“Americans are practical on immigration issues,” David Mermin, a partner at Lake Research Partners, said in a press release. “Americans support comprehensive immigration reform as a practical solution, even among a cranky electorate this year. Republican leaders thinking they have a  mandate to pursue enforcement-only approaches are really mistaken.”

In the poll, interestingly, most members of both parties said they supported comprehensive immigration reform — even before they were given a description of what it would entail. After a description, support rose even higher: 72 percent of Republicans said they strongly supported it, versus 68 percent of Democrats.

Most people in both parties said border security should be tackled at the same time as other immigration issues and that deporting all of the illegal immigrants in the country would be unrealistic.

Of course, those views are different from the ones held by most of the Republicans voted into office last Tuesday. The next session’s House GOP leaders on immigration issues, Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Steve King (R-Iowa), have advocated enforcement-first approaches to immigration, and many other Republicans in the House and Senate claim nothing can be done on immigration until the border becomes more secure.

Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a group that advocates stricter immigration enforcement, claimed in its post-election analysis that the election results proved widespread support for enforcement-first immigration efforts and “opposition to the Obama Administration’s version of ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform.” In the exit poll results the group released last week, most voters agreed when asked if “President Obama has not been aggressive enough in enforcing immigration laws.”

America’s Voice claims its results indicate that most people support comprehensive immigration reform — even under the Democratic definition — but voted based on economic issues instead. Very few people polled from either party — 3 percent of both Democrats and Republicans, and just 1 percent of independents — said immigration was the most important issue they considered when choosing a candidate.

“The American people are out in front of the politicians on this issue,” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, said in a press release. “There’s a vocal and visible anti-immigrant minority that makes some politicians believe they speak for the majority. As this polling makes clear, they don’t.”

The Republican National Committee, which has struggled in recent months to keep pace, has yet to release its own September numbers, but campaign ad spending by outside groups — which at this point totals $80 million and has favored Republicans by as much as 7 to 1 — promises to keep the overall spending totals for both sides roughly on par.

Campaign finance law places strict limits on the size of individual donations to party committees, however, indicating that the DNC is taking in a greater number of small donations than Republican campaigns are getting from new conservative-leaning outside groups like American Crossroads, which face no comparable restrictions. Indeed, groups like American Crossroads have registered with the FEC under the new designation of an “independent expenditure committee,” which means than can raise unlimited amounts of cash as long as they promise to spend it all on independent ad buys. They’ve since raised the majority of their funds from a couple of billionaires.

Rick Scott won the Florida Republican primary for governor Tuesday. (St. Petersberg Times/ZUMApress.com)

In an upset, former health care executive Rick Scott won Florida’s Republican primary for governor tonight, beating Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, according to the Associated Press.

Unknown candidate Mike McAlister earned about 10 percent of the vote. McCollum was all but expected to win the nomination until Rick Scott entered the race, and some polls in recent days showed him with a slight lead.

Scott, who has never held elected office, only announced his candidacy in late April and spent almost $40 million, out of of $218 million he has in disclosed assets. He ran on his business experience as former CEO of the for-profit hospital chain Columbia/HCA, despite the fact that he was forced out after the company paid $1.7 billion to the U.S. government for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Last year, he founded the group Conservatives for Patients Rights to fight against the Obama health care plan.

Late in the election, The Florida Independent, The Washington Independent’s sister-site, reported on new allegations against another health care chain he co-founded, Solantic, that included Medicare overbilling and using doctors licenses at clinics they did not operate at.

McCollum had been a former congressman from Orlando from 1981 to 2001; he won the race for attorney general in 2006. He had lost two nominations for U.S. Senate. McCollum had the endorsement of top Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and most Republican leaders across the state.

The race was among the most negative the country. Buoyed by his self-funding, Scott ran ads attacking McCollum for being a career politician, and McCollum and associated groups ran ads attacking Scott for his tenure at Columbia/HCA. McCollum lost out on state matching funds over the spending cap of $24.9 million after a Federal Appeals Court in Atlanta declared an injunction against it after Scott’s lawyers filed suit against it.

Scott has a difficult task in uniting the party. He will have to persuade the vast majority of state Republicans who backed McCollum and the to support him. The RPOF condemned Scott for linking McCollum to disgraced former party chairman Jim Greer, who faces criminal charges related to funneling party money into his own checking account.

Scott now faces Democratic Florida CFO Alex Sink and independent candidate Bud Chiles in the general election.

Peg Luksik (pegluksik.com), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.)(WDCpix) and Pat Toomey (Flickr: Fred Thompson)

It’s a familiar story that makes Pennsylvania conservative activists turn red when they tell it. Every six years, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) runs for re-election and he must quiet a Republican base angry with some of his moderate votes. Every six years, Specter briefly veers to the right to placate them. Every six years, he wins — and promptly goes back to being the Arlen Specter who stubbornly votes against their interests.

“This has happened before,” said Michael Geer, the president of the conservative Pennsylvania Family Institute. “The closer to the election we get, the greater his tendency to tack in more conservative direction.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

As conservatives prepare to take down Specter in the 2010 Republican primary, some high-level activists are trying to aid the senator by giving him cover on two issues that, they hope, will mollify the base. This week, Specter has introduced — for the second time — legislation that would replace the current tax code with a flat-rate income tax. Behind the scenes, Specter is being lobbied to support a constitutional amendment to protect the rights of parents to homeschool their children. The goal is to prove to conservatives that Specter, if re-elected, will be on their side. Pennsylvania’s conservatives, with Specter in their sights, are not yet buying it.

“This is pure political posturing,” said Peg Luksik, the conservative activist who is, at the moment, the only declared Republican candidate against Specter. “This is a sop to conservatives because he’s afraid of losing his seat.”

The flat tax bill, which Specter first introduced in 2007 and is not expected to pass in this Senate, either, has not taken Specter’s opponents by surprise. But the Parental Rights Amendment and the launch of its grassroots lobbying arm at ParentalRights.org is something new. The amendment, sponsored in the House by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and in the Senate by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), is a response to legal developments that have rattled the homeschool movement, if little noticed outside of it. The most recent precedent on homeschooling, the 2000 Supreme Court decision Troxel v. Granville, defended the right of parents to visit their child but did not find a fundamental right of a parent over a child’s education. Homeschool activists read, in the decision, a need to enumerate parents’ rights. The amendment would rewrite the Constitution to make a “fundamental right” out of “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Outside of Congress, the amendment is backed by a small coalition of conservatives who have appealed to Specter to support it. The purpose is not only to move the bill forward by putting a more moderate spokesman than DeMint forward, but to build support for Specter with homeschoolers. Specter’s office, contacted for this story, did not say whether or not he would support the bill.

“One of the challenges that the traditional values people have is that they’re seen as trying to impose their values on other people,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and an early supporter of ParentalRights.org.

The amendment, Norquist said, is a politically popular way for homeschool activists to get something they want, while exposing the government-knows-best agenda that opponents of homeschooling are usually able to conceal. It might also be a way of bucking up Specter, whose chief of staff, Scott Hoeflich, gave Norquist a head’s up when Specter decided to vote against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would have made it easier for workers to unionize. “Why would I want to go after Arlen Specter,” Norquist asked, “when he just saved us on the single most important vote in this Congress?”

The heaviest hitter trying to get Specter on board with the Parental Rights Amendment might be Mike Farris, the group’s president, and the founder and chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a conservative university in Virginia. Farris has spoken to Specter’s office about the amendment, though it wasn’t clear this week whether Specter was warm to the idea. “If Sen. Specter joined our efforts it would be an enormous help,” said Farris on Wednesday. “We would love his help.”

Specter’s conservative critics — a group that includes as much as 70 percent of the Pennsylvania Republican electorate — are wary of the senator’s efforts to court them in the run-up to next year’s election. “Generally speaking,” said Mike Geer. “Sen. Specter has not been very good on school choice issues.” But Geer wasn’t entirely dismissive of Specter. “We hope that every day is a new day.”

Conservatives who oppose Specter are cool to the possible impact of a Parental Rights Amendment endorsement not just because of his pattern of moving right in election years, but because they don’t think the amendment has much of a chance in the 111th Congress. “We’re having an awful time of getting Democrats on board,” Hoekstra said on Wednesday. “I’m getting told, ‘Pete, I don’t do constitutional amendments. Pete, I support the idea but I don’t want to get out in front on it. I think that the Democratic leadership is putting a lot of pressure on the party not to do anything.” Hoekstra had not talked to Specter about the amendment, but added that it would “be awesome if he got on board.”

Allies of both of Specter’s likely primary challengers, Luksik and Club for Growth President Pat Toomey, dismissed any effect the act could have on Specter’s re-election hopes. “If Arlen were to sponsor a parental rights bill,” said Ted Meehan, a Toomey ally who will work for the eventual Senate campaign, “would it discourage [Vice President Joseph] Biden and [Gov. Ed] Rendell (D-Pa.) to discourage him from becoming a Democrat? No. They love the guy, and this isn’t going anywhere.”

Once a candidate receives $5,000, he or she must file a statement of candidacy with the FEC.

“I’m filing that because a few people have sent me donations,” Goode said.

Goode said he’s not sure when he’ll decide about a rematch and that he’s more concerned with helping the GOP win state assembly races this year.

He sounds dedicated!

Goode’s loss was one of the real upsets of 2008, though people who paid attention to the fundraising of now-Rep. Tom Perriello (D), a lawyer with deep netroots connections, knew Goode was in trouble. Because he went down that year, he’s best remembered for his attacks on Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim congressman, but Goode was a Democrat-turned-Independent-turned-Republican who used to win comfortably in a district that voted narrowly for Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

To reporters, he’s a guy who can provide great copy from afar — often laying into witnesses at congressional hearings with an alacrity that can’t be insincere — only to dismiss one-on-one inquiries with grunts of annoyed inarticulation.

Well, it seems Bunning’s crotchety nature is more liability than he knew. As The New York Times reports this morning, even Republicans have had about enough of the Kentuckian’s attitude. In fact Senate GOP leaders are vetting possible contenders to replace Bunning in 2010 even as Bunning is screaming from the rafters that he plans to run for reelection.

From The Times:

Republicans are trying to rid themselves of Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, the former baseball star who clearly has little use for some colleagues and party leaders, and who keeps exhibiting what one senator calls “behavior issues.”

Key Republicans are gently (or not gently enough) trying to dissuade Mr. Bunning from seeking re-election in 2010 out of concern that his paltry fund-raising, declining approval ratings and irascible conduct have made him something between vulnerable and unelectable.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Bunning has shown no sign of stepping aside and delivered a string of incendiary pronouncements that have fed an impression that he is, to go with a baseball metaphor, a bit of a screwball.

Long a safe bet for Republicans, Kentucky has slowly shifted toward the Democrats in recent years. Although Sen. John McCain won the state by a 17-point margin in November, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, held his seat by a count of just 53 to 47 percent. With Republicans and Democrats going after Bunning, it’ll be no easy task for the 77-year-old to keep his place in Washington in 2011.