Photograph by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Delegates stand at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa, Florida, on Aug. 30, 2012.

The Republican organization working to secure state offices for the party will focus on recruiting Hispanic and female candidates in the 2014 election cycle, when it plans to raise $50 million.

The Republican State Leadership Committee is “on track” to meet that fundraising goal after raising $39 million for the 2012 election, committee president Chris Jankowski told reporters today. The group focuses on state legislative races and “down-ballot” statewide contests for lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state. As a 527 organization, the RSLC can accept donations in unlimited amounts.

Fielding more Hispanic candidates is a top priority for the group. While the RSLC met its goal of recruiting more than 100 Hispanic candidates for state legislatures in 2012, Jankowski said, they won just 16 races instead of the 30 to 35 he expected.

“The biggest demographic challenge is the Hispanic challenge, but we as a party need to do better, period, and we intend to try,” Jankowski said.

President Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election, exit polls show, helping him carry politically competitive states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado while aiding Democrats down the ballot.

Jankowski said the Republican party does not always value female candidates “as much, but they are a great asset as candidates” because they “bring a different approach to campaigning.”

“We obviously need more women to enter public office and get on the escalator to higher office so that our leadership reflects stronger women in the Republican Party,” he said.

The RSLC will work to elect more Republicans to state legislatures in Virginia and New Jersey this fall. Both states also are holding elections for governor.

Republicans hold a 67-32 advantage in the Virginia House of Delegates, whose members are up for re-election this November. Each party holds 20 seats in the state Senate, whose members are next up for election in 2015.

The tie-breaking vote is held by the lieutenant governor, an office that’s up for election in November. On May 18, Republicans nominated E.W. Jackson, a black pastor who’s drawn attention for comments opposing abortion and homosexuality.

“It is very important that we can disagree without being disagreeable, that we highlight issues that are relevant and what we can actually accomplish,” Jankowski said when asked about Jackson.

All 120 state legislative seats in New Jersey are on the ballot in November. Even a landslide re-election by Republican Gov. Chris Christie over Democratic challenger Barbara Buono may not be enough to overturn Democratic majorities of 48-32 in the Assembly and 24-16 in the Senate.

Jankowski acknowledged that ”the districts are very unfavorable and present a challenge” for Republicans.

“If Christie stays strong, we think there are some excellent opportunities for pickups in the Assembly and in the Senate, and we will be very engaged to do so,” he added.

Original post is Republican Group Seeks More Hispanic and Female Candidates by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg

New York City Mayoral Candidate and Senior Managing Director at Siebert Brandford Shank & Co William Thompson speaks at the Bloomberg Link State and Municipal Finance Briefing held at Lighthouse International in New York. Photo by Jin Lee / Bloomberg

William Thompson hasn’t stopped campaigning for mayor since 2009, when he lost to Michael Bloomberg by just 4.3 percentage points, after the billionaire outspent Thompson 10-to-one to win a third and final four-year term.

Thompson, 59, the only black candidate in what may be six-way primary, has said he expects to capitalize on changing demographics that have made black and Latino voters more than 50 percent of the Democratic Party vote.

Yet that hasn’t happened. For the past three years, the Democratic former city comptroller has seemed to be running in place. A Quinnipiac University poll last month showed he had 10 percent Democratic voter support among five candidates, down from 13 percent a year ago.

The leader so far has been City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, yet she’s slipped to 28 percent support in an April 19 Quinnipiac poll from 37 percent in a Feb. 27 survey.

Thompson says he’s seized the momentum, and in the past week the campaign has backed up that boast, announcing Merryl Tisch, who as chancellor of the state Board of Regents is a top education policy maker, has signed on as campaign chairwoman.

She’s married to James Tisch, CEO of the Loews Corporation.
Thompson also won the endorsement of Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor and Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman whose government experience goes back to the 1970s when he helped former Gov. Hugh Carey resolve the fiscal crisis that brought New York City to the brink of bankruptcy.

Thompson’s campaign also has disclosed ahead of the May 15 deadline that it raised $600,000 since March 15, about twice as much as it had raised during the previous two-month period, bringing total donations to about $3.4 million, including $270,000 in contributions eligible for six-to-one public matching funds under the city campaign finance system.

“He’s shown he’s in the money race; he’s in the endorsement race, and his next test is to somehow show he can be more of a draw in the polls,” said Douglas Muzzio, professor of urban politics at Baruch College in Manhattan.

Tisch’s involvement as campaign chair highlights Thompson’s past experience as city Board of Education president,” Muzzio said. “And she brings social connections that bring both cash and cache.”

As his Democratic competitors try to position themselves as progressives, calling for changes in police practices that include stop-and-frisks that mostly affect minority youths, Thompson has rejected proposed City Council laws to create an Inspector General to oversee the police department and create a right to sue for people who say police used racial profiling to detain them on the street.

“He’s positioning himself as the centrist in the race, the moderate in the field, as everyone else has tried to move left,” said William Cunningham, a political adviser to former New York Govs. Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News, parent Bloomberg LP. “He’s putting it together quietly, methodically.”

It’s a strategy that Harlem-based political consultant Bill Lynch says may backfire. Lynch, an advisor to Thompson rival John Liu, the current city comptroller, says that Thompson may lose support among black voters who want changes in police practices.

“He’s assuming he has the African-American voter and now he just has to pick up more white voters,” Lynch said in an interview. “While he’s peeling off white voters from the competition, he may find he’s lost the progressive Democratic base, and that includes a lot of people in the black community.”

Original post is NYC’s Thompson Counts on Momentum in Mayoral Race by Political Capital.

Photograph by by John Moore/Getty Images

A bilingual sign stands outside a polling center in Texas.

That’s the share of eligible Hispanics who voted in the 2012 presidential election.

The voter turnout rate among Hispanics — a burgeoning bloc that leans Democratic — fell from 49.9 percent in 2008, when President Barack Obama won his first term.

The 2012 voter turnout rate for Hispanics compared to 66.2 percent for black voters, 64.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 47.3 percent for Asians, according to a report the Census Bureau released last week.

While Hispanic voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada and other states helped re-elect Obama, the Census report underscored how that bloc hasn’t realized its full potential in elections. Hispanics have lower rates of citizenship and voter registration and participation than non-Hispanic whites.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 48% by Political Capital.

Photograph by Julie Denesha/Getty Images

Eileen Woofford, 84, waited in line to cast her vote at Cleveland Avenue Baptist Church on November 6, 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri.

That’s the share of black voters eligible to vote in the 2012 presidential election who cast a ballot.

Blacks outvoted non-Hispanic whites, who had a 64.1 percent turnout rate, according to a Census Bureau report released yesterday. It’s the first time blacks voted at a higher rate than whites since before 1996, when the bureau began publishing statistics on the eligible voters.

Blacks outvoted whites amid the re-election of President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black chief executive.

The share of all eligible citizens who voted fell to 61.8 percent in 2012 from 63.6 percent in 2008, Census data show.

Bloomberg’s John McCormick has more here.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 66.2% by Political Capital.

Photograph by Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg

U.S. Border Patrol agents monitor the area near the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, California, on March 21, 2012.

Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, offers this reason for supporting an overhaul of immigration laws: It will help national security.

Durbin, in an interview on “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend on Bloomberg Television, said that strengthening border security, providing a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and new steps to make sure visitors don’t overstay their visas would improve security. His comments came as two immigrants were blamed for the Boston Marathon bombings.

“It’s the right question at the right time, because we’re talking about what to do with foreigners in the United State sor coming to the United States,” Durbin said. “And it’s put in the context, clearly, of our national security first.”

President George W. Bush, in 2001, was discussing a plan to allow undocumented immigrants to remain the U.S. Those proposals were derailed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In 2007, the Senate failed to overcome a filibuster to enact a Bush-backed immigration bill.

This time, Durbin said senators of both parties who authored the proposed immigration legislation are fanning out to their colleagues in the House to try to get bipartisan support in both chambers.

“Some of them are running into some resistance,” Durbin said, “but they’re also finding those who want to talk.”

Read the full story here.

Original post is Durbin Says Immigration Law Overhaul Is National Security Issue by Political Capital.

Original post is Rand Paul Eyes 2016 as Reaching Out on Immigration, Race by Political Capital.

Photograph by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), center, and Sen. John Isakson (R-GA) depart from a Senate subway car as Senate Republicans and Democrats head to their weekly policy luncheon on March 19, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky with a libertarian outlook and son of the retired congressman from Texas who ran for president with an appeal to libertarian instincts, says there is a goal for government.

Protecting your property.

“If you look at lawless parts of the world where there is no protection of property – where you can’t protect your property… you can’t borrow against that property, so no capital develops and there is no capitalism and there is no marketplace,” Paul says in an interview with National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More” airing today.

“So the government does have a role; they are an arbiter,” Paul says. “They are they the one who protects property, protects the sanctity and the name that goes and attaches to the house. They protect transactions. They protect commerce. There is a role for government.”

Paul, son of Texan Ron Paul, is setting out on his own quest for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. He is taking his pitch to Iowa, addressing party activists there in May. And he is taking his pitch to places where Republicans haven’t fared well — he spoke this week on the campus of Howard University in Washington, one of the nation’s pre-eminent black colleges.

“I think, in some ways, they (Republicana) have sort of given up, and I’m here to say that the Republican Party, to be a national party, can’t give up on any ethnic group and can’t say to any ethnic group, ‘We don’t care about your vote.’ ” Paul says in his interview with NPR’s Michele Martin. “We need to be out there competing for the African-American vote.”

It’s not a reach, he suggests.

“I believe that our drug laws are too harsh, too long and unfair to minorities,” he says. “These aren’t things I say just because they might be popular at Howard, but I say them because I truly believe in them. And think these are issues that if it got out that not all Republicans weren’t the same, that there were Republicans who were interested in issues like this, I think all of a sudden you will see some of the African-American vote saying, ‘You know what, we believe in economic opportunity, we think high taxes are not good for the economy, we just thought Republicans didn’t like us for some other reason.”’

And while he’s at it, Paul promises to protect everyone’s property.

Original post is Rand Paul: Role of Government by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kevin Wolf/AP Photo

Sen. John McCain during a news conference supporting a pardon for boxer Jack Johnson, shown in stand up photo at right, in this file photo. Behind McCain are referee Richard Steele, left, a member of the World Boxing Hall of Fame, and Iran Barkley, a former WBB boxing champion.

Harry Reid was a boxer in his time (amateur lightweight).

Mike Tyson was a boxer in his days (heavyweight champion).

The late Jack Johnson remains a boxing legend.

Now the Senate majority leader from Searchlight, Nevada, and the tattooed darling of Las Vegas have something in common: Calling on President Barack Obama to posthumously pardon Johnson.

Tyson has started a petition at Change.org, “the world’s petition platform,” urging the president to pardon the late, great first black heavyweight boxing champion, who was imprisoned for crossing state lines with a white girlfriend.

(Small problem here: Obama doesn’t do posthumous pardons, or many contemporaneous ones, for that matter  – more on that later.)

Without any comment on Tyson’s own relationship with girlfriends, it’s said that Tyson launched his petition for the falsely convicted (in 1913) champ after a meeting with Democrat Reid,  leading a bipartisan effort with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona to clear Johnson’s name. (The late Miles Davis might approve of all this.)

“Please help get a pardon for Jack Johnson, the first BLACK heavyweight champion of the world [who] was convicted by an all-white jury in June 1913, under the Mann Act,” the petition states. “He was sentenced to one year and a day for a consensual relationship he had with a Caucasian woman.”

I don’t ask for much but please help me do the right thing by signing this petition chn.ge/12fK8wZ

— Mike Tyson (@MikeTyson) April 3, 2013

One great boxer standing up for another: chn.ge/12fK8wZ CC @miketyson

— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) April 3, 2013

President Barack Obama: Pardon boxing legend Jack Johson change.org/petitions/pres… via @change

— Mike Tyson (@MikeTyson) April 3, 2013.

Soul-mates, these two: Vegas-born Reid was chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission at one point, and Tyson has his own Vegas show about “undisputed truth-telling” now: “Mike Tyson is no angel. He’s done time in prison, openly admits to using drugs and paying prostitutes. And “Iron” Mike Tyson tells all in this sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, sometimes emotional show.”

So there might be some hope here for Johnson, if Obama weren’t so basically stingy about clemency in general — granting fewer pardons and commutations of sentence than any full-term-serving president since George Washington. (James Garfield issued fewer, but he was assassinated four months into office.)

The Office of the Pardon Attorney recently addressed this issue in response to a request for posthumous clemency for the author O. Henry, imprisoned for bank fraud during his illustrious writing career (He published from behind bars following that 1897 indictment.)

Ronald Rodgers, the pardon attorney at Justice, wrote to the petitioners for Henry that  “the well-settled policy of the Justice Department not to accept for processing applications for posthumous pardon is grounded in the belief that the time and efforts of clemency officials are better dedicated to the clemency requests of living persons, who can actually benefit from the President’s mercy.”

But hey, how often do we get to mention Harry Reid, John McCain, Mike Tyson, Miles Davis, Jack Johnson, O. Henry and Barack Obama in one breath?

Original post is Harry Reid, Mike Tyson: In the Same Ring for Jack Johnson (Bell) by Political Capital.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images

Immigrants take the oath of citizenship at a special Valentine’s Day naturalization ceremony for married couples on Feb. 14, 2013 in Tampa, Florida.

As President Barack Obama presses Congress to produce legislation granting legal status to 11 million undocumented immigrants, Republican proponents have quietly begun laying the groundwork to persuade their own lawmakers and supporters to embrace the plan.

That effort goes public this weekend, when the Republican-aligned Hispanic Leadership Network will launch a TV ad featuring former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez making the case for an overhaul.

“America’s the only place where a little boy who couldn’t speak English can grow up to be a CEO and U.S. secretary of Commerce,” says the Cuban-born Gutierrez, who served under former President George W. Bush. “Washington must pass immigration reform that grows the economy and respects the rule of law.”

The spot is to air nationally in English on ABC’s “This Week” and “Fox News Sunday” as well as in Spanish on the Spanish-language network Univision as part of a “six-figure” buy, the group said. The organization is an arm of the nonprofit American Action Network, which spent $11.7 million to influence congressional races last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election compared to 27 percent for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who referred to proposals to legalize undocumented immigrants  as “amnesty” and said his goal would be to prompt them to “self-deport.” Since then, Obama has aggressively campaigned for an immigration law rewrite. Many Republicans have said their party must drop its longstanding opposition to such a bill.

“American Action Network recognized years ago that conservatives have had an uphill battle in the Hispanic community,” Communications Director Dan Conston said. “As this immigration debate moves forward, we are looking to play a positive role in both supporting reform and in supporting the people that are making a positive contribution.”

The ad is only one part of the campaign. The Hispanic Leadership Network distributed talking points to Republican lawmakers earlier this year about how to talk about immigration reform and has been working to educate them about the benefits of an overhaul.

In the coming weeks, its think tank the American Action Forum plans to produce a study authored by its president Douglas Holtz-Eakin on the economic benefits of an immigration rewrite. Hotlz-Eakin is a former Congressional Budget Office director and Republican economic advisor.

“We think we can play a positive role in helping educate conservatives on the benefits,” said Conston.

Original post is Republican-Leaning Group On Immigration Revamp: It’s the Economy by Political Capital.

Photograph by Massachusetts Governor's Office

This undated photo released by the Massachusetts Governor’s office shows
William “Mo” Cowan, right, former chief of staff for Gov. Deval Patrick.

William “Mo” Cowan, the choice of Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick for John Kerry’s Senate seat, is joining a chamber that will have two black members for the first time in its history.

Cowan, a Democratic lawyer and Patrick’s former chief of staff, will join a Senate that includes Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who entered the Senate by way of appointment this month as the first black senator from the South since the Reconstruction era more than a century ago.

At the same time, Cowan will serve on an interim basis for about five months and isn’t running in a special election planned June 25. Kerry is vacating his Senate seat on Friday to become Secretary of State.

Cowan will become just the eighth black senator in history, adding his name to a short list that includes President Barack Obama, who was an Illinois senator for four years. Obama’s successor, Democrat Roland Burris, served for less than two years on an interim basis; one of their predecessors, Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, served from 1993 to 1999 and remains the only black female senator in history.

Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican who held the seat Cowan will assume, served from 1967 to 1979 as the first black senator to enter the chamber by popular vote.

Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both Mississippi Republicans, served in the Senate during the Reconstruction era, though never together.

Original post is Senate: Two Black Members a First by Political Capital.