In an upsetting kind of year, there are bound to be more surprise upsets when votes actually are counted next week. So this is a good time to look ahead in an attempt to figure out where those final upsets might pop up.
Bryan Curtis on The Daily Beast offers up one potential shocker: Immigration hawk Tom Tamcerdo, running as a third-party candidate, could win the Colorado governor’s race:
Let’s stipulate that at least one wild and inexplicable event will occur on Election Night. Here’s a nominee: Tom Tancredo, a man whose immigration rhetoric was so rough that he was banned from the Bush White House, becomes governor of Colorado.
We feel fantastic,” Bay Buchanan, Tancredo’s campaign manager, said Tuesday. “We’ve gone from 14 points in August to the low 40s now. It’s a climb of nearly 30 points in a couple months.”
This is Posturing Week in American politics, and all numbers tend to be highly bogus. But in a year in which immigration has captured the public imagination, the notion of Governor Tancredo is gaining currency. An October 25 Public Policy Polling survey showed Tancredo three points behind the Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. That tracks with a Republican poll last week that showed Tancredo trailing by just one point among likely voters. A Denver Post poll from the weekend showed Hickenlooper with a 10-point lead.
John Rossomando of the Daily Caller suggests another potential upset coming out of the blue:
Democratic Rep. Jim Moran’s 8th Congressional District is considered the second bluest district in Virginia, and the 19-year incumbent has consistently demolished his GOP challengers, but internal polling conducted by his current GOP opponent’s campaign suggests this year could be different.
Republican candidate Col. Patrick Murray’s most recent internal numbers from the last four days show Moran leading with 32.3 percent compared with Murray’s 29.7 percent. 30.5 percent are shown to be undecided.
The Murray campaign’s internal numbers also suggest Moran has high negatives. A Sept. 22 poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates found Moran’s support at below 50 percent 6 with only 42 percent of those polled rating him as good or excellent and 41 percent rating him as fair or poor.
Meanwhile, there’s one race that was defying conventional wisdom because the vulnerable Democratic incumbent seemed to be in pretty good shape. Now, Michael Ames of Politics Daily says that picture may be changing:
The Idaho congressional race that had been defying national trends seems to be finally conforming. A new Mason-Dixon poll sponsored by seven Idaho newspapers shows conservative Republican challenger Raul Labrador pulling into a statistical dead heat with incumbent Blue Dog Democrat Walt Minnick. The poll has Minnick leading Labrador 44 to 41 percent, a seven point tightening since the last Mason-Dixon survey in mid-September.
The poll spells out explicitly what many insiders have been saying about this race for months 52; regardless of Minnick57;s wide leads in fundraising and name recognition, the freshman Democrat is an endangered incumbent in one of the most conservative districts in the country.
