Archive for the ‘Attorney General News’ Category

From Louis Jacobson at Governing Magazine:

The battle to control state attorney general offices is continuing to shift in the Republican direction, but the movement since Governing’s last rating in October has been modest.

This represents our third effort this year to handicap the 30 states that have attorney general elections this fall. With this analysis, most of the races stay as is, but two contests shift one notch toward the Republican candidate.

Currently, the Democrats hold a 32-to-18 edge in AG offices. Of these 50 positions, 43 are popularly elected, with the remaining seven appointed by a governor, the Legislature or the state Supreme Court.

Of the 43 elected seats, the Democrats currently control 27 to the Republicans’ 16. And of those 43, a total of 30 are being contested this fall, of which the Democrats currently hold 19.

The broad picture doesn’t change much from our last analysis. Based on interviews with dozens of partisan and nonpartisan sources, the Democrats are poised to lose between six and 13 attorney general posts on Election Day. If they suffer a net loss of just six seats, the Democrats would hold on to their now-solid majority, though by just a single seat. But if the Democrats were to lose a net 13 seats, they’d see the GOP take the lead by roughly the same 3-to-2 margin they currently enjoy.

The two states moving toward the GOP in this analysis are Kansas, which shifts from tossup to lean Republican, and New York, which shifts from lean Democratic to tossup.

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From wtvm.com:

Republican attorney general candidate Luther Strange has raised more than $1 million more than Democratic opponent James Anderson during the campaign for Tuesday’s general election.

Campaign finance reports show that Birmingham attorney Strange has raised about $1.47 million since the primary runoff election in July. A Montgomery attorney, Anderson has raised almost $374,000 during that same period.

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From AL.com:

Republican Luther Strange has next to no experience in the courtroom. He has spent most of his career as an attorney in Washington, D.C., for Sonat, a natural gas pipeline company in Birmingham, and as a congressional lobbyist for clients of the Bradley, Arant, Rose and White law firm.

He has emphasized that he could use his experience in the business world to help bring industry to the state.

Strange talks more like he is running to become the state’s top industrial recruiter rather than the attorney who represents the interests of the state and its citizens as Alabama’s top prosecutor and civil attorney.

Democrat James Anderson, who once served as a member of the Alabama Ethics Commission, has handled more than 2,000 court cases over 30 years; State Farm Insurance has been one of his major clients.

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From CJonline.com:

Schmidt, the state Senate majority leader running a tight race against Six, said Kansans yearn for a legal representative who will join litigation against federal health reform. Six declined to file a brief with about 20 states objecting to provisions of reform approved by Congress and Obama.

“Kansas is sitting on the sidelines,” Schmidt said.

Six said it would be a waste of Kansas resources to piggyback on a federal case that would be decided with or without his input. Kansas will benefit from any court ruling on the issue, he said.

Kobach, who leads in polling against Secretary of State Chris Biggs, said he would push for state laws requiring Kansans to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to provide a picture identification card when voting. He said Biggs hadn’t done enough to catch voting cheaters, but Biggs said Kobach was exaggerating claims about the integrity of Kansas elections.

“We’re going to make some commonsense reforms,” Kobach promised.

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From scpr.org:

The race for California attorney general pits Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley against San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris. Both are career prosecutors. The similarities stop there. Harris bills herself as an innovator. Cooley says he’s a by-the-book lawman.

Retired LAPD Detective Jimmy Trahin remembers training Steve Cooley in the early 1970s as a reserve police officer.

“First thing I noticed about Steve is that he was one of these gung-ho types,” Trahin told a reporter a couple of years ago. “He just couldn’t wait to get out there and pick up bad guys.”

Trahin recalls one confrontation with three robbery suspects on the rough streets south of downtown Los Angeles.

“It was an all knock-out brawl. And it ended up, other officers came in and Steve backed off,” Trahin said. “Then he came back in with his baton, and he was doing his number to try to keep these people down, and he ended up hitting half of the other cops that were there with his baton.”

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From LegalNewsLine:

With five days left until Tuesday’s general election, Georgia’s Republican attorney general candidate Sam Olens looks likely to defeat his Democratic opponent, according to the newest poll results.

According to a SurveyUSA poll of all statewide races on Monday, Olens leads his rival and former prosecutor Ken Hodges by 13 points in the open-seat fight.

The survey found Olens, the former Cobb County Commission chairman, with exactly 50 percent of the vote and Hodges with 37 percent.

Meanwhile, Libertarian candidate Don Smart was found taking 7 percent of the vote overall, 26 percent among independents and 18 percent among liberals.

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