Midterm mania (yes, still)
Posted: Thursday, December 07, 2006 8:58 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Midterms
Christine Jennings (D), who still isn't conceding her congressional race to Vern Buchanan (R), holds a press conference in Sarasota, FL today with hundreds of voters who say they experienced problems registering their votes.
The Saturday runoff for Democratic Rep. William Jefferson's seat in Louisiana may be the state's last December runoff for a congressional seat "thanks to a bill passed this year by the Louisiana state legislature," says The Hill. "The state is departing from its unpredictable nonpartisan open primary system in favor of more traditional closed primaries, allowing it to settle all of its congressional races on Election Day, just like the rest of the country. The change affects only federal races, not state and local ones."
The runoff is going down the wire, per the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Challenger Karen Carter (D) yesterday “hammered home the message that Jefferson can't be effective given the taint of the corruption investigation and the loss of his seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.” Jefferson, meanwhile, “said he would remind voters that he hasn't been charged with a crime in a probe that began back in March 2005.”
And the nonpartisan Cook Political Report's Jennifer Duffy recounts some instances of bloggers taking things a bit too far in 2006, sometimes on behalf of or against certain campaigns. Duffy asks, "the bigger issue is whether some of the campaign staffers/bloggers are becoming the new hit men of campaign politics. Do they end up in the position--knowingly or not--of doing the campaign's dirty work, allowing the campaign to appear to remain at a respectable distance with a degree of deniability? Or consider the flip side of the argument. What if a campaign gets blamed for questionable postings by campaign staffers/bloggers or other sympathetic bloggers that they knew nothing about?"
