Friday, May 27, 2011

Run Sarah Run

As Andrew Sullivan noted today, does this look like she's not running?





Palin's looking more and more like a (really bad) candidate.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Hochul Wins NY-26

That's really, really good news for Democrats from Obama to Pelosi and really, really bad news for Republicans. This is a district Democrats lost in 2006 (Democratic wave year) and that Obama lost to McCain in 2008.

What it suggests is that, on a national level, the House is now in play. Republicans are saying that the Tea Party candidate in this race drew votes away from the Republican (Corwin) and cost her the election. That's not true. Some of Davis's votes would have gone to Corwin but not all of them. More importantly, even if you give Corwin all of Davis's votes, she still only wins by about the same margin as the Republican who won this district in 2006 ... which was a really, really good year for Democrats and a really, really bad year for Republicans.

The House is back in play for 2012.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Daniels Not Running

Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, has just announced he's not running for president.

This is good news for Obama in two ways:

1) Daniels would have been the strongest general election candidate so far in a field of fairly weak general election candidates on the GOP side.
2) Daniels says the main reason he's not running is family considerations and that's probably mostly true. But he probably also figured that that putting his family through all the troubles of a presidential campaign would be less defensible if you don't have a strong chance of winning in November 2012. Daniels would have had a shot against Obama but it is not currently a 50% shot.