Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:<\/p>\n
* The good news for Rep. [tag]Katherine Harris[\/tag]’ Senate campaign in Florida is that it’s almost at the point in which it has no where to go but up. A new Mason-Dixon poll<\/a> shows incumbent Sen. [tag]Bill Nelson[\/tag] (D) leading Harris, 57% to 29%. The 28-point margin is significantly worse than the 16-point gap from a Mason-Dixon poll conducted in March.<\/p>\n * Speaking of Florida, a new Quinnipiac poll<\/a> shows [tag]Charlie Crist[\/tag] (R) with a big lead over [tag]Tom Gallagher[\/tag] (R) in the Republican’s gubernatorial primary 55% to 32%. On the other side of the aisle, Rep. [tag]Jim Davis[\/tag] is still leading state Sen. [tag]Rod Smith[\/tag] in the Dem primary, 47% to 19%. Crist still leads Davis in a hypothetical general-election match-up, 44% to 38%, and leads Smith, 45% to 36%.<\/p>\n * Roll Call reported<\/a> today that [tag]Coleen Rowley[\/tag], Time’s Person of the Year in 2002, is having a very tough time in her House campaign against incumbent Rep. [tag]John Kline[\/tag] (R-Minn.), so much so that state and national Dems have all but given up hope. Rowley’s campaign manager recently quit, and the situation worsened when the FBI’s inspector general released a report criticizing her work during her tenure at the bureau. Complicating matters, Rowley’s fundraising has been slow and she badly trails Kline in cash on hand. “It’s evident the campaign hasn’t materialized as well as we’d hoped,” said one national Dem official.<\/p>\n * Yesterday was primary day in Oklahoma, and there were no surprises. Rep. [tag]Ernest Istook[\/tag] won<\/a> the GOP gubernatorial primary and will face Gov. [tag]Brad Henry[\/tag] (D) in November, while Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin and Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett were to the top two<\/a> vote-getters in the GOP primary to replace Istook. They’ll meet in an Aug. 22 runoff.<\/p>\n * Also in Oklahoma, [tag]Al McAffrey[\/tag] (D), a funeral director, member of the Choctaw Nation, Navy veteran and former Oklahoma City police officer, became the first openly gay lawmaker<\/a> to the state legislature yesterday. (McAffrey won a Dem primary, and no Republican has filed to run for the seat.) Keith Smith, a state lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, called McAffrey’s election historic. “It shows that Oklahoma is evolving and moving,” he said. “(This will help) all misconceptions about gay people start to fall away.” (thanks to Edward Copeland<\/a> for the tip)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * The good news for Rep. [tag]Katherine Harris[\/tag]’ Senate campaign in Florida is that it’s almost at the point in which it has no where to go but up. A new Mason-Dixon poll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}