Connie Brennan and Del. Watkins Abbitt are neck-and-neck in fundraising, with $124k raised apiece. Abbitt has never had a substantial challenger before — I can’t imagine that the next few months are going to be a whole lot of fun for him. Connie, on the other hand, should be having a blast — things appear to be going swimmingly.
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Just curious: The blurb says Abbitt is a Dem turned Independent. Which side does he caucus with?
That is pretty awesome.
Lloyd over at Democratic Central,
http://www.democraticcentral.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=4FB6E2225AC06E64FD90A7FCCB10FB7E?diaryId=640
He outlines the difference in where the the two are getting their money: pretty much all of Connie’s money comes from individuals, where Abbit’s money came from American Electric Power, Anthem, Citigroup, Norfolk Southern, and so on.
I am told that he doesn’t actually caucus with the Republicans, but he gets his Committee assignments through them. So he is effectively a Republican, which is why we’re running a Democrat against him.
Somebody recently made the point (maybe it was you, Lloyd) that a good test of somebody’s party alignment is which party challenges him. In Abbitt’s case, the very idea of Republicans running somebody against him is laughable. But this is the second election running that a Democrat has challenged him, to nobody’s surprise.
Thanks. I feel a little stoopid for not realizing that the party challenging the incumbent may shed some light as to where the incumbent’s sympathies lie. Knowing about Abbitt seems to make the HoD a de facto 58-40-2 body. Any idea about the other two independents in the HoD, Lacey Putney and Someone Else?
Lacey Putney is very much aligned with the Republicans. Like Del. Abbitt, he’s being challenged by a Democrat. The third independent, Katherine Waddell, I’ve certainly gathered that she’s more like a Democrat than a Republican. But some of my Democratic friends lament that she’s a Republican after all, and want to see her challenged, which has just left me confused.
All of this strikes me as making it all the more necessary for me to finish adding the party allegiance metric on Richmond Sunlight, so that we can see where somebody sits on an ideological scale, w/r/t their votes.
I just crunched the numbers (accurately, I hope), and it looks like Waddell voted the same as Bill Howell in 93% of floor votes last session, but the same as Frank Hall in just 89% of votes, meaning that she voted with Republicans 4% more often than Democrats. That might not sound like much of a margin, but there are just so many bills that pass unanimously or close to it that it’s bigger than you might suspect. Del. Kilgore, for instance, voted with Republicans 10% more than he voted with Democrats.
There’s no guarantee that these numbers are right — this is very much a work in progress — but having reviewed the numbers for about 30 members of the GA now, they do seem to make some sort of sense.