The New York Times starts to peel back the curtain on which major companies are the big donors to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its $75 million election year campaign effort.
Just to remind you. The 10th anniversary of TPM is coming up on November 13th. Ten years.
Juan Williams bags new $2 million contract with Fox News.
I’m usually a skeptic of poll skeptics. But I think Alan Abramowitz has a pretty good question in his analysis of the Gallup poll’s new congressional generic vote screen …
But that’s not the most implausible result in the latest Gallup likely voter survey. Among nonwhites other than blacks, a group that comprises about 13% of likely voters, a generic Republican is leading a generic Democrat by 10 points, 52% to 42%. That’s a group that voted Democratic by a 2-1 margin in the 2006 midterm election. Moreover, it’s a group that has never given a majority of its vote to Republican candidates for Congress in any election since the advent of exit polling. According to the 2006 exit poll results, about two-thirds of these “other nonwhite” voters are Latinos. How plausible is it that at a time when the Republican Party is closely associated with stridently anti-immigrant policies that Latino voters are moving in droves toward Republican candidates? Not plausible at all, especially when Gallup’s results are directly contradicted by other recent polls of Latino voters.
Christina O’Donnell keeps talking about serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if she is elected — as if a slot on the primo committee was hers for the asking. As Brian Beutler explains, it’s not nearly that simple.
Christine O’Donnell scrubs the endorsement of Pam Geller, premier Islamophobe, from her website.
The news is coming fast and furious now with a lot of fast-breaking nuggets of news. So don’t miss our auto-updating TPM Midterms Wire. You can visit the main page here or see the latest updates down beneath our feature story on the right.
Mexico disposes of what it says is the largest pot bust in its history:
There are a number of races that look like they’re becoming newly competitive, mainly but not solely ones where Dems had seemed like they were out of it. But the one that seems most clearly to be the real thing is the PA Senate race with Sestak against Toomey.
You can see the movement on the trend chart above. But we’re getting close enough to election day that you really need to look at the most recent numbers. We’ve now got three polls in the last week. One from Quinnipiac, one from PPP and two days of a tracking poll from Muhlenberg. You can see the specific numbers here. And they all show basically a dead even race.
In response to the Christine O’Donnell hair question, raised earlier (in jest), comes this striking analysis of her image strategy, from TPM Reader HF:
Here’s what I think.
The bangs in the ad released October 4 look pretty freshly cut, probably to give her a plainer, more girlish look and possibly specifically for making this ad. Her hair is parted just off-center and straight back to the crown. (Usually she parts it farther off to the right with a zig zag and does a bit of a 60’s, Jackie Kennedy type bang.) The hair on the right is probably longer, which is why much of it is tucked back behind her ear for the ad. Most of her hair is probably pulled back out of the way, as the goal here is to make her hair look as thin, straight and unattractive as possible. It looks like her hair has been flattened with a straightening iron and an oily product to make it very smooth and straight. It falls from a bit of a natural cowlick, so it looks like it was combed and air-dried rather than blown out. All in search of the “I just got out of English class and what’s all this about witchcraft?” look.