The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Matt Booker, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● TX-34, TX-15: Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who currently represents Texas’ 15th Congressional District, says he might seek re-election in the 34th District, where Rep. Filemon Vela, a fellow Democrat, is retiring.

In comments to Politico, Gonzalez said that “a large portion of my constituency” would move from the 15th to the 34th under a new map proposed by Republicans, but the word “large” is doing a lot of work there: According to calculations from Daily Kos Elections, 23% of the population of the new 34th would come from the old 15th, while the rest—77%— would come from the old 34th. That is to say, the vast majority of the district will remain the same.

But should the new map pass and Gonzalez switch seats, such a development would come as unwelcome news for Texas Democrats. The revamped 34th would have gone for Joe Biden 57-42 but the neighboring 15th would in fact have voted for Donald Trump 51-48. That considerable difference in difficulty undoubtedly is playing a role in Gonzalez’s thinking, though from the party’s perspective, Democrats would much prefer to defend the 15th with an incumbent already known to most voters rather than as an open seat.

Campaign Action

Thanks to Vela’s departure, though, there’s already one Democrat running in the 34th, ACLU attorney Rochelle Garza, and others could join, including state Rep. Alex Dominguez, who says he’s “seriously considering” a bid. Vela says he’d support Gonzalez if he were to run in the 34th.

Redistricting

● IN Redistricting: Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed new congressional and legislative maps on Monday that were passed by fellow Republicans in the legislature late last week. The maps ensure outsize dominance for the GOP through partisan gerrymandering, as we detailed in our earlier coverage.

3Q Fundraising

● AZ-Sen: Blake Masters (R): $1 million raised

● CA-Sen: Alex Padilla (D-inc): $1.7 million raised

● OH-Sen: Morgan Harper (D): $533,000 raised (in six weeks)

● PA-Sen: John Fetterman (D): $2.68 million raised, $4.2 million cash-on-hand

● IA-01: Liz Mathis (D): $640,000 raised, $550,000 cash-on-hand

● IL-13: Nikki Budzinski (D): $455,000 raised (in five weeks)

● NH-01: Matt Mowers (R): $450,000 raised (in one month); Karoline Leavitt (R): $333,000 raised, $255,000 cash-on-hand

● WI-03: Derrick Van Orden (R): $1 million raised

Senate

● CO-Sen: Republican state Rep. Ron Hanks, a vocal proponent of the Big Lie who attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., has announced that he’ll run for Senate next year. Hanks, a first-term lawmaker, marched on the Capitol following Donald Trump’s speech but claims he did not enter the building. Earlier this year, he led a push for an unsuccessful “no confidence” vote in House Minority Leader Hugh McKean, just weeks after reportedly threatening McKean that he would “break your neck.”

Hanks has run for federal office once before, albeit in a different state: In 2010, he challenged Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson in what was then numbered California’s 1st Congressional District, getting crushed 63-31. He joins Air Force veteran Eli Bremer in the GOP primary to take on Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet next year.

● KS-Sen: Former Kansas City Mayor Mark Holland is reportedly planning to challenge Republican Sen. Jerry Moran next year and has filed paperwork to do so, though he hasn’t publicly commented yet. Holland, a Democrat, served a single term as the head of Kansas’ third-largest city but lost re-election in 2018 in an upset.

Kansas remains the state with by far the longest run of electing a single party to the Senate, as no Democrat has won here since 1932. (Three other states are tied with streaks dating to 1970.) Last year, Democrats were particularly optimistic about their chances thanks to shifting demographics and an open seat, but state Sen. Barbara Bollier lost to Rep. Roger Marshall by a 53-42 margin.

● NV-Sen, NV-Gov: The Nevada Independent is the first media organization to release a survey of next year’s general elections, and it finds both Democratic incumbents, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Gov. Steve Sisolak, with small leads 13 months out. The poll was conducted by the Mellman Group, which normally does work for Democratic campaigns but has been employed by the Independent for years: Reporter Jon Ralston, who founded the nonpartisan news site in 2017, explained that same year that he’d tapped pollster Mark Mellman because of his strong record in hard-to-poll Nevada, especially ahead of then-Sen. Harry Reid’s upset 2010 victory.

To the numbers: Cortez Masto posts a 45-41 lead over Adam Laxalt, the 2018 GOP nominee for governor who should have no trouble winning the Senate primary. Those numbers are a bit different from Laxalt’s recent internal from WPA Intelligence, which showed him ahead 39-37, though both firms find things tight here.

Mellman, meanwhile, has Sisolak leading former Sen. Dean Heller 46-43, while he enjoys a smaller 45-44 edge against Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo. The firm also gives us our first look at the GOP primary and shows Heller, who like Laxalt lost statewide in 2018, with a 31-23 advantage against Lombardo. In third place with 11% is Joey Gilbert, whom we hadn’t mentioned before. The former boxer spoke at the infamous Jan. 6 Trump rally in D.C., but he claims he didn’t enter the Capitol during the ensuing attack. Far behind in fourth place with just 3% of the vote is North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, a conservative Democrat-turned-Republican.

While all of the candidates Mellman tested have launched campaigns, there’s still one notable Republican name who’s still flirting with running. Rep. Mark Amodei, who is the Silver State’s only Republican member of Congress, said days before this poll was released that he was “torn" about whether to run for re-election or take on Sisolak. Amodei, who said he planned to decide during the final week of October, didn’t sound impressed by his would-be primary foes, arguing, “If you run for governor, you’ve got to come with something other than … ‘Hey, I don’t like the way [Sisolak] handled COVID.'”

● UT-Sen: Former CIA officer Evan McMullin, who ran as a conservative third-party alternate to Donald Trump in 2016, will reportedly challenge Republican Sen. Mike Lee as an independent next year, with an announcement “likely to come soon.” McMullin, a Utah native, took just 0.5% nationwide but turned in his best performance in his home state with 21% of the vote, thanks in part to distaste for Donald Trump among some Mormon voters.

Lee was one of those conservatives who initially shared that distaste, calling on Trump to quit after the “Access Hollywood” tapes surfaced. But just like countless Republican officials across the country, Lee soon grew compliant and became a reliable Trump sycophant. Many of his constituents also made their peace with Trump, giving him 57% of the vote last year—a sizable jump from his 45% share in 2016—so it’s unlikely there’s a big appetite for dumping Lee on account of his obeisance.

Governors

● IL-Gov: Venture capitalist Jesse Sullivan launched his first TV spot on Saturday, well ahead of next year’s GOP primary, which his campaign says will run for five weeks on a “variety of cable networks and times of day.” Sullivan, who served in Afghanistan as a uniformed civilian aiding the armed forces, tells the audience, “Growing up in central Illinois, I learned these core values of faith, family and service.” Democratic incumbent J.B. Pritzker began his own early ad campaign back in July.

● NY-Gov: State Attorney General Tish James continues to tease a possible challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul in next year’s Democratic primary. At a Democratic event late last week in upstate New York, James told attendees “that day is coming very, very soon when I need to make a decision” about her “future plans.” The New York Times’ Katie Glueck adds that James has “made it clear” to supporters that she’s “weighing a bid and is nearing a final decision.”

Meanwhile, state party chair Jay Jacobs has endorsed Hochul’s bid for a full term, saying he wanted to deter more liberal challengers. While it’s normally de rigueur for party officials to back their own incumbents, Jacobs was an extreme Andrew Cuomo loyalist who only turned against the former governor just before his resignation, so his support for Hochul is a signal that she’s wrested the party apparatus from Cuomo’s control.

● RI-Gov: WPRI’s Ted Nesi notes that former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, who was the GOP’s nominee for governor in both 2014 and 2018 and had been considering a third bid, was just hired as an adviser to help Rhode Island manage funds received from the American Rescue Plan Act by Democratic Gov. Dan McKee. It seems unlikely that McKee would tap someone for a lucrative contract like this who might then turn around and run against him next year, so this may mean that Fung is no longer eyeing the governor’s race. In fact, says Nesi, Fung is now looking at a campaign for state treasurer, a post that’s open because Democrat Seth Magaziner (who himself is running for governor) is term-limited.

House

● CA-37: Culver City Vice Mayor Daniel Lee has filed paperwork with the FEC ahead of a possible bid for California’s open 37th Congressional District, which is open because Democratic Rep. Karen Bass is running for mayor of Los Angeles. Lee ran in a special election for the state Senate earlier this year but lost in a 69-13 blowout to fellow Democrat Sydney Kamlager.

● CO-08: Adams County Commissioner Chaz Tedesco entered the race for Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District on Monday, making him the second notable candidate after state Rep. Yadira Caraveo to join the Democratic primary. The state’s new independent redistricting commission recently signed off on a new House map but it’s still awaiting review by the state Supreme Court. The proposed 8th, located in the Denver suburbs, would be a swingy district that would have gone 51-46 for Joe Biden last year but 46-45 for Donald Trump in 2016.

● MI-08: Real estate agent and election conspiracy theorist Mike Detmer has dropped his second bid for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District and will instead run against Republican state Sen. Lana Theis in next year’s primary. To the extent Detmer counted as notable (he did make headlines last year for a Facebook post defending the Proud Boys), Republicans now lack any prominent candidates challenging Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, though redistricting remains unresolved.

● NE-01: This is very strange: Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry put up, then took down, a fundraising page for a legal defense fund claiming, “Biden’s FBI is using its unlimited power to prosecute me on a bogus charge!” As far as anyone knows, Fortenberry hasn’t been charged with anything, though as Axios noted, his campaign did pay $25,000 to a white collar criminal defense firm in June.

After Axios’ report appeared, a spokesperson claimed that Fortenberry was raising money to pay off expenses incurred during an FBI investigation of Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury, who used straw donors to illegally funnel $180,000 to four different Republican candidates, including the congressman. The aide said that “no charges were filed against” Fortenberry, who “never saw or approved the language on that website.” (Chagoury agreed to pay a $1.8 million fine earlier this year but avoided jail time.)

Fortenberry doesn’t usually make much electoral news, since his 1st Congressional District isn’t normally competitive turf—though it will become a little bluer under the state’s new map, going from a 56-41 win for Donald Trump to a smaller 54-43 margin. The last time he was in the headlines, though, it was also for something bizarre: His chief of staff tried to threaten the job of a local professor who in 2018 “liked” a Facebook post featuring a photo of a Fortenberry campaign sign that had been doctored to give the candidate googly eyes and rename him “Fartenberry.”

● PA-18: WPXI’s Rick Earle reports that state Rep. Summer Lee is “planning” to challenge Rep. Mike Doyle in next year’s Democratic primary, according to unnamed sources. Lee, an attorney and community organizer, has experience going up against Democratic incumbents: In 2018, she demolished state Rep. Paul Costa by a 68-32 margin and won the general election unopposed, making her the first Black woman from southwestern Pennsylvania to serve in the legislature.

Lee hasn’t yet spoken about a possible campaign against Doyle or why she might want to seek his ouster, though in her campaign against Costa, she ran with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America on a platform in favor of single-payer health insurance and opposed to fracking. She also argued that Costa, who’d first won office in 1998, had fallen out of touch with his district, calling him “a victim of the Democratic establishment because he was part of it.”

● WI-03: State Sen. Brad Pfaff announced on Monday that he’d run for Wisconsin’s open 3rd Congressional District, giving Democrats their first prominent candidate in the race. Pfaff, a former staffer for retiring Rep. Ron Kind, was tapped by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as his agriculture secretary in January of 2019, a move that allowed him to begin serving right away. However, he was ousted from his job by the GOP-led Senate that November when Republicans voted to reject his confirmation, a move that Evers called “absolute bullshit.”

Republicans claimed new rules Pfaff planned to promulgate for manure storage, intended to mitigate odors and contamination, would hurt farmers, despite the fact that Pfaff enjoyed the support of a number of agriculture groups. Democrats, including Evers, countered that the real reason Republicans booted Pfaff was because he’d criticized the legislature for failing to release $100,000 in funds aimed at preventing suicide among farmers. (The money was eventually disbursed.)

Following his ouster, Pfaff ran for the state Senate to succeed Democrat Jennifer Shilling, who’d defeated Republican Dan Kapanke in the 2011 recalls. Kapanke had actually beaten Pfaff in the very same district back in 2004 by a 53-47 margin when the seat was last open; a dozen years later, he just barely came short in a comeback bid against Shilling, losing by 61 votes. Shilling later resigned to become an energy lobbyist, but Kapanke failed in his second comeback attempt last year, losing to Pfaff 50.3 to 49.7.

Pfaff is likely to face off against Republican Derrick Van Orden, who lost to Kind 51-49 last year and is trying once more. Van Orden has come under attack for spending campaign funds to attend the Jan. 6 insurrectionist rally in D.C., when, it appears, he went inside a restricted area on the Capitol grounds. It’s this topic Pfaff hits in the first seconds of his launch video, when he wryly says, “Life was a little different when I grew up on a farm. We saved our pitchforks for lifting hay—not for storming Congress.”

Secretaries of State

● MI-SoS: State Rep. Beau LaFave announced Monday that he was joining the Republican race for the right to take on Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. LaFave will face Kristina Karamo, an election conspiracy theorist who has Donald Trump’s endorsement, and Plainfield Township Clerk Cathleen Postmus at the GOP’s April nominating convention.

Mayors

● Buffalo, NY Mayor: Incumbent Byron Brown, who is trying to keep his job in the Nov. 2 general election as a write-in candidate, outraised Democrat India Walton $831,000 to $442,000 from July 12 to Sept. 27 and ended the period with a $464,000 to $360,000 cash-on-hand lead.

Walton, for her part, recently began her general election TV ad campaign. In her 60-second spot, she narrates, “Buffalo. A city with a lot of pride and a few too many bad headlines out of City Hall: indictments, corruption, mismanagement—that’s not who we are. I’m India Walton, and I’m running to change all that.”

Deaths

● Former Rep. Todd Akin, the six-term Republican whose comments about “legitimate rape” almost certainly cost him the 2012 Missouri Senate race after he refused his party’s pleas to end his campaign against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill, died Sunday at the age of 74.

Akin’s downfall became a cautionary tale well before the election was over, though the ex-congressman was hardly chastened: He published a memoir in 2014 retracting his original apology, and he even considered a primary bid against Sen. Roy Blunt the following year.

Akin got his start in elected office in 1988 when he won a seat in the Missouri state House, quickly establishing himself as an ardent anti-abortion crusader. He sought a promotion in 2000 when he ran to succeed Republican Rep. Jim Talent, who was on his way towards losing a close race for governor, in what was then the reliably red 2nd Congressional District in the St. Louis suburbs. Akin ended up winning the crowded GOP primary by edging out former St. Louis County Executive Gene McNary 25.9-25.8, a margin of 56 votes; Akin would later credit bad weather for his tight win, arguing that his supporters were more motivated to turn out.

The elements, though, had nothing to do with Akin’s primary victory 12 years later in the race to take on McCaskill, who’d become one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate thanks to Missouri’s continuing lurch to the right. The incumbent, as she would write in her 2015 memoir, believed that the hardline Akin would be a considerably weaker general election foe than his two main intra-party rivals, businessman John Brunner and former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, inspiring her to take an uncommonly active role in helping him secure the nomination.

McCaskill’s campaign would spend $1.7 million during the final four weeks of the primary, which she noted was more than Akin spent in total to secure the GOP nod, on ads calling him “pro-family” and “too conservative"—messages calculated to make Republicans like him more. McCaskill wasn’t the first or the last politico to try to manipulate the other side’s primary this way, but she went further than these ads, and almost anyone else before her, by passing advice to Akin.

The senator would write that her team was dismayed after Akin pulled a strong TV spot featuring an endorsement from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in favor of a bizarre low-budget commercial in which Akin mused about “flames of freedom.” McCaskill detailed how, after she informed Akin through backchannels that her polls showed the switch was a disaster, the two campaigns ended up talking directly. After her pollster shared their findings “in broad generalities,” Akin’s Huckabee commercial returned to the airwaves just three hours later. The intervention worked, as the congressman ended up beating Brunner 36-30.

Even McCaskill, though, couldn’t anticipate just how disastrous Akin would be for the GOP. Weeks after the primary, he made international news when he explained his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape by saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The backlash came immediately, and influential Republicans, including presidential nominee Mitt Romney, universally urged Akin to drop out so they could select a better candidate.

Akin didn’t listen, however, and national Republicans largely left him for dead. But not all of Team Red was done with their radioactive candidate, as the NRSC quietly directed $760,000 to aid him late in the campaign when some polls showed a close race. Unlike McCaskill’s covert interference, though, this did little good for Akin: While Romney carried the Show Me State 54-44, McCaskill won by a surprisingly dominant 55-39, a far greater margin than the polling prophesied.