Newspapers Heart Hagan
Of all of this year’s Senate races, the one that’s most taken me by surprise is the Dole-Hagan race in North Carolina. Right out of the starting get, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire were understood to be solid pickup opportunities. And Oregon and Minnesota (along with Maine, which now looks very safe for the GOP) are classic instances of going after GOP incumbents in solid blue states in a bad year for Republicans. Then there’s Alaska where obviously Ted Stevens’ legal problems were going to create problems with him. And then you’ve got some longshot races in Kentucky and Georgia. But Hagan doesn’t fit those models and her race isn’t a longshot at this point — she’s clearly favored. It’s a turn of events that’s really taken DC by surprise.
I’m not sure exactly how to account for it, but her impressive string of newspaper endorsements does seem noteworthy. Conventional wisdom has it that these endorsements don’t matter, but part of that is probably because most newspaper endorsements are pretty predictable. Something like the Washington Post, which always endorses the Democratic presidential nominee, endorsing the Democratic presidential nominee despite having tilted somewhat more to the right in recent years passes for noteworthy. But the solidity with which Hagan has picked up endorsements — every paper in the state that’s endorsed so far — suggests something well-beyond picking up the predictable sources of support. And one can see how that kind of thing could be a big boost to a candidate who didn’t start out with great statewide name recognition or a strong financial backing.
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Hagan and Transit
Like Atrios, I haven’t really paid any attention to the North Carolina Senate race and thus don’t know anything about it beyond the fact that Democratic challenger Kay Hagan seems to have an improbably good chance of winning. So I thought I might poke around at her website, and she turns out to be . . . a mass transit advocate just like me like and Atrios. Her energy plan devotes substantial space to the idea that increased investments in mass transit infrastructure will boost economic growth while also helping to clean up the environment.
An economic downturn is the best time to start working on the big new infrastructure projects that, among other things, will partially determine the contours of future growth when the next upswing begins. It’d be really nice for the country to be smart about this stuff if, as seems likely to me, we have a renewed push for economic stimulus early next year.
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