Joe Sestak Will Beat Arlen Specter In The 2010 PA Primary

There, I've said it. I'm not above making some predictions. And this one is based in some reality, for once! The fact is that Arlen Specter's standing with voters in Pennsylvania has slipped significantly a year out from any primary. His job approval rating is down to 34%, and among Democrats, only 43% believe he deserves re-election. In a head-to-head matchup, Specter only garners 33% against Sestak, who has 13%, with a whopping 48% undecided.

These are much better numbers than, for example, Ned Lamont had at a similar time, nearly a year out from his primary against Joe Lieberman. And the trends in terms of key stakeholders are moving Sestak's way as well. This Open Left piece is hilarious:

At first glance, Joe Sestak reiterating that he is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act while speaking at a United Steelworkers conference doesn't seem like much of a news story. As the title of this post implies, however, there is something that made it very interesting...

The catch is that Senator Arlen Specter did not speak at this event. In fact, he was disinvited.

Here is the full story, courtesy of an email exchange with Jim Savage, who is President of a Steelworkers local here in Philadelphia:

"The Senator [Arlen Specter] was invited & confirmed as the keynote speaker."

"There was quite an uproar when we found out. He was uninvited because of the rank-and-file reaction."

"Also, it's worth noting that the Senator was none too happy about it."

At that point, Sestak was then invited. Before he spoke, he was "introduced to the delegates as "our next Senator" to a rousing ovation."

The general sentiment toward Specter was "fuck'm."

I have to say, talking to local union leaders is a lot more fun than talking with communications staff.

Sestak keeps dipping his toe in the water and intimating that he'll get in the race. At some point he'll have to go ahead with a full-fledged announcement. But if, as appears likely, he does run, I think he'll win. I've certainly been wrong before, but then again, so has Larry Sabato....

...and by the way, this is exactly why Specter came out today in favor of the public option for health care reform. He will not be a problem in this fight, unlike what would have been the case if Sestak shied away from running.

Shame On You Harold Ford

What the Harold Ford-linked machine is trying to do in his old House seat is beyond disgusting. Steve Cohen, a progressive Democrat who may be the best freshman House member in America, is facing a challenge from Nikki Tinker. Cohen is white and Jewish; Tinker, along with the overwhelming majority of the district, is African-American. She's been race-baiting the entire campaign, and her final ad, complete with its KKK imagery, is revolting.



It's irrelevant and disgusting for this local pastor and Nikki Tinker to rile up voters and make the absurd claim that Steve Cohen, a JEW, is somehow aligned with the KKK.

Howie Klein has more on this race.

It's been a very ugly race-- and the ugliness is all on one side, Nikki Tinker's. Steve Cohen was first elected in 2006 with the help of Blue America and we have enthusiastically endorsed him again. If you know anyone in Memphis, please call them and talk to them about this race. Cohen has been a real leader for working families and he is the only progressive congressman from Tennessee. Tinker is a complete corporate shill and far more conservative across a wide array of issues. Rahm Emanuel, a longtime ally of Ford's, has encouraged institutional support for Tinker and has prevented his DCCC pawn, Chris Van Hollen, from coming to the aid of Cohen, the way the DCCC and Nancy Pelosi backed other challenged incumbents like Kilpatrick yesterday and Al Wynn a few months ago. One of the most corrupt members of the Democratic Party, Gregory Meeks (NY) has been supporting Tinker, as has Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio). More progressive and respectable members of the Congressional Black Caucus like John Conyers and Jesse Jackson, Jr. have been campaigning for Cohen.

A race like this lets you know who your friends are. Steve Cohen is absolutely superior to a race-baiting anti-Semite like Nikki Tinker. Let's hope the Harold Ford machine gets their butt handed to them tomorrow night.

UPDATE: Wow, this ad is even worse.

"While he's in our churches, clapping his hands and tapping his feet ... he's the only senator who thought our kids shouldn't be allowed to pray in school," the announcer says, referring to an old vote against school prayer from when Cohen was a state senator. And remember, this is coming from a Democrat.

The California Report

Here are a few links for you.

• It's two days until the kickoff of Netroots Nation, and among the many luminaries attending will be Gavin Newsom, who is introducing green jobs expert Van Jones at the Sunday morning keynote. The fact that he's running for Governor has nothing to do with this, I'm sure.

• The final numbers on the June election were miserable, with a record low (for a regular election) 28.2% turnout. A ridiculous amount of voters cast ballots by mail - 58.7%, also a record. VBM is far stronger in Northern California than in the Los Angeles area, and not surprisingly turnout is higher up there as well. This is really changing how elections ought to be conducted, as we move to a VBM state. Campaign operatives need to understand this quickly.

• Hey, we had a bank run at IndyMac yesterday. Fun! The FDIC insures up to $100,000, so consumers should be fine for the most part, but what you're going to see is eroding confidence in regional banks as the financial crisis widens.

• Another leader at the LA Times is out, this time publisher David Hiller. I'm sure Sam Zell and his team can make loads of money on the paper if they just fire everybody and go to robot reporters.

• AB 97 cleared the legislature yesterday, which would ban trans fats at California restaurants and bakeries. It now goes to the governor. He did sign a ban on trans fats in school cafeterias last year.

Open Forum For California DNC Candidates

You wouldn't know this unless you follow these things closely, but this coming Sunday, June 15, is very significant in the future of Democratic politics. On that day at the California Democratic Party executive board meeting in Burlingame, 19 men and women from throughout the state will be voted in as DNC members. Those elected will take their positions after the Democratic National Convention in August, and will serve through the DNC in 2012. Here's the list (it's a PDF) of names who will appear on the ballot - 9 men, 9 women and the 19th-highest vote-getter regardless of gender will win the election.

Now, why is this important? These 19 DNC members will be part of the organization that will need to decide how to reform our completely broken primary process that almost turned a historic nomination season into utter chaos. There is no other issue - not the war, not poverty, not the economy, not health care, nothing - where DNC members will make any kind of a difference compared to primary reform. I know a lot of party members read this site, so let this be a jumping off point for discussion. No California e-board member should vote to elect any of these candidates without knowing their plans for primary reform. And on the flip, here are a few ideas.

Here's a brief sketch of some of the necessary reforms, IMO, that I wrote at The Washington Monthly last week:

Now the next challenge, in my view, is reforming this disastrous primary system entirely, reviewing it from top to bottom and ditching the most undemocratic elements. I would move to a rotating regional set of primaries (decided by lottery on January 1 of the primary year so nobody can park in any one place prior to that), superdelegates with no vote until after the first ballot, which is reserved for delegates picked directly by the voters (so they get to go to the party but not have an undue influence on the process), and all delegates selected proportionately based on their state's popular vote. I would remind those who think caucuses should be thrown out that they are tremendous party-building tools, and many of the states with caucuses this year are swing states (Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, even Texas perhaps), and those state parties captured priceless voter contact information on hundreds of thousands of voters who could be turned into volunteers.

Let's go a bit more in depth.

Primary schedule - the reason that we ended up with such a chaotic system for delegate selection is that Michigan and Florida jumped the line set by the DNC, and instead of past years where sanctions would be granted on those states only to be lifted after the winner was chosen and the delegate counts no longer mattered, this was a close race. So that sanction hung over the entire primary season. Yet the DNC must be able to manage their own nominating process. So it seems to me that they shouldn't allow one delegate to be chosen before their set date for the beginning of the primaries, and that states should be grouped by region and chosen by lot. This breaks the Iowa/New Hampshire stranglehold (and if they don't like it, really, let them secede), eliminates the penchant for 30 visits to the early states on the calendar, and continues to allow for retail politics through the various regions. It's somewhat similar to the American Plan.

Real proportional representation - the current system is kind of a joke, in that congressional districts which allocate even-numbered amounts of delegates have quite a bit less influence on the overall result as districts which allocate odd-numbered amounts. Simply put, it's easier to gain an advantage in an odd-numbered district, needing only 50% plus one, as it is in an even-numbered district, needing as much as 63% of the vote. There is absolutely no reason why the delegate allocation can't be proportional based on statewide popular vote, with the congressional allocations included later. Furthermore, the states need to be proportionally represented relative to one another - the system of add-on delegates and rewarding states that kept their primaries later in the process and giving Puerto Rico more delegates than 27 states simply has to end.

Dealing with the superdelegates - all of these DNC members elected will then become so-called "superdelegates," so I recognize that asking them to renounce their own power and influence is kind of dicey. But nothing had a more damaging impact on the party than the perception that the process was controlled by party insiders who could subvert the will of the people. That it "worked out" in the end is of no consequence. Superdelegates really shouldn't have such an outsized impact on the nominating process. I suggest that their votes for President and Vice President at the DNC don't count on the first ballot, ensuring that they get a ticket to the event but the voters have the first crack at choosing the nominee. A standard of 50 or even 55% could be set as the necessary threshold to get the nominee over the top, if superdelegates want to hold out the option of having their wise counsel be determinative.

There are probably dozens of other ideas, but I want to open this up to discussion. How would you reform the primary process, and what can potential DNC candidates do to assure you that they will adequately represent the interests of California voters to see the process reformed?

Post-Mortem On the California Primaries

I think the results of yesterday's primaries had some good news and some bad, and also brought to light the depressing realities of California politics.

• Turnout was horrendous. These numbers will go up, but with all precincts reporting we're looking at 22% turnout, the lowest in recent memory, far lower than 2006 and 2004. There still is not much of a real political culture in California with respect to state politics, and I think that's something we have to recognize. I saw a lot of activism and citizen-led activity leading up to these primaries which made me somewhat hopeful, but it did not translate at the ballot box. Of course, with so many uncontested primaries there was little at stake. But as a measure of intensity of the electorate, there wasn't much.

• IE campaigns win elections. The outsized influence of IE campaigns is something we have to understand and work with. Even the races where, as Robert said, progressives won in state legislature primaries, there were in general a lot of IEs, funded mostly by labor, on their behalf. Rod Wright basically bought a seat in SD-25, with well over a million dollars of independent expenditures funded mostly by tobacco and business interests. And the size of Bob Blumenfield's victory in AD-40 suggests the importance of IEs. There isn't going to be a lot of appetite for reforming this from a set of state legislators who have IEs to thank for their positions in office. Clean money elections is obviously the killer app, and I'm glad Loni Hancock will be in the State Senate to carry the bill, but it's pretty depressing how easily these seats can be bought, particularly in low-turnout primaries where almost nobodyis paying attention.

• Measuring Congressional intensity. Looking at turnout numbers in the primaries isn't really a great measure of how the candidates will do in the general elections, but it's a good benchmark of base support. Among the winners were Bill Durston (within 8,000 votes of Dan Lungren) and Charlie Brown (just nipped by Tom McClintock in raw votes, but he got 42,000-plus out to vote for him in one of the highest-turnout elections anywhere). Among the losers? Well, pretty much everyone else. But Nick Leibham can't be happy about his totals, and he has a MAJOR activist support problem in the 50th district that he has to recognize and fix. Russ Warner did sort of in the middle, well enough but with the need for improvement. Considering she faced two challengers, Julie Bornstein didn't do too badly either.

• Incumbency can be defeated, but it's tough. Carole Migden is something like the first incumbent to be beaten in a primary in California in a dozen years. Mervyn Dymally was a sitting Assemblyman and something of a legendary figure so I'll call him a sort-of beaten incumbent. But it took lots of money to unseat these two and they had their share of political scandal. Otherwise, it's just real hard to get your message out.

• PDA is less than worthless. I love and respect my friends in Progressive Democrats of America for their advocacy of progressive causes. As an electoral engine, they are simply not a legitimate organization. Only Cheryl Ede can hold her head up high as a PDA-backed candidate, and honestly I think that had more to do with Leibham than her. Mary Pallant had PDA backing, more resources than the other two candidates in the race, and was thrashed by someone who suspended her candidacy and came back just weeks before the vote. It takes more than screaming about the system and emailing frantically back and forth and writing resolutions to build a power base, and PDA needs to learn in a hurry.

• The legislative battlegrounds. I'm very excited by Manuel Perez' win in AD-80, where he was the only candidate to show strength in all parts of the district (he actually finished a close second in both Riverside and Imperial Counties). He has a lot of momentum going into November against Gary Jeandron, the former sheriff of Palm Springs. And Democrats got about 5,000 more votes than Republicans in that seat. If Perez can unify the factions, he wins. AD-78 looks good, too. Marty Block squeaked out a win, and overall Democrats got over 8,000 more votes. Joan Buchanan did well in AD-15 and has a decent base of support - this will be a close race against Abram Wilson. I like what Alyson Huber did in AD-10, getting more votes than anyone on the ballot, Republican or Democratic. In AD-26, John Eisenhut, a farmer, got almost as many votes in his unopposed primary as Republican Bill Berryhill did in his. Ferial Masry is a longshot in AD-37, but the Democratic vote was within 5,000 of Republican Audra Strickland's total. Those are the 6 races that get us to 2/3.

In the State Senate, we'll see what becomes of the Morris write-in. But the good news was in SD-19, where Hannah-Beth Jackson got 47,000-plus votes to Tony Strickland's 50,000-plus. That's relative parity, and a good place to be. Because of the coattails Barack Obama will bring, I don't mind some deficit between Democratic and Republican numbers in the primary, because there will be lots and lots of new voters coming out to support the nominee in the fall who will pull the lever for downticket candidates.

That's what I've got for now, I'm sure we'll all be poring over the numbers in the days to come.

Forgot To Plug Calitics

I'm kind of minding the store at Calitics on primary election night, so come on over!

Oh yeah, Obama made a good speech. Water, also, is wet.

The California Report

Here are a few tidbits on this GOTV weekend!

• Obviously everyone is going to be working hard for their causes and candidates, so it may be a little quiet around here. I'll be out walking all day tomorrow. Oh, and don't vote for the racist guy, Bill Johnson, as a Judge of the Superior Court (Office number 125) in LA County.

• Yesterday was the deadline for bills to get passed out of their chamber of origin, and the Assembly passed major subprime mortgage legislation, without help from Republicans (6 of them abstained despite being seated right in the chamber). This bill has some good homeowner assistance elements that will allow people to restructure their financing before foreclosure. A mortgage bill has also passed the State Senate, so some form of legislation will hopefully get to the governor post haste.

• One of the biggest problems with the housing crisis is that, as home sale prices lower, homeowners are reassessing their value and getting their property tax lowered, decreasing state revenue yet more.

• Sticking in the shiv before riding off into the sunset, Fabian Nuñez writes a puzzling op-ed in the Sacramento Bee approving of the Governor's horrible idea to borrow against future lottery revenue. Considering that the only sustainable solution to the permanent crisis mode that we have in our budget is to reorganize the tax structure instead of constantly borrowing, I have no idea why any Democrat would veer so far off message and undermine the new Speaker's ability to move forward. What's more, lotteries are regressive taxes on the poor.

• One spot where there will be a lot of action on Tuesday is in Ventura County, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans and which could have contested elections in the Assembly, Senate and US Congress. However, the LA Times shows its political acumen by writing:

One of the more closely watched contests on Tuesday will be the Democratic primary in the 24th Congressional District. Insurance agent Mary Pallant of Oak Park; Marta Jorgensen, a Solvang educator; and Oxnard businesswoman Jill Martinez are running.

Marta Jorgensen quit the race over a month ago and endorsed Martinez. Way to go, LAT.

• Excellent news out of Los Angeles: there's been a $1 million dollar settlement with Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for their dumping homeless patients on Skid Row. They will also be monitored by a US Attorney for five years. This unethical practice has reached a reasonable conclusion. Hollywood Presbyterian deserved punishment.

• Trying to get rid of marijuana grow houses in Arcata is like trying to get rid of the Pacific Ocean on the California coast.

Enjoy!

The Coming DTS Meltdown in LA County

So I went to my polling place at an off-hour to see if turnout was decent (it was pretty average, in my view). It was a new location for me, in a little art gallery featuring an exhibit called "Patriot Acts" (yes, a politically themed art installation in a polling place. Ah, the People's Republic of Santa Monica). I had no problem getting my ballot and heading to the booth. The guy behind me was a DTS voter who had no idea that Republicans didn't allow them to vote in the primary. "I wouldn't vote for the Republicans anyway," he yelled as he took a Democratic ballot. But nobody told him to make sure to fill out that Democratic oval to re-assert that he, as a nonpartisan voter, requested a Democratic ballot (as if taking the ballot in the first place wasn't enough of a clue). So I told him.

My neighbor was headed to the polls; she's also a DTS voter. I told her to make sure to fill out that Democratic oval. She said she kind of heard something about that but wasn't sure.

I've received more than a couple emails from DTS voters thanking me for telling them about the issue, or saying that they didn't fill out the bubble, asking me whether or not their votes will be counted.

This is a NIGHTMARE. An absolute nightmare. This has been in place since 2002, and somehow the evidence from 2004, when so few DTS voters participated in the Democratic primary in LA County, wasn't enough to dummy-proof the system. Thousands upon thousands of voters are going to be disenfranchised today. I can't reach them all; neither can the CDP. The Secretary of State must demand that all those DTS ballots are impounded, the machines recalibrated to eliminate this problem, and all votes reread through the feeder. In a race so close, we cannot have this crisis of confidence.

UPDATE: I'm on a conference call with the Obama campaign right now and they're talking about this very issue. "There is great concern" in Los Angeles County, and "the pollworkers are confused" about this as well, according to the lawyer on the phone now (I would use the word "ignorant" and not confused). "We're hoping the Secretary of State and the County Registrar will rectify this situation" but they don't sound particularly hopeful.

DTS voters are also being denied ballots in selected counties, according to the campaign.

Carla Marinucci is wondering why this wasn't challenged previously. This has been in place in LA County in multiple election cycles, and knowing that DTS voters would show up in record numbers, I agree that it should have been caught earlier. My point is that the Secretary of State's office or the county registrar should have been the ones to catch it. The lawyer just said "We hope that they will adopt procedures to make sure these ballots are counted," and if they aren't adopted, he raised the option of legal challenges.

These ballots almost certainly won't be counted tonight, and keep that in mind when you start seeing the results roll in.

They're hoping that the media gets this out. I'm trying.