Senate 2008 Guru: Following the Races

Keeping a close eye on developments in the 2008 U.S. Senate races

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Late Night News

An overnight round-up for you:

  • Minnesota: The Star-Tribune calls Smilin' Norm Coleman on his leftward dive for his re-election cycle:

    Because he is up for reelection in 2008 and expected to face a difficult campaign, the ranking raises the question of whether Coleman is moving toward the political center as the election year approaches.

    The ideological rankings by the National Journal suggest the answer is yes. The leftward shift of Coleman's voting record from 2003 to 2006 exceeds that of all but two other senators.
    An obvious and now quantitatively-documented dive to the left to pander to moderate voters for his re-election bid.

  • New Hampshire: Dean at Blue Hampshire highlights a second state senator, Peter Burling, re-joining David Gottesman in the state-legislators-considering-a-Senate-bid list in the media. Dean, one of my most valued and reliable sources of NH-Sen info, also throws a compliment the Guru's way.

  • New Mexico: Do members of Pajamas Pete Domenici's staff need to be subpoenaed? TPM comes through with more coverage, including this tidbit from a Domenici statement [emphasis added by me]:

    While I recall, as I stated previously, that I asked Mr. Iglesias about timing of the investigation, neither I nor those who overheard my side of the brief conversation recall my mentioning the November election to him
    So who was it that Domenici was referring to as "those who overheard [his] side of the conversation"?? Josh Marshall at TPM mentions that Domenici's Chief of Staff placed the call. Was anyone else there? What do they recall? Perhaps they need to be subpoenaed so that they would share their testimony.

  • North Carolina: This is a couple weeks old, so let me rectify its lack of mention here. Blue South at BlueNC asks and analyzes the question: Where does Elizabeth Dole live? Blue South notes that while North Carolina is one of quite a few residences, official documents go to her apartment home in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC and that her North Carolina "residence" is just her mother's house.

  • 7 Comments:

    Blogger VA Blogger said...

    You should know better than to cherry-pick your stories. From the same exact article that you linked to re: Coleman:

    The statistical ratings may shift from year to year, depending on which votes are scored. And different organizations rate the senators in different ways.

    That's quite a caveat to your contention. For the sake of argument, let's look at how Coleman did in 2005-2006:

    http://public.cq.com/public/senate_unity_state.html

    77,one of the lowest rankings for voting with his party. Since the 109th Congress started in 2005, I would hardly call that an "election year conversion".

    3:17 PM, March 07, 2007  
    Blogger Will Cubbison said...

    The story continues on Dole...

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/7/153932/6045

    3:52 PM, March 07, 2007  
    Blogger Senate2008Guru said...

    va blogger - you might want to be careful how you cherry pick your statistics. In that same time frame, Coleman's Presidential support score (perhaps the most important stat of all, given that Bush's approvals are in the gutter) was a robust 88% - putting him even with such left-wing liberals as Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Pat Roberts of Kansas.

    4:31 PM, March 07, 2007  
    Blogger VA Blogger said...

    The President has never been with the base of the party; that much is obvious when fewer than 20% of polled Republicans identify Bush as a "Reagan Republican", and only 3% at CPAC said that they would support a candidate in the mold of GWB. Coleman's 88% score with Bush doesn't mean that he wasn't moderate, which was your original claim.

    5:10 PM, March 07, 2007  
    Blogger Senate2008Guru said...

    va blogger - The President, the leader of his Party, has "never been with the base of the party"? I'll plead ignorance on this one, having spent no time in the Republican cloakroom, but I would think that a Republican President would find himself somewhere in the mix of the "base" of his political party.

    And my "original claim" wasn't that Coleman was or wasn't a moderate -- do you ever get tired of mischaracterizing what I write? My "original claim" is that Coleman dives to the left in an election year to gain the support of moderates. And what did the Star-Tribune say in its article?

    QUOTE
    Because he is up for reelection in 2008 and expected to face a difficult campaign, the ranking raises the question of whether Coleman is moving toward the political center as the election year approaches.

    The ideological rankings by the National Journal suggest the answer is yes. The leftward shift of Coleman's voting record from 2003 to 2006 exceeds that of all but two other senators.
    UNQUOTE

    That's my claim, va blogger.

    12:44 AM, March 08, 2007  
    Blogger VA Blogger said...

    According to the National Journal, yes. But as the article you posted yourself notes, there are different organizations with as high credibility as the NJ who rank Senators differently, and the results from CQ paint a much different picture.

    8:40 AM, March 08, 2007  
    Blogger Senate2008Guru said...

    va blogger - so instead of just ranting and raving, go out and find some of these other rankings that paint "a much different picture" as you say, and post a link.

    Actually substantiate what you're claiming!

    Wow.

    11:53 AM, March 08, 2007  

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