Alaska. This soap opera of a race will likely hang in the balance until November 2. Too bad it has to end then, though, because the campaign ads just keep getting funnier -- and dirtier -- up in The Last Frontier.
The back story: In 2001, Republican Senator Frank Murkowski ended a 20-year Senate career midterm to run for governor. He succeeded popular Democrat Tony Knowles, who was prevented from running by term limits. Murkowski won that race, and in a rare bit of imperialist nepotism, he appointed two-term state Representative -- and daughter -- Lisa Murkowski as his successor. (Knowles vetoed the new law that made this appointment possible; as governor on election day, he should have made the appointment, not Murkowski. But no dice.) Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski is waging a fierce battle to keep her seat. Her opponent? Wait for it …
… Tony Knowles.
A KTUU-TV poll taken August 24 showed Knowles barely ahead of Murkowski. But that was in the direct aftermath of the late Republican primary, where Murkowski took a beating for her moderate position on abortion and her willingness to support tax increases. With no new polls, it's difficult to gauge the added effect of Knowles' ad attack on Murkowski, and vice versa.
Because Murkowski and Knowles share many of the same positions (most notably their support of development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), Democrats have ably used their ads to exploit her most glaring weakness: nepotism. Her appointment to the Senate was without precedent; indeed, it was the first time a governor had ever appointed his child to fill a vacancy. Knowles' ads don't miss a chance to gag Murkowski on her silver spoon: His most successful one to date uses an audio clip of Murkowski before a press conference at an Exxon gas station, where she made the statement, “We've got that little issue, remember?” in reference to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The Knowles ad replays Murkowski saying the phrase six different times, between an announcer saying things like, “Remember, Lisa Murkowski wants you to judge her by how she does her job, not by how she got her job.” Murkowski then says (again), “We've got that little issue, remember?”
Yes, they remember.
Colorado. While it's possible that Democrat Ken Salazar was really beating Republican Pete Coors by 11 percentage points on September 20 (as reported by a Rocky Mountain News poll) only to fall behind by 5 points in a Survey USA poll taken just three days later, no one thinks it's very likely. In that light, Salazar's conclusion, as reported by The Denver Post, that he needs to distance himself from the putatively unpopular John Kerry is a bit hard to understand. The presidential election in Colorado, like the Senate race, has fluctuated wildly, and Kerry, like Salazar, is either winning or losing depending on which pollster you trust. These facts notwithstanding, Coors is running ads attacking Salazar for having tax policies that are similar to Kerry's, while during a debate in Grand Junction, Salazar disavowed Kerry's vote against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq last year.
If Salazar does manage a win, it will likely be due to strong support from Colorado's sizable and growing Latino community. New polling released by the New Democrat Network indicates that Democrats enjoy an overwhelmingly favorable image (71 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable, up from 66 percent to 27 percent in June) among Hispanics while Republicans are viewed negatively (29 percent to 60 percent, down from 33 percent to 50 percent in June). Salazar himself is even more popular than the party, enjoying a massive 79 percent to 15 percent advantage over Coors.
Florida. Three recent polls from the Sunshine State, taken between September 12 and 22 (or, in Floridian parlance, between Ivan and Jeanne), give Democratic Senate candidate Betty Castor a slight lead. Quinnipiac, Gallup, and Survey USA polls all give the former University of South Florida president a bit of an edge over her challenger, Mel Martinez, President Bush's former Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary. These polls, however, are quite suspect given the power outages and phone-line disruptions that have plagued Florida since the onslaught of the hurricanes.
Quantitative assessments aside, petty intraparty rancor stemming from a nasty Republican primary is threatening to disunite Florida's GOP. In the days leading up to the August 31 primary, Martinez accused his rival, Bill McCollum, of pandering to the “radical homosexual lobby” in a campaign mailing. Both candidates had vociferously opposed gay marriage throughout the primary, so what was McCollum's offense? He once voted in favor of hate-crimes legislation, which included crimes directed against homosexuals. McCollum has now refused to endorse Martinez until he issues an apology.
North Carolina. Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and Winston-Salem Congressman Richard Burr squared off in their only debate on Monday. Both candidates went on the offensive on issues like health care, gay marriage, and, most forcefully, trade. Given the debate's canned format and the absence of any embarrassing gaffes, it's unlikely that it changed the dynamic of the race much. And that's good news for the nerdy Dem from Charlotte with those gigantic glasses.
Indeed, Erskine Bowles has defied near-universal expectations by maintaining a substantial and consistent lead over Burr all the way through the early fall. Observers had all but guaranteed that the race would tighten rapidly by this point, but the last Raleigh News & Observer poll, taken by the firm Research 2000 between September 20 and 22, gives Bowles the same 9-point lead (49 percent to 40 percent) that he's enjoyed for months now. One source told The Hill that a recent internal GOP poll gave Bowles an advantage of 18 points.
So what gives? Most Carolina politicos chalk it up to a much better organized and focused campaign operation on Bowles' side, with a candidate at the helm who learned valuable lessons in his unsuccessful 2002 race against Liddy Dole about grass-roots campaigning and tailoring a populist appeal to voters. Meanwhile, Republicans have been grumbling for months now about Burr's anemic and unfocused effort. They're beginning to air their worries in public, with fellow North Carolina Representative Walter Jones telling The Hill on Tuesday, “I think in the next 10 days he's really got to move some numbers.”
That may very well happen. Burr only recently unveiled his first attack ads (as part of a planned GOP blitzkrieg for the last six weeks of the campaign, according to The Hill). It looks like the theme he's settled on is “all Clinton, all the time,” tying Bowles explicitly to the his old boss' tax increases and anti-tobacco zealotry and implicitly to every other aspect of Bill Clinton's tenure that North Carolinians believe to be bad. Burr has $6.7 million ready to unload on TV ads, while the National Republican Senatorial Committee has already reserved $5.3 million in North Carolina ad space to run its own anti-Bowles effort. Meanwhile, the committee just released its own poll this week claiming that the Clinton tarring is already working, with Bowles' lead reduced to a single, statistically meaningless point (45 percent to 44 percent). That figure should obviously be taken with a major grain of salt, but it shouldn't be ignored.
Bowles has plenty of money himself, as well as the help of an independent ad campaign being run by the political arm of the League of Conservation Voters, but the fact that he's had no luck breaking the 50-percent threshold in any poll is cause enough not to get complacent. And, lest we forget, this is North Carolina. As the go-to political expert on Tar Heel politics, Ferrel Guillory of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, puts it, “No Republican Senate candidate here has gotten less than 45 percent in practically 20 years … . You've got to say that simply because he's the Republican candidate and he looks OK, Burr's going to get 45 points.”
It's true: Burr does indeed look OK.
South Dakota. Ever since Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist stumped through South Dakota in May to support Representative John Thune's insurgent campaign against Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, it's been clear that this will be an acrimonious race. The candidates defined their strategies early, and they've largely stuck to them: Daschle has sought to draw attention to any pork he's sent South Dakota's way, while arguing that Thune has held back the Coyote State's interests in the House; Thune, on the other hand, is portraying Daschle as a co-opted Washington Democrat. The rivals' September 19 debate onMeet the Press upped the rhetoric, as the two challenged each other's commitment to South Dakota and spat out the single phrase “not true” 13 times in less than an hour. The following week, Thune released seven different 60-second radio spots, each featuring a South Dakotan criticizing Daschle for his stance on a different issue, everything from taxes to guns to “his Dakota values.”
The result, predictably, has been an increase in both candidates' unfavorability ratings -- but Thune, the less well-known politician, may be suffering more. While Daschle's unfavorability number has crept up from 33 percent in May to 37 percent last week, according to the polling firm Mason-Dixon, Thune's has shot up from 23 percent to 34 percent over the same period. Although an upcoming flag-amendment vote in the Senate could give Thune fodder for three or four more negative ads, it's hard to see his slash-and-burn campaign unseating Daschle, whose case rests on specific benefits he's delivered to South Dakota -- a strategy that helped junior Senator Tim Johnson fend off a similar challenge from Thune in 2002.
Compiled by the Prospect staff. Click here to read the previous edition of “Purple People Watch.”
