Close races mean possibility Senate control will be decided by post Election Day runoffs

A handful of tight races in states with quirky election laws make for the possibility that Election Day will come and go without deciding which party controls the Senate.
If that happens, brace for a fierce runoff election and possible recounts that could make for an ugly holiday season in politics and government.
The main reason for uncertainty: Louisiana's election laws. Strategists in both parties say a Dec. 6 runoff is likely because Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and top Republican challenger Bill Cassidy will struggle to exceed 50 percent on the crowded Nov. 4 ballot.
In Louisiana's "jungle primary," all candidates -- regardless of party -- run in November. If none exceeds 50 percent, the top two finishers head into a Dec. 6 runoff.
It's not implausible that control of the Senate could hang on a Louisiana runoff.
Republicans need six more seats to claim a 51-49 Senate majority. A 50-50 split would let Vice President Joe Biden break tie votes and keep Democrats in charge.
Republicans are strongly favored to win three races where Democratic senators are retiring: West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana.
Their best hopes to pick up three more seats are in the four contests where Democrats seek re-election in states President Barack Obama lost: Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina.
Republicans are also making strong bids in Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire, which Obama carried.
If Republicans win two of those races, plus the three where they are heavily favored, then all eyes and lots of campaign money would turn to Louisiana if there's a runoff.
"And I don't think there's any chance we don't go into a runoff in Louisiana," said Brian Walsh, a Republican adviser in Senate races.
A major GOP campaign group has reserved $4 million in Louisiana TV air time after Nov. 4, anticipating battling Landrieu through Dec. 6.
Waiting for a make-or-break Louisiana outcome would deeply affect the postelection congressional session scheduled to start Nov. 12. Congress must appropriate money in November to keep the government running, and it may revisit the president's continued authority to arm Syrian rebels, among other things.
If Republicans think they will control the Senate in the new Congress set to convene Jan. 3, they may want to limit action in the Democratic-controlled lame-duck session. It's almost certain that Republicans will retain their House majority.
Georgia's Senate race could have an even messier outcome than Louisiana's. GOP nominee David Perdue is thought to have a modest lead over Democrat Michelle Nunn in the race to succeed retiring Republican Saxby Chambliss.
But there's a Libertarian on the ballot, who might win enough votes to keep Perdue and Nunn from reaching 50 percent. That would trigger a runoff Jan. 6, three days after the new Congress' scheduled start.
It requires a lot of "ifs." But a scenario in which Republicans entered the new Congress with a 50-49 Senate majority, while awaiting a Georgia outcome that could soon return them to the minority, would further roil an already bitterly partisan government.
If nothing else, "it would make for a bad Christmas for everyone," said GOP strategist Ron Bonjean.
A recount of a Georgia runoff result, should there be one, would extend confusion even deeper into 2015. A candidate may request a recount if the margin is less than 1 percent of all votes cast.
Alaska presents another possibility for an inconclusive Nov. 4 Senate election. Alaska traditionally counts only about two-thirds of its total vote on election night. State law postpones counting most absentee and questioned ballots until a week after the election.
Twice in the past six year, a Senate winner in Alaska wasn't declared until at least two weeks after Election Day. This year, the state features one of the nation's tightest races. First-term Democratic Sen. Mark Begich faces Republican Dan Sullivan. Obama lost Alaska by 14 percentage points.
Of all the high-stakes "what if" possibilities, campaign professionals see a Dec. 6 Louisiana runoff as the most likely. Landrieu has scrapped to win three Senate terms, but the state has trended Republican in recent years.
"If Louisiana is the deciding seat, pity anyone watching television in the state that month," said Matt Bennett, who has advised several Democratic candidates. "They will be blitzed with more ads, from campaigns and outside groups, than they could possibly imagine."
Generally, Republicans fare better in runoffs because their supporters tend to vote regardless of the date, weather or levels of publicity.
But an intensive, well-targeted get-out-the-vote operation could save Landrieu, Bennett said, "and the Democrats clearly dominate in the technology and coordination of their ground campaigns."

Alleged White House intruder is decorated Iraq combat vet

The Texas man accused of dashing through the White House front door Friday with a folding knife is a decorated Army veteran and marksman who served in Iraq, the U.S. military said Sunday.
Omar Jose Gonzalez, who is being held in connection with illegally trying to enter the White House complex, served more than 13 years over the course of two Army stints.
The 42-year-old Gonzalez was discharged in 2003 after serving six years and completing his military service obligation. He retired in 2012 as a result of a disability, after serving roughly seven more years, according to his military record.
The military does not provide details about a soldier's disability due to privacy considerations.
Gonzales, of Copperas Cove, Texas, allegedly jumped the White House fence along Pennsylvania Avenue at 7:20 p.m. Friday, then crossed the North Lawn and opened the mansion’s front door before being apprehended by a Secret Service police officer standing guard.  
President Obama, his two daughters and a friend had left minutes before on helicopter Marine One for Camp David. First lady Michelle Obama had departed earlier for the western Maryland presidential retreat.
According to court documents, Gonzales told Secret Service agents after being apprehended that the “atmosphere was collapsing” and that he had to tell the president so he could warn the public.
Officials first said the fact that Gonzales appeared to be unarmed may have been a factor in why agents at the scene didn't shoot or have their dogs pursue him before he made it inside the White House.
According to Gonzales’ record, his military occupation was Cavalry Scout, which the Army calls the “eyes and ears of the commander during battle” and whose duties included preparing ammunition, reporting on terrain and collecting data on classify routes.
He received more than a dozen awards, badges and ribbons during his military career including two Good Conduct medals an Iraq Campaign medal, a Combat Action badge and an Expert Marksmanship badge.
Gonzalez is expected to appear in federal court Monday to face charges of unlawfully entering a restricted building or grounds while carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon.
At a hearing late Saturday afternoon in D.C. Superior Court, the assistant public defender representing Gonzalez said her client had no convictions or arrest warrants and had tested negative Saturday for drug use, according to The Washington Post.
"This is someone who has provided service to his country and shown commitment in his life," said the lawyer, Margarita O'Donnell, as she tried unsuccessfully to get Gonzalez released.

JV Team Cartoon

Dem rep under fire over video with lewd reference to Maine GOP senator, sex act

The Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Maine is under fire from Republicans for promoting a video containing a rap song that makes a sexual reference to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Rep. Michael Michaud’s campaign says it did not pay for or oversee the contents of the video, and is lashing back out at Republicans for making it a campaign issue.
But the trouble started when Michaud retweeted the short video, a documentary-style clip on his campaign that was made by a Maine multimedia company.
The video includes a song by local rapper Spose. It lyrics include the line: "I'm the King of Maine. I've got Susan Collins giving everyone brain" -- a slang term for oral sex.
The Maine Republican Party on Friday denounced the video and demanded Michaud apologize to Collins and “all Maine women” for his “endorsement” of the video.
“It is absolutely appalling and completely inexcusable that Michael Michaud would make a video with such a vulgar reference to Susan Collins,” party spokeswoman Deborah Sanderson said in a statement. “In his quest to win votes from a younger generation, Congressman Michaud has gone way over the line by participating in this depraved insult to Maine’s senior senator.”
Michaud's campaign, though, says it wasn't immediately aware of the lyric's meaning, and has since asked the production company to take the video down.
While the state GOP claimed the video was a “collaboration” with the Democrat’s campaign, Michaud denied it.
“The Michaud campaign did not produce the video or have any control or advance knowledge of its contents,” the candidate tweeted. 
His campaign and its allies, meanwhile, are accusing Republicans of “gutter politics” for making an issue of it.
“This is just rank dishonesty. Period. It’s really a shame that at a time when so many important issues are facing the state of Maine, the Maine GOP has resorted to outright lying in trying to tear down Mike Michaud,” Ben Grant, chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, said in a statement.
Spose appears to be no fan of Michaud’s Republican rival, Gov. Paul LePage. According to The Maine Wire blog, the rapper tweeted a picture of himself posing with Michaud. In the tweet, he called the sitting governor an “a—hole.”
Polls show Michaud and LePage in a tight race.
The Portland Press Herald reports that Michaud wasn’t the only one who may have missed the meaning of the sexual innuendo in Spose’s “King of Maine” lyrics -- and that state Republicans also had promoted the video.
According to the newspaper, Bangor Daily News blogger Alex Steed, who made the video with his production company, said Michaud had “nothing to do with it” -- though Republicans argued that the Democrat’s staff nevertheless gave him access to the candidate and his team.

F-22 fighters intercept Russian military planes 55 miles off Alaska

Two U.S. F-22 fighter jets intercepted six Russian military airplanes that were flying near Alaska, military officials said Friday.
Lt. Col. Michael Jazdyk, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, said the jets intercepted the planes about 55 nautical miles from the Alaskan coast at about 7 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday.
Tensions are high between the United States and Russia as the two countries are increasingly at odds over Ukraine, where Russian-backed insurgents have been fighting for control of parts of the country.
The Russian planes were identified as two IL-78 refueling tankers, two Mig-31 fighter jets and two Bear long-range bombers. They looped south and returned to their base in Russia after the U.S. jets were scrambled.
At about 1:30 a.m. Thursday, two Canadian CF-18 fighter jets intercepted two of the long-range Russian Bear bombers about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coastline in the Beaufort Sea.
In both cases, the Russian planes entered the Air Defense Identification Zone, which extends about 200 miles from the coastline. They did not enter sovereign airspace of the United States or Canada.
Jazdyk said the fighter jets were scrambled “basically to let those aircraft know that we see them, and in case of a threat, to let them know we are there to protect our sovereign airspace.”
In the past five years, jets under NORAD’s command have intercepted more than 50 Russian bombers approaching North American airspace.
NORAD is a binational American and Canadian command responsible for air defense in North America.

Will Tea Party, GOP establishment be 'mending fences' to win Senate in November?

After a long, unapologetic effort to defeat Tea Party and other so-called “unelectable” candidates in GOP primaries, the Washington establishment will likely need Tea Party voters in November to help swing several tight Senate races and win control of the upper chamber.
Republicans appear poised to win three of the net total six seats required to take the Senate. But they are locked in six other, too-close-to call contests in their effort to win the remaining three seats.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Friday dismissed the notion that party voters are not united behind their candidates.
“Can you point to a race … ? It’s a false narrative,” said group spokeswoman Brook Hougsen, who cited a recent George Washington University survey that shows Republicans with a 16-point advantage over Democrats (52-to-36 percent) in a generic poll on competitive Senate races.
Kevin Broughton, spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, a political action committee, singled out a few races, particularly in Kansas and Mississippi, but suggested his troops will rally for the general election.
“While Tea Party people and conservative activists might have a bad taste in their mouth, the goal is to keep Barack Obama from making more bad appointments to the federal appeals courts,” he said. “And the way you stop that is to take away (Nevada Sen.) Harry Reid’s Democratic majority and his nuclear option.”
Broughton said they will focus on such grassroots efforts as get-out-the-vote, instead of buying TV or other media spots. 
The establishment and its deep-pocket supporters made clear from the start of the 2014 election cycle that their goal was to field a full squad of electable candidates, thus avoiding past mistakes, and to weed out anybody who might get elected and undermine their legislative agenda.
“Our job is to win a GOP majority,” NRSC strategist Brad Dayspring said in terse November 2013 tweet.
Two months later, the Chamber of Commerce made clear that Big Business was also going to work -- vowing to support candidates “who want to work within the legislative process” and to unleash “enough resources to run the most effective political program of 2014.” 
The results were indeed impressive.
All six Republican senators who faced promising Tea Party-backed challenges won their primaries, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in March boldly predicted he and the rest of the Washington establishment would “crush” far-right advocacy groups and their candidates. 
“I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country,” the five-term Kentucky Republican told The New York Times.
The other wins came in Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Kansas, where the NRSC helped incumbent GOP Sen. Pat Roberts to victory with more than 40,000 phone calls in the final three weeks of his campaign.
In Mississippi, Tea Party-backed candidate Chris McDaniel forced GOP incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran -- who had strong inside-the-beltway financial and grassroots support -- into a runoff to retain his seat.
Politico described the contest as “a flashpoint in the GOP civil war.”
The North Carolina Senate race is among the six deadlocked races.
The Washington establishment has invested in candidate Thom Tillis, a state House leader who defeated a field of Tea Party-backed challenger in a May primary and now faces incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagen.
The U.S. chamber has so far put $1.2 million into the race, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The other races are in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana and now Iowa -- all considered “tossups,” according to the nonpartisan website RealClearPolitics.
“There will have to be some fence mending with these groups, particularly in states with late primaries,” Andrew Smith, a University of New Hampshire pollster and political science professor, said earlier this week.
He said the GOP establishment must get those groups energized and that the best way is to “make it easy for independent voters” by tying every Democratic candidate to President Obama.
Republicans blame Tea Party-backed and flawed candidates for squandering the party's shot at Senate control in 2010 and 2012, especially in Delaware, Nevada, Colorado, Missouri and Indiana.
In Delaware, for example, Christine O’Donnell rode the 2010 Tea Party wave to victory over nine-term Rep. Mike Castle in the state’s GOP Senate primary, only to run a disastrous general-election campaign and lose the Republican-held seat by 17 percentage points.
“I’m sure a lot of party leaders are also saying, ‘Look, you saw what happened in 2010 and 2012. Don’t let it happen again,’ ” Smith said.
This weekend, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund sent an email to members attacking Colorado Democratic Senate nominee Rep. Bruce Braley. The email in part criticized Braley for his support of ObamaCare but made no mention of Republican nominee Joni Ernst, who has support from the Washington establishment and such Tea Party stalwarts as 2010 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
“By any measure, Republicans are fired up and ready to deliver victories to their candidates in November,” said Ed Goeas, president and chief executive of the Tarrance Group, which helped in the GWU poll.   

NFL Cartoon

Democrats' big guns court women voters

With little more 40 days until voters head to the polls, the 2014 midterm election cycle marks the first in modern history in which Democrats find themselves scrambling to reclaim the lion’s share of the female vote in such elections.
Women tilted Republican in 2010, an unprecedented development since exit polling for congressional races began in 1992, and both parties recognize the critical role women will play in determining whether the GOP regains control of the Senate.
With such concerns in mind, the Democratic Party’s biggest guns – President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the party’s putative frontrunner if she runs in 2016, as many expect – descended on Washington’s Marriott Marquis Hotel, site of the 21sr annual conference of the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum.
The event represented a homecoming of sorts for Clinton, who co-founded the group back in 1993, when she was First Lady. Conceding that midterm elections are not as “glamorous” as presidential contests, Clinton urged the several hundred people in attendance to vote in November, singling out a number of female candidates locked in tight House and Senate races across the country. “This election is a crucial one,” she said.
While touting her own record on women’s issues – a term Clinton herself discounted, preferring instead “family issues” – the potential 2016 contender also praised the records of Obama and Biden, who has made no secret of his interest in pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination.
Following the rocky rollout for her book this spring, when Clinton’s comments about her finances prompted criticism that she has lost touch with ordinary Americans, she used the DNC event to emphasize that she understands the challenges faced by working mothers. 
She recounted her own days as a young attorney in Arkansas, when her husband, the future president, was the state’s governor, and the couple occasionally had problems lining up day care for their daughter Chelsea.
Obama argued that America is “better off” now than when he became president, and that “strong women” will help the nation reach its best days in the years to come. He also rose to the defense of the embattled DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. Published reports over the past week have alluded to dissatisfaction with Wasserman-Schultz within Democratic ranks – alternately linked to the White House and the Clinton camp – and suggested that some party activists are angling for her replacement.
“Nobody, anywhere, works harder than Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” the president said in comments that followed the congresswoman’s staunch defense of the Obama administration’s record on issues of concern to women.
Biden also defended the DNC chair, saying, “If we want anybody to do that 60 seconds or 120 seconds we get to respond to some attack on the president or on the administration, the best person…is always Debbie.”
As the principal architect of the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark law enacted 20 years ago, Biden enjoys a solid reputation among women voters. However, he committed a gaffe Friday when, in his remarks before the mostly female crowd, he praised the moderation of a number of Republican senators with whom he used to collaborate on legislation – and specifically named former Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, who was forced to resign in 1995 amid multiple allegations of sexually harassment.
Polls show no clear trend lines for women voters in key races for the Senate, where Republicans need to win six seats to reclaim majority control of the chamber. Some analysts argue that that bodes well for the GOP, because it shows Democratic candidates are not enjoying the kind of lopsided support from women that they may need in order to offset traditional Republican strength among male voters.
With videos of the beheadings of two American journalists driving fears about the deteriorating state of the Middle East, and U.S. military forces preparing for war against the terrorist army known as ISIS, one female conservative suggested this election cycle will witness the return of “security moms” – female voters distrustful of Democrats on national security issues.
“After all of the unraveling around the world this summer with President Obama’s foreign policy – in the Middle East, with ISIS, in Russia, new relationships with China – we see that unraveling is unsettling to women,” said Gayle Trotter,an attorney and senior fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington. “More women are saying now that foreign policy is something that they’re very concerned about for the midterm elections.”