Category Archives: House

Chaffetz to Retire; Cruz Down

By Jim Ellis

April 21, 2017 — Five-term Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Alpine/Sandy) announced Wednesday that he will surprisingly retire from the House at the end of the current term. Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, says he wants to return to the private sector and devote the rest of this time in Congress to completing his open investigations. The congressman said he may well run for public office again, but not in 2018. When asked about him entering the impending open 2020 gubernatorial race, Chaffetz joked that he is a “definite maybe.”

Rep. Chaffetz becomes the 14th House incumbent who will not be on the ballot for the next election, including the four remaining special congressional elections. At least another 15 members are reportedly considering seeking a different elective office, or outright retirement. Nine of the previously mentioned 14 are Republicans.

Utah’s 3rd Congressional District is safely Republican. President Trump took the district with 47.2 percent of the vote, while Hillary Clinton actually placed third, just behind Independent Evan McMullin at 23.3 percent. The 3rd was one of Mitt Romney’s strongest districts in the entire country. In 2012, he defeated President Obama, 78-19 percent, in this CD. Reviewing the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain won here with a 68-30 percent margin.

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GA-6: Ossoff vs. Handel

By Jim Ellis

April 20, 2017 — Democrat Jon Ossoff came within a relative whisker of capturing the 6th District special election contest last night against 17 other candidates. In an election night that featured a laboriously slow count from Fulton County, Georgia, which experienced technical problems throughout the day, Ossoff tallied 48.1 percent of the vote, just two points away from winning the seat.

Turnout was unusually high for a special election, and the 6th will likely have the highest participation factor of the five special congressional contests occurring throughout the early summer. With the vote totals still a bit sketchy because of the Fulton County problems, and final tallies potentially changing, it appears that just over 192,000 voters will have cast ballots. Compare this to the 28,731 who voted in the California special congressional election on April 4, and the 120,897 participants in the Kansas special held last week. In the regular 2016 general election, 326,005 individuals voted in the congressional election.

Karen Handel, the Republican former Secretary of State placed a solid second and advances to the June 20 run-off election with Ossoff. Her percentage of just about 20 percent almost doubled the vote of the third place finisher, businessman and local city councilman Bob Gray.

Most of the polls released before the special jungle primary appeared flawed because they were not listing all of the candidates. Thus, there was some potential that the surveys over-stated Ossoff’s strength, but such was not the case. They also consistently showed the four competitive Republicans are closely bunched together in low double-digits, but Handel distinctly out-performed most of those estimates.

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GA-6 Today

By Jim Ellis

April 18, 2017 — Voters in the northern Atlanta suburbs go to the polls today, and if a new Opinion Savvy survey is correct, Democrat Jon Ossoff will easily claim the first run-off position but will fall well short of claiming an outright victory in Georgia.

Since Rep. Tom Price (R-Roswell) was nominated as President Trump’s Secretary of Health & Human Services, the Democrats have been investing heavily into the replacement special election, believing that they have a shot to convert this historically reliable Republican district. Their hopes were buoyed in finding that President Trump scored only a 1.5 percentage point win over Hillary Clinton within the 6th District boundaries.

Though five Democrats are on tomorrow’s ballot, the party has coalesced around investigative filmmaker and former congressional aide Ossoff. It is apparent that he is the strongest individual candidate, but the combined Republican number still outpaces him.

The new Opinion Savvy data (April 13; 437 GA-6-weighted likely voters) is very similar to one they conducted over the March 22-23 period. The OS surveys likely provide our best glimpse into the race because the firm is the only polling operation that has included the names of all 18 candidates on their survey questionnaire. Because the entire field is so large, the other pollsters have given their sampling group members only an abbreviated list of individuals from which to choose.

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New GA-6 Data

By Jim Ellis

April 17, 2017 — With the KS-4 special election just concluding last week, we now turn our attention to the imminent Georgia congressional primary. Voters in the northern Atlanta suburbs head to the polls for next week’s much-anticipated electoral contest scheduled for Tuesday, April 18.

While the hot early polling pace has seemingly dissipated for an election that will eventually produce a replacement for Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price in his vacated congressional district, the RHH Elections firm just released a fresh set of numbers.

Once more, however, we are examining a methodologically flawed survey, but the polling conclusion again proves consistent with other previously released data.

RHH Elections – identified as a group of eight unnamed lobbyists who are conducting an independent poll for this race – uses a combination of survey methods, neither of which included personal interviews with the individual respondents. The RHH survey (April 5-10; 321 likely GA-6 voters; 75 percent IVR; 25 percent online respondents) was conducted questioning participants through an interactive voice response system supplemented with online responses. Therefore, the sample’s error factor is a serious issue, and likely greater than the 5 percent estimated in the pollsters’ analysis.

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Kansas Expectations

By Jim Ellis

April 11, 2017 — Today is Election Day in Kansas’ 4th Congressional District, the Wichita-anchored seat left vacant when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo (R) was appointed CIA Director. Republican state Treasurer Ron Estes is favored over Democratic attorney James Thompson in a race that is only now catching some national attention.

Neither candidate has been strong on the fundraising circuit. The national Democrats have done next to nothing for Thompson, not believing he had a chance to win the strongly Republican district. The GOP apparatus has come in late to run ads painting Thompson as an extremist, particularly in the area of abortion, and possibly indicating that internal data is not showing Estes in as strong a position as necessary from their perspective.

Media stories have been trying to paint the race as close, quoting GOP strategists as admitting the contest could be within single digits.

Trying to place realistic expectations around the outcome tonight, the GOP’s Estes should win with a victory percentage in the high 50s. Though some may believe Estes’ margin should be greater, the average vote percentages and the overlay of other races suggests that a GOP win in the 56-59 percent range would mean the campaign performed in accordance with historical voting trends.

An Estes winning percentage under 55 percent, however, will lead to Democrats and the media proclaiming that Thompson’s better-than-expected showing is reflective of national disapproval with President Trump and the Republican Congress. They will begin to draw parallels between the KS-4 result and how such developing trends will continue for the coming three special elections in the other vacated Republican US House districts.

There is little chance that Thompson wins the race. The Republican registration advantage here is 20 percentage points and unless the party turnout drops well below normal special election levels, Estes will be victorious.

Early voting does not indicate a Republican turnout drought. According to election officials, approximately 13,000 ballots from registered Republicans have been returned as compared to just over 10,000 for Democrats. Some 3,400 ballots have come from unaffiliated, or Independent, voters.

KS-4: Special Election

By Jim Ellis

April 11, 2017 –National Republicans are investing in media and digital ads at the very end of the Kansas special congressional election cycle in order to infuse energy into what has been a lackluster campaign effort from GOP nominee Ron Estes.

The 4th District of Kansas contains 16 south-central Sunflower State counties and a sliver of Pawnee County. Sedgwick County, home to the city of Wichita, is the population anchor (70 percent of the congressional district population resides in this local entity).

Since the 1936 elections, only one Democratic congressional candidate has won here: former Rep. Dan Glickman, first elected in 1976. He would serve nine consecutive terms before falling to defeat in 1994. Republican Todd Tiahrt unseated Rep. Glickman that year, and held the seat for an additional eight terms until departing for an unsuccessful US Senate run. In 2010, businessman Mike Pompeo won a crowded Republican primary to capture the seat. President Trump’s selection of Rep. Pompeo as CIA director opened the district for today’s special election.

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The Gloves Come Off in GA-6

By Jim Ellis

April 7, 2017 — National fundraising has exploded in the GA-6 special election, especially for the Democrats. Candidate Jon Ossoff (D), who has won unanimous support from national liberal groups, reports now raising more than $8 million for his special election campaign. Republicans have already spent over $4 million, meaning that this campaign will likely set a national record for special election expenditures.

Democrats believe their chances of electing investigative filmmaker Ossoff are strong, while Republicans are countering with a barrage of heavy media attack ads designed to tarnish the highly touted candidate’s image. (See example below)

Georgia’s 6th District is a traditionally Republican north Atlanta suburban seat that Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price represented since his original election in 2004. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) were the previous incumbents.

The Dems find themselves in a position of having a candidate around whom they can coalesce while the Republicans see five serious candidates within a field of 11. As we have reported several times, all polling shows Ossoff leading the race in the 40 percent range, but it is highly unlikely that he can touch the 50 percent threshold in order to win the seat outright on April 18. If not, then he and the top vote-getting Republican will advance to a June 20 run-off election. Polls show dead-heat ballot test pairings between Ossoff and the strongest Republican candidates.

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