And at the ballgame in today’s October @ the White House Slideshow …
In its endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens today, the Watertown Daily Times said that over the course of yesterday Dede Scozzafava, the regular GOP nominee who bowed out yesterday, “began to quietly and thoughtfully encourage her supporters to vote for Democrat William L. Owens.”
The Times itself didn’t leave much room for doubt about its views. The strongest line: “It is frightening that Mr. Hoffman is so beholden to right-wing ideologues who dismiss Northern New Yorkers as parochial when people here simply want to know how Mr. Hoffman will protect their interests in Washington.”
This is a reference to an incident we noted a few weeks ago when Hoffman showed up to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and then got defensive and abrupt when he wasn’t able to answer questions about the district or the issues that faced it. Armey stepped in and chastised the editors for focusing on “parochial” issues.
Late Update: As you can see in our feature story, this afternoon Scozzafava removed all doubt and formally endorsed Owens.
That was a year ago?
One year on from election day, Team Obama takes several trips down memory lane remembering the big night — including a special red carpet screening of the new HBO Obama documentary in Chicago on Friday night.
Christina Bellantoni reports.
Now that Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of the special election in NY-23, the odds look pretty good for Doug Hoffman, even though Scozzafava’s Sunday endorsement of Owens adds a new wrinkle of uncertainty. And in any case it was always going to be the New Jersey governor’s race that I would be watching most closely. But I don’t think there’s any question that the New York special election is turning out to be the significant contest this cycle. And that will be the case regardless of who actually wins the race. After all, for Republican hardliners, the goal of this whole exercise was taking out Scozzafava. If Hoffman actually wins the race, that’s just icing on the cake.
Every non-hard-right congressional Republican will have this episode in mind going forward the next year — it will shape votes, positions on key issues. And what happened in this race will be the backdrop for every primary contest between a mainline and hard-right Republican this cycle — think particularly of the Crist/Rubio contest in Florida, which hard-right Republicans are already pointing to as the logical place to repeat the Scozzafava/Hoffman pattern.
This is the electoral equivalent of those brief moments earlier this year when prominent Republicans issued tepid criticisms of Rush Limbaugh only to be forced into craven apologies hours or days later. The hard-right of the GOP just got a much stronger lock on the institutional Republican party than it had before. And, let’s face it: the lock was pretty strong to start with.
President Obama is in New Jersey tonight for one final campaign appearance with Gov. Jon Corzine (see Obama’s speech here). But the polls continue to shed little light on just who’s in the driver’s seat going into Tuesday night. Of the last four released, all on Friday, each candidate leads in two.
Christie’s collapse over the last month and the relentlessly bad series of news cycles he’s had had gotten me used to thinking that Corzine was going to win this one. But the truth is these polls just give no reason to think this isn’t a coin toss. And for all the bad news, Christie’s still standing. And really no worse than tied. I’m slightly less confident of Corzine’s ability to pull this one out than I was a few days ago, though I really can’t point to any concrete reason or number to support that slight shift in impression.
It seems to me that you’ve got two contending factors — either of which could be the key to understanding the results of Tuesday night. Read More
TPM Reader DC checks in from New Jersey …
My view from Jersey City:
You correctly note that NJ polls tend to underestimate Democratic turnout in the cites in statewide races–Newark, the Oranges, Hudson County–because they don’t account for the party’s stong GOTV operation.
You fail to account for the opposite.
Public Policy Polling now has a late poll out on the NY-23 special election and it shows Hoffman pretty much crushing Owens. The poll was taken over the weekend. And obviously a lot happened over these couple days. But according to PPP’s Tom Jensen, the results changed very little from before Scozzafava’s suspension till after it and continued pretty much the same after she endorsed Owens today.
PPP came up with Hoffman 51%, Owens 34%, Scozzafava 13% in a three way race and Hoffman over Owens 54% to 38% in a two person race. Read More
As noted below, Public Policy Polling is showing a much bigger advantage for Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 special election than two other key pollsters tracking the race. And the difference seems tied to PPP’s assumptions of a much more Republican electorate than the other outfits are expecting.
Those assumptions seem to apply as well to the NJ-Gov race. PPP is out tonight with a final survey of this race. And they show Christie 47%, Corzine 41%, a substantial margin compared to pretty much every other pollster who has looked at this race over the last couple weeks.
There’s little doubt there will be a number of final polls of this race out tomorrow. So we’ll have a better sense of whether PPP is an outlier (and remember, outliers can be right) or whether there’s a broader trend of momentum back in Christie’s favor.
A seven-point swing in Chris Christie’s favor over the last week in the latest Quinnipiac poll: Christie 42%, Corzine 40%.
The final Siena poll shows Conservative Doug Hoffman only 5 points ahead of Democrat Bill Owens.