Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off: ' IA-03: Well lookee here: Some prognosticators had started writing off Dem Rep. Leonard Boswell's chances in his member-vs.-member matchup against GOP Rep. Tom Latham, but it looks like that might be premature. A new DCCC poll from Benenson Strategy Group shows the two incumbents tied at 45 apiece, with independent Scott Batcher (who seems to have Republican sympathies) at 7. The rest of the survey also offers reasons for Boswell supporters to feel hopeful: For one, the Democrat is tied despite having a worse favorability rating, 34-31 vs. 39-23 for Latham. For another, Generic D beats Generic R 48-44, suggesting there are more undecided Democrats than Republicans. And Obama is beating Romney 52-45, an almost identical spread to his 52-46 margin in 2008. So if these numbers hold, Latham would need a bunch of crossover votes to win'an increasingly hard feat in our ever-more polarized political environment.
Beyond all this, these numbers appear to contradict a recent claim by the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman:
Wasserman said private polls show that Latham has "opened up a lead in the high single digits to low double digits."If Republicans really did have data showing Latham with a 10-point lead, then why wouldn't they release it? Numbers like that would be devastating to Boswell, undermining him with donors and outside spending groups and helping to foster a narrative that he's "done." The fact that we never saw such polling, combined with these new D-Trip numbers, leads me to guess that things perhaps don't look as rosy for the GOP as all that.
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