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A: That's an easy one. When DiStaso rushes to report on (and link to) the new Ras "poll" before he can be bothered with mentioning (and not linking to) the PPP poll.
But here's the thing. Even the Union Leader and FAUX News' favorite narrative driver pollster can't do what it's supposed to do. Paul Hodes is still within the margin of error of that non-credible survey as well.
Political types: I just received a robocall for Jim Bender for Senate on my cell phone, which (I've now confirmed) is in the National Do Not Call Registry. Am I correct that this despicable behavior is illegal in New Hampshire?
and
Just got another one on my home phone, also on the NDNC Registry. Filed a complaint with the NH Attorney General's office (DOJ-CPB@doj.nh.gov). I hope everyone who receives an illegal call will do the same.
(I'm keeping this off the front page until/unless we can corroborate this with more examples.)
This is really getting unbelievable (and unbelievably bad for Ayotte). Magellan:
In our final poll of the New Hampshire Republican primary for US Senate, we find Kelly Ayotte leading Ovide Lamontagne by 4 points, 35% to 31%. Bill Binnie is third with 14%, Jim Bender with 10%, the generic "another candidate" receives 3%, and 7% are undecided. These results are based on a September 12th automated survey of 1,083 likely Republican and independent primary voters who intend to vote in the September 14th primary. This survey has a margin of error of +/- 2.98% at the 95% confidence interval.
The story in this race is the 10 point surge in support for Ovide Lamontagne since our last survey on September 1st. His increase in support is broad, but not limited to any particular subgroup of voters. He has improved his standing among every major voting subgroup in the state by 9 to 11 points.
At this point, even if she squeaks out a win tomorrow, this late surge has damaged the confidence others will have in her ability to close in the general.
Another paper doesn't endorse Kelly Ayotte. From the Conway Daily Sun:
...of all the candidates, [Ayotte] spoke the most in sound bites and messages. Perhaps it is her relative youth or style as a government prosecutor, but she seemed to lack intellectual circumspection and experience befitting a U.S. senator.
Kelly Ayotte's got a lot in common with Sean Mahoney:
In the e-mails with Varsalone, Ayotte also considered her viability for a run for governor in 2012 and seemed to decide that she'd have an easier road in the Senate campaign, which ultimately didn't happen because several other Republican candidates entered the race.
"Plus in my estimation, govs race in (2012) is a crowded primary for me," she wrote that day, referring to a gubernatorial campaign.
"Yep, but if you run for senate and lose (but it is close) you will be the top contender for (governor) in (2012)," Varsalone responded.
"Fair point. I think if I get (out) early enough, I can foreclose a primary. Your thoughts? Who do you think I should be worried about?" she wrote.
I'm trying to imagine two jobs, two skill sets, in public service more different than state governor and US senator. But what matter compared to being elected to the high office of Something or Other?
The UL continues its campaign to defeat Kelly Ayotte, this time with yet another guest column:
Ayotte could have used her commanding front-runner status to galvanize the faithful around a strong agenda tied to an identifiable set of core conservative principles. Instead, she appeared to play it safe, relying on name recognition and her front-runner status to carry her through the primary.
Sources say a recent automated poll from Magellan Strategies, which had Ayotte up 34 percent to 21 percent on Lamontagne, is pretty close to reality. And Lamontagne's campaign is set to release an internal poll this afternoon that shows him down 34 percent to 24 percent (two other candidates are at 12).
And yet another newspaper, the Laconia Citizen, demurs on Ayotte, giving the nod to Bender. The field is absurdly diluted at this point, and the only one trending up is Lamontagne.
As the Fix notes, and as Jim Splaine noted before that, Ovide could pull this off with 30% of the vote.
Every day, the meme grows a little bigger. Kornacki in Salon:
It's not impossible to envision a Lamontagne win next Tuesday. With Ayotte and Binnie sniping at each other (and Binnie pouring even more money into his self-funded campaign this week), Lamontagne may start to look more appealing to the electorate. And Ayotte, who has positioned herself as a pro-lifer, is suddenly taking heat for the revelation that she approved a $300,000 taxpayer-funded settlement with Planned Parenthood last year. Plus, the Union Leader is hardly done pleading his case; when the paper endorses a candidate, it tends to follow up several times before Election Day.
The fallout continues from the revelation that Kelly Ayotte quietly paid Planned Parenthood $300,000 of Granite State money to settle the legal fees from the case Sarah Palin claims she "won". Former US Senator Gordon Humphrey on the Laura Ingraham show:
Laura Ingraham: ...There was a case-parental notification. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. She was not obligated in her role as attorney general to authorize a payout of $300,000 in legal fees to Planned Parenthood. Am I getting anything wrong there?
Sen. Humphrey: No, that is correct. That is absolutely correct. I'm not an attorney, but I've been advised by one of the most imminent attorneys in the state, that she could have rejected the judges' ruling, she could have appealed the judges' ruling that the state pay the defense costs for Planned Parenthood. She did not appeal it, she did not dig in her heels. In fact the whole thing was rather, um, quietly pushed under the rug...
And the UL is unrelenting, today with a guest cloumn:
Sarah Palin may know her Alaskan grizzly bears, but she got a bit confused here in New Hampshire, where we have only black bears. If Palin cares about the Constitution and the conservative values that prompted her ill-advised "mama grizzly" movement, she should admit her mistake and rescind her endorsement of Kelly Ayotte.
Emily Browne brought up a good point today (I've posted her words below the fold).
We are in the closing days of the primary, and Kelly Ayotte is trending downward thanks to her ongoing negative ad wars with Bill Binnie.
Meanwhile, genuine right-winger Ovide Lamontagne is trending up in a recent poll. What's more, he's snagged the endorsements of the Union Leader and Keene Sentinel.
All of which begs the question: where is Sarah Palin to help close the deal for her Mama Grizzly? This is precisely the situation where the former half-term governor could be of assistance.
So where's Sarah? And does it have anything to do with the fact that her Grizzly quietly paid the "loser" of her resume building judicial exercise, Planned Parenthood, $300,000 from the State of New Hampshire?
Stumbling toward the finish line, can Ayotte hold on to base GOP voters and undeclareds given the FRM and Planned Parenthood scandals?
Even the right-wing Fosters editorial board can't hold back:
Now comes Ayotte's spokesman again laying blame elsewhere, this time charging a conspiracy. The only conspiracy was by FRM officials.
It is incredulous that Ayotte's camp would indirectly claim the report should have been held until after the primary or, better yet, held until after the November election.
Her Nixon-ian denials not withstanding, Ayotte's only prayer of reclaiming her credibility is to issue a mea culpa directly to the media, not through Grappone.
Kelly Ayotte took Planned Parenthood all the way to the Supreme Court on a fool's errand.
She lost.
Then, without legislative approval, or a governer's signature, paid Planned Parenthood off, to the tune of $300,000 Granite State tax dollars.
Sarah Palin says New Hampshire Republicans should vote for Ayotte because she is a fiscal conservative and because she won the case (that she lost).
Mental exercise: try to imagine the Union Leader's or Cornerstone's reaction to Bill Binnie giving away 300 grand of New Hampshire money to a pro-choice group.
On economic issues, all of the candidates agreed they would repeal any remaining money from the federal stimulus package.
OK then:
President Obama's much-maligned economic stimulus package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of this year, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
In its latest quarterly assessment of the act, the CBO said the stimulus lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points during the quarter ending in June and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million. The higher figure would come close to making good on Obama's pledge that the act would save or create as many as 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year.
Adding: I have a dream that someday I will be able to have a genuine policy disagreement with the opposing party's ideology that is grounded in reality.
Some Republicans in New Hampshire still have a stubbron adherence to reality:
A pro-fossil fuel political group, the American Action Network, has spent a whopping $450,000 over the past three weeks on TV and radio ads attacking U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes for his vote for the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The ads also support Kelly Ayotte, Hodes' leading opponent to fill Sen. Judd Gregg's Senate seat.
One of us is a Republican who has publicly endorsed Ayotte, and the other is an independent who has yet to endorse a candidate. Both of us believe the ACES bill could have been greatly improved, but we also both strenuously object to the ads' grossly and dangerously misleading claims.
...Heritage's analysis is likely tainted by its heavy reliance on funding from anti-climate science, fossil-fuel interests: $200,000 from ExxonMobil from 2005-09 and more than $1.6 million from Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest, privately held company.
My follow up to former Senator Rubens is to think very carefully about whether Kelly Ayotte and the 21st century Republican party will bear any relationship to his priorities and values if elected.
I'm sure the Ayotte folks will love spreading around this story of the dreadful horrors of gated community dictators, but what I'm not sure they'll get is that that's how a lot of people view all major Republican office-seekers.
Put any of the others names in place of Binnie in there; I don't really see a difference.
The Jim Bender for US Senate Campaign will be hosting a forum entitled,
"No Compromise: Secure our Borders Tight and Solid" Forum and breakfast with special guest speaker Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project on Wednesday, September 1st. The event will be held at Bickford's Family Restaurant in Nashua.
Jim Gilchrist:
On the other hand, he says, Congress could spur an insurrection from the anti-illegal immigration side if it approves a plan that would legitimize those now in the country illegally. Such a move, he says, would undermine this country's rule of law.
"I'm not going to promote insurrection, but if it happens, it will be on the conscience of the members of Congress who are doing this," he said. "I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that."
and:
Several prominent civil rights groups support Chase's claim that Gilchrist allowed members of the National Alliance, one of the United States' largest neo-Nazi organizations, to help with his 2005 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. A former volunteer in Gilchrist's campaign told researchers from the Southern Poverty Law Center that "they were basically allowing skinheads and white nationalists to work the phone banks and do IT and distribute National Alliance fliers targeting non-whites," and that "[when I told them] that I didn't want to work for a campaign that was tainted by white supremacy in any way, they told me not to cause a stir."
Mr. Sununu's petulant comments are partisan politics at its worst. Instead of engaging in a thoughtful conversation or offering any ideas for putting New Hampshire back to work, Mr. Sununu resorted to petty political attacks and childish name-calling. He showed disrespect to the Office of the Presidency.
In late May former RNC chairman and 2004 Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman gave $2400 to Kelly Ayotte.
In early June Kelly Ayotte said the following:
KELLY AYOTTE: "I absolutely support and believe in marriage as between a man and a woman, and I do think it's unfortunate that our state has made a different decision on that. And I know that many of you who are out there working at the state level, running for state office, I commend your efforts to repeal that law here in the state of New Hampshire. And I think that's very important.
Yesterday, private citizen Ken Mehlman revealed to the world that he is gay and "he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage".
This is pretty simple. If Mehlman would like the world to focus on his advocacy for gay marriage, and less on the real harm he caused to gays and lesbians in the past, he would retract his support for Ayotte, and give it instead to Paul Hodes. Not doing so tells married gays and lesbians in New Hampshire that his money stands with those who would revoke their rights.
And regarding our former Attorney General: if Kelly Ayotte does not either return Mehlman's money or speak out against his advocacy, she won't have much credibility with the public at large or with her friends at Cornerstone Policy Research when she calls out "liberal" Bill Binnie on the TeeVee.
Binnie hasn't been shy about bashing party Republicans as he runs on a fiscally conservative but socially moderate platform.
"It seems like his natural base might be moderate Republicans, those who want social issues to play a back seat. Perhaps pro-choice Republicans," Scala said. "The dilemma is, that's not enough voters to win a Republican primary on this state."
Sometimes I feel like there are two New Hampshires. In my hunting grounds, away from the more populous southern tier, and the modern era Massachusetts Republicans who move there, Binnie is a natural fit for what remains of the old Yankee Republicans who have not moved over to the D column.
(It's funny he's on the other side of Judd Gregg, the progenitor of the Kelly Ayotte movement, since the two are not unlike.)
Ayotte went much further right than I expected her to. But if turnout is higher than expected and more undeclareds pull R ballots, will it have been a colossal error?
Kelly Ayotte would not have put this negative ad up against Bill Binnie. The benefit in driving up Binnie negatives comes at the risk of alienating a non-trivial number of his supporters in the general.
Very. Interesting.
Though I'm not sure how Sarah Palin-ing it up as a reality TeeVee star is going to help either (h/t Pindell).
