In California, no voting bloc is safe
First Republican Meg Whitman, a political novice running for California governor, seemed to catch her Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown, napping with an aggressive early push for Latino voters – a voting bloc that has proven tough for her party to crack.
Whitman has run a series of Spanish-language TV commercials and billboards that, according to the latest p0lls, paid off with a 14-point gain among Latinos – despite the still simmering furor over a crackdown on illegal immigrants in neighborhing Arizona that was signed into law by Republican Governor Jan Brewer.
Brown, the state’s attorney general and a veteran California politician who served as California governor from 1975 to 1983, has been criticized within his party for being slow to respond and taking the Latino vote for granted.
Brown counters that the November election is still more than three months away and points out that, as a man who marched with Cesar Chavez during the 1970s, his credentials with that constituency are well established.
Now Whitman, a billionaire former eBay CEO who is largely bankrolling her own campaign, is going after another group of voters that Brown might have considering safely in his corner: the nurses.
California’s public employee unions, including the California Nurses Association, are the most powerful special interest groups in the state and carry unmatched influence over the Democratic party. And Brown, at a distinct fundraising disadvantage to the wealthy Whitman in a race on track to be the most expensive nonpresidential election in U.S. history, is counting heavily on support from those unions.
But Whitman has been reaching out to rank-and-file nurses, setting up a web site called Truth for Nurses to reach them directly which explains her support of nurse-to-patient ratios and trumpeting a poll that says nurses — like the rest of California’s electorate — actually spilit almost evenly between her and those who support her and Brown.
The First Draft: Will Giuliani try for the U.S. Senate?
He probably won’t run for New York governor but might for the U.S. Senate … or will he? That’s the speculation swirling around Rudy Giuliani, the Republican former New York City mayor who walked tall after the Sept. 11 attacks and ran for U.S. president in 2008. A spokeswoman says the 65-year-old former federal prosecutor has made no decisions. But the New York Daily News, the New York Times and the New York Post all report that Giuliani has decided not to run for New York governor in 2010. Analysts think he could defeat Democratic incumbent Governor David Paterson without much fuss. But overcoming a possible challenge from New York’s Democratic attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, could be have been difficult. Cuomo has not announced his candidacy. The Daily News reports that Giuliani is strongly considering a Senate run against Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to fill out the remaining two years of Hillary Clinton’s term. Clinton, who lost in last year’s Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, is now U.S. secretary of state.
The Daily News cites poll numbers showing Giuliani losing to Cuomo 53 percent to 43 percent in a race for governor, but beating Gillibrand 54 percent to 40 percent for the Senate.
But the Senate speculation may not last long.
The New York Post quotes people close to Giuliani as saying a run for the Senate is unlikely.
And even the Daily News seems to be hedging its bets with a story saying Giuliani doesn’t need to run for the Senate because he already has plenty of money and influence and a private life that’s working out just fine. Giuliani ran for the Senate in a 2000 campaign that pitted him against Clinton. But events and declining poll numbers were against him and he withdrew after a quick succession of revelations: he had prostate cancer, he had a girlfriend, and he was separating from his second wife. Giuliani has since beaten cancer, divorced his second wife, Donna Hanover, and married his former girlfriend, Judith Nathan.
Photo Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Giuliani)
Guiliano is a clown, but he has some leadership ability. Right now there is a vacuum in leadership at the White House and it’s name is Obama. When you turn the switch to foreign affairs–it sucks, when you turn the switch to domestic affairs–it blows
The First Draft: Preparing for a fall?
Are Democrats trying to soften the blow for President Barack Obama if the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, Creigh Deeds, loses in the November elections?
The Washington Post thinks so. It says in a front page story that top Democrats sense that Deeds is likely to lose in the key swing state so they’re trying to distance Obama from him.
The article cites senior administration officials who are frustrated with the way Deeds has handled his campaign, saying he refused some strategic advice. They also say he did not reach out to some key constituencies that helped Obama win Virginia in the 2008 presidential race — the first time in decades that a Democrat won in that state.
A senior administration official said Deeds badly erred on several fronts, including not doing a better job of coordinating with the White House. “I understood in the beginning why there was some reluctance to run all around the state with Barack Obama,” said the official, who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly about the race. “You don’t do that in Virginia. But when you consider the African American turnout that they need, and then when you consider as well they’ve got a huge problem with surge voters, younger voters, we were just a natural for them.”
So will this prep work help shield Obama from any fallout if the Democrat does not win the Virginia governorship?
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Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama campaigns with Deeds)
