If he runs up the margins in Charlottesville and Danville, does comfortably well in exurbs of Richmond, and offsets the conservative Lynchburg vote by overperforming in other rural areas, he will have a shot.
Obituaries: Former Rep. Pat Saiki (R-HI) has died at 96.
Serving in both chambers of the state legislature in an Oahu district from 1968 to 1982, Saiki became the first Republican elected to the House from Hawaii in 1986 after Rep. Cecil Heftel resigned to make an unsuccessful run for governor. She lost the special to replace Heftel to Neil Abercrombie, but won the general against future Honolulu mayor Mufi Hanneman.
In 1990, she lost to appointed Sen. Dan Akaka, and Abercrombie returned to the House seat, eventually becoming governor under similar circumstances to Heftel's run. She served in the administration of George H.W. Bush as head of the SBA, then later as chair of the state Republican party.
FL, MI, MN-Sen: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will fundraise with his hefty $23 million war chest for progressive Senate nominees Angie Nixon, Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan, who are all in single-digit races.
Let's hope that the campaign rustiness of all three mentioned holds true and the Dems can win all three.Two are in deep red states but Trump has shown-no GOP officeholders are safe this election. Oregon shows though that D officeholders are not automatic wins either.
I urge the Dems to pass tax relief while still boosting voter turnout, saving a ton of tax money, and resulting in more women and MORE MINORITIES to local offices by combining the local elections with the even year midterm elections!!! Every blue state in the East needs to follow Vermont and pass universal vote by mail with a provision of one polling place per county for those who want or need to vote in person!!! Every blue state needs to pass legislation copied after the John Lewis and the (old name) Pelosi voting rights Acts. New Jersey and Virginia need to move their governor and state legislative races to the midterms like other states have done. That would boost voter turnout and save millions of tax dollars, need for replacing Trump's cuts and for universal all-day kindergarten and universal Pre-K education. All of these reforms result in tax savings EVERY ELECTION CYCLE!!!
I'm pretty sure actually that only having a single polling place per county is a voter suppression strategy Texas has used before to depress Democratic turnout in populous counties
I think a better idea is having a specific amount of polling places per county that scales with population
All of these Texas internals also point to a clear Talarico win and very close Gov race (if one were to extrapolate out). In this district, Talarico is up 52-43; Hinojosa up 48-47.
I'm still cautious about the last couple points. Need margins, turnout, across the state to go just right. Still seems to be in a better postion then Beto was in 18.
I suspect this is the type of district (heavily Latino) that will snap back even more than the national average. Or, put a different way, I'm not sure we can fully extrapolate to statewide (or national) results from it.
Is there a chance the Oregon legislature will also go red, or is this kind of like Massachusetts and Maryland who elected GOP governors to run the day-to-day government knowing that the legislature would stop them from doing anything crazy (and vice-versa)?
-Dems hold a 18-12 majority in the Senate. The state Senate had 3 competitive seats in 2022, 2 of them being won by Democrats. One of those 2 is retiring.
-Dems hold a 37-23 majority in the House. There were 10 single digit races in 2022, 8 of them being held by Democrats, and Republican Cyrus Javadi has since switched parties.
Doing the math, Democrats will still hold majorities even if they lose all single digit legislative seats from 2022, a weak year for the party statewide with Kotek at the top of the ticket.
Joel Rosenfield, are you in, or familiar with, Massachusetts? A big reason MA voters often elect Republican governors is that for decades the state legislature was dominated by Democrats, usually of Irish or Italian descent, who were pro-labor but ambivalent (I'm being polite here) about civil rights and other social issues. There's a reason Ed Brooke, a Black man and a political moderate/liberal, won election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1966 and 1972.
Prominent white Republicans of that era include Frank Sargent, who served as lieutenant governor and then governor, and Elliot Richardson (who as Nixon's attorney general resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox). Much more recently, moderate Charlie Baker was elected governor in 2014 and re-elected in 2018. Since then, the state Republican Party has gone full MAGA, and I'll be surprised if voters elect Republicans to statewide office any time soon. The real contests are likely to be in the Democratic primary.
Per Politico Playbook AM (NY version) and her own press release, Cait Conley raised 'over $5M' in Q3 for her race against Mike Lawler in NY17. No word on cash-on-hand, though.
New Economist/YouGov poll has Trump at a -26 approval, underwater in all but WV, WY and ID.
On October 1, 2018, before his first midterm, he was at -10.
If that translated to voting for Democrats, which isn't necessarily the case, Democrats would hold upwards of 65-70 Senate seats and about the same percentage in the House.
33 days. A cynical part of me wonders if all of this is set up for him to overturn everything and for us to fail. I decided on top of joining Indivisible, I'm becoming a poll worker on Election Day as well as possibly during early voting.
Only a third of the Senate is up each cycle, so you would have to have three strong Democratic cycles in a row (highly unlikely) to approach that many seats. House redistricting limits the number of competitive seats as well. My best hope for this year is Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, with some margin to spare. We don't want a 51-49 Senate or a 220-215 House if we can do better.
70 senate seats, 66 to change the constitution to actually get some BIG stuff done with 4 spare no votes for the Fettermans and Angus Kings is my fantasy. And it will remain a fantasy.
a personal opinion based on nothing more than the fact that he opposes getting rid of the filibuster, and I see him as one of the top 5 or top 10 sens most resistant to any sort of serious structural changes, removing the filibuster and beyond. Can't imagine he'd go with packing SCOTUS, etc.
Eastern Oregon is much more conservative than the rest of the state, and the Greater Idaho movement is calling for the annexation of Eastern Oregon by Idaho. Although she has not endorsed the movement's aim of breaking up her state, the Greater Idaho movement has endorsed Christine Drazan for governor of Oregon.
This reminds me of the idiots who want upstate NY to split off from the rest of NY. Or the “California independence movement” whose leader fled to Russia.
And then there are the zealots who want eastern Washington to break away and form a new state called "Liberty" in which same-sex marriage is banned and guns are readily available.
I don't think an Oregon Republican would ever actually support the breaking off of their most reliable voters. At best they would give lip service to the idea. "I understand the frustration with Salem. I don't like it either."
NEWS FROM THE NORTH: Yet another Conservative MP is resigning rather than sit in opposition for the next couple of years (at least). Scott Aitchison announced he will retire at the end of the fall sitting of Parliament, likely in December. He represents the district of Parry Sound-Muskoka, a mostly rural area in the north of Ontario. In 2025 he won re-election with a 52-43 split over the Liberal candidate, but with current polling numbers, it is categorized as LPC leaning at polling aggregator 338 Canada.
It’s rare you get high-quality independent house polls, and today we got three. All pointing to signs of a wave (especially Wittman):
—
Washington Post/Schar School poll | 9/23-9/28
US House 2026 | Virginia’s 5th congressional district (Trump +12 | 2024)
🟥John McGuire 51% (incumbent)
🟦Tom Perriello 45%
—
Virginia’s 1st congressional district (Trump +5 | 2024)
🟦Shannon Taylor 50%
🟥Rob Whittman 46% (incumbent)
—
Emerson NY17 POLL with @PIX11News, 9/27-29
🟦 Cait Conley (D) 48%
🟥 Mike Lawler (R-inc) 46%
7% undecided
Beat me to it.
Interesting that Perriello is getting closer, given the district’s partisan lean. I don’t think he’ll win but it’d be nice if he did.
If he runs up the margins in Charlottesville and Danville, does comfortably well in exurbs of Richmond, and offsets the conservative Lynchburg vote by overperforming in other rural areas, he will have a shot.
Also sets him up to waltz into the seat once we reinstall our gerrymander after kicking out the supreme court judges who killed it.
If maps are proposed before voting starts in 2027, the judges are unlikely to block the maps.
Lynchburg is a bit to the left of the district as a whole, he'd need to win it by a few points.
After being a subscriber since you've left DailyKos, I've only just realized that I can go to the website instead of the Substack app! lol!
So glad to have a quicker way to get caught up to speed. Thank you all for your hard work. :)
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/pat-saiki-former-gop-congresswoman-from-hawaii-dies-at-age-96
Obituaries: Former Rep. Pat Saiki (R-HI) has died at 96.
Serving in both chambers of the state legislature in an Oahu district from 1968 to 1982, Saiki became the first Republican elected to the House from Hawaii in 1986 after Rep. Cecil Heftel resigned to make an unsuccessful run for governor. She lost the special to replace Heftel to Neil Abercrombie, but won the general against future Honolulu mayor Mufi Hanneman.
In 1990, she lost to appointed Sen. Dan Akaka, and Abercrombie returned to the House seat, eventually becoming governor under similar circumstances to Heftel's run. She served in the administration of George H.W. Bush as head of the SBA, then later as chair of the state Republican party.
Anthony and Paleo keep up the good work on other updated polls
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/822490-bernie-sanders-will-spend-from-23m-war-chest-to-boost-angie-nixon/
FL, MI, MN-Sen: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will fundraise with his hefty $23 million war chest for progressive Senate nominees Angie Nixon, Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan, who are all in single-digit races.
Cook moves FL and TX-Gov from Likely to Lean R.
Let's hope that the campaign rustiness of all three mentioned holds true and the Dems can win all three.Two are in deep red states but Trump has shown-no GOP officeholders are safe this election. Oregon shows though that D officeholders are not automatic wins either.
I urge the Dems to pass tax relief while still boosting voter turnout, saving a ton of tax money, and resulting in more women and MORE MINORITIES to local offices by combining the local elections with the even year midterm elections!!! Every blue state in the East needs to follow Vermont and pass universal vote by mail with a provision of one polling place per county for those who want or need to vote in person!!! Every blue state needs to pass legislation copied after the John Lewis and the (old name) Pelosi voting rights Acts. New Jersey and Virginia need to move their governor and state legislative races to the midterms like other states have done. That would boost voter turnout and save millions of tax dollars, need for replacing Trump's cuts and for universal all-day kindergarten and universal Pre-K education. All of these reforms result in tax savings EVERY ELECTION CYCLE!!!
Good thoughts, but 1 polling place per county wouldn't be very meaningful in, like, Queens County, NY.
I'm pretty sure actually that only having a single polling place per county is a voter suppression strategy Texas has used before to depress Democratic turnout in populous counties
I think a better idea is having a specific amount of polling places per county that scales with population
Exactly. We Democrats know that land doesn't vote: people do.
Usually don't post internals, but this one's noteworthy:
TX 15: Pulido 54 De La Cruz 41
https://x.com/cjwarnke/status/2105646969775403226?s=20
All of these Texas internals also point to a clear Talarico win and very close Gov race (if one were to extrapolate out). In this district, Talarico is up 52-43; Hinojosa up 48-47.
I'm still cautious about the last couple points. Need margins, turnout, across the state to go just right. Still seems to be in a better postion then Beto was in 18.
I suspect this is the type of district (heavily Latino) that will snap back even more than the national average. Or, put a different way, I'm not sure we can fully extrapolate to statewide (or national) results from it.
Is there a chance the Oregon legislature will also go red, or is this kind of like Massachusetts and Maryland who elected GOP governors to run the day-to-day government knowing that the legislature would stop them from doing anything crazy (and vice-versa)?
-Dems hold a 18-12 majority in the Senate. The state Senate had 3 competitive seats in 2022, 2 of them being won by Democrats. One of those 2 is retiring.
-Dems hold a 37-23 majority in the House. There were 10 single digit races in 2022, 8 of them being held by Democrats, and Republican Cyrus Javadi has since switched parties.
Doing the math, Democrats will still hold majorities even if they lose all single digit legislative seats from 2022, a weak year for the party statewide with Kotek at the top of the ticket.
Joel Rosenfield, are you in, or familiar with, Massachusetts? A big reason MA voters often elect Republican governors is that for decades the state legislature was dominated by Democrats, usually of Irish or Italian descent, who were pro-labor but ambivalent (I'm being polite here) about civil rights and other social issues. There's a reason Ed Brooke, a Black man and a political moderate/liberal, won election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1966 and 1972.
Prominent white Republicans of that era include Frank Sargent, who served as lieutenant governor and then governor, and Elliot Richardson (who as Nixon's attorney general resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox). Much more recently, moderate Charlie Baker was elected governor in 2014 and re-elected in 2018. Since then, the state Republican Party has gone full MAGA, and I'll be surprised if voters elect Republicans to statewide office any time soon. The real contests are likely to be in the Democratic primary.
https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/guide-to-2026-general-election/
Bolts just dropped their massive guide to the midterms covering 650 different elections. Gonna spend the next month studying this tome
Per Politico Playbook AM (NY version) and her own press release, Cait Conley raised 'over $5M' in Q3 for her race against Mike Lawler in NY17. No word on cash-on-hand, though.
Good to announce good fundraising numbers early!
Meanwhile, heard Lawler campaign put campaign lit in (at least 1) mailbox - not legal.
In my experience one of the first things campaigns tells canvassers is
don’t put lit in mailboxes.
Why would that be illegal? Because no postage was used??
Right. To get mail in someone’s mailbox, pay for postage and a postal worker will deliver
I see. I never knew that was illegal.
New Economist/YouGov poll has Trump at a -26 approval, underwater in all but WV, WY and ID.
On October 1, 2018, before his first midterm, he was at -10.
If that translated to voting for Democrats, which isn't necessarily the case, Democrats would hold upwards of 65-70 Senate seats and about the same percentage in the House.
33 days. A cynical part of me wonders if all of this is set up for him to overturn everything and for us to fail. I decided on top of joining Indivisible, I'm becoming a poll worker on Election Day as well as possibly during early voting.
Only a third of the Senate is up each cycle, so you would have to have three strong Democratic cycles in a row (highly unlikely) to approach that many seats. House redistricting limits the number of competitive seats as well. My best hope for this year is Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, with some margin to spare. We don't want a 51-49 Senate or a 220-215 House if we can do better.
70 senate seats, 66 to change the constitution to actually get some BIG stuff done with 4 spare no votes for the Fettermans and Angus Kings is my fantasy. And it will remain a fantasy.
What's your concern about Angus King?
a personal opinion based on nothing more than the fact that he opposes getting rid of the filibuster, and I see him as one of the top 5 or top 10 sens most resistant to any sort of serious structural changes, removing the filibuster and beyond. Can't imagine he'd go with packing SCOTUS, etc.
Maine Fabrizio/Ward:
Jackson 50-47
Pingree 52-39
https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/voter-research/politics/2026-midterm-election-poll-maine/
This seems about right to me. The polling with Jackson behind has Gov, race much closer than I find credible.
TX-Sen: Headline from the San Antonio Current: Ken Paxton’s office struck plea deals in three other sex abuse cases beyond one facing scrutiny (https://www.sacurrent.com/news/politics-and-elections/ken-paxtons-office-struck-plea-deals-in-three-other-sex-abuse-cases-beyond-one-facing-scrutiny/)
Talarico's campaign has already posted about it, so I'm sure we'll have some ads coming soon with this.
Eastern Oregon is much more conservative than the rest of the state, and the Greater Idaho movement is calling for the annexation of Eastern Oregon by Idaho. Although she has not endorsed the movement's aim of breaking up her state, the Greater Idaho movement has endorsed Christine Drazan for governor of Oregon.
This reminds me of the idiots who want upstate NY to split off from the rest of NY. Or the “California independence movement” whose leader fled to Russia.
There is the "State of Jefferson" folks who want a new state out of the rural counties on the California / Oregon border.
And then there are the zealots who want eastern Washington to break away and form a new state called "Liberty" in which same-sex marriage is banned and guns are readily available.
Nobody wants to tell people how to live more than a conservative libertarian
I don't think an Oregon Republican would ever actually support the breaking off of their most reliable voters. At best they would give lip service to the idea. "I understand the frustration with Salem. I don't like it either."
Replace Salem with Portland, because that’s the real place these separatists want to target.
Salem is a byword for the State government or legislature, (Like Washington at the Federal level or Albany for NYS)
NEWS FROM THE NORTH: Yet another Conservative MP is resigning rather than sit in opposition for the next couple of years (at least). Scott Aitchison announced he will retire at the end of the fall sitting of Parliament, likely in December. He represents the district of Parry Sound-Muskoka, a mostly rural area in the north of Ontario. In 2025 he won re-election with a 52-43 split over the Liberal candidate, but with current polling numbers, it is categorized as LPC leaning at polling aggregator 338 Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-mp-aitchison-resigning-seat-9.7364059
https://338canada.com/35084e.htm