Updates on five Senate primary campaigns this evening:
1. North Carolina looks like a run-off The May 4th Democratic primary in North Carolina looks like it is headed for a runoff. In order to avoid a run-off, the winning candidate needs at least 40.01% of the vote. While Elaine Marshall and Cal Cunningham are well ahead of the rest of the field, neither is close to 40% right now. Here is the Pollster.com trendline in the campaign since February 1:
There are six candidates in the campaign. At this point, the role of the other four seems to be to prevent either Cunningham or Marshall from reaching 40%. The run-off in five weeks time should actually be a positive for the eventuall winner, however, as it will keep attention and resources focused on the campaign, thus raising Democratic interest and name ID of the candidates.
Fisher has the support of the DSCC, so this is an uphill battle for Brunner. It is still just one poll though, and primary polling is notoriously inaccurate. The primary is on May 4th.
3. Specter wonders if he should have stayed a Republican In an odd moment, on the one-year anniversary of his switch, Arlen Specter wonders if he should have stayed in the Republican Party:
''Well, I probably shouldn't say this,'' he said over lunch last month. ''But I have thought from time to time that I might have helped the country more if I'd stayed a Republican.''
Specter mused that perhaps if he'd remained in the caucus he could have persuaded one or two of his GOP colleagues to support health care reform.
It seems pretty unlikely that Specter could have convinced anyone in the Republican Party to vote for the health care bill, given that Specter would have always been heading toward a crushing defeat in the Republican primary. His credibility among Republicans would have been extremely low.
Personally, I am glad that he switched. Specter has proven surprisingly easy to pressure when he wants your vote. As such, it is a rock-solid guarantee that Specter would have voted, and acted, much more right-wing over the last year if he was seeking Republican votes rather than Democratic ones.
Still, publicly musing about whether he should have stayed in the Republican Party raises a lot of the fears that many progressives have had about Specter over the last year. There is good reason to worry that, if he wins the Democratic nomination on May 18th, we will see a very different Arlen Specter for the rest of the year, and maybe the next seven years, than we have had over the past year.
Still, the situation is fluid. The next big shoes to drop in this campaign will be when Crist announces which party he will caucus with should he win the election, and if the FBI investigation of Marco Rubio heats up.
