The Audience for GOP Debates

One reason why the GOP debates seem to matter more this year is that more people are watching them. Brian Stelter writes at The New York Times:

In September 2007, Fox News put Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani and a man who was, back then, a long shot for the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain, on a debate stage in New Hampshire. The face-off attracted 3.2 million viewers — the most of any debate so far that year.

This September, Fox’s debate — in Florida, with Mr. Romney, Mr. Paul and new names like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann — attracted almost twice as many viewers: 6.1 million, the highest so far this year. The very first televised Republican debate this spring attracted almost 3.3 million viewers, while the first debate in the spring of 2007 had 1.8 million.

California Campaign Finance News

Scott Lay reports at Around the Capitol (CA):

Tonight at midnight is the third quarter filing deadline for congressional candidates. As I wrote in Thursday's Nooner, this is an important period for several candidates. It will give an indication of whether some people who are testing the waters are in it to win it, may signal some retirements, and can shine the light on dark horses. This quarter's reports give us a little of each.

Anyway, not all reports are in, but I'm hopping on a plane back to Sacramento after several days in Dallas. I'll update the online version of this message tonight or tomorrow morning and I'll have more analysis in Monday's Nooner.

My quick take:

• The shocker: Lodi resident and UC Berkeley law student Ricky Gill raised $283,417 for his campaign against Jerry McNerney. He outraised and has more cash on hand than three-term incumbent McNerney.

...

The -ermans: Having the DreamWorks trio headlining your fundraising efforts pays off. Howard Berman reported raising $818,769 compared to Brad Sherman's $151,207. Sherman still has $1.5 million more on hand than Berman's $2.2 million, which should be enough to pay for a website redesign.

...

The retirees?: Dennis Cardoza gave the strongest sign that he's retiring, reporting only $23,150 raised and $62,472 cash on hand. David Dreier raised only $37,300, but has $774,464 on hand that he can use if he finds a district, and Jerry Lewis raised $43,750 and has 755,830 on hand.

A few weeks ago, The Washington Post profiled Gill and his fundraising prowess:

Much of that cash came from the Sikh community — where his parents are politically active — but also from small-busi­ness­ owners and residents of all stripes.

The impressive fundraising got Gill on the National Republican Congressional Committee’s ‘On the Radar’ list, and the party has been attacking McNerney with robocalls and ads.

Gill is downplaying his party affiliation — no surprise given the district’s Democratic tilt expected to materialize after redistricting.

The new bipartisan map will make the new 9th district about five points more Democratic — McNerney’s old 11th district was Republican-leaning, and he still survived the 2010 bloodbath. President Obama won the new 9th district by 15 percentage points in 2008.

Democrats will do everything they can to emphasize the R after Gill’s name.

The Hollywood Primary

There are some Republicans in the entertainment industry, but so far they are not flocking to a GOP presidential candidates. At Variety, Ted Johnson reports:

So far, Hollywood's reticence on the right is reflective of the herky-jerky nature of the race itself, where Mitt Romney looks like the front-runner, yet Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and now Herman Cain threaten to make him work hard for the nomination. Romney has garnered the support of such industry execs as Harry Sloan, and Cain has received the high-profile endorsement of comedian and radio host Dennis Miller, while such disparate figures as Vince Vaughn and Barry Manilow favor Ron Paul. But by and large, industry conservatives have yet to coalesce around a candidate.

Flash back four years ago at this point, and industry Republicans were lining up largely behind Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, who courted coin and endorsements from figures like Robert Duvall, Sylvester Stallone and Jerry Bruckheimer.

By contrast, the present GOP candidates have not been as aggressive in mining showbiz dollars and support. McCain and Giuliani, celebrities in their own right, had long-time Hollywood ties, while few in the current GOP field have that kind of cachet. The ones that do, like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, teased candidacies but chose not to run.

Hollywood Democrats, meanwhile, were hoping that Perry would do better. Tina Daunt writes at The Hollywood Reporter:

Rick Perry's supporters weren't the only ones disappointed with the Texas governor's shaky performance in the latest Republican presidential debate on Tuesday night. He also let down a very determined cadre of Hollywood politicos.

For weeks industry activists have been quietly rooting behind the scenes for a Perry victory in the Republican primary -- simply because they think he would be easy for President Obama to beat.

With Perry seemingly weakened (he was the subject of widespread Internet ridicule Tuesday night after he misstated the date of the American Revolution by two centuries), there is more work ahead than some Hollywood Dems had anticipated.

"What if it's a Romney/Christie ticket?" said one insider. "(New Jersey Gov. Chris) Christie could be wrongly seen by some as the Bill Clinton of the Republican Party."

Los Angeles veteran political consultant Bill Carrick had a bit of advice today for his fellow Democrats: "Everyone has to get over their complaining and suck it up and go to work."

Mostly Bad Numbers for POTUS

Most of the survey data and economic statistics this week are bad for the president:

Gallup reports:

U.S. registered voters, by 46% to 38%, continue to say they are more likely to vote for the Republican presidential candidate than for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. The generic Republican led by the same eight-percentage-point margin in September, and also held a lead in July. The August update, conducted just after an agreement to raise the federal debt limit, had Obama with a slight edge.

Ronald Brownstein writes at National Journal:

Just 44 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Obama’s performance as president—his lowest rating in the 10 Heartland Monitor polls conducted since April 2009. Likewise, the share of adults disapproving of his performance also reached a high at 50 percent. Those results reversed modest but consistent gains for Obama since his previous low point in the survey in August 2010. In the most recent survey, conducted last May in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid, Obama’s approval rating had edged up to 51 percent, with only 41 percent disapproving.

Equally ominous for the president: 70 percent of those polled in the new survey said that the country was on the wrong track. That’s a sharp increase just since the most recent Heartland Monitor in May—and by far the highest level of dissatisfaction over the country’s direction recorded in any of the 10 polls.

Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. government posted its third consecutive annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

The shortfall registered $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2011, up from $1.29 trillion in 2010 and the second-highest on record, according to Treasury Department data issued today in Washington. It reached $1.42 trillion in 2009, the highest ever. The September gap widened to $64.6 billion from $34.6 billion in the same month last year.

Reuters reports:

Consumer sentiment unexpectedly slumped in early October as worries about declining incomes drove consumer expectations back down to the lowest level in more than 30 years, a survey released on Friday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment sagged to 57.5 from 59.4 the month before. It fell short of the median forecast of 60.2 among economists polled by Reuters.

There were a couple of bright spots. Stocks are up, though in light of his planned attacks on Wall Street, the president probably will not tout that trend as a positive sign. An uptick in retail sales is probably the one unambiguous point of light.

Crossroads, Candidates, and Super PACs

Holly Bailey writes at Yahoo about a potential new wrinkle in campaign finance rules, courtesy of American Crossroads:

American Crossroads, a conservative "super PAC" linked to former Bush adviser Karl Rove, is asking the Federal Election Commission for permission to use federal candidates and office holders in its ads.

The request, filed Wednesday with the FEC, could potentially undermine campaign finance laws that have long prohibited direct coordination between outside groups and political candidates.

But in a letter sent to the FEC, attorneys for American Crossroads argue they are simply seeking permission to do what Democrats are already doing. As evidence, they site a series of recent campaign ads starring Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, in which he is shown explaining his votes on the debt ceiling and other hot button issues.

The spots look like campaign ads for Nelson, who is facing a tough path to re-election next year. But they were paid for by the Nebraska Democratic State Central Committee, an offshoot of the state Democratic party, with funds routed to the committee by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the fundraising arm of Senate Democrats in Washington.

Nicholas Confessore writes at The New York Times:

In a sign of the intensifying fight for control of the House, allies of Congressional Republicans are forming a new Super PAC to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to defend the G.O.P. majority next year.

The new group, the Congressional Leadership Fund, will be loosely affiliated with the American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy organization that spent about $26 million in 2010 to help Republicans win control of the House. The network’s founder, the businessman Fred V. Malek, will sit on the board of the new fund, and Brian Walsh, the network’s president and a former political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, will run it.

The arrangement mirrors that of the leading Republican-oriented independent group, American Crossroads, a group founded by Karl Rove that is paired with a nonprofit group, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies. The combination allows for more flexibility in raising and spending money: The Super PACs must disclose their donors but can advocate explicitly for or against a candidate, while the nonprofits may keep donors secret but are technically restricted to issue advocacy.

Perry's Basic Problem

Byron York offers the clearest explanation to date of why Romney is rolling and Perry is stumbling:

There's no doubt former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has thought a long, long time about being president. Romney can tell you, at any level of generality or detail you want, why he is running and what he would do if he won. He adjusts to new issues and questions by building on all the preparation he's already done.

For Romney, debate preparation involves taking all the things he has already thought through and finding the most effective way to present them in one-minute answers. For Perry, debate preparation is trying to learn new stuff about national issues that he should have been thinking about a long time ago.

It's often pointed out that since Perry entered the Republican race late, on Aug. 13, he had little time to build a campaign organization and hone a campaign pitch. That's true, but the fact is, if Perry wanted to be president, he should have been thinking seriously about the substance of national issues -- not just money-raising and state chairmen -- years before he declared his candidacy.

Now Perry is paying the price for that lack of preparation. And if that, in fact, is the real problem behind his poor debate performances, then he's not going to improve as a candidate in the next few weeks. It's far too late for that.

DeVore Goes Texan

Another Californian is departing for Texas. But this one is unusual. Chuck DeVore served in the California State Assembly, sought the 2010 GOP nomination to run against Barbara Boxer, and until recently, was running for a supervisorial seat in Orange County. He explains on his website:

As some of my friends know, our family has been caring for my aged in-laws, 86 and 82. As with many people who have seen a full life of war and work and raising a family, they need our help. This assistance has consumed our whole family – in fact, it’s the toughest thing – and the most important thing – we’ve done, even more so than running for statewide office.

In addition, as with many in the Golden State, I have found it hard to earn enough to support my family. My old aerospace clientele has fled to greener, less-expensive pastures. Combined with the drain on our savings caused by six years of public service in the Assembly, we have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is time to move.

The good news is that there are still other places in America where the taxes are lower and the regulations less onerous than here in California, my home for most of the past 36 years.

One such place is Texas.

It is there, I am pleased to announce, that I have accepted a position as Senior
Visiting Scholar for Fiscal Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. My first order of business is to write a book on the Texas Model of how low taxes and low government spending, a light and predictable regulatory environment, respect for property rights, and a business-friendly legal climate has turned Texas into America’s jobs generating dynamo. (In fact, as part of my research, I’ve noted that almost 2 million Californians moved out of the Golden State in the past ten years – Texas, with no income tax, having received the largest number of Californians.)