Call It A Comeback
Rich has a poll of Cook County voters over at the Capitol Fax Blog
Biggest news–Stroger is in big trouble–Claypool up three on him. That’s huge.
Notably, Blagojevich’s numbers are only at 53% in a match up with Eisendrath at 13%. That’s not good in a heavily Democratic County where Blagojevich should have huge numbers. More later on both bits.
Jeeshh….
Roskam comes in with $1,066,000 for the cycle and $834,000 on hand.
For the quarter $386,000 raised
From the press release
Roskam FEC Report Highlights
·
Total Individual Donors – 2,402
·
Individual Donors who contributed less than $200
– 1,493
·
Online Contributions – $130,000
·
No personal loans/contributions from the
candidate
Rich points to the Hotline’s post on rising stars in Illinois. The thing I picked up on was the Judy Baar Topinka entry
State Treas. Judy Baar Topinka (R): Running for Gov, leading in
the polls at the moment. Conservatives don’t like her, but “Judy is an
establishment” GOPer in IL, “and establishment” GOPers “win.”
This isn’t necessarily true anymore. Certainly Jim Ryan his primary, but looking back at statewide elections since 1996, we don’t see the establishment dominating contested primaries. Salvi beat Kustra in 1996. Fitzgerald beat Didrickson in 1998. Jack Ryan won in 2004, though one can argue whether he was the establishment candidate or not. The establishment isn’t what it used to be.
That doesn’t mean Judy won’t or can’t win, but increasingly, Republican primaries are moving the party farther to the right and the organization from social conservatives and movement conservatives gives them a significant advantage in any race. Oberweis is polarizing enough that he might not be capable of putting together a win against Judy, but it’s not unreasonable to see it as a possibility. That said the best analysis I’ve seen yet is Russ Stewart’s in which he predicts wins for Judy and Birkett
This race is becoming increasingly hot so there will be a lot of these through the primary.
Stuart Rothenberg ranks the race a top race for control of Congress in Roll Call
llinois’ 6th. Democrats have a shot at the seat of retiring Rep. Henry Hyde (R), but they must endure a primary and overcome a district in which Bush drew 53 percent in each of his presidential races. Unsuccessful ’04 nominee Christine Cegelis starts as the Democratic frontrunner, but many party insiders and the state AFL-CIO are backing Illinois Army National Guard Maj. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran. The GOP nominee will be state Sen. Peter Roskam, a politically savvy and personable former Capitol Hill aide. Roskam starts out as the favorite, but it could be competitive.
Duckworth gets frontpaged in USA Today. While news junkies scoff at USA Today, marginal voters read it. It’s a huge free media opportunity.
Sweet’s article on the 13th about Duckworth’s “Meet and Greet” at a law firm.
IFT backs Duckworth giving her AFL-CIO, SEIU, and AFSCME. If IEA endorses, that’ll give Duckworth essentially all of the union support both monetarily and for volunteers.
And while I had reservations, XM Fred playing Guadacanal Diary ended those reservations quite quickly.
If I lived in Chicago I wouldn’t have felt the need so much with WXRT being available and WXRT being on the internet probably stopped me from getting XM sooner. Even with the weird Pretenders obsession of certain XRT Deejays.
The commercial Eric points out actually made me feel better about my purchase–it reminded me that being a kid in central Illinois meant my primary contact with the music world was WXRT through my cable system in the late 1980s and that would have been worth paying for over the crap available locally. At the time I had public radio that primarily played classical and some jazz, a top 35 station in Bloomington-Normal and a 105.7 classic rock out of Peoria. During the school year, 88.1 WESN at Illinois Wesleyan (which I also appeared on in 1988-89) was fun, but erratic. XRT was it in terms of shaping my musical tastes.
While I love the local community radio station KDHX in St. Louis (and I appear on it every few weeks on Collateral Damage), the station has odd choices of music when I most want to listen, and there are about two local talk show hosts I can listen to.
I was terribly excited by XRT’s on-line streaming and still am, but even I’m only at my computer a portion of the day.
Do you think it’s appropriate for Tim McVeigh to bomb a federal building? Hey, what do you think?
Do you think it’s appropriate that the Irish guys in my neighborhood get falling down drunk?
Do you think Gerry Adams has said something stupid in his life and you should have to comment upon that?
Do you think Matt Hale’s calling Judge Lefkow a Jewish Conspirator was appropriate?
Rick Pearson wrote a weekend column on G-Rod’s strategy for reelection and it’s running against the Georges: Ryan and Bush.
It’s a good strategy. Sure, it might annoy you, but it’s an effective strategy.
In a state that has turned increasingly Democratic, Blagojevich signaled that he planned to take political advantage of the highly visceral reactions Illinoisans have to both men, who conveniently are less popular with voters in the state than he is
Emphasis mine.
Research 2000 polled Illinois voters for the Post-Dispatch and other Lee papers like the Pantagraph with the Governor doing better than he has with the Survey USA polls and with a slightly less Democratic weighted sample.
Rich doesn’t think it’s as bad as the story makes it out to be, and I’d tend to agree. In fact, it may be a sign of a increasing poll numbers. It’s always hard to compare polls this far out when who will vote is squishy, but his disapproval numbers are under 50% in this poll and below his approval numbers–that’s a good sign from the other numbers we’ve seen lately. He’s vulnerable regardless, but if this poll is reasonably accurate, he’s in a better position than I thought. That isn’t to say he’s home free, but it’s not the worst place to begin from when you are a good campaigner. In the breakdowns, the independent numbers are better than the SurveyUSA results have been as well which really are a key for him to capture.
Perhaps most importantly, his downstate numbers aren’t anything to brag about, but they aren’t as far in the toilet as many would expect.
Sample 800 Voters
The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus3.5 percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the ?true? figure would fall within that range if the entire population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any subgroup, such as for
gender or party affiliation.
Jeff Berkowitz has Cegelis and Scott on Public Affairs Cinema
Via Rich
Roskam raised $380,000. That’ll be a fun report to go through.
Hiram says Lindy Scott is about to pull in $103,000 which is a good quarter with 20% spent at $80,000 on hand–good numbers assuming they are accurate along with interesting news about Lindy’s ground operation. At a minimum he beats expectations and will be taken seriously–the ground operation might be the thing to keep your eye on.
Duckworth makes Newsweek and gets the AFL-CIO endorsement.
My sense is Unite to Win might be more important in the District, but those on the ground can correct me. Either way it is a big endorsement.
Christine gets the Progressive Democrats of America Endorsement and a nice personal endorsement from Marci Kaptur of Ohio.
John Laesch running in IL-14 just got an endorsement as well.
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