I’ll admit it’s not a lot but the AP is projecting that Romney will end up with all of Maine’s delegates.
update: Rasmussen has Arizona numbers posted. McCain is in the lead but below majority.
AZ Republic’s azcentral.com steadily losing visitors
February 2, 2008 By 5 Comments
After reading an article in the Phoenix Republic section of the Arizona Republic bragging about how much traffic the Republic’s blogs are getting (which I don’t read – the formatting on its website is so bad, difficult to maneuver around, and constantly being changed so you can’t bookmark favorites or consistently find anything, that it’s not worth the headache), I decided to research how many people are really visiting its azcentral.com site, which includes its blogs. The article didn’t mention how many unique visitors the blogs are getting, it only referred to hits – which could be grossly inflated if you have the same tech support guys at work and employees accessing the site frequently.
I looked up azcentral.com’s popularity and performance on quantcast.com, and alexa.com, two of the leading website stats trackers. The graph below is from alexa and tracks what percentage of global users are accessing the site over the past 5 years. As you can see, the Republic’s share has been sharply declining.
Quantcast only tracks sites within the past 6 months. Their chart, which tracks monthly unique U.S. visitors, reveals the same downward trend, which buttresses the accuracy of these numbers and this trend.
Below are two more charts from alexa showing how azcentral.com’s ranking among all the websites in the world in terms of popularity has continued to decline, and also its page views.
In comparison, check out the graph for KTAR.com, right wing talk radio that is adapting slowly to the web with news articles:
The Republic’s downward trend started coincidentally around the same time the paper hired Keven Willey as editor, who pushed the paper much farther to the left. It has continued to take a hard left slant under editor Ward Bushee and now Randy Lovely with no sign that the bleeding will stop. Any predictions on how long before the Republic closes its doors? The Seattle Times announced over Christmas that it’s not making it, and they are going to try to cut jobs and change the newspaper, but one of the options considered at this point is shutting down. They’ll probably be gone in a year. Espressopundit has noted that it takes 100 times as many website readers to generate the ad revenues as print readers. The Republic must really be tanking with declining web readers in addition to its declining print subscribers.
NY and LA Times endorse, WAPO covers the news
February 2, 2008 By 4 Comments
While the NY Times and LA Times were busy endorsing John McCain a Washington Post writer was in Arizona actually covering the story.
update - Rasmussen said it would release Arizona poll number later today. Nothing yet but here is the link.
Mesa Mayor’s Race – By the Monies
February 2, 2008 By 3 Comments
Money is apparently no factor for one candidate running for mayor in the City of Mesa.
According to the latest financial reports, developer/lawyer, Scott Smith, has dropped $70,000 into his campaign coffers in an attempt to win a seat at Mesa’s City Hall. This brings to total $144,162 in fundraising with $80,820 cash on hand.
Also in the same race are small businessman, Rex Griswold and Claudia Walters. Griswold resigned from his seat on the council last fall in order to run for the position in accordance with Arizona’s resign to run law. Walters continues to serve on the council only because she announced her bid after the beginning of the new year.
Prior to the latest reporting, Griswold’s led fundraising efforts and reflecting broad support from city and community leaders. His latest report indicates that he has raised $79,823 with $51,766 cash on hand. Griswold and his family also loaned and contributed to his campaign a combined total of $17,710.
Claudia Walters’ financial reporting trailed Griswold’s lead by just over $27,000. Her latest campaign reports that she has raised a total of $52,385 with $39,711 cash on hand. Walters loaned her campaign $100.
But with Smith now putting another $70,000 into his campaign (Smith has loaned a total of $80,000 to his campaign), both Griswold and Walters’ fundraising has been eclipsed by the former developer/lawyer’s personal monies.
According to the City of Mesa’s charter, the position of Mayor only pays $33,600/year. Mesa’s mayors serve a four-year term so the total compensation over that period would add up to be $134,400 plus expenses.
For anyone looking at this race from the perspective of a return on investment, Smith is already running at a loss. And the perception is that Smith is spending a lot of his own money to buy the mayor’s seat.
Despite campaign finance records being broken, the race will continue to heat up as Smith, Griswold and Walters dash for first place on the March 11th election. The candidate crossing the finish line with 50% + 1 vote will win the seat. But if no candidate breaks that threshhold, the two top finishers will face a runoff race which will be decided on May 20th. Early voting begins on February 7th.
East Valley Tribune – “Smith top fundraiser in Mesa mayor race”
Arizona Republic – “Personal loan puts Smith on top for campaign donations”
Steyn weighs in on McCain and Giuliani
February 2, 2008 By 25 Comments
Mark Steyn has a column out today examining Giuliani’s impact on the race and wondering if McCain is up for the task. In his own words:
McCain will not permit a military defeat in Iraq. But it’s not clear to me he has much of a strategic vision for the ideological struggle, for the real long-term battlefield in the mosques and madrassahs of Pakistan and Indonesia and Western Europe.
Lord Needs Help From On High
February 2, 2008 By 6 Comments
The latest FEC reports should put to rest any of the speculation that Bob Lord will be competitive against Congressman John Shadegg in CD 3.
Lord garnered attention early in the year when he filed with just over $120,000 for the first quarter, while Shadegg filed just $19,000. Obviously, Shadegg was not expecting an early challenge, but quickly bounced back, raising a whopping $312,000 and ending the 2nd quarter with $50,000 more cash-on-hand than Lord.
Now, the year-end reports paint a very clear picture: Bob Lord doesn’t have a chance in hell (or in heaven) to beat John Shadegg.
Shadegg raised a stunning $495,000 in the fourth quarter – more than any other candidate in the state when you subtract any personal candidate money loaned (ie, Schweikert). Lord, with a top-tier fundraising event in D.C. with the DCCC Chairman and with a major event with Governor Janet Napolitano during the fourth quarter managed to only scrape together $211,000. When an incumbent – and a popular one at that – ends the off-year with a $360,000 cash-on-hand advantage, turn the lights out, the party is over.
If anyone doubts the desperation of the Democrats in the face of the fundraising onslaught by Shadegg, just take a look at the attacks they have launched against him in the last two weeks. They fed a bogus story to their in-house press operation (the Arizona Republic) attacking Shadegg’s ethics (a clear non-starter with anyone who has followed Shadegg’s career), filed a frivolous complaint with the FEC about the bogus allegation, attacked Shadegg’s contributors, attacked his vote against the stimulus package and then launched thousands of robocalls into his district to take that attack directly to voters.
Shadegg’s response was a good-natured jab at the Democrats, thanking them for communicating his position to voters in his district and suggesting that they may need to file an in-kind contribution with the FEC because it directly supports his re-election.
So, why all the attacks in the last two weeks? The only explanation is that Shadegg’s campaign put out a press release in the middle of January reporting his huge fundraising quarter and announcing that he would be filing with an eye-popping $863,000 cash-on-hand. When that got out, the choking sound down on Indian School was Bob Lord spitting up his morning coffee. Democrat spinster, Emily Bitnner’s head was about to explode and the out-of-state-manager-that-beat-a-Pennsylvania-Republican-incumbent-who-strangled-his-mistress Drew Eldredge-Martin (what guy has a hyphenated last name? Oh, I guess we have to ask Jeff Hatch-Miller) realized that managing a campaign in 2006 against a weak Republican incumbent who HAD POLICE CHARGES FILED AGAINST HIM (and still only lost by a smallish margin), was very different than coming into Arizona and trying to manage the campaign of a little-known leftist Democrat against a popular incumbent in a very safe Republican seat. Essentially, they went into full panic mode and the mudfest began.
Bottom line? In Presidential year, in a district that gave Bush 58% of the vote in 2004 and Shadegg nearly 60% of the vote in 2006, this district is staying deep red. But there will be plenty of mud to clean off as the Democrats try to keep up the facade of a real race.
