linda lingle – Moe Lane

Looks like she may be, at that:

[Former Governor Linda Lingle’s] favorability is up 5 points to 46% while her negatives have dropped 8 points to 43%. And with that improvement in her image has come an improvement in her standing against her potential opponents. She now trails [Rep. Mazie] Hirono by just 6 points at 48-42, and she actually leads [former Rep. Ed] Case by 2 points at 45-43.

Hirono and Case are probably going to slug it out for the nomination; they’ve already begun to confront each other in entertainingly nasty ways. As that link shows, Hirono’s the establishment choice, while Case… is not; which is kind of funny, because last year Case was the establishment choice in the HI-01 special election. Right up to the point where he and Colleen Hanabusa more or less handed the seat to Charles Djou, and in the process destroyed the last tattered Democratic apotropaic talking point that had been arrayed against DOOM. Continue reading #rsrh (PPP) Lingle looking good in HI-SEN?

Excellent news, if true: former governor Lingle was popular for most of her two terms in office (term limits prevented her from running for a third term in 2010). Some heavily partisan Democrats trumpeted some heavily partisan Democratic polling earlier in the year in an apparent attempt to keep her out of next year’s race; it’s apparently backfired.

This does not necessarily translate to ‘Lingle is a shoo-in.’ The state is reliably Blue these days; it’s one of the few places where the Republican party did unambiguously worse in the 2010 elections (loss of the governorship, a House seat*, and losses in both houses of the state legislature). How bad is it, in fact? Well, let me put it this way: meet Sam Slom, otherwise known as the Hawaiian Republican Senate caucus. The retirement of Sen. Akaka is likewise going to attract a lot of Democratic hopefuls; Hawaii has an institutional tendency to keep re-electing incumbents once they’re in office, which means that anybody getting that Senate seat can reasonably expect it to hold it for a while – even by US Senate standards.

Continue reading #rsrh Linda Lingle (R) recruited for HI-SEN?