In the flow of endorsements in recent days and weeks -- and indeed over the past few months as well -- one thing we haven't seen is very many Senate candidates come out and endorse in the presidential race. There have been a few -- both Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick in Oregon have endorsed Barack Obama, for instance. But by and large, top-tier Senate candidates have refrained from wading into the presidential contest, whether out of fear of alienating half of the party or a desire not to make press in that way. Yet today, an endorsement from a Democratic Senate hopeful and Congressman (and thus a superdelegate to boost) for Obama.

Congressman Tom Allen is throwing his support behind Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Allen, a superdelegate to this summer's Democratic National Convention, said Monday he believes Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are both "supremely qualified" to be president. Allen has been friends for decades with Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

But Allen says most of the nation's primary voters have spoken, and that the time has come to bring a "graceful end" to the primary campaign.

Thus far, people like Mark Warner and Tom Udall and Mark Udall -- the top-tier of Democratic Senate hopefuls -- have not come out and endorsed either candidate for President. As alluded to before, in the eyes of most Senate campaigns, the risks of such an endorsement outweigh the potential benefits. Or at least they did.

It remains to be seen if the Allen endorsement foreshadows more to come -- if it is a dipping of the toe in water, in a sense -- or if it simply represents one American coming to a public decision about his views on the race for the Democratic nomination. In the coming weeks, we will have to wait to see if any more Udalls or Warners come out and publicly support either Obama or Hillary Clinton. But if others do follow in Allen's footsteps, we could see a new stage of coalescing in the Democratic presidential primary in which the campaign class of the party, as well as candidates who will actually face the voters in competitive general elections in the fall, are ready to see one nominee emerge.

I think this is a fair read of the lay of the land for Senate races we are challenging by DSCC chair Sen. Chuck Schumer. From MSNBC's FirstRead...

Here's the picture for the DSCC provided by Schumer:

Top targets: VA, NH, NM, CO, AK. (Schumer says they are ahead here.)

Second tier: OR, MN, ME. (These are blue states; Democrats are not ahead, but are competitive.)

Red-state seats in striking range: KY, NC, MS.

Good candidates with an outside chance: NE, KS, OK, GA, ID, TX. (Schumer says of Texas that he likes Noriega as a candidate and that incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is polling surprisingly low.)

The note on the fourth set about Noriega is actually from Schumer and included in the article so it's nice to see him pointing this race out in particular. There is good reason for this because the Texas Senate race is competitive, possibly as much or more so than other races listed in higher tiers. I use Maine for an example.

The latest Maine polling...


Pollster       Collins  Allen
Rasmussen           54     38    
McLaughlin (R)      54     31    
Critical Insights   54     34


Polling from the Noriega campaign conducted prior to the primary.


                        Cornyn   Noriega
Initial Head-to-head       42        22
Informed Ballot Positive   42        31
Informed Ballot Contrast   41        33


Maine is a lot smaller than Texas and Tom Allen represented half of Maine in Congress verses Rick Noriega representing 1/150th of Texas in the state house. And even with that and the fact that the Texas numbers are pre-primary it seems clear that Texas is well positioned to be heading on up those charts.

No offense intended to my friends in Maine and the good folks at Turn Maine Blue! We suffer from an embarrassment of riches this year.

For those of you who've been following, I'm a State Senator and candidate for Congress here in Maine's First District (our current representative, Tom Allen, is getting ready to knock Susan Collins out of the Senate).  Since Monday is the end of the first quarter, and that's always a major event on the campaign trail, I thought I'd look back at what we've accomplished over the last three months, and where we'll be going in the weeks ahead, as we approach the Democratic primary and the November general election.

If you like what we're doing here in Maine, please show your support via ActBlue.  (Fundraising is tough when you've sworn off PAC and lobbyist contributions, so individual supporters are that much more important to our campaign.)

This past week was National Sunshine Week, a period dedicated to furthering open government and discussion.  So I guess this announcement is fitting.

I've spent years advocating for Maine's public financing laws, because I feel our campaign finance system needs fundamental changes.  So in my campaign for Congress, I'm putting my money where my mouth is.  I'm banking my campaign on the support of individual voters, not the support of special interest lobbyists or federal PACs.

Today, I'm taking my commitment to clean elections one step further.

I'm proud to announce that moments ago, even though my internal polling shows that I am neck and neck with my opponent, I signed on with the Change Congress Movement, a plan to start eliminating the influence of big-money contributors in politics, and to restore our government to the people.

Five years ago this week, our nation was taken down a dark and dangerous path by a President we now know repeatedly deceived the American people.  Because of George W. Bush's deception and determination to take our country to war, almost 4,000 of our fighting men and women, and countless Iraqi civilians, lost their lives in the sands and streets of Iraq. Thousands more have come home battered and broken, with wartime injuries they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. No words we speak now can ever remove this stain upon our history, and no amount of grief will ever return those we've lost back to us.  

That is the very steep cost of this war.

Please be aware that the pop vote totals on Real Clear Politics are non-representative of the real totals, as they exclude several states who haven't fully reported their popular vote totals.

Numbers Don't Lie
by Me (L.J.)

To be debunked:

--ME, NE, LA and WA had representative of electorate voter turn out.
-- Obama's wins are more significant than Hillary's losses.
-- Obama has more total votes than Hillary.

Maine:
(h t t p : / / www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=3&a mp;docID=news-000002668825)
(h t t p : / / www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art icle?AID=20080123/NEWS/801230333-1/NEW S01)

About 1 million registered voters

45,000 total voters came out in ME Caucus

59.5% = 26,550 for Obama

40.5% = 18,450 for Clinton

Nebraska:
(h t t p : / / www.journalstar.com/articles/2007/12/30/ news/politics/doc4776dd0caea8b171580917. txt)

375,000 registered Democrats

36,000 total voters came out in Nebraska caucus

57% = 25,986 for Obama

32% = 12,396 for Clinton

Louisiana:
(h t t p : / / www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives /015165.php)

2.8 million registered voters, about half are Democrats
(1.4 million Democrats registered in Louisiana)

358,000 voted on Saturday, meaning about
ONE MILLION DEMOCRATS IN LA DID NOT VOTE

57% = 220,588 for Obama

36% = 136,959 for Clinton

Washington:
(h t t p : / / blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/02/our-view -on-pre.html)

About 4.3 million voters
50,000 voters came out in Washington caucus, 1.3% of registered voters

68% = 34,000 votes for Obama
32% = 16,000 votes for Clinton

Alright, so we have a blow-out win for Obama in New England, where Clinton was expected to at least keep it close.  But it wasn't a real win, because it was a caucus.  And we all know that caucuses are undemocratic, even if we didn't start to complaint about it until Obama started winning them.

And we know his primary wins aren't real wins because they were mostly in the south, where black votes are abundant.  Or in his home state.  Or anomalies in New England like Delaware and Connecticut.  Or Utah because they want to copy the other rectangular states all having caucuses where Obama gets 60 to 80 percent of the white vote, which isn't really the white vote because its in caucus states.