Chillinois passes along Sunday’s story that Vallas isn’t leaving Philly. Normally, I’d ignore that as a sort of denial, but keeping options open, but the DJWinfo has more.
On the Republicans I think it is interesting that we have two of the fab 5 Conservative Senators seemingly being mentioned for the run with Patrick O’Malley pretty much announced and Steve Rauschenberger also having noises made. The question is if they’d run against each other and that seems unlikely that Rauschenberger might challenge him unless he has some sort of significant conservative support. And of course, some still insist that Peter Fitzgerald might run.
If Rauschenberger run and O’Malley is in, then we probably see Judy in as well as potentially Bob Schillerstrom bring a four way primary that has all sorts of cross-cutting cleavages and The Blagorgeous looking like he’ll get a free ride in the primary.
I’ve been meaning to get into this in-depth, probably in the next few days, but the interesting question about the Republican primary is going to be whether more people hold Topinka responsible for the Jack Ryan mess and the six weeks with no candidate or the Rauschenberger/Syverson/conservative wing for bringing upon them the Alan Keyes disaster.