One other point worth making on the Kentucky Senate race. Kentucky remains very red, but the recent polling on a hypothetical match-up between Paul and Conway surprisingly shows Conway very much in this race. The current TPM Poll Average gives Paul a 44.7 to 38.4 lead, but the two most recent polls, taken this month, give Paul only a 1-point lead and 3-point lead:
Hypothetical match-ups are tricky to poll. Or I should say that there’s a higher degree of volatility when you’re asking voters to hypothesize. So it’ll be very interesting to see the new polling done after last night’s results now that it’s no longer a hypothetical match-up.
Way back during the Lewinsky debacle in 1998, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman got Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) on the phone for an interview and asked if he’d ever had an extramarital affair — at which point the line went dead because he apparently just hung up rather than answer the question.
So maybe we’ve all just had our head in the sand all this time about what old Souder was up to. Speaking of which, here’s the congressman in better days, emerging from Saddam Hussein’s spider hole during a tour of Iraq:
We’ll have more on this as the day goes on, but all this talk of anti-incumbency and “throw the bums out” really oversimplifies what’s going on out there. It’s an easy instant analysis, especially for the time-strapped broadcast media. But particularly as it concerns last night’s results, it’s such an overbroad analysis that it’s not just meaningless, it’s actually misleading.
In almost every respect the big losers last night were national Republicans. Even in cases where the ostensible Democrat lost or suffered a setback — Specter in Pennsylvania and Lincoln in Arkansas — the Democrats emerged with a stronger or potentially stronger candidate.
More on this later, but Democrats come out of last night in about as good a shape as they could possibly have hoped for. And Republicans have to be wondering if they are up to surfing the expected 2010 wave.
So is Rand Paul, on a personal level, just a deeply unlikeable guy? One of the weird things about his acceptance speech last night was that he held it at the local country club — to what looked uncannily like a members only crowd. This morning he defended the venue by saying that Tiger Woods has made golf a lot more popular. More to the point, news came out overnight that Paul allegedly refused to take Trey Grayson’s concession phone call last night. Read More
Conservative women’s group leader: “If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone. The frat house environment on Capitol Hill does nothing to encourage accountability.”
Ex-Knight Alan Stanford calls in Alan Dershowitz to fill out boffo defense team. They’re going for the argument that being held in prison is making it impossible for Stanford to prepare his own defense.
The losing candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Kentucky, Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, is seeking a recanvass of the election results, even though he conceded defeat last night. He trails Attorney General Jack Conway by 3,542 votes, or less than 1 percent of the votes cast. But we’ve talked to state officials in Kentucky and it looks like Mongiardo has a steep hill to climb here to make up the difference.
I’ve been watching to see the reaction of Richard Blumenthal’s two leading Republican opponents to his Vietnam/fibbing scandal. My general rule of thumb in these situations is that you can infer the opponents’ reads from their initial response. If they think the person being hit by the scandal is crippled or going to go down the drain on their own, they’ll generally hold back. If they think it’s damaging but not crippling, they’ll hit hard. (For a classic illustration of this, look at the day one and week one GOP reactions to the Lewinsky scandal.) And Rob Simmons is coming down clearly in the latter category, unleashing a harsh “Blumenthal Lied About Vietnam” ad now running and trying to raise money around the interwebs.
Cancer, mental illness, car crashes, bedding down your married congressional staffer in some clearing in the forest. Fate is so precarious. And so many things that can befall us.
“If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone,” says Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Nance.