Better Democrats Busted Through $50K

by: Matt Stoller

Sun Oct 26, 2008 at 19:40

• Markos and Crisitunity blog the new Dailykos/Research 2000 poll (these polls are such an awesome concept), which shows the race all tied up at 46-46.  It's a random digit dial, which makes this kind of poll more favorable to Reichert since cell phone only and VOIP users aren't sampled.  The stats seem to bear that out; Obama's ahead by only 6 points in the poll, and most people think he's up more than that in WA-08.  Trendwise, it's very good news that Darcy's gone up by 8 points since the last Kos poll, when she was behind 49-41.  Reichert's dropped 3 points and Darcy's gone up 5.

• The Mormons are pulling the plug on Prop 8 calls from Utah.

• Progressive Democrat Senate candidate Jim Martin is about two points off of Chambliss in a composite of polls, which is far closer than anyone could have imagined a month ago.  Al Franken is up by three, Begich leads by two, and Merkley's up by six.

• We managed to convince Debbie Wasserman Schultz to back Annette Taddeo, which is not a small feat.  Taddeo is in a tight race with Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the district that encompasses South Beach.  South Beach.  That's the setting of the Bird Cage movie.

• Massa's opponent is on the 'death list' of Republicans, Dennis Schulman and Tom Perriello are closing, and Grayson is up over 10 on his opponent.

When Blue Majority split up earlier this year, it took us some time to figure out the right way to add to the Democratic wave.  In retrospect, the Better Democrats concept should have been obvious - with our work on Donna Edwards and Ed Fallon, it was pretty clear the direction this community was headed.  I'm really proud of what all of us have been able to do with Better Democrats.  In the waning days of a campaign, money becomes less important, because the electorate is basically settled.  In this case, though, there are so many seats on the bubble, including many of our best Better Democrats (Merkley, Darcy, Perriello, Martin, etc), that a little more cash to bring them up to the level of Obama actually matters.  So to those of you who have given till it hurts, thank you.  And for those of you who haven't, what are you waiting for?

Better Democrats