Based on all the polling, voter registration, and absentee/early voting data I am seeing, and on conversations with key operatives in the field and other analysts following Senate races, I believe Kentucky and Georgia should be moving up on everyone's radar screens.
I'm impressed with Scott Kleeb. This Nebraskan Senate candidate takes progressive stances, isn't afraid of offering intelligent answers and is giving a real run in a red state. He also likes to drink liberally.
Scott joined us in New York last night, and demonstrated pitch perfect how a politician can connect with a Drinking Liberally crowd...which also says something about how to connect with people in general.
He didn't give a long speech. He didn't ask everyone to stop what they were doing to listen to him. Instead, after a brief introduction, he hung out for 2 hours having real conversations.
Lincoln, NE, is AWESOME. The best moment was at the state fair watching a beauty contest where one of the speakers talked about her platform as 'eating right and being healthy' right next to booths like the one above.
This is what labor day looks like for lots of people here.
I've been asking around about why Nebraska is Republican. The most common response is 'tradition', and while there is a strong religious element, this is not a state where Huckabee was strong or Ron Paul had resonance. Nebraska has remarkable wind resources, and unlike Oklahoma, very little oil, so it's a net energy consumer. With high energy costs, this is killing the bedroom communities of 800 sprinkled throughout the state, and causing people to move into more urban areas. My guess is that 'tradition' has a lot to do with a heavily subsidized rural and military economy undergirded by historically cheap energy.
Obama is going to run much stronger here than Kerry did, and since Nebraska splits its electoral votes, he may come out and take one or two votes here. If the campaign chooses to organize here, Scott Kleeb could really benefit.
I'm heading over to Scott Kleeb's tailgate before the opening game of the season for the University of Nebraska Cornhusker's football team. I spent a bunch of time at the state fair, and there are more pictures coming, including the state's largest pig and some conversations and interviews about renewable energy. I'm driving through Lincoln on the way to Minneapolis for the RNC Convention.
Here's what you're missing.
And here's a description.
Finally, here's beefman.
I'm staying with Marvin Ammori, the lawyer behind the Comcast decision at the FCC and a law professor as of a week ago in Lincoln, NE. If you're in town, let him know.
If it's as much a Democratic year as the three special election victories and current polling suggest, the utterly unthinkable not very long ago is conceivably in range: 60 Democratic seats in the Senate. There are a lot of races in play, and with a strong wind at our back, we could have a legitimate shot at it. But the only path to getting there is that some uphill races are going to have to come through. Races in states like Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas- Republican states with extremely well-financed and well-established incumbents- are going to be damn tough to pull off. Sixty is potentially within reach, but we in the progressive community are going to have to invest in a variety of different uphill gambles to give ourselves a chance.
I'm going to argue here that the Scott Kleeb race is one of the places we ought to make that gamble in. Nebraska is a Republican state, for sure, but so are the others I listed above. Scott's opponent Mike Johanns is a fairly well-liked former governor, so he will be tough to beat, but he's not an incumbent and compared to the well-established incumbents referenced above, he's no more formidable than any of them, and can't point to seniority, committee chairmanships, or pork he's brought home as the incumbent to bolster his case. The fact that Johanns was Bush's Agriculture Secretary, given the messy politics of the farm bill, isn't going to help him either.
The polling on the race also shows that Scott has a shot at this thing. One private poll I'm aware of shows only a 10-point gap, which would put this closer than Slattery in Kansas, Hagen in NC, and Noriega in TX, all races that many of us think are potentially winnable. And what that poll does not reflect is that young people in NE are registering Democratic by a two-to-one margin over Republicans, and that there is some serious outside organizational money being put into youth registration and turnout in NE.
That polling also doesn't reflect the real weaknesses in Johanns' record, starting with the farm bill fiasco, or the split in NE Republican politics between the more moderate Hagel Republicans and the right-wingers. And it doesn't reflect Scott's strength as a candidate- this is a guy who ran a competitive race in the 5th-most Republican congressional district in 2006.
I would add one final note here: unlike a lot of these Senate races, Scott is a grassroots, netroots kind of guy. I hope Lunsford in Kentucky, and Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Hagen in North Carolina, just to name three examples, all win their races this fall, because they are better than their Republican rightwing opponents and get Democrats closer to 60. But they are all more conservative, establishment candidates. Taking a gamble on Scott is worth doing because he relates to our values better than those kinds of candidates.
I will admit my bias here, with NE being my home state and Scott and his wife being friends, but I am pretty hard-nosed when it comes to politics, and I hope you will give Scott some coin before the June 30th quarterly deadline passes. He's a good fundraiser and is raising some decent money, but to get any DSCC help, he's going to have to have a big quarter. I think it's a gamble worth taking.
Although Chuck Hagel is obviously a really quirky guy and could change his mind at the drop of a hat, everyone I talked to in the know about Nebraska politics is pretty convinced that Hagel is going to announce his retirement, and that Bob Kerrey is going to get in the race to replace him. I know that many in the blogosphere are not fans of Kerrey's, some even comparing him to Lieberman, and I have never been close to him. But I think his running again is actually a good thing.
The most obvious reason is that he will likely give Democrats another seat in the Senate. Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey and Scott Kleeb are the two other potential Senate candidates, and while both have a lot going for them, I think their paths to winning a statewide Senate race are much more uphill compared to Kerrey's, who is still very popular and who would likely beat any of the Republican candidates.
I also don't think Kerrey is as bad as a lot of the blogosphere assumes. He is for sure an independent cuss, one who has driven me crazy many times over the years, and he would be very unpredictable on issues the progressive community cares about. But overall he was the most progressive Senator that Nebraska has had since the legendary George Norris (a Republican in the 1930s who championed rural electrification and labor law reform). And unlike most politicians, he will be open and passionate about what he believes. He will drive us all crazy from time to time, but on balance he's a whole lot better than either Lieberman or any of the Republicans running.
I also had a good conversation with Scott Kleeb, his wife and new Nebraskan Jane Fleming Kleeb, and most importantly their one month-old baby Maya (they got me to lunch by promising I could hold her). Scott got 45% last year in one of the five most Republican districts in the country, and is trying to decide whether to run again. It's a tough call given the nature of the district, and it would be really difficult to defend the seat even if he did win in 2008. I think he's leaning toward going for it in spite of the odds, and I hope he does- he's a good guy. The nature of the district wouldn't allow him to vote with progressives on every issue, but I think he would always be open to listening to us, and would do what he could, given the district, to be a solid team player for Democratic leadership on tough votes.
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