FL-15: National political parties are piling into race

As expected, both national political parties are piling into the Congressional District 15 race, viewed as the Democrats' best chance in Florida to flip a GOP-held U.S. House seat.

This week, the Democratic Party’s House campaign arm put their candidate, Alan Cohn, on its exclusive Red to Blue program, which can provide a candidate substantial financial and other help.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy showed up for a fundraiser backing GOP candidate Scott Franklin and suggested he’ll provide fundraising help so Franklin will no longer have to self-fund his campaign.

While McCarthy was at the fundraiser Sunday at Tampa’s Palma Ceia Country Club, a crowd of about 75 Democrats showed up to protest outside, after rumors incorrectly said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was attending.

They stayed for about an hour carrying signs saying “Ditch Mitch” and “No SCOTUS Before POTUS,” a reference to McConnell’s announced plans to quickly replace the late Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

A wealthy insurance executive and Lakeland city commissioner, Franklin has spent $400,000 of his own money on the race, mainly in the primary in which he unseated incumbent Republican Ross Spano.



https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2020/09/26/national-political-parties-are-piling-into-local-congressional-district-15-race/

GOP asks Supreme Court to halt mail voting extension in Pennsylvania

Republicans on Monday asked the Supreme Court to halt a major Pennsylvania state court ruling that extended the due date for mail ballots in the key battleground, teeing up the first test for the high court since the death of its liberal leader Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The filing comes after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the GOP in an election lawsuit that could help shape the race between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the Keystone State, which the president won by just over 44,000 votes in 2016.

The Pennsylvania court’s decision earlier this month requires election officials to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day, as long as they arrive within three days. The ruling was seen as a win for Democrats, since Biden voters are more likely than Trump supporters to vote by mail in November.

n their Monday filing, top officials from Pennsylvania’s GOP-held legislature asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the ruling while they formally appeal to the justices.

“In the middle of an ongoing election, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has altered the rules of the election and extended the 2020 General Election beyond the 'Time' established by the state legislature,” they wrote. “In doing so, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has violated federal law and the federal Constitution.”




https://thehill.com/regulation/518591-gop-asks-supreme-court-to-halt-mail-voting-extension-in-pennsylvania

Democrats have raised more than $300M since Ginsburg's death

Democrats have raised more than $300 million in small-dollar donations for candidates and progressive causes since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, an ActBlue spokesperson told The Hill on Monday.

ActBlue had already announced that Democratic candidates had received more than $91 million in 28 hours after the Supreme Court announced Ginsburg’s death on Sept. 18.

Swing Left, a Democratic group that aims to flip the Senate to Democratic control, told The Hill that it has raised more than $2.6 million for Senate candidates and more than $1.7 million for state legislative races since Ginsburg's passing.

The group says that, for the entire election cycle, it has raised more than $18 million from grassroots donors.

Catherine Vaughan, the co-executive director of Swing Left, told CNN that donations usually ramp up closer to Election Day, but the justice’s death sparked a flood of contributions.




https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/518621-democrats-have-raised-more-than-300-million-since-ginsburgs-death

Voter registration spiked in days immediately following Ruth Bader Ginsburg death

Voter registration and mail-in ballot requests spiked in the days following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to a report by NBC News.

Vote.org, a nonpartisan non-profit organization, tells NBC News that it saw a surge of requests the weekend following Ginsburg's death, with 139,046 registration verifications, or a 118 percent increase compared to the previous weekend.

It's website has tools that let voters double-check that their registration is still active, register to vote and request a mail-in-ballot. It also includes information on voting laws and how to find polling places.
The site also saw 41,000 new voter registrations the weekend of Ginsburg's death, a 68 percent jump from the previous week, and 35,000 mail-in ballot requests, which marked a 42 percent spike.

“I think it means that people are paying attention, that there's a younger generation that's definitely paying attention,” Vote.org CEO Andrea Hailey told NBC News. “With 30 some-odd days left to go, people are connecting these major moments in American history with action at the ballot box.”



https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/518655-voter-registration-spiked-in-days-immediately-following-ruth-bader-ginsburg

Statistic shows Democrats' strength in Texas battlegrounds

ANALYSIS — After all the hype and money surrounding Beto O’Rourke last cycle, Democrats came away from Texas with just two more House seats than usual. Two years later, Democrats are seriously competing in a handful of House seats due to the strength of their candidates and the weakness of President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.

It’s true that many of the Democratic nominees in the most competitive Texas races lost in 2018. But not only is that not an insurmountable résumé item, but it’s a metric that quantifies each candidate’s value. And Democrats have some valuable candidates in Texas, including Mike Siegel (10th District), Sri Preston Kulkarni (22nd), Gina Ortiz Jones (23rd), and Julie Oliver (25th).

Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, measures the strength of a political candidate relative to a typical candidate from the same party by comparing the percentage of the candidate’s vote to the party’s Baseline. Baseline is the trimmed mean of each party’s performance in partisan, contested statewide elections over the four most recent general election cycles.

After the 2018 elections, Kulkarni had a 7.4 VAR, followed by Siegel (6.1), Oliver (5.8) and Ortiz Jones (2.6), which means they did that many points better than a typical Democratic candidate, accounting for the 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections.

For some perspective, this current class of U.S. senators includes a number of Republican rising stars with lower VAR scores, including Cory Gardner of Colorado (2.02), Joni Ernst of Iowa (1.41), Thom Tillis of North Carolina (-1.3), and Tom Cotton of Arkansas (-2.87). Those scores were tabulated compared to a Baseline that calculated results from the 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections.



https://rollcall.com/2020/09/28/statistic-shows-democrats-strength-in-texas-battlegrounds/

Police took 10 guns from Trump associate's Florida home after wife showed them bruises

Fort Lauderdale police confiscated 10 guns Sunday from the home of President Donald Trump’s former reelection campaign manager after his wife told them he was suicidal, hits her, and racked and loaded a handgun during an argument, according to newly released police reports.

Brad Parscale, 44, was involuntarily hospitalized under Florida’s Baker Act by officers and taken to Broward Health Medical Center Sunday after barricading himself in the $2.4 million home he shares in Fort Lauderdale’s Seven Isles with his wife, Candice. In reports released Monday, police documented a tense scene in which Parscale — after possibly firing a shot inside his house — refused to leave and was ultimately tackled by SWAT officers outside the home when he emerged shirtless with a beer in his hand.

“I initiated a double leg take down,” wrote Sgt. Matthew Moceri, one of the responding officers, noting that the 6-foot-8-inch Parscale towered over him and ignored his commands to get down.

Police have not charged Parscale with any crimes.

Officers say they were first called to the Parscale home around 3:36 p.m. Sunday by a neighbor who’d encountered Candice Parscale. When they arrived, police said the two women were in a parked car outside the couple’s home. Officers said Parscale’s wife told them the couple had been arguing and her husband had pulled out a handgun and loaded it.




https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article246062390.html#storylink=cpy

NE-02: Don Bacon leads Kara Eastman 45% to 43%

Biden leads Trump in NE-02

Wisconsin Is on the Brink of a Major Outbreak

In New York, the decisive moment came in March. In Arizona and other Sun Belt states, it struck as the spring turned to summer. In every state that has so far seen a large spike of COVID-19 cases, there has been a moment when the early signs of an uptick are detectable—but a monstrous outbreak is not yet assured. Can a state realize what’s happening, and stop a surge in time? Wisconsin is about to find out.

In the past week, Wisconsin has crashed through its own coronavirus records, reporting more cases and more COVID-19 hospitalizations than it has at any time since the pandemic began, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. It now ranks among the top states in new cases per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it is reporting more new cases, in absolute terms, than all states but California, Texas, and Florida.

Wisconsin’s outlook was deteriorating into the weekend. Yesterday, it reported more than 2,620 new cases of COVID-19, an all-time high. More than 540 people are hospitalized with the virus statewide.




https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/wisconsin-coronavirus-hotspot/616510/

It's trying to change the subject.