If you have any questions on where, when or how to vote, the League of Women Voters has information on how to register to vote, where to vote in your local area, what to bring to the polling place and all the relevant laws governing the process at Vote411.org.

In St. Paul, Tuesday’s election signals the city’s first use of ranked choice voting, which allows voters to pick a second choice that will be counted if the voter’s first choice is eliminated (more information on ranked voting is available at the Ramsey County election center).

Wherever you are in the state, if you run into any problems at the polling places tomorrow—long lines, not enough ballots, partisan attempts to intimidate voters—we encourage you to report that news to the world by using the Twitter hashtag #votingproblems and by emailing the Minnesota Independent at tips@minnesotaindependent.com.

“This decision does not come easily or without regret, especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country. I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election.”

Trump was humiliated when a fed up Obama called upon authorities in Hawaii, where Obama was born, to release his original so-called long form birth certificate and, the same week, mocked Trump at the White House correspondence dinner, pointing out that he was now free to take up other conspiracy theories.

Trump’s release:

After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the Presidency. This decision does not come easily or without regret; especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country. I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election. I have spent the past several months unofficially campaigning and recognize that running for public office cannot be done half heartedly. Ultimately, however, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector.

I want to personally thank the millions of Americans who have joined the various Trump grassroots movements and written me letters and e-mails encouraging me to run. My gratitude for your faith and trust in me could never be expressed properly in words. So, I make you this promise: that I will continue to voice my opinions loudly and help to shape our politician’s thoughts. My ability to bring important economic and foreign policy issues to the forefront of the national dialogue is perhaps my greatest asset and one of the most valuable services I can provide to this country. I will continue to push our President and the country’s policy makers to address the dire challenges arising from our unsustainable debt structure and increasing lack of global competitiveness. Issues, including getting tough on China and other countries that are methodically and systematically taking advantage of the United States, were seldom mentioned before I brought them to the forefront of the country’s conversation. They are now being debated vigorously. I will also continue to push for job creation, an initiative that should be this country’s top priority and something that I know a lot about. I will not shy away from expressing the opinions that so many of you share yet don’t have a medium through which to articulate.

I look forward to supporting the candidate who is the most qualified to help us tackle our country’s most important issues and am hopeful that, when this person emerges, he or she will have the courage to take on the challenges of the Office and be the agent of change that this country so desperately needs

Thank you and God Bless America!

Long seen by Democrats as a stunt candidate, he was increasingly becoming a less-than-serious choice on the right.

Erick Erickson, the founder of right-wing blog site RedState, was set to interview Trump tomorrow. Erickson wasn’t surprised by the news that Trump decided against running.

“I think Donald Trump finally had to take seriously the fact that many didn’t take his bid for the Presidency seriously and he was either going to have to change some minds or change his mind,” he wrote today. “It’s a lot easier to change one mind than many. Likewise, for the first time in a very long time, the maestro of media spin let a story spin out ahead of him beyond his control… Trump does not like story lines he cannot control.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics,” Myers wrote, according to a report at City Pages.

Politifact rated Bachmann’s statements about the U.S. Constitution’s census requirements in 2009 as “Pants on Fire” false. CNN’s Anderson Cooper dinged Bachmann back in January for her revisionist history regarding the U.S. Constitution’s racist past.

Here’s Myers’ full letter:

Dear Representative Bachmann,

My name is Amy Myers. I am a Cherry Hill, New Jersey sophomore attending Cherry Hill High School East. As a typical high school student, I have found quite a few of your statements regarding The Constitution of the United States, the quality of public school education and general U.S. civics matters to be factually incorrect, inaccurately applied or grossly distorted. The frequency and scope of these comments prompted me to write this letter.

Though I am not in your home district, or even your home state, you are a United States Representative of some prominence who is subject to national media coverage. News outlets and websites across this country profile your causes and viewpoints on a regular basis. As one of a handful of women in Congress, you hold a distinct privilege and responsibility to better represent your gender nationally. The statements you make help to serve an injustice to not only the position of Congresswoman, but women everywhere. Though politically expedient, incorrect comments cast a shadow on your person and by unfortunate proxy, both your supporters and detractors alike often generalize this shadow to women as a whole.

Rep. Bachmann, the frequent inability you have shown to accurately and factually present even the most basic information about the United States led me to submit the follow challenge, pitting my public education against your advanced legal education:

I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.

Hopefully, we will be able to meet for such an event, as it would prove to be enlightening.

Sincerely yours,
Amy Myers

Campaign finance regulation has been going downhill since long before Citizens United. (Chris Kleponis, ZUMAPress.com)

Campaign finance reform groups are telling a sobering story. During the 2004 and 2006 elections, nonprofit groups reported who donated nearly every penny spent on independent advertisements mentioning candidates (called electioneering communications) to the Federal Election Commission. In 2008, they accounted for less than two-thirds of the dollars behind the ads. And in the current primary season, reporting has fallen by about one-half again. Just one-third of the dollars spent on such ads were tracked back to their donors.

[Congress1] The precipitous decline comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The January 2010 ruling allowed corporations or labor unions to spend unlimited sums of money to advocate on behalf of candidates; previously, only individuals or groups of individuals could do so. And many well-meaning citizens and politicians blame the rise in opacity on the ruling.

But the falloff in disclosure started long before the Court’s decision. And blame for the current drop off in disclosure falls not at the feet of the Supreme Court, but at the feet of the FEC, an agency so mired in gridlock that it is part unable and part unwilling to enforce its own guiding statutes.

“It’s essential to put the national spotlight on the FEC,” notes Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an organization that advocates for campaign finance reform in Congress and in the courts. “I do not think that most citizens know that, for all practical purposes, we do not have a campaign finance enforcement agency. We have a set of laws on the books, but we have an agency that basically refuses to enforce them, or misinterprets the laws in ways that cripples their impact.”

Congress is trying (and, thus far, failing) to strengthen campaign finance and disclosure laws, with legislation like the DISCLOSE Act. But reformers argue that legislation is not the only way to shore up donor disclosure. The FEC currently lacks the willpower, but not the prerogative, to enforce disclosure laws that exist on the books, and three of its six current commissioners are serving past the end of their designated terms. The Obama administration, advocates note, could appoint new, committed commissioners to take their seats, but thus far it has shied away from the political fight with Republican leadership that would be required to make it happen.

A Commission Divided

As a body, the FEC has never been mistaken for a paragon of nonpartisan professionalism, or even mere efficiency — and a portion of that has to do with the way it was set up. Designed so that no political party is allowed to claim the allegiance of more than three of its six serving commissioners, any action taken by the commission necessarily requires at least one commissioner to cross the political aisle.

“[Those who designed it] either knew they were intentionally creating a dysfunctional agency or they were not familiar with decision-making processes and how it might work out,” says Paul Ryan, associate legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “The agency was designed to deadlock,” he adds, and “if you look at it from perspective of members of Congress creating an agency tasked with policing them, we too might choose to create a less-than-functional agency.”

Yet despite its partisan design, for much of its history the commission rarely deadlocked, especially when it came to decisions regarding enforcement proceedings against political groups believed to have broken campaign-finance laws.

A recent report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, argues the real trouble started in mid-2008, when Congress confirmed three new Republican commissioners — Caroline Hunter, Donald McGahn, and Matthew Petersen — to the regulatory body. The proportion of enforcement actions stalled in the FEC at that point jumped from less than 2 percent per year to 16 percent in 2009. In 2010, “all I can think of are deadlocked votes,” says the report’s author, Public Citizen’s legislative representative Craig Holman.

While commissioners had always displayed flashes of partisan politics, the new GOP members went a step beyond, displaying an ideological mistrust of any effort to enforce regulations that might deter the political speech of political groups supporting either party — regulations that they, as commissioners, were tasked with the duty of enforcing.

“These three individuals on the commission have made it very clear that they are ideologically opposed to campaign finance laws and prepared to take extreme steps to make sure that they have minimal impact and make sure that they are not enforced,” Wertheimer says.

Commissioner Donald McGahn, in particular, is often cited as the ringleader of the current GOP voting bloc and the architect of its disciplined commitment to block all critical enforcement matters. McGahn served as a campaign finance and ethics lawyer for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, whose violations of campaign finance laws made his name synonymous with Beltway corruption. McGahn also rigidly opposes the idea of campaign finance regulation itself. He “views enforcement of the law as an infringement of rights,” argues Ryan, “and has often expressed a fair degree of hostility to the very purpose of the commission itself.”

True to their sentiments, four times in 2008 the GOP commissioners rebuffed the FEC’s own staff lawyers’ recommendations to investigate different groups believed to have skirted the body’s regulations. And on a 3-3 party-line vote, the GOP commissioners even refused to accept a punitive fine that the FEC counsel had previously negotiated with a U.S. Chamber of Commerce-funded group for improprieties committed in a previous election cycle.

Donor Disclosure Begone

The final nail in the coffin of donor disclosure, however, came earlier this year when the FEC declined in a party-line vote to pursue an investigation into the now-defunct organization, Freedom’s Watch, effectively absolving the group for failing to report any donors for the vast majority of its electioneering communications in 2008.

Both the DCCC, which originally filed the complaint, and the FEC’s own staff, which recommended an investigation, had cited a New York Times article that quoted anonymous Republican operatives and reported that the group’s approximately $30 million for ad spending “came almost entirely from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has ‘insisted on parceling out his money project-by-project.’” In their justification for not taking action, however, the Republican commissioners ridiculed the Times’ use of anonymous sources and, more importantly, substantially reinterpreted and narrowed the FEC regulations outlining the conditions in which donor disclosure must take place.

While current regulations dictate that all donations of more than $1000 made “for the purpose of furthering electioneering communications” must be disclosed to the FEC, the GOP commissioners argued that since the $126,000 ad in question could, in theory, have been funded by other donors besides Adelson, the group was under no obligation to report their primary backer’s involvement in the ad. In other words, the GOP commissioners now argued that unless a specific donor contribution could be demonstrably linked to the creation of a specific ad — a practice no political donors engage in — nonprofit groups that cut political ads were under no requirement to disclose their donor rolls.

“[The GOP commissioners] locked down on the interpretation that there must be some sort of written or oral designation by the contributor that the money is going to a specific ad at a specific time in a specific place, and nobody does that,” explains Holman. “As a result they’ve shut down all disclosure.”

The impact of the FEC’s decision, meanwhile, has extended far beyond the individual enforcement case at hand. Rather, it has contributed to what Wertheimer describes as a “Wild West situation where there’s nothing to worry about as far as complying with campaign finance laws.” 501(c) organizations — the group of choice for influencing political races in the current election cycle — now feel little fear of reprisal when they list “.00” on their electioneering communication reports under the area for donor contributions, and the ever increasing number of groups abstaining from the practice of disclosure attests to their sense of impunity.

No Appetite for Reform

Fixing the FEC by reforming its basic, gridlocked structure would require new legislation that’s simply out of the question at this point, reform advocates argue. But naming new appointees to replace the three commissioners — including McGahn — whose terms have long since expired is doable. But even though McGahn, along with Democratic commissioners Ellen Weintraub and Steven Walther, are all serving in a lame-duck capacity, the Obama administration has made hardly any effort to replace them.

The reason for Obama’s inaction, advocates speculate, is that custom dictates that the President ask the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate to submit names for the FEC commissioner positions and nominate them accordingly. But Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has vociferously opposed the DISCLOSE Act in the Senate, is hardly motivated to disrupt the body’s current gridlock and even more unlikely to recommend a commissioner whose beliefs would stray from his own, rigid distaste for campaign finance regulation.

“Where the commission has broken down is with the appointment process to the FEC,” notes Holman. “Even though legally the process is that the president appoints commissioners with the confirmation and advice of Senate, it’s really always been the other way around… and McConnell started realizing some time ago that he could wreck havoc through the appointment process.”

The administration, in other words, is free to nominate a Republican or an independent appointee to replace McGahn tomorrow. But doing so would be sure to ruffle some feathers.

“[Obama] could nominate new commissioners and send them up to the Senate,” notes Wertheimer, “and if McConnell used his influence to filibuster or block the appointments, then he could consider recess appointments. To date it’s simply been not important enough in their minds to take on McConnell.”

Indeed, the only action the administration has attempted since taking office was in 2009 when it appointed Democratic union lawyer John Sullivan to replace one of the Democratic commissioners, a move that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) announced they would block until the president agreed to submit nominations to replace all three lame duck commissioners at once.

McCain and Feingold, who co-sponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 and have been frustrated with the FEC’s refusal to adequately enforce the bill’s statutes, released a statement at the time that urged the president to “nominate new commissioners with a demonstrated commitment to the existence and enforcement of the campaign finance laws,” but since then the administration has been mum. (Probed about the ongoing delay in nominating new FEC commissioners, a White House spokesman could only say “the President is committed to filling these positions with the most qualified persons.”)

Reform advocates, while eager to get the commissioners replaced, nonetheless sided with the two senators, in part because Obama’s pick hardly represented the kind of integrity and commitment to campaign finance laws for which they were hoping. “My concern with Sullivan’s nomination is that he has made a career out of fighting FEC regulations for labor unions,” Ryan says. “It didn’t represent one iota of change.”

Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown casts his ballot in the Massachusetts special election on Tuesday. (ZUMA Press)

BOSTON — The volunteers, journalists, and donors who entered the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel on Tuesday were greeted by enthusiasm that didn’t usually belong to Republican campaigns in Massachusetts. The room was packed–no one else allowed in–only an hour after the polls closed. And among the throngs were Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, leaders of Tea Party Patriots, who’d flown in from Georgia and California to watch the final stretch of Scott Brown’s Republican U.S. Senate bid. Meckler held up a Flip Video camera, panning it across the room to film Brown supporters as they chatted and lined up for food and drinks.

[GOP1] “What you’re seeing here in Massachusetts is a reflection of what’s happening all across the country,” said Meckler. Democrats, after all, had tried to turn the momentum against Brown by attacking his endorsements from Tea Party groups and painting him as a tool of out-of-state right-wingers. In a fundraising appeal, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had even called Brown a “far-right teabagger Republican.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos derisively called him “the first teabagger senator.”

“Clearly, they’re paying attention to us,” said Martin. “They’re not ignoring us.”

Riding a wave of voter anger, and taking full advantage of an opponent who never fully engaged with the electorate in this Democratic state, Brown won the special election to fill the remaining term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The result, unthinkable just two weeks earlier, gave Republicans what Brown had campaigned on in the final stretch–the “41st vote” to sustain filibusters of Democratic bills. National Democrats greeted the news with a mixture of infighting–Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who lost to Brown, was blamed for running an “act of political malpractice”–and panic. In Washington, top Democrats worked phones to prevent members of Congress from being spooked out of re-election, while Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters that the party had squandered its right to push through the health care legislation that occupied his party for most of 2009.

Republicans and conservatives, overjoyed at what many called the “perfect storm” that elected Brown, just danced, sang, and gloated. It was undeniable that Coakley had botched up her campaign. From winning the Democratic primary in December to holding a crucial rally with President Obama on Sunday, she had held only 19 public events. Brown had held 66. She made a series of baffling snafus and gaffes, from leaving the campaign trail right before the election for a Washington, D.C. fundraiser to telling the Boston Globe that she’d rather meet local machine leaders than “stand in the cold” and “shake hands” outside of Fenway Park. Even the campaign’s final press release, a pre-emptive warning of possible election tampering, was mistakenly backdated to January 18. When televisions at the Park Plaza Hotel cut over to her concession speech, Brown supporters alternated between loud boos and delighted victory songs.

“Thank you, Martha!” yelled a 30-year-old Brown volunteer from South Boston named Shaun Green. “Thank you for running the worst campaign ever!”

Todd Feinburg, a conservative radio host who’d tracked Brown’s rise, offered basically the same assessment. “It was the worst campaign anyone’s ever run in the history of mankind, probably.”

A few steps away from the stage where Brown would make his victory speech, a team of conservative activists–some from the state, some not–focused on how they’d brought together their movement to outsmart and outspend one of the country’s most effective Democratic machines. Two months ago, several of them had worked for the insurgent campaign of Doug Hoffman, a first-time candidate who ran on the Conservative Party ticket for a House seat in New York’s 23rd district, forced the Republican Party’s moderate candidate out of the race, and narrowly lost what had been safe GOP territory. Those activists looked at Brown as Hoffman 2.0, a candidate and a campaign that learned the right lessons from that experience and leveraged them into a winning effort.

“They were better funded than Hoffman,” said Eric Odom, the executive director of the American Liberty Alliance. “More importantly, NY-23 lacked any sort of a coherent get-out-the-vote effort. That dominated here. Phone banks, visibilities, giving everybody something to do.” Tea Party activists, said Odom, had flooded into the state. A few feet behind him stood Hannah Giles, the young conservative activist who’d posed as a prostitute for video stings of ACORN, and who had come to the state for (mostly unsuccessful) crowdsourced investigations of possible “voter fraud.”

Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”

In late December, not far under the radar, the Brown campaign was sold to influential and far-flung activists as a winnable race–a chance to stop complaining and actually break the back of the Obama administration. In a December 30 blog post titled “Fight Everywhere: Scott Brown for Massachusetts,” GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini–who launched RebuildtheParty.com with Willington after the 2008 elections, and who provided some software support for Brown, made what was, at the time, a dreamy-sounding argument that Brown could win. “Any chance we have to take out the Obamacare abomination,” he wrote, “however remote, is a fight worth fighting.”

Organizers for both the Brown and Coakley campaigns now know that the race was fairly close by the time that this outreach occurred. In mid-December the National Republican Senatorial conducted, and kept secret, a poll that showed Brown down by only 13 points. As the candidate out-hustled Coakley, he was made available to conservative opinion-leaders. “He did a wonderful job of going from conservative talk show to conservative talk show, getting his name out there,” said former state treasurer Joe Malone, a Republican, in an interview with local TV station WECN.

There was universal agreement among Brown supporters that the game-changing moment came from a source that Democrats mistrust almost as much as talk radio–pollster Scott Rasmussen. His January 5 poll showing Brown within 9 points of Coakley was immediately derided by Democrats. It didn’t matter.

“In terms of everyone becoming aware of it,” said Todd Feinburg, “that was the moment it broke through.”

From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who’d backed Doug Hoffman. Where Coakley had been able to avoid national scrutiny, conservative blogs and media turned her stumbles into major stories. After the candidates debated on January 11, conservative medias promoted two storylines–that Coakley had erred in declaring that there were “no terrorists” in Afghanistan, and that Brown had a “Reagan moment” when he referred to the open Senate job as “the People’s seat.” It was a line he’d used in interviews before, to little attention. On video, it got a prominent link from the Drudge Report.

The heat poured on after that. On January 13 Coakley flew to Washington to raise money at a long-scheduled event with the Massachusetts delegation. Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack, who had shaken up the momentum of the NY-23 special election after Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava’s husband called the cops on him, chased Coakley to ask an Afghanistan question and was pushed aside by an aide. McCormack tumbled; the photo of him sprawling on the ground as Coakley, hands in pockets, looked on, made it into the Boston Herald.

Every negative Coakley storyline was amplified and made infamous by the same means. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal–owned, like The Weekly Standard and Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp–ran an op-ed on Coakley’s record as attorney general, putting the spotlight on a gruesome case of sexual abuse involving a curling iron. The story, aired out earlier by the Boston Globe but not yet known to activists, became infamous, as did Coakley’s verbal stumbles. At Brown rallies attended by TWI, there was universal awareness of Coakley’s gaffes and the curling iron case.

Liberals, by contrast, were too late to engage with the race. A reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress who asked Brown uncomfortable questions only arrived on the trail 24 hours before the election, too late for videos of Brown trying to explain, for example, a vote against financial assistance for Red Cross workers assisting in post-9/11 efforts, to have any impact. A video of the viral “curling iron” story backfiring on Brown as a supporter yelled a crude remark about Coakley also appeared too close to the election, after the momentum was sealed.

Brown’s online outreach also brought him a fundraising surge, starting with a January 11 “moneybomb” that raised $1.3 million, that put him far ahead of where either campaign expected him to be. He ended the race with $4 million in campaign funds, the result of $1 million in daily fund-raising. In the days to come, partisans will get a better sense of how much support got from more traditional sources–waves of ads from the Chamber of Commerce, late support from the NRSC and RNC, and early fund-raising aid from Mitt Romney, who introduced Brown at the victory party after remaining mostly absent from the campaign. And any effort to replicate the “perfect storm” in other states will need more candidates like Brown, who on Tuesday night had become a superstar, an object of outright veneration from supporters who couldn’t believe what he pulled off.

“He’s almost like a messiah,” said Deborah Strange, a former Ted Kennedy supporter–although she’d voted for George W. Bush and John McCain–who sat resting her bad knees as Brown gave his victory speech. “He’s given us hope. He’s given us hope.”

Read his full statement after the jump.

“I took a leave from my practice of law thirteen months ago on Election Day to lead the Department of Justice transition for President Obama. My hope then was to identify the goals for a successful transition at a critical time for the Department, when its credibility was under attack and when its traditional law enforcement missions had suffered. During the transition, President-elect Obama and Attorney General-designate Holder asked me to serve as the Deputy Attorney General, which gave me the opportunity to complete the transition process and see the Department solidly on a path to achieving those goals. I accepted that challenge, with the intention of returning to my practice as soon as I felt the Department was firmly on that path.

“I believe the objectives established over a year ago have been accomplished. In order to afford the President and the Attorney General sufficient time to identify my successor and to ensure a smooth transition, I have agreed to continue to serve until February 5, 2010, when I will step down to return to private practice.

“The Department today is on the path we first set out over a year ago. First, we have reinvigorated the Department’s traditional law enforcement mission with new resources and new initiatives. I am proud of the work we have done in establishing a Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to fight financial crime, leading a Health Care Prevention Task Force that has already pursued major prosecutions, establishing a Border Working Group to combat Mexican cartels, and attacking international organized crime through increased intelligence sharing with our partners. We have implemented new policies to stem the terrible tide of violence against women and children in Indian Country, crafted budgets that will provide critical new funding for law enforcement, civil rights and our nation’s prison system, and we will soon make key recommendations for reforms of sentencing and corrections policy. I appreciate the Attorney General’s having asked me to lead these initiatives and am proud of the progress we have made.

“Second, we have taken significant steps to ensure that we vigorously protect our national security consistent with the rule of law, including working closely with the FBI and the Intelligence Community on major counter-terrorism investigations, working on closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and bringing perpetrators to justice in federal courts or military commissions, and developing a new policy for effective and lawful interrogations.

“Third, we have substantially restored the Department’s historically strong relationship with state, local, and tribal law enforcement through outreach and inclusion on the Department’s major initiatives including the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and HEAT.

“And finally, we have put in place a terrific senior management team that under the Attorney General’s leadership will build on this foundation. Through our work in each of these areas, the goals I hoped to achieve when I accepted this position either have been or soon will be fulfilled. The Department is in good hands, and I feel I can now return to the private practice I have missed these thirteen months.

“It has been a singular privilege to work alongside the Department’s dedicated career professionals, whose commitment to the national interest and the cause of justice is an inspiration to me. I am very grateful to President Obama and Attorney General Holder for the opportunity to serve my country and the Department of Justice in this Administration, and I will continue to assist them in any way possible.”

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Arizona voters finds Arpaio, famed for his crackdowns on illegal immigrants, leading Goddard, the state’s current attorney general, by 12 points – 51% to 39%. Seven percent (7%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.

According to the survey, Goddard leads Republican Gov. Jan Brewer by a comfortable nine-point margin, and Goddard is virtually tied with State Treasurer Dean Martin. Brewer is the only one of the possible candidates who is officially in the race.

With numbers like this, could Arpaio be enticed to run for governor? And could he win?

Rumors have been swirling in Arizona for the past few months that Arpaio is mulling a gubernatorial bid, fueled by his antipathy for Goddard. The 77-year-old Arpaio was first elected in 1992, and he won re-election in 2008 by a commanding 13-point margin, with 55 percent of the vote. During that race, Arpaio raised more than $600,000 — an eye-popping sum for a countywide election. Effectively a modern-day political boss, “Sheriff Joe” is well-known for his heavy-handed tactics to combat illegal immigration and bragging about the harsh conditions in county detention facilities. He has launched investigations of numerous political opponents, including Goddard, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the Phoenix New Times and the Maricopa County Superior Court.

While Arpaio remains extremely popular in Maricopa County — the home of Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe accounts for approximately 61 percent of Arizona’s population — Goddard has already proven himself in statewide races, having been elected attorney general in 2002, and re-elected in 2006 with 60 percent of the vote (pdf). A poll released last month by the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and KAET found Arpaio had a 61 percent approval rating among Maricopa County voters, while the same survey found 55 percent of Arizona voters approve of Goddard’s performance. Arizona has been trending Democratic in recent years, but a Gallup poll from January found party identification in the state was essentially a dead heat, and one would be hard-pressed to find anybody in Arizona without a strong opinion about Arpaio.

All of this seems to confirm Rasmussen’s findings: If Arpaio got into the race against Goddard, he would stand a pretty good chance of winning. It’s also a safe bet that Arpaio would raise a lot of money from out-of-state illegal immigration opponents.

The Obama administration has already clashed with Arpaio on a couple of occasions. In March, the Justice Department announced it was opening an investigation into allegations of racial profiling and unlawful searches and seizures, and last month Arpaio was stripped of his authority to enforce federal immigration laws under the controversial 287(g) program.

But if the Justice Department thought Arpaio was a handful as sheriff of Maricopa County, just imagine what he could do with control of the state’s Department of Public Safety, and Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislature.

(Via Eric Kleefeld)

This post has been updated.

Doug Hoffman, Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie

WATERTOWN, N.Y. — Conservatives declared victory in the 2009 off-year elections four days before voters went the polls. With the withdrawal of Dede Scozzafava, the embattled moderate Republican candidate, from the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, activists and organizers are toasting a shocking victory over the Republican establishment.

[GOP1]“WE WON!” wrote Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState.com, after the news broke. “I said this was our hill to die on, but to paraphrase Patton, we won my making the other guys die on our Hill!”

The hero of the moment is Doug Hoffman, the first-time candidate of the Conservative Party who effectively forced Scozzafava out of the race after national conservative groups like the Club for Growth and the Susan B. Anthony List showered his campaign with cash and staffed it with volunteers. On Sunday night, campaign strategists reacted to Scozzafava’s endorsement of Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate, by projecting confidence and dismissing the efforts Democrats made to win her over. Hoffman’s campaign was cheered by a survey from the North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling showing the candidate easily consolidating Scozzafava’s support. It did not push back against reports that the candidate failed to win over Scozzafava for an endorsement.

“I didn’t reach out to her,” said Hoffman’s spokesman Rob Ryan. “From day one, I haven’t had a thought about Dede Scozzafava unless it was about getting her out of this race.”

Still, conservative activists and Republican strategists told TWI that they were watching the results from NY-23 as part of a picture with at least three other high-profile elections on Tuesday. They are also looking to, and preparing to spin, an all-but-certain victory in Virginia’s statewide races, a possible victory in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, and Maine ballot measures on tax rates and gay marriage.

In even the most disappointing scenario, where Republicans only gain ground in Virginia, they are getting ready to argue that voters are growing cold on the Democratic agenda and Barack Obama’s vaunted brand. (None of of the conservatives who spoke to TWI mentioned the mayoral election in Atlanta, where Mary Norwood, a onetime Republican activist, is expected to win the first round of voting and head to a runoff. If elected, Norwood would be the first white mayor of Atlanta since Richard Nixon’s presidency.)

“After the 2008 election, [there] was a lot of analysis that this country had made a big seismic shift to left of center,” said Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, and one of the first conservative organizers to endorse Hoffman. “I don’t think anything is going to happen to confirm that analysis. It’s still a right of center country. The ‘blame Bush’ card is getting old.”

Last week, the Los Angeles Times characterized the White House’s optimal election day scenario as a loss for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Deeds, a win for Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), and a “tie-breaker” Democratic win in NY-23. Conservatives, while optimistic about sweeping every one of these races, gave TWI some reasons why losses in New York, New Jersey and Maine would not necessarily be big defeats for the movement. But all suggested that the night would start out with unalloyed good news for the GOP: sweeping victories in Virginia. Polls in the commonwealth close at 7 p.m., and former Attorney General Robert McDonnell, the GOP’s candidate, leads Deeds by double-digit margins.

“This is a state that Democrats said was going blue, or least purple,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. “How do they explain it if they lose?”

Republicans are doing what they can to refocus on attention to what, according to polls, could be a Republican landslide. It would happen in a state that the Obama-Biden ticket carried by six points. Last week, RNC Chairman Michael Steele trekked across the Potomac and into Virginia for rallies with the GOP ticket. Victories in the races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general on Tuesday would mark only the second time in history–the first was 1997–when Republicans grabbed control of all three of Virginia’s statewide offices.

Republicans are optimistic, too, about a handful Republican candidates winning back state legislative seats that had fallen to the Democrats over the past few election cycles. One of those candidates, Barbara Comstock, is a powerful Republican lawyer running for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the defense teams of both I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Tom DeLay. In the summer, her partisan image was seen as a possible impediment to victory. Today, conservatives are hopeful that she’ll be swept in on McDonnell’s coattails.

There is less conservative optimism about New Jersey. It’s a Democratic-leaning state that’s played host to many Republican candidates who lost early poll leads as the electorate moved back to the majority party. Chris Christie, the GOP standard-bearer, has watched a once-commanding lead dwindle into a tie with Corzine. President Obama has repeatedly stumped for Corzine, hitting two of New Jersey’s vote-rich but poor cities in a Sunday campaign swing.

If Christie loses, Republicans have multiple scapegoats at the ready. One is Chris Daggett, a liberal Republican who ran as an independent and trained most of his fire on the GOP candidate. The other, to conservatives, would be Christie himself. He beat Americans for Prosperity state chairman Steve Lonegan in a surprisingly tough summer primary, taking hits from Lonegan for allegedly being too far to the left. At AFP’s “Defending the American Dream” summit held last month in northern Virginia, Lonegan told TWI that Christie was failing to give conservatives a reason to come out and vote. This week, Lonegan has joined Christie on the campaign trail to fire up conservative voters, but this pessimistic spin is at the ready if Corzine pulls out a win.

“If Christie is to win in New Jersey,” said Citizens United President and conservative activist David Bossie, “it would be a good day for America. It would be a rebuke of the establishment that is in complete control of New Jersey politics. But Christie is not really a leading conservative. He’s a good Republican, and he’d do a good job, and his election would be a rebuke to Barack Obama.”

Polls in New Jersey and in Maine close at 8 p.m., and few expect the results for either state to be announced quickly. And polls close at 11 p.m. ET in a special election for Congress in CA-10, a northern California district that Democrats have easily held in the past. Few conservatives give Republican candidate David Harmer a chance there, as Lt. Gov. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), who’s won elections in the state for decades, holds strong leads in polls of the early and absentee voters who make up more than half of California’s electorate. Inevitably, the election will be seen in the context of what happens in NY-23–where polls close at 9 p.m., and where counting could go on for hours. Some Hoffman backers believe that Mike Huckabee, one of few prominent Harmer supporters, endorsed the candidate before he endorsed Hoffman because of Huckabee’s long-standing feud with the Club for Growth.

Heading into Tuesday, most conservatives and Republicans professed optimism about what will happen at the polls. But an alternative take has already been written. Michael Barone, the editor of the Almanac of American Politics a conservative-leaning columnist, told TWI that it would be practically impossible for Democrats to claim significant wins even if they succeed in the White House’s “tiebreaker” scenario.

“If Corzine and Owens win,” said Barone, “they both will have gotten well under Obama’s percentages in those constituencies.”

How close to Karzai is Khalilzad? Jon Lee Anderson profiled Khalilzad in 2005, and included this paragraph:

In late 2003, Khalilzad was sent to Afghanistan as the U.S. Ambassador. The political capital he has in the Administration—which is considerable—is due to his successes there. While he was in Kabul, Afghanistan held its first free elections in history, which Karzai won handily. Karzai regarded Khalilzad as his close friend and adviser; he was very unhappy when, last April, President Bush nominated Khalilzad to replace Bremer’s successor in Baghdad, John Negroponte. Karzai appealed to President Bush several times to reconsider his decision.

There even used to be a wacky arrangement that the Obama administration considered to give Khalilzad some weird job to help Karzai govern somehow. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Khalilzad is opining to Amanpour that Abdullah will just accept a job in a Karzai government, even though Abdullah has gone on record denying that he’ll accept any such option.

Still, we’ll see over the weekend, I suppose.

Update, 1:15 p.m., Oct. 31: Dexter Filkins reports from Kabul:

Abdullah Abdullah, the chief rival to President Hamid Karzai, will announce on Sunday his decision to withdraw from the Nov. 7 run-off election, effectively handing a new five-year term to Mr. Karzai, according to Western diplomats here and people close to Mr. Abdullah.

But Mr. Abdullah seemed to be keeping his options open until the last second, as he has done through the Afghan political crisis. Those close to him, speaking on condition of anonymity on Saturday, said he was still trying to decide whether to publicly denounce Mr. Karzai, whom he has accused of stealing the Aug. 20 election, or to step down without a fight.