In yet another sign that national Dems view Kirsten Gillibrand as having an increasingly good shot at bumping off GOP Rep. John Sweeney, who's reeling amid charges of domestic violence, Bill Clinton has scheduled a last-minute visit to the district at 1:45 P.M. today to help Gillibrand close the deal with voters, according to Capitol Confidential, the blog of the Albany Times-Union. As Election Central reported below, Gillibrand had a great weekend politically: She racked up the endorsement of the Times-Union, even as a Siena poll found that she'd surged to a three-point lead over Sweeney, whose favorability ratings have plunged an astonishing 14 points amid his scandals.

Reeling from charges of domestic violence, GOP Rep. John Sweeney has now fallen three points behind surging Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand, a Siena Polling Institute survey released today shows. The poll finds Gillibrand up 46%-43%, an astonishing turnaround from the last Siena poll on Oct. 19, which had Sweeney up 53%-39%. Sweeney's favorability rating has plunged 14 points, from 49% to 35%. All in all, a very good day for Gillibrand: As noted below, she also picked up a key endorsement today from the Albany Times-Union, an influential upstate paper.

The Albany Times-Union, an influential upstate paper which backed GOP Rep. John Sweeney for reelection the last two times, today threw its support to Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand. Like many local papers across the country backing Dems against GOP incumbents, the TU decides that whatever Sweeney's done for the district is outweighed by his support for national GOP policies which have damaged the country as a whole:

But for the past six years, he also has been a prominent and unapologetic advocate of deleterious Bush administration policies, from the Iraq war to tax laws that favor the rich over the poor. At a crucial moment when his voice might have been raised on behalf of openness and accountability in Congress, Mr. Sweeney remained a supporter of the ethically challenged House GOP leadership...

This election is about more than who's best for the interests of the 20th Congressional District. It's about who's best for the interests of the country. Ms. Gillibrand is clearly the better choice.

Full endorsement after the jump.

Read more »

In the wake of GOP Rep. John Sweeney's refusal to release documents surrounding charges of domestic violence in his home, the upstate Post-Star newspaper has just withdrawn its endorsement of Sweeney: "We urge the congressman to release the police documentation he says will unveil the truth about what really happened at his house that night," the paper says. "Given this situation and Congressman Sweeney's unacceptable response to it, we can no longer stand behind our earlier endorsement of his candidacy." Full withdrawn endorsement after the jump.

Read more »

The ultra-tight race between GOP Rep. John Sweeney and Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand has been thrown into turmoil by new revelations in the Daily News and Albany Times-Union, both of which reported late yesterday that GOP Rep. John Sweeney is in trouble over a newly-leaked police report that says his wife called 911 last December and told a dispatcher that Sweeney was "knocking her" around the house. Daily News reporter Ben Smith has the police report right here on his blog. Today the story is detonating like a bomb in the midst of the contest, and Gillibrand has just released her first statement on the revelations: "Today is a day for John Sweeney to answer questions about his own actions and behavior. The voters of this district deserve a full accounting from Mr. Sweeney instead of more attacks."

This one surprises us a bit, because the last couple of polls showed sizeable leads for GOP Rep John Sweeney, but CQ has now downgraded its rating of the race between Sweeney and Dem Kirsten Gillibrand from "Leans Republican" to "Toss up":

Gillibrand, an attorney and first-time candidate for public office, on Tuesday sent an open letter to Sweeney requesting he release information regarding police incidents earlier in his career, including an arrest for driving while intoxicated...

It was another step in Gillibrand’s efforts to tie Sweeney to the “culture of corruption” tag with which Democrats have been trying to bedevil Republicans throughout the 2006 campaign. In fact, Gillibrand was an early entry, issuing accusations as early as last January that Sweeney was joining lobbyists on ski trips while ignoring the district’s problems.

The contest is front and center for the national Democratic Party, which sees the upstate 20th as an only mildly Republican-leaning district — President Bush took a modest 53 percent there in 2004 — that is ripe for a partisan takeover...The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee lists the race in its “Red to Blue” program — its roster of highly competitive races that the party hopes to switch from Republican red to Democratic blue on electoral maps — and has spent $110,000 on the race in recent weeks.

CQ's full roundup of New York races is here.

On the lighter side, Dem Kirsten Gillibrand has just released a new ad rapping GOP Rep John Sweeney for a recent boozy excursion to a late-night frat party which got him in some trouble. The ad's key line quotes the Beastie Boys: "We deserve a Congressman who will fight for more than his right to party." Why focus on Sweeney's partying in a dorm? Easy: It's a subtle allusion to Foleygate. As Ben Smith of The Daily Politics notes, the ad "is an attempt to paint John Sweeney -- who was allegedly drunk at a frat party -- with Mark Foley, who allegedly showed up drunk at congressional page dorms." The acting in the ad is pretty awful, but it's still worth a look. You can view it here.

GOP Rep John Sweeney -- who's facing a challenge from antiwar Dem Kirsten Gillibrand -- has just released one of the strangest political ads we've ever seen. It stars a mother whose son died serving in Iraq who's nonetheless endorsing the pro-war Sweeney. She says she told Sweeney that her dead 21-year-old son had been traveling in Iraq in a vehicle without proper protection. Sweeney said he would "help." The mom concludes: "I don't believe in the war. But I do believe in our soldiers. And John Sweeney. For the sake of every mother who's child still seves." It's an intriguing gamble. The Sweeney campaign seems to be willing to remind voters about the war he voted for and supports -- in hopes of persuading voters not to hold him accountable for it.

The DCCC released new polling data today meant to show that Dem Kirsten Gillibrand can still knock off GOP Rep. John Sweeney. The polling, commissioned from Grove Insight, puts Sweeney ahead, 43%-31% -- noteworthy because incumbent Sweeney's well below 50%. Meanwhile, Capitol Confidential also reports that the DCCC has bought up $500,000 worth of local TV ad time -- a "significant buy in this market," the blog says. But today's Hill says the RNC disagrees: It's placed Sweeney's seat on a list of seats it's confident it will retain this fall.

GOP Rep. John Sweeney has come up with a novel counterattack against the ad campaign that MoveOn has launched against him and two other upstate GOPers: Sweeney's sent out a flyer saying that the MoveOn ads are so negative that they're...unfit for minors. Capitol Confidential reports that the flyer asserts that the "ads are so full of lies that WTEN-Channel 10 and others refused to put them on the air!"

The Kirsten Gillibrand campaign has just released an internal poll which claims she's closing in on GOP Rep. John Sweeney. The campaign's polling memo claims that Sweeney is leading Gillibrand by only eight points, 47% to 39% -- far less than a previous poll. Pollster Jefrey Pollock concludes: "All data points are headed in the right direction for this campaign...there is no reason to think that she can’t pull even with or ahead of Sweeney in the next 45-60 days." More from the memo after the jump.

Read more »

Memo to those Republicans who are trying to argue that when they say "stay the course" they don't really mean "stay the course": You aren't going to like this one. Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand has just released a new ad bashing Sweeney on Iraq which the campaign is calling "Stay-the-course Sweeney." Relatedly, if you want to look at a picture of Sweeney at the helm of the yacht industry's, well, yacht, TPM muckraker has one here.

Incumbent GOP Rep. John Sweeney has a nearly 20-point lead over Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand, a new poll shows. The Siena Research Institute's new survey says Sweeney is leading Gillibrand 53%-34%, with Sweeney enjoying a nearly two-to-one favorability rating while Gillibrand remains unknown to more than half the voters.

Rep. John Sweeney has enlisted a big-shot lawyer to battle on his behalf against MoveOn, which is dumping huge amounts of cash into a TV ad campaign targeting the endangered GOP incumbent. Capitol Confidential reports that the lawyer, E. Stewart Jones, has sent a scathing missive to local stations demanding that they pull the ad, which he slams as "irresponsible and reckless."

MoveOn has just launched a major national ad campaign -- and one of their main targets is vulnerable upstate New York GOP Rep. John Sweeney. Capitol Confidential reports that the first ad, which went up today, slams Sweeney's continued support of the war and features a dumptruck full of money bags meant to represent all the cash squandered on the war and on reconstruction. The second goes up tomorrow, and faults Sweeney for taking big contributions from defense contractors who are getting rich off the war. Speaking of dumptrucks full of cash, MoveOn is spending some $54,000 a week on the buy -- a substantial amount for the area, the blog says. View the ads here.

Incumbent GOP Rep. John Sweeney must be really worried about his chances of hanging on to his seat against Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand, because today he brought in Rudy Giuliani to campaign with him, making sure to pose with Rudy in front of a firehouse. (Get it? Rudy, firehouse, 9/11, etc.) And Rudy must really be worried about Sweeney's chances, too, because Rudy's people didn't want to let the press into another of the day's events. Maybe they were worried about something else like this happening.

Yesterday we brought you word that it looked as if some unnamed Republicans were "push-polling" Kirsten Gillibrand, the Dem challenger to incumbent GOP Rep. John Sweeney. In response, a number of readers wrote in to protest that the process we described wasn't push-polling, but a more routine effort to test the potential value of negative arguments against Gillibrand. So we checked in with Mickey Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, and asked: What is a push poll, exactly?

Read more »

Some pretty nefarious stuff is going down in upstate New York: It looks as if Kirsten Gillibrand, the Dem challenging incumbent GOP Rep. John Sweeney, is getting push-polled. Capitol Confidential reports that several voters in the district got a call that started out innocuously enough -- that is, before the nastier questions started.

Read more »

A few days back the campaign of Rep. John Sweeney (R) blasted challenger Kirsten Gillibrand's (D) campaign, saying its "tracker" -- you know, the poor young person who's designated with the thankless gig of showing up at the opponent's events with a video camera -- had been "stalking" Sweeney. The Sweeney campaign claimed not to have trackers.

But now the Gillibrand campaign has struck back, sending photos of what certainly appear to be Sweeney trackers to the Capitol Confidential blog. Sweeney spokesperson Maureen O'Brien Donovan rather bizarrely responded by slamming Gillibrand for using a tracker from outside the state (he's from Florida):

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Donovan said. “At least our flock is local and does not migrate north in the summer.”

The campaign of Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) is accusing an intern for Dem challenger Kirsten Gillibrand of “stalking” him. A spokesperson has even implied that the intern, Benjamin Rosenbaum, may have plans to physically assault the Congressman.

A question for the Sweeney camp: Have you guys ever heard of trackers? Every modern campaign uses them. Those are the poor youngsters who are so low on the totem pole that they get the task of following the opposing candidate everywhere with a video camera. Yes, this "stalker" just may be a "tracker" -- or so the Gillibrand campaign is claiming, anyway, adding that Sweeney’s team uses them, too.

Despite the fact that several political handicappers have predicted a potentially close race in New York’s 20^th district, a new Zogby Poll published in Thursday’s Times-Union of Albany shows incumbent John Sweeney (R) with a distinct advantage over his challenger, Hudson attorney Kirsten Gillibrand (D).

Read more »