mason Dixon simply having polling samples that were too friendly to Wellstone (in October) and Mondale (in November).
No shade is intended to Mason Dixon if they did because it was a hard race to poll, with an unusually dynamic Minnesota electorate diverging in unpredictable ways. Wellstone's campaign was upfront that the only reason they were hanging in there against Coleman was Wellstone's strength in rural Minnesota. The Coleman campaign telegraphed the same dynamic as they were on the airwaves with ads lobbying hard to cut Wellstone's rural advantage and were funding full-page color ads about the "death tax" in weekly rural newspapers to further land a foothold among voters who were ambivalent toward him.
Anecdotally, I was observing the same thing working at the time as a farm reporter in southwestern Minnesota. Wellstone's decades of advocacy on behalf of farmers and workers had broken through and he won considerable crossover support from otherwise rock-ribbed conservatives in farm country in a race against the former mayor of St. Paul. Given the trajectory of ideological loyalties in the generation since, it seems all the more remarkable that a Senator as unapologetically progressive as Paul Wellstone put together such a comprehensive downscale coalition in a Midwestern state.
Every indication is that this rural advantage transferred to Mondale, who also punched above the DFL's weight in the majority of farm and factory towns throughout the state and across media markets. Mondale's coalition looked very similar to what Wellstone's campaign teased that they expected their own coalition to look like. There's no way of knowing if the familiar Mondale name increased that outstate Minnesota advantage by a tick or if Wellstone's absence on the ballot compelled some pro-Wellstone Republicans back to the GOP, but it's reasonable to assume the difference was negligible.
Whatever the case, the real action was going on in the metro area, which saw a massive swing to Coleman. The Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and exurbs experienced both blistering population growth and a political realignment in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was hard to get a good read on this realignment in 1998 because of the third-party factor with Jesse Ventura, but it was harder to ignore when George W. Bush managed double-digit gains in nearly all of the Twin Cities collar counties. Senator Rod Grams scored margins nearly identical to Bush that cycle, prevailing in every suburban and exurban county even while losing decisively statewide. It was a worrying pattern for Democrats that seemed likely to persist in 2002, but the magnitude of the GOP suburban advantage come election night was genuinely shocking even to those expecting the worst.
The double-digit swing toward the GOP in suburban Minnesota in 2000 was matched by another double-digit swing in 2002. And this one wasn't limited to the collar counties. It touched every corner of the metro area, with wimpy margins (slightly less than 2-1 Mondale) even in the city of Minneapolis. And all this in a midterm with a Republican President! What in the hell was going on in Minnesota in 2002?
Whatever it was, it seemed significantly bigger than backlash to Paul Wellstone's memorial service. The arithmetic was fuzzy because Wellstone had already banked thousands of votes before he died and it's not clear how many of his absentee voters cast another ballot, but the final outcome was by no means extremely close. Coleman beat Mondale by nearly 50,000 votes and a margin of 2.2%. Furthermore, turnout was high at 64.9%. That's a higher turnout percentage than any of the five midterm cycles since then.
Does it seem credible that Wellstone's memorial had THAT big of an impact? Did it promote a metro-specific turnout surge that went overwhelmingly to Coleman, a surge that didn't touch adjacent outstate counties in the same media market where Mondale outperformed Gore, and in most cases outperformed Dayton, two years earlier?
I mean...maybe. But it seems more likely that this cake was baked before Wellstone died and the polls showing him with a comfortable mid-single-digit lead three weeks before the election were just as wrong as the polls that showed Mondale with a mid-single-digit lead three days before the election. It seems more likely that polling models weren't accurately gauging the magnitude of suburban shift toward Coleman and the GOP that year. It seems more likely that Minnesota was on the tipping point of becoming a red-tilting state until Bush's misadventures in Iraq triggered a reversion to the Democrats beginning in the 2004 cycle.
I have 23 additional years of election nights and poll-watching under my belt since 2002, and they've led me to conclude that Norm Coleman would more likely than not have won this election against Wellstone just as he did against Mondale. The notion that backlash to the Wellstone memorial alone cost the Democratic Senate nominee scores of thousands of votes--almost all of them specific to a dozen counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area--is too far-fetched to accept in retrospect. The far more believable scenario is that those massive Coleman margins in the suburbs were gonna happen anyway.
Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them has a great chapter on the memorial service and how the backlash to it was utterly astroturfed.
Exactly what I thoguht about when reading this comment.
Has any internal pollster who worked on the campaign for Wellstone (or Coleman, for that matter) every stated publicly that they saw these shifts in their own numbers?
I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get to the point where he was only winning Hennepin county by 7 points or Ramsey by 14. He would have gone pedal to the metal there if he knew he was being pressed.
That had always been my assumption as well until I rediscovered that turnout in Minnesota in the 2002 midterm was already the highest of any midterm in at least a quarter century. I question whether there was still 50,000 votes out there to pick up and/or flip in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
There’s also the older suburban counties like Dakota, Washington and Anoka where Mondale lost by almost 20 while Gore (even with Nader taking a substantial number of votes) only barely lost. Even Kerry didn’t lose any of these by more than 5 in 2004, meaning that something fluky was happening in 2002 in that race. I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get this out of hand here either.
It’s almost as if Mondale (to be fair he didn’t have a lot of time) and Dems were asleep at the switch in this general area of the state in 2002.
Looking at other parts of the state like Rochester’s Olmsted county that used to be Republican leaning, Mondale’s 9 point loss was the same as Gore’s.
2002 was more or less a 50-50 election outside of two states: Georgia and Minnesota. Coalitions held up remarkably well at the Congressional level and nearly every Blue Dog in Congress who wasn't redistricted out of his seat (David Phelps) held on comfortably. Gubernatorial contests were incredibly dynamic with red states going blue and blue states going red.
I suppose it's true that 2002 wasn't a typical midterm because it didn't favor the out-party, but it was by no means a Republican landslide outside of the two above-mentioned states. In Georgia, one could argue that allegiance to Bush and his post-9/11 agenda was the driver. In Minnesota, it seems more likely something else was going on.
2002 has to be up there for weirdest election results this century. 2022 maybe as well, but that year was at least consistent with bad Republican candidates getting punished. In 2002 you had Republicans picking up Hawaii and a newcomer winning a third Republican term in Rhode Island by double digits while at the same time Democrats picked up Wyoming and Oklahoma. I doubt we’ll ever see an election like that again in our lifetimes.
Looking back at GA in 2002 and the margin Cleland lost by (7 points) and the fact that even Roy Barnes lost by 5, it’s clear that there was nothing Dems could have done to stop those losses that year. From 2002-2008, that state was at the worst possible place for Dems where the old rural Dems in the Northern and Southern parts of the state that used to prop Dems up were dying off while at the same time the Atlanta suburbs were growing and were still super Republican.
Cleland and Barnes just happens to be there right when the music stopped.
While Obama didn't win Georgia in 2008, his campaign was wise to heavily invest in it, picking up on the favorable demographics starting to take shape. I was surprised how close he got.
Wow, this was an amazing read. Do you think that Wellstone makes a comeback in 2008 and launches a primary against Hillary Clinton in 2016 in this timeline?
I have read about his disease (MS in right leg) which some say would have prevented this, but it was reported to be minor, pretty slow progressing which could be controlled with physical therapy and medications. He joked that it was fitting for a progressive to have a progressive disease.
Note: 2006 was also open so he could have run instead of Klobuchar.
Good question about a Wellstone comeback playing out in 2008. There probably would have been a push to convince him to run again for his old seat, but since he'd already vowed to run for only two terms and he was struggling with MS, he may have been harder to convince to run again than one would think.
If his health had held up, I think it would have been just as likely that he'd become a Cabinet secretary (agriculture or labor) under Obama in 2009.
“He decided last year to run again, breaking his pledge to serve only two terms.
The disease, he said, hasn't affected anything but his right leg.
"Currently, Senator Wellstone is in excellent physical health and leads a very active lifestyle," Bartleson said. "Patients with this type of multiple sclerosis typically are able to maintain normal activities over the long term.”
Assuming he maintains his health and his doctor’s prognosis is correct, I believe if he decided to continue his career in 2008, he would have certainly chosen the Senate over a cabinet role since he saw himself as the lonely voice representing the left wing of the party. Warren hadn’t been elected at that point (she had worked with Wellstone) and Bernie wasn’t prominent enough to play that role.
That didn't surprise me, considering that Kirk wasn't terribly well-known in life outside of his online echo chamber, and maybe college campuses (he was rapidly aging out of the latter shtick, too).
The attempts to turn him into some kind of martyr for a noble cause quickly fell flat after people simply started quoting him verbatim. What a horrible legacy to leave behind.
Kirk wasn't running for anything and wasn't identified with a particular state as Wellstone was with Minnesota, so it's not comparable.
I don't think that most voters noticed or cared much about the memorial service. What backlash there was might have been related to Trump officials, including the FCC chair, trying to use Kirk as an excuse to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. But that probably had little electoral impact, as the Dem wins in various states, cities, and other constituencies were likely to happen anyway.
Thanks for that great post. I always had the impression that Mondale lost that race because he was overly bland compared to the fiery Wellstone and seemed like his heart wasn't in the campaign, but your analysis is more sophisticated than that and probably right.
That is very impressive!! We need more of this in other red states.
I'm in NC which, as we all know, is heavily gerrymandered. But once again, Anderson Clayton and her NCDP team did a great job on candidate recruitment!
We have several important state-wide races including the US Senate and the NC Supreme Court as well as several other judicial races. There are also some General Assembly races that are hopefully flippable and a couple more that Dems need to hold onto!
For any NC readers, the NC Democrats have rolled out anytime canvassing for the upcoming Judicial races. They are calling this effort "Field Team Justice" in honor of Justice Anita Earls who we MUST reelect in November. It uses the software canvassing tool to identify people in your neighborhood that need to be canvassed. You can request a list of 16 voters that will be valid for the next 7 days. Read up on this effort here and join the team:
Just a friendly heads up for you or anyone else who posts links, if you erase every character up to and including the question mark, but no further, you won’t have a massive 12 line link from redirections and previous places you were before clicking the link, but will still have the link to the page you want to post. I’ve noticed it happen a few times lately, so wanted to share that knowledge that someone else shared with me a while ago.
FYI, If you aren't sure, you can copy and paste the abbreviated link into a new window to make sure you have a valid link before including it in a post.
I would be interested to hear how these candidates approach economic development and revitalization.
When 2024 Senate Candidate Glenn Elliott was in the race, he had been riding high on success in being able to reinvigorate Wheeling’s economy. He had good ideas coming into the race, which I think would had been better addressed if perhaps he had run for Governor instead of the Senate.
Hopefully Flanagan and Klobuchar win and when Klobuchar resigns, Walz appoints Franken to replace her, if he will accept the role. He was a given a raw deal by his own colleagues, particularly Gillabrand. We need his frank wisdom in the Senate again.
Franken is 74. It is exceeding unlikely Klobuchsr resigns before she is sworn in, and would appoint her own replacement. She is going to appoint someone younger than Franken, for sure. Yes, Franken was a victim of a dark era of virtue signaling within Democratic politics, but we can't turn back the clock as a party or as a society.
Personally, I'd prefer we get a placeholder senator so that the voters can decide who they want, but I'd be super down with Franken as a placeholder. As Oggoldy noted, he's already retirement age, so appointing him would give him back some dignity while not installing someone in the seat.
Agreed, the placeholder makes sense, particularly since he has the experience and may not want to keep serving, but he’s a spring chicken compared to Grassley, McConnell and Feinstein before her passing. Still, the question would be whether he wants the job
I see others here bringing up the metoo episode, as if the allegations had any merit. Let’s be honest — much of Metoo became a witch hunt, with non offenders getting caught up in it through specious accusations. He was railroaded, period. Having him in the senate for the midterm would indeed restore the dignity he deserves.
I doubt it will happen though. The Dems have no backbone.
I am a fan of Franken politically (I referenced his book upthread!) but it's not hard to find Democrats that haven't had allegations of groping against them; no thank you.
Indiana: the Morning Consult results for Braun were pretty bad and have been for a few quarters. Maybe there’s a narrow path where Beau Bayh topples Diego Morales this year in the Secretary of State’s race and then runs for Governor in 2028 against an unpopular Braun? It’s what his dad did from 1986-88.
I’m probably going to get push back on this, but imo that race isn’t winnable for us. I’m glad Beau Bayh stepped up for us and if you live there, by all means, donate and support his campaign, but we can’t win these offices anymore because of an awful Republican that we could before. Too much negative polarization against Democrats in red states. Even if we get a tsunami, Beau will probably lose by about 4-6 points and my bet is he loses by around 8 atm. I do hope with every fiber of my being that I’m wrong fwiw.
I actually think a lack of a gubernatorial and Senate race really helps Bayh’s chances of an upset there. No polarization of Republicans to turnout low-propensity voters. Add that to Bayh’s legacy name, impressive background, and a disastrous incumbent. I think an upset there is pretty high. Maybe that’s delusional optimism.
Makes sense. Kalawao County has a far higher high school and college graduation rate than the rest of Hawaii. Not that particularly many parts of Hawaii are Red...
I agree. And if Bayh loses, he now has a base from which to run for another office in Indiana. Too many Hoosier candidates do not take the long view. Sometimes, candidates must lose elections before they can win them.
Politico is trying to make a mountain over a molehill with a clickbait article, ie the Talarico/Crockett/Allred nonsense. I don't want to give them clicks so I'm not linking to it.
Rachel Bitecofer, who can be very accurate, thinks that will hurt Talarico in November. But he hasn't won the primary! Nor has Crockett!
She's panicking on Xitter. She has a few good takes on her Substack (mainly post elections) but a lot of it is really fear mongering and saying Democrats aren't doing enough.
The old days of the media being able to effectively gatekeep had it's advantages. One is that people like Bitecofer would have had their mics taken away instead of allowed to spread their takes to too many people.
Bitcofer is our version of Robert Cahaly. Was right a single time in a single election, and has been alarmingly wrong every other time. Broken clock hacks, at best.
Republican incumbent Warren Limmer of Maple Grove is retiring sfter 32 years in the Senate. This is the most noteworthy retirement yet, as Limmer is a remnant of a time when Republicans dominated suburban Hennepin County. Even before the retirement, Limmer was the #1 Senate target for the DFL in the currently 34D-33R chamber.
Holy cow, it’s Harris +8. “Autoflip” might be too strong, but is there really a replacement Republican that could hold a seat like that in a year like this? I imagine the Democrat would have to be a convicted felon or something to lose it, right?
If the GOP could not turn Klobuchar’s win back in 2024 to below 15% points and in single digits, they really have no chance at all not just at he gubernatorial race but in running a truly competitive race.
Of course, it’s a difference race for Governor vs being a Senator.
Interesting that Doc Jensen fares the least poorly of the GOP candidates after his 2022 embarrassment. Slightly better name familiarity is all it is I'm sure.
NY-Gov (Siena poll) - Hochul leads Blakeman 54-28, 49-40 favorability. Mamdani's favorability at +16 in NY state, the highest of any politician in the state.
So even if the Republican Blakeman sucks up 100% of the undecided vote, Hochul wins by more in 2026 than she does in 2022 by 2 points. She also has 5% of voters who disapprove of her, already backing her over her GOP opponent. Kind of hard to find any data to deny that a blue wave is forming right now.
I’m guessing Hochul wins something like 58%-40%. Maybe a little less. That likely means she’s winning NY-17 by greater than five, which is probably too much for Lawler to survive.
Seems to me that the concern over Mamdani’s ability to lead in the snowstorm doesn’t seem to factor here.
How could this possibly be? A popular politician for Gen Z NYCers being competent on the job. I’m sure Mamdani will be questioned as to his ability to fix his own car or put a plunger in his toilet at home.
Derkmc shared this post in the weekend thread yesterday. It shows Morning Consult's governor approval ratings for November-December (the post says quarter 4, but looking at the timeframe for previous polls it seems like this is instead just November and December?):
Some things that stood out to me that I figured would be better to share today when more people would see it:
1.) Mike Dunleavy went from +15 approval in August-October to -11 approval in November-December. What happened in Alaska to cause this? I would be curious to know if this collapse in approval exists for other Republicans in the state as well, or if it's unique to Dunleavy as that could give insight into whether Democrats could do well across the board in Alaska elections this year.
2.) Glenn Younkin had a +16 approval in the timeframe that included the election, up from +12 in the August-October poll. Yet his party still lost overwhelmingly in the elections. While I know that Youngkin wasn't on the ballot, he is/was the most prominent VA Republican. Does this indicate that even popular Republican politicians can't alleviate the electoral backlash?
3.) Walz had a +7 approval, down from +12. Indicates that he may have been correct to end his run for re-election. Of course a lot can happen before the end of this year, so maybe he could have brought his approvals back up, but it also seems like the fraud scandals were really able to impact his standing, and they definitely could have continued to do so. Reflecting as a Minnesotan, I am glad he ended his run for re-election. Not because I think he was a bad governor (he wasn't), but because this means he is able to focus completely on the issues facing our state while giving our party almost a full year to run a new candidate for governor who could likely have greater coattails than he would. I want to think this an example of Walz seeing the cards early and making a selfless, team-player decision rather than waiting until the last minute, hoping his approvals would rebound, to drop out.
4.) Hochul is at +18, up from +15. This seems to indicate Hochul doing well in November, and potentially even wth coattails in congressional and state legislative districts.
I'd be curious to know what stands out to other people from the numbers in these polls.
In general I tend to add about 10 points of negative favorability to every Morning Consult poll for Governor. They’re one of the few outfits that poll Governors races consistently, but they’re almost always far too rosy for incumbents. I know that’s not scientific or backed by any data, but considering doing so for most incumbents would then match up to most other Governor polls taken around the same time, it seems like a flawed, but workable assumption to make. Salt to taste.
Yeah, you’re probably right, I think I went over a bit too much. Maybe closer to around 5 points? But yes, these polls shouldn’t be taken as accurate regardless.
Other polling had Youngkin's approval lower, though still generally positive. He was fairly popular, or at least respected, personally but that obviously wasn't enough for his party to overcome negative opinion of the national administration.
Would he have won if he could have run again? Quite possibly, but not certainly. He certainly could self finance and would probably have run a better campaign than Earle-Sears, whose campaign was often disorganized and emphasized issues that weren't that important to voters. There's also the question of if Spanberger or a similarly strong Democrat would have wanted to run against an incumbent. But personal popularity isn't always enough to fend off a wave, even at the state level, and Youngkin's wasn't overwhelming (MC is a bit of an outlier here, and that probably isn't unique to VA.)
I don't think there was any way a Republican was winning a statewide race in VA in this environment. Maybe he could have pulled Jason Miyares over the line against Jay Jones
anyone have a handy explainer or link to MN caucus protocol FAQs? is it run like Iowa caucuses, ie lots of small events across the state and people phone in the result so it takes a while to get the results that evening? and does it constitute "the party endorsement" or does the party endorsement go on after that? I believe both Craig and Flanagan have committed to staying in til August regardless.
Its anachronistic as hell, to be honest. There are several rounds of thousands of straw polls across thousands of precincts that are reported, but ultimately what comes out of the caucuses are delegates that approximate the straw polls of each precincts, and they go to their organizational unit conventions in a few weeks (county or Senate district, depending). So there is likely not going to be certainty coming out of today's caucuses, just the first of a ~4 step process that all culminates at the end of May at the State Convention.
GA-Gov: random Republican billionaire enters the race, with a $40 million ad blitz. I think all this does is up the chances Burt Jones is forced to go to a runoff.
Jones will definitely get the first spot with his Trump backing and most other endorsements going his way. A runoff benefits us by leveling the playing field since we’ll likely have a runoff of our own to deal with.
Worth noting: Steyer's money is almost all from himself. Porter had more than 12,000 small donors in 4Q. Much of Becerra's money is from transfers from other accounts. Swalwell raised many donations of more then $10K from across the country. The Cal Matters link mentions Jon Hamm, Robert De Niro and Sean Penn.
I don’t know officially he is or at least has been consistently but Sean Penn has traditionally been quite liberal.
Back in the 2000’s, he was quite fiery, especially on his anti-Iraq War rhetoric. He supported Dennis Kucinich in the 2008 Primaries but then protested against the exclusion of third party candidates like Ralph Nader at the debates. He supported Biden against Trump back in 2020 even while he had a history going back to his relations with Hugo Chavez. He’s also been strongly in favor of Ukraine over Russia.
Compared to how Dennis Rodman’a judgement is shaped because of his relations with Kim Jong Un, I would say I trust Penn’s judgement more. That doesn’t mean he’s been consistent though.
Yes, it is still a pack. Other than Steyer self-funding and Yee and Thurmond lagging behind they are all in a remarkably narrow range of COH.
Less than four months to go until the deadline. Ballots will be sent out in just over three months. And yet the public campaign has barely started (other than Tom's TV ads...)
Interesting. Given the primary isn't until June, all that can be said at this point is that this is a four-way candidate race between Becerra, Porter, Swalwell and Villaraigosa (leaving out Steyer as I doubt he has a real campaign besides his ads and media attention) with Porter and Swalwell probably getting the most leverage.
I'd though really watch out Swalwell as with $2.58 million cash on hand, that's an indicator he may be running a really credible campaign along with polling well. He hasn't been in the race as long as the rest of the Democratic candidates (absent of Steyer), especially Porter.
Certainly, the pressure will be on Thurman and Yee to drop out as there's no realistic path either one of them have at advancing out of the primary.
I just wish we gutted the Top 2 format entirely. It seems like every two years there’s some sort of panic about a potential lockout from vote splitting. Just do RCV or something instead.
Out of curiosity, how is the campaign going for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election (which will be taking place in about two months)? Has either side started to run ads? I haven't heard as much about this election as I would've expected.
I don’t think money will be an issue for us. On top of Chris Taylor’s 10-1 fundraising advantage over Maria Lazar, the Wisconsin Democratic Party outraised the state Republican Party by over $10 million last year in their federal accounts. I don’t know if that money can only be spent on federal races, so if so, it might not be usable for the Supreme Court race.
I remember when Protosaewicz won the February 2023 primary, the WI Democratic Party transferred several million dollars to her campaign the following day. It wasn’t specified whether they used a federal account or not.
This is the 2nd campaign Leckey is running but I like the fact that she was formerly a financial regulator. If she were to win the primary, she would be a great ally to Elizabeth Warren and the rest who want to reform the financial sector (banks included).
I've heard Craig call herself gay in a post-election bar party. If you have a statement where she says that she prefers using another term, that would be good to know. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like a problem.
Absolutely not. Haven't we already gone over how almost nobody identifies as a acronym that lists a series of possible identities?
Hi, gay person here; gay is not incorrect for lesbians. Quit trying to police language.
Would Wellstone Have Won?
As promised, here's my essay speculating on a 2002 Minnesota Senate race counterfactual, coincidentally on a morning where another Minnesota Senate race is the headline topic of today's page. I welcome alternative opinions challenging my conclusion, and I especially welcome any polling data that backed up Wellstone's reported lead above and beyond what I found.
Simple question: if Paul Wellstone hadn't died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, would he have won a third term?
The conventional wisdom about this election has endured for nearly a quarter century, particularly in the minds of Democrats. The general breakdown of the CW is that Wellstone and Republican challenger Norm Coleman had been effectively tied for most of the year, but when Wellstone cast his vote against the resolution for military force in Iraq in October, Minnesotans respected his integrity and migrated in his direction. Wellstone was poised to win before he died, but when voters perceived his televised memorial service to have turned into a tasteless campaign rally, they recoiled in disgust and censured the Democratic Party by voting for Coleman.
I've never fully bought this conventional wisdom for a number of reasons. Foremost among them, I'm skeptical of the weight of individual events in generating wholesale transformations in voters' decisions. My skepticism about campaign missteps and media-fueled controversies moving voters in meaningful numbers has only hardened in the Trump era, but I suspect it was quite relevant in 2002 as well. The polling suggested Wellstone got a five-point bounce after casting his vote against military action in Iraq....and the election night tally suggested Coleman got a five-point bounce in the closing days of the election. Few people seemed to consider that the common denominator may have been questionable polling samples rather than dithering voters.
And far as I can tell, most of the narrative surrounding the momentum shifts was tied to a single Mason Dixon poll released by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in mid-October. Previous samples had shown Wellstone and Coleman deadlocked, but the poll released after Wellstone's Iraq vote showed him leading by 6 points. It was a relief to those of us on Team Wellstone but there was scant polling data beyond that backing up the premise of Wellstone pulling away.
Following the exasperated responses of local and national media, as well as then-Governor Jesse Ventura, to the tone of Wellstone's October 29 memorial service, Democrats were nervous that there would be fallout. They were relieved when the poll released the Sunday before the election, taken entirely after the memorial, had replacement Democratic nominee Walter Mondale leading by 5 points. The only problem: it was the same pollster (Mason Dixon on behalf of the Star Tribune). If there was additional reliable public polling backing up Mason Dixon's findings, I wasn't aware of it then and am struggling to discover any record of it now. The only other poll on my radar that late in the cycle was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and showed the opposite outcome, with a 6-point lead for Coleman.
So were Minnesota voters really this fickle in October and early November 2002? Did they really flock to Wellstone to reward his courageous vote against invading Iraq only to do a heel turn back to Coleman in response to Wellstone's memorial service? That seems less likely to me than Mason Dixon simply having polling samples that were too friendly to Wellstone (in October) and Mondale (in November).
No shade is intended to Mason Dixon if they did because it was a hard race to poll, with an unusually dynamic Minnesota electorate diverging in unpredictable ways. Wellstone's campaign was upfront that the only reason they were hanging in there against Coleman was Wellstone's strength in rural Minnesota. The Coleman campaign telegraphed the same dynamic as they were on the airwaves with ads lobbying hard to cut Wellstone's rural advantage and were funding full-page color ads about the "death tax" in weekly rural newspapers to further land a foothold among voters who were ambivalent toward him.
Anecdotally, I was observing the same thing working at the time as a farm reporter in southwestern Minnesota. Wellstone's decades of advocacy on behalf of farmers and workers had broken through and he won considerable crossover support from otherwise rock-ribbed conservatives in farm country in a race against the former mayor of St. Paul. Given the trajectory of ideological loyalties in the generation since, it seems all the more remarkable that a Senator as unapologetically progressive as Paul Wellstone put together such a comprehensive downscale coalition in a Midwestern state.
Every indication is that this rural advantage transferred to Mondale, who also punched above the DFL's weight in the majority of farm and factory towns throughout the state and across media markets. Mondale's coalition looked very similar to what Wellstone's campaign teased that they expected their own coalition to look like. There's no way of knowing if the familiar Mondale name increased that outstate Minnesota advantage by a tick or if Wellstone's absence on the ballot compelled some pro-Wellstone Republicans back to the GOP, but it's reasonable to assume the difference was negligible.
Whatever the case, the real action was going on in the metro area, which saw a massive swing to Coleman. The Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and exurbs experienced both blistering population growth and a political realignment in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was hard to get a good read on this realignment in 1998 because of the third-party factor with Jesse Ventura, but it was harder to ignore when George W. Bush managed double-digit gains in nearly all of the Twin Cities collar counties. Senator Rod Grams scored margins nearly identical to Bush that cycle, prevailing in every suburban and exurban county even while losing decisively statewide. It was a worrying pattern for Democrats that seemed likely to persist in 2002, but the magnitude of the GOP suburban advantage come election night was genuinely shocking even to those expecting the worst.
The double-digit swing toward the GOP in suburban Minnesota in 2000 was matched by another double-digit swing in 2002. And this one wasn't limited to the collar counties. It touched every corner of the metro area, with wimpy margins (slightly less than 2-1 Mondale) even in the city of Minneapolis. And all this in a midterm with a Republican President! What in the hell was going on in Minnesota in 2002?
Whatever it was, it seemed significantly bigger than backlash to Paul Wellstone's memorial service. The arithmetic was fuzzy because Wellstone had already banked thousands of votes before he died and it's not clear how many of his absentee voters cast another ballot, but the final outcome was by no means extremely close. Coleman beat Mondale by nearly 50,000 votes and a margin of 2.2%. Furthermore, turnout was high at 64.9%. That's a higher turnout percentage than any of the five midterm cycles since then.
Does it seem credible that Wellstone's memorial had THAT big of an impact? Did it promote a metro-specific turnout surge that went overwhelmingly to Coleman, a surge that didn't touch adjacent outstate counties in the same media market where Mondale outperformed Gore, and in most cases outperformed Dayton, two years earlier?
I mean...maybe. But it seems more likely that this cake was baked before Wellstone died and the polls showing him with a comfortable mid-single-digit lead three weeks before the election were just as wrong as the polls that showed Mondale with a mid-single-digit lead three days before the election. It seems more likely that polling models weren't accurately gauging the magnitude of suburban shift toward Coleman and the GOP that year. It seems more likely that Minnesota was on the tipping point of becoming a red-tilting state until Bush's misadventures in Iraq triggered a reversion to the Democrats beginning in the 2004 cycle.
I have 23 additional years of election nights and poll-watching under my belt since 2002, and they've led me to conclude that Norm Coleman would more likely than not have won this election against Wellstone just as he did against Mondale. The notion that backlash to the Wellstone memorial alone cost the Democratic Senate nominee scores of thousands of votes--almost all of them specific to a dozen counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area--is too far-fetched to accept in retrospect. The far more believable scenario is that those massive Coleman margins in the suburbs were gonna happen anyway.
Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them has a great chapter on the memorial service and how the backlash to it was utterly astroturfed.
"An event that feels like it happened in another universe now: the 2002 funeral of Paul Wellstone, where Democrats were seen as acting really gauche and Republicans benefits from the backlash https://minnpost.com/politics-policy/2008/10/six-years-later-wellstone-memorial-host-latimer-still-agonizes-over-events-p/"
https://x.com/daveweigel/status/1307703780809551873
Exactly what I thoguht about when reading this comment.
Has any internal pollster who worked on the campaign for Wellstone (or Coleman, for that matter) every stated publicly that they saw these shifts in their own numbers?
I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get to the point where he was only winning Hennepin county by 7 points or Ramsey by 14. He would have gone pedal to the metal there if he knew he was being pressed.
That had always been my assumption as well until I rediscovered that turnout in Minnesota in the 2002 midterm was already the highest of any midterm in at least a quarter century. I question whether there was still 50,000 votes out there to pick up and/or flip in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
There’s also the older suburban counties like Dakota, Washington and Anoka where Mondale lost by almost 20 while Gore (even with Nader taking a substantial number of votes) only barely lost. Even Kerry didn’t lose any of these by more than 5 in 2004, meaning that something fluky was happening in 2002 in that race. I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get this out of hand here either.
It’s almost as if Mondale (to be fair he didn’t have a lot of time) and Dems were asleep at the switch in this general area of the state in 2002.
Looking at other parts of the state like Rochester’s Olmsted county that used to be Republican leaning, Mondale’s 9 point loss was the same as Gore’s.
It was not a typical midterm because of 9/11.
2002 was more or less a 50-50 election outside of two states: Georgia and Minnesota. Coalitions held up remarkably well at the Congressional level and nearly every Blue Dog in Congress who wasn't redistricted out of his seat (David Phelps) held on comfortably. Gubernatorial contests were incredibly dynamic with red states going blue and blue states going red.
I suppose it's true that 2002 wasn't a typical midterm because it didn't favor the out-party, but it was by no means a Republican landslide outside of the two above-mentioned states. In Georgia, one could argue that allegiance to Bush and his post-9/11 agenda was the driver. In Minnesota, it seems more likely something else was going on.
2002 has to be up there for weirdest election results this century. 2022 maybe as well, but that year was at least consistent with bad Republican candidates getting punished. In 2002 you had Republicans picking up Hawaii and a newcomer winning a third Republican term in Rhode Island by double digits while at the same time Democrats picked up Wyoming and Oklahoma. I doubt we’ll ever see an election like that again in our lifetimes.
Looking back at GA in 2002 and the margin Cleland lost by (7 points) and the fact that even Roy Barnes lost by 5, it’s clear that there was nothing Dems could have done to stop those losses that year. From 2002-2008, that state was at the worst possible place for Dems where the old rural Dems in the Northern and Southern parts of the state that used to prop Dems up were dying off while at the same time the Atlanta suburbs were growing and were still super Republican.
Cleland and Barnes just happens to be there right when the music stopped.
While Obama didn't win Georgia in 2008, his campaign was wise to heavily invest in it, picking up on the favorable demographics starting to take shape. I was surprised how close he got.
He got some very terrible numbers in the suburb/exurbs for 08/12.
Georgia 2002 probably had not much to do with W. The final collapse of the old South urban-rural coalition for Democratic.
Wow, this was an amazing read. Do you think that Wellstone makes a comeback in 2008 and launches a primary against Hillary Clinton in 2016 in this timeline?
I have read about his disease (MS in right leg) which some say would have prevented this, but it was reported to be minor, pretty slow progressing which could be controlled with physical therapy and medications. He joked that it was fitting for a progressive to have a progressive disease.
Note: 2006 was also open so he could have run instead of Klobuchar.
Good question about a Wellstone comeback playing out in 2008. There probably would have been a push to convince him to run again for his old seat, but since he'd already vowed to run for only two terms and he was struggling with MS, he may have been harder to convince to run again than one would think.
If his health had held up, I think it would have been just as likely that he'd become a Cabinet secretary (agriculture or labor) under Obama in 2009.
“He decided last year to run again, breaking his pledge to serve only two terms.
The disease, he said, hasn't affected anything but his right leg.
"Currently, Senator Wellstone is in excellent physical health and leads a very active lifestyle," Bartleson said. "Patients with this type of multiple sclerosis typically are able to maintain normal activities over the long term.”
Assuming he maintains his health and his doctor’s prognosis is correct, I believe if he decided to continue his career in 2008, he would have certainly chosen the Senate over a cabinet role since he saw himself as the lonely voice representing the left wing of the party. Warren hadn’t been elected at that point (she had worked with Wellstone) and Bernie wasn’t prominent enough to play that role.
Was there a backlash to the grotesque politicization of the Charlie Kirk memorial service?
Didn't seem to be. But there also wasn't an election one week later so we have no real way of knowing.
It didn’t seem to produce a backlash, per se - but that may because the funeral itself became something of a non-event culturally
That didn't surprise me, considering that Kirk wasn't terribly well-known in life outside of his online echo chamber, and maybe college campuses (he was rapidly aging out of the latter shtick, too).
The attempts to turn him into some kind of martyr for a noble cause quickly fell flat after people simply started quoting him verbatim. What a horrible legacy to leave behind.
Kirk wasn't running for anything and wasn't identified with a particular state as Wellstone was with Minnesota, so it's not comparable.
I don't think that most voters noticed or cared much about the memorial service. What backlash there was might have been related to Trump officials, including the FCC chair, trying to use Kirk as an excuse to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. But that probably had little electoral impact, as the Dem wins in various states, cities, and other constituencies were likely to happen anyway.
The Great Kirkification memes? Erika Kirk memes?
Thanks for that great post. I always had the impression that Mondale lost that race because he was overly bland compared to the fiery Wellstone and seemed like his heart wasn't in the campaign, but your analysis is more sophisticated than that and probably right.
Great post. This would have been a diary on DKE.
I noticed that WV Democrats did a great job of fielding candidates for state legislature races this year.
https://www.wvdemocrats.com/news/historic-slate-2026
We sure did! Doing the best I can to get the word out
That is very impressive!! We need more of this in other red states.
I'm in NC which, as we all know, is heavily gerrymandered. But once again, Anderson Clayton and her NCDP team did a great job on candidate recruitment!
We have several important state-wide races including the US Senate and the NC Supreme Court as well as several other judicial races. There are also some General Assembly races that are hopefully flippable and a couple more that Dems need to hold onto!
For any NC readers, the NC Democrats have rolled out anytime canvassing for the upcoming Judicial races. They are calling this effort "Field Team Justice" in honor of Justice Anita Earls who we MUST reelect in November. It uses the software canvassing tool to identify people in your neighborhood that need to be canvassed. You can request a list of 16 voters that will be valid for the next 7 days. Read up on this effort here and join the team:
https://www.fairjudgesnc.com/
Just a friendly heads up for you or anyone else who posts links, if you erase every character up to and including the question mark, but no further, you won’t have a massive 12 line link from redirections and previous places you were before clicking the link, but will still have the link to the page you want to post. I’ve noticed it happen a few times lately, so wanted to share that knowledge that someone else shared with me a while ago.
I was going to post the same thing!
FYI, If you aren't sure, you can copy and paste the abbreviated link into a new window to make sure you have a valid link before including it in a post.
Thanks!
Edited my post.
Awesome!
I would be interested to hear how these candidates approach economic development and revitalization.
When 2024 Senate Candidate Glenn Elliott was in the race, he had been riding high on success in being able to reinvigorate Wheeling’s economy. He had good ideas coming into the race, which I think would had been better addressed if perhaps he had run for Governor instead of the Senate.
Hopefully Flanagan and Klobuchar win and when Klobuchar resigns, Walz appoints Franken to replace her, if he will accept the role. He was a given a raw deal by his own colleagues, particularly Gillabrand. We need his frank wisdom in the Senate again.
Franken is 74. It is exceeding unlikely Klobuchsr resigns before she is sworn in, and would appoint her own replacement. She is going to appoint someone younger than Franken, for sure. Yes, Franken was a victim of a dark era of virtue signaling within Democratic politics, but we can't turn back the clock as a party or as a society.
Personally, I'd prefer we get a placeholder senator so that the voters can decide who they want, but I'd be super down with Franken as a placeholder. As Oggoldy noted, he's already retirement age, so appointing him would give him back some dignity while not installing someone in the seat.
Agreed, the placeholder makes sense, particularly since he has the experience and may not want to keep serving, but he’s a spring chicken compared to Grassley, McConnell and Feinstein before her passing. Still, the question would be whether he wants the job
I see others here bringing up the metoo episode, as if the allegations had any merit. Let’s be honest — much of Metoo became a witch hunt, with non offenders getting caught up in it through specious accusations. He was railroaded, period. Having him in the senate for the midterm would indeed restore the dignity he deserves.
I doubt it will happen though. The Dems have no backbone.
I am a fan of Franken politically (I referenced his book upthread!) but it's not hard to find Democrats that haven't had allegations of groping against them; no thank you.
I do *not* want to see people relitigating Franken here—not today, not ever. Jesus christ, it was nearly a decade ago. Find something better to do.
Indiana: the Morning Consult results for Braun were pretty bad and have been for a few quarters. Maybe there’s a narrow path where Beau Bayh topples Diego Morales this year in the Secretary of State’s race and then runs for Governor in 2028 against an unpopular Braun? It’s what his dad did from 1986-88.
Slight correction: it’s Diego Morales.
I’m probably going to get push back on this, but imo that race isn’t winnable for us. I’m glad Beau Bayh stepped up for us and if you live there, by all means, donate and support his campaign, but we can’t win these offices anymore because of an awful Republican that we could before. Too much negative polarization against Democrats in red states. Even if we get a tsunami, Beau will probably lose by about 4-6 points and my bet is he loses by around 8 atm. I do hope with every fiber of my being that I’m wrong fwiw.
I actually think a lack of a gubernatorial and Senate race really helps Bayh’s chances of an upset there. No polarization of Republicans to turnout low-propensity voters. Add that to Bayh’s legacy name, impressive background, and a disastrous incumbent. I think an upset there is pretty high. Maybe that’s delusional optimism.
I too am glad Beau Bayh is running. The only elections Democrats are absolutely sure to lose are those in which they fail to have a candidate.
I applaud the fact that we keep getting closer and closer to a 50-State Strategy. And better yet: a 3,143-County Strategy!
How's the Democratic Party of Kalawao County doing these days?
;)
They voted for Kamala 83-17 in '24, I think they're doing great!
Makes sense. Kalawao County has a far higher high school and college graduation rate than the rest of Hawaii. Not that particularly many parts of Hawaii are Red...
The West coast of Oahu is now red. Places like Ma'ili, Wai'anae, and Nanakuli are now the reddest large area of Hawaii.
I agree. And if Bayh loses, he now has a base from which to run for another office in Indiana. Too many Hoosier candidates do not take the long view. Sometimes, candidates must lose elections before they can win them.
Politico is trying to make a mountain over a molehill with a clickbait article, ie the Talarico/Crockett/Allred nonsense. I don't want to give them clicks so I'm not linking to it.
Rachel Bitecofer, who can be very accurate, thinks that will hurt Talarico in November. But he hasn't won the primary! Nor has Crockett!
People still listen to Rachel Bitecofer?
She's panicking on Xitter. She has a few good takes on her Substack (mainly post elections) but a lot of it is really fear mongering and saying Democrats aren't doing enough.
The old days of the media being able to effectively gatekeep had it's advantages. One is that people like Bitecofer would have had their mics taken away instead of allowed to spread their takes to too many people.
Bitecofer is one of the most hackish grifters out there lol. Chris Cillizza levels of wrong.
Her latest crusade is criticizing party primaries since the party cannot pick its own blue dog candidates.
Bitcofer is our version of Robert Cahaly. Was right a single time in a single election, and has been alarmingly wrong every other time. Broken clock hacks, at best.
MN-SD-37
Republican incumbent Warren Limmer of Maple Grove is retiring sfter 32 years in the Senate. This is the most noteworthy retirement yet, as Limmer is a remnant of a time when Republicans dominated suburban Hennepin County. Even before the retirement, Limmer was the #1 Senate target for the DFL in the currently 34D-33R chamber.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/local-news/gop-sen-warren-limmer-to-retire-after-38-years-in-minnesota-legislature/
This was a Harris seat too, no? So an autoflip basically?
Autoflip is too strong of a word, but favored to flip, to be sure.
Holy cow, it’s Harris +8. “Autoflip” might be too strong, but is there really a replacement Republican that could hold a seat like that in a year like this? I imagine the Democrat would have to be a convicted felon or something to lose it, right?
Good. Limmer is an anti-LGBT nutcase hugely out of step with his Dem-trending district.
MN-Gov:
Amy Klobuchar leads Republican opponents by 14-20 points each.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/kstp-surveyusa-klobuchar-leads-all-gop-candidates-by-double-digits/
2012 style Klobuslide incoming
I can sense that.
If the GOP could not turn Klobuchar’s win back in 2024 to below 15% points and in single digits, they really have no chance at all not just at he gubernatorial race but in running a truly competitive race.
Of course, it’s a difference race for Governor vs being a Senator.
More like 2024-style Klobuchar landslide I suspect. Too many 2012 voters are no longer available even in the best-case scenario.
There will be in a midterm wave year
Polarization is so much higher than in 2012 so I doubt that
Interesting that Doc Jensen fares the least poorly of the GOP candidates after his 2022 embarrassment. Slightly better name familiarity is all it is I'm sure.
NY-Gov (Siena poll) - Hochul leads Blakeman 54-28, 49-40 favorability. Mamdani's favorability at +16 in NY state, the highest of any politician in the state.
https://sri.siena.edu/2026/02/03/hochul-with-her-best-ever-favorability-rating-49-40-continues-to-hold-commanding-leads-over-blakeman-54-28-among-dems-delgado-64-11
So even if the Republican Blakeman sucks up 100% of the undecided vote, Hochul wins by more in 2026 than she does in 2022 by 2 points. She also has 5% of voters who disapprove of her, already backing her over her GOP opponent. Kind of hard to find any data to deny that a blue wave is forming right now.
I’m guessing Hochul wins something like 58%-40%. Maybe a little less. That likely means she’s winning NY-17 by greater than five, which is probably too much for Lawler to survive.
Regardless of Hochul, Lawler will not survive a Trump presidency unless his opponent is very weak.
Lawler's seat is pretty low-hanging fruit, IMO.
Seems to me that the concern over Mamdani’s ability to lead in the snowstorm doesn’t seem to factor here.
How could this possibly be? A popular politician for Gen Z NYCers being competent on the job. I’m sure Mamdani will be questioned as to his ability to fix his own car or put a plunger in his toilet at home.
About the only positive that Blakeman brings to the race is that he'll have more coattail potential on Long Island than, say, Stefanik.
Derkmc shared this post in the weekend thread yesterday. It shows Morning Consult's governor approval ratings for November-December (the post says quarter 4, but looking at the timeframe for previous polls it seems like this is instead just November and December?):
https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/2018439535466606693
Some things that stood out to me that I figured would be better to share today when more people would see it:
1.) Mike Dunleavy went from +15 approval in August-October to -11 approval in November-December. What happened in Alaska to cause this? I would be curious to know if this collapse in approval exists for other Republicans in the state as well, or if it's unique to Dunleavy as that could give insight into whether Democrats could do well across the board in Alaska elections this year.
2.) Glenn Younkin had a +16 approval in the timeframe that included the election, up from +12 in the August-October poll. Yet his party still lost overwhelmingly in the elections. While I know that Youngkin wasn't on the ballot, he is/was the most prominent VA Republican. Does this indicate that even popular Republican politicians can't alleviate the electoral backlash?
3.) Walz had a +7 approval, down from +12. Indicates that he may have been correct to end his run for re-election. Of course a lot can happen before the end of this year, so maybe he could have brought his approvals back up, but it also seems like the fraud scandals were really able to impact his standing, and they definitely could have continued to do so. Reflecting as a Minnesotan, I am glad he ended his run for re-election. Not because I think he was a bad governor (he wasn't), but because this means he is able to focus completely on the issues facing our state while giving our party almost a full year to run a new candidate for governor who could likely have greater coattails than he would. I want to think this an example of Walz seeing the cards early and making a selfless, team-player decision rather than waiting until the last minute, hoping his approvals would rebound, to drop out.
4.) Hochul is at +18, up from +15. This seems to indicate Hochul doing well in November, and potentially even wth coattails in congressional and state legislative districts.
I'd be curious to know what stands out to other people from the numbers in these polls.
+7 is still solid.
I believe Walz would have won fairly comfortably, if not by as much as Amy.
In this environment he would have been favored.
Kinda wonder if he'll get appointed to the Senate
He'd be a great Senator, but I think he's exhausted and just done with public life.
In general I tend to add about 10 points of negative favorability to every Morning Consult poll for Governor. They’re one of the few outfits that poll Governors races consistently, but they’re almost always far too rosy for incumbents. I know that’s not scientific or backed by any data, but considering doing so for most incumbents would then match up to most other Governor polls taken around the same time, it seems like a flawed, but workable assumption to make. Salt to taste.
I'm not sure about adding net 10 to every one but yes MC's state level polls have always been pretty garbage.
Good to know!
Yeah, you’re probably right, I think I went over a bit too much. Maybe closer to around 5 points? But yes, these polls shouldn’t be taken as accurate regardless.
Other polling had Youngkin's approval lower, though still generally positive. He was fairly popular, or at least respected, personally but that obviously wasn't enough for his party to overcome negative opinion of the national administration.
Would he have won if he could have run again? Quite possibly, but not certainly. He certainly could self finance and would probably have run a better campaign than Earle-Sears, whose campaign was often disorganized and emphasized issues that weren't that important to voters. There's also the question of if Spanberger or a similarly strong Democrat would have wanted to run against an incumbent. But personal popularity isn't always enough to fend off a wave, even at the state level, and Youngkin's wasn't overwhelming (MC is a bit of an outlier here, and that probably isn't unique to VA.)
I don't think there was any way a Republican was winning a statewide race in VA in this environment. Maybe he could have pulled Jason Miyares over the line against Jay Jones
anyone have a handy explainer or link to MN caucus protocol FAQs? is it run like Iowa caucuses, ie lots of small events across the state and people phone in the result so it takes a while to get the results that evening? and does it constitute "the party endorsement" or does the party endorsement go on after that? I believe both Craig and Flanagan have committed to staying in til August regardless.
Here are some links from the SecState, state party and AFL-CIO:
https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/how-elections-work/precinct-caucuses/
https://dfl.org/caucus/
https://mnaflcio.org/stpaulunions/news/2026-precinct-caucus-information
Its anachronistic as hell, to be honest. There are several rounds of thousands of straw polls across thousands of precincts that are reported, but ultimately what comes out of the caucuses are delegates that approximate the straw polls of each precincts, and they go to their organizational unit conventions in a few weeks (county or Senate district, depending). So there is likely not going to be certainty coming out of today's caucuses, just the first of a ~4 step process that all culminates at the end of May at the State Convention.
GA-Gov: random Republican billionaire enters the race, with a $40 million ad blitz. I think all this does is up the chances Burt Jones is forced to go to a runoff.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/2026/02/surprise-republican-rick-jackson-enters-georgia-governors-race/
A runoff is almost certain, I guess. The problem is who vs who.
Jones v Raffensperger is my idea
Jones will definitely get the first spot with his Trump backing and most other endorsements going his way. A runoff benefits us by leveling the playing field since we’ll likely have a runoff of our own to deal with.
TX-18: Rep. Christian Menefee was sworn in yesterday, 2 days after his election. I guess Johnson learned after the Grijalva debacle last fall.
The shutdown gave him an excuse, however bullshit, that didn't exist here.
They were also trying to stop a vote on releasing the Epstein Files last year.
That was the excuse he didn't want to say out loud, lol
CA Gov: Cash on Hand 12/31/2025
Tom Steyer $28.9 million
Xavier Becerra $3.75 million
Antonio Villaraigosa $3.45 million
Katie Porter $3.23 million
Eric Swalwell $2.58 million
Steve Hilton $2 million
Chad Bianco $1.98 million
Betty Yee $535K
Tony Thurman $477K
https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/02/governors-race-fundraising-reports/
https://eastbayinsiders.substack.com/p/moneyballing
Worth noting: Steyer's money is almost all from himself. Porter had more than 12,000 small donors in 4Q. Much of Becerra's money is from transfers from other accounts. Swalwell raised many donations of more then $10K from across the country. The Cal Matters link mentions Jon Hamm, Robert De Niro and Sean Penn.
Sean Penn, who played Greg Bovino in One Battle After Another, is a Democrat? /s
I don’t know officially he is or at least has been consistently but Sean Penn has traditionally been quite liberal.
Back in the 2000’s, he was quite fiery, especially on his anti-Iraq War rhetoric. He supported Dennis Kucinich in the 2008 Primaries but then protested against the exclusion of third party candidates like Ralph Nader at the debates. He supported Biden against Trump back in 2020 even while he had a history going back to his relations with Hugo Chavez. He’s also been strongly in favor of Ukraine over Russia.
Compared to how Dennis Rodman’a judgement is shaped because of his relations with Kim Jong Un, I would say I trust Penn’s judgement more. That doesn’t mean he’s been consistent though.
That's genuinely an interesting history but I was being sarcastic, lol
His character in the movie really just looks a lot like Bovino and does things similar.
Got it. I had sensed that from the beginning but thanks for the heads up. :)
You forgot your sarc emoji. 😁
Yes, a famously outspoken one
Kind of incredible at how little money they have individually. Fits with no one being able to break apart from the pack.
Yes, it is still a pack. Other than Steyer self-funding and Yee and Thurmond lagging behind they are all in a remarkably narrow range of COH.
Less than four months to go until the deadline. Ballots will be sent out in just over three months. And yet the public campaign has barely started (other than Tom's TV ads...)
Interesting. Given the primary isn't until June, all that can be said at this point is that this is a four-way candidate race between Becerra, Porter, Swalwell and Villaraigosa (leaving out Steyer as I doubt he has a real campaign besides his ads and media attention) with Porter and Swalwell probably getting the most leverage.
I'd though really watch out Swalwell as with $2.58 million cash on hand, that's an indicator he may be running a really credible campaign along with polling well. He hasn't been in the race as long as the rest of the Democratic candidates (absent of Steyer), especially Porter.
Certainly, the pressure will be on Thurman and Yee to drop out as there's no realistic path either one of them have at advancing out of the primary.
I just wish we gutted the Top 2 format entirely. It seems like every two years there’s some sort of panic about a potential lockout from vote splitting. Just do RCV or something instead.
Out of curiosity, how is the campaign going for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election (which will be taking place in about two months)? Has either side started to run ads? I haven't heard as much about this election as I would've expected.
I don’t think money will be an issue for us. On top of Chris Taylor’s 10-1 fundraising advantage over Maria Lazar, the Wisconsin Democratic Party outraised the state Republican Party by over $10 million last year in their federal accounts. I don’t know if that money can only be spent on federal races, so if so, it might not be usable for the Supreme Court race.
https://www.wispolitics.com/2026/wisconsin-dem-party-outraises-state-gop-6-1-through-federal-account/
I remember when Protosaewicz won the February 2023 primary, the WI Democratic Party transferred several million dollars to her campaign the following day. It wasn’t specified whether they used a federal account or not.
MA-4: Ihssane Leckey is officially challenging Jake Auchincloss.
https://www.wpri.com/news/elections/ihssane-leckey-will-challenge-auchincloss-in-second-bid-for-4th-district-seat/amp/
This is the 2nd campaign Leckey is running but I like the fact that she was formerly a financial regulator. If she were to win the primary, she would be a great ally to Elizabeth Warren and the rest who want to reform the financial sector (banks included).