By popular request in comment threads and emails, I’ll be putting together a Saturday digest of election-oriented diaries from now until November. This project emerged from the Community Power! Election Season diary written Feb. 20. Next week I’ll introduce you to a couple of other Kossacks who will be joining me in running the project.

Each digest will include a list of election diaries published during the previous week and categorized by region. A separate section will include diaries written in the previous week by incumbents, new candidates and wannabe candidates. (Diaries by incumbents may or may not be directly related to the coming elections.)

Digests will also focus on a few tips for making diaries more persuasive, informative and written in a way that encourages everyone to read them even if they live 2000 miles away from the spotlighted contest. This week, we’re talking headlines.

Just as with a story in a newspaper or magazine, a headline can make or break a diary. That is, you can attract an audience or drive it away by the words and structure you choose. Crafting great headlines is something even some of the best writers never quite get the knack of, but everybody can train themselves to become better at it. Too many writers spend hours on research and writing their diaries, then slap on a 30-second headline. Spend some time at it. A good practice is to write three or four possible headlines and choose the best one. Happily for bloggers, some of the old rules from the old media – like character counts – don’t apply in wwwLand. But some do. Here are 10 guidelines to think about:

• Headlines are bait. Instill curiosity: “Paternity Test Demanded for Florida Abstinence Campaigner”; “Voters Eager to Punish Liberals, Selves”

• Conversational headlines appeal to the most readers.

• Use the active voice. Good verbs work wonders. “To be” conjugations bore readers.

• There’s power in humor, but serious stories suffer from overly cute headlines. Headlines with a twist of an old cliché reel in readers. But take care not to twist too far.

• Beware. Double entendres can help or hurt. “Cops Pinch Lewd Nude” works; however, “Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead” has problems.

• Be succinct. Short headlines are punchier and easier to read. Ernest Hemingway told a whole story once in six words – “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” A helluva good headline, too.

• Match the headline to the story. Don’t deceive. Nobody likes being taken for a fool.

• If the diary is about a candidate, the candidate’s and/or district’s name should usually appear in the headline.

• DON’T WRITE HEADLINES IN ALL CAPS. Besides “shouting,” they are hard to read.

• If it’s not BREAKING! don’t lie about it.

From this week’s collection of election diaries, I’ve picked what I think are four solid headlines. But even most of them could be tweaked:

NY-Sen: GOP eyes notorious Bush war-flack Dan Senor. (Perfect)

Sen. Richard Burr: Playing Politics in Right Field. (N.C. Sen. Richard Burr: Playing Politics in Right Field)

A call to Netroots – There’s a Dem willing to fight against DeMint. (Calling the Netroots – There’s a Dem willing to fight DeMint)

Is it all about the Benjamins? The GOP primary for governor in Wisconsin. (Is it all about the Benjamins? In Wisconsin’s GOP primary, yes)

The election digest follows below.

BAGHDAD — A coalition led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was winning in the all-important capital and a Shiite province in the south, according to a partial tally of election results released Saturday.

If the Baghdad trend cont…

“All hoodlums” working at ACORN.

By Capt. FoggIs David Frum having his “mission accomplished” moment? ” Israel may have to retire its title as the only democracy in the Middle East. With Sunday’s free and fair national election, Iraq joins the honor roll as one of the very few I…

All polling in Nevada shows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trailing his little-known opponents badly. But this one, from mid-February, was more intriguing, as it included the Tea Party candidate, fresh off his party’s qualification for the ballot:

Public Opinion Strategies (R) for the Retail Association of Nevada. 2/15-16. Likely voters. (No trend lines)

It’s pathetic that Reid still trails his opponents, even with a 2-way split on the Right, but that’s a much easier order than Reid faced in two-way matchups. For example, a Mason-Dixon poll out of Nevada the week after that POS poll had Lowden beating Reid 52-39, and Tarkanian winning 51-40. Those aren’t easy numbers to recover from, no matter how strong Reid’s labor machine works in Vegas.

So the question then becomes, will that Teabagger support actually materialize at the polls? Election prognosticator, and all-around curmudgon Stu Rothenberg thinks the notion is preposterous:

News of the Tea Party’s ballot status in Nevada spread like wildfire. PoliticalWire reported on a Public Opinion Strategies poll by asserting that Ashjian “changes” the Nevada race, with Ashjian “helping” Sen. Harry Reid (D).

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quoted highly regarded Nevada political analyst Jon Ralston as tweeting that Ashjian “could have huge impact” on the contest, and National Journal reported that Ashjian “could split conservative votes.”

CQ-Roll Call got caught up in the hype too, I must add.

First, as everyone who watched the New Jersey gubernatorial race last year should remember, Independent Chris Daggett received 5.8 percent of the vote, underperforming every survey from mid-September to Election Day.

Early polls always exaggerate the strength of third-party candidates, and there is every reason to believe that this is the case with the POS poll.

Actually, Stu is right. Third party candidates usually overperform in the polls, underperfom at the ballot box. But that was pre-Tea Party. Here are two counter-examples:

First there’s NY-23, where third-party challenger Doug Hoffman got teabagger support, and didn’t just maintain early poll support as the Conservative Party candidate, but ended up finishing second in the race ahead of the Republican.

But here’s an even better, more recent example, from the Texas gubernatorial primary:

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 2/8-2/10. Likely Voters. No trend lines.

That was three weeks before Tuesday’s primary election in Texas. The final results were:

Note, our poll of the race was taken before Medina supposedly self-destructed on Glenn Beck’s show by betraying Truther sentiments:

GLENN: Right. Here’s then let me be more frank and ask you the question: Do you believe the government was any way involved with the bringing down of the World Trade Centers on 9/11?

MEDINA: I don’t, I don’t have all of the evidence there, Glenn. So I don’t I’m not in a place, I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments, and I think the American people have not seen all of the evidence there.

Yet despite the controversy, Medina didn’t just hold her support, she actually picked up some of those earlier undecideds.

Medina was heavily backed by the Ron Paul brigades, at a time when the teabaggers, Paulites, and even old-school Birchers are swirling into one giant pot of suck. But as crazy as they might be, they actually stick together and stay on mission.

I’m not ready to declare the Nevada Tea Party a factor in Reid’s reelection bid, but given the early track record of that crowd, I’m also not ready to discount them as an irrelevant flash in the pan.

If I was Harry Reid, I would make sure the Tea Party campaign was lavishly funded.

Alex Koppelman at Salon interviewed Howard Dean Wednesday. The former governor and Democratic National Committee chief cut against the conventional wisdom that Democrats are going to be devastated in November, perhaps even lose their House majority, as long-time analyst Charlie Cook has said.

“I think what you’re going to see in the fall is not so much an anti-Democratic vote, I think you’re going to see an anti-incumbent vote, and I think that’s going to include Republicans,” Dean said …

“There are two good signs for the Democrats: One is all this blowup happened 10 months before the election, not 10 weeks before the election. Two, the average American believes that better times are ahead. Those are two important indicators. Now, there are plenty of indicators that aren’t so good, but I think a month is a huge lifetime in politics, so I think we’re actually going to do a bit better than people are predicting.”

Republicans are working on their narrative. Tea partiers are working on theirs. How effective they will be depends in great part on how well Democrats, individually and collectively, can persuade Americans who like neither the Party of No Way, No How nor the Teabagger Brigades that they have a lot to lose by sitting on their hands in this year’s contests. Given the frequent poor messaging, pre-compromising, surrendering and, frankly, kow-towing to certain interests by too many Democrats, making that case is going to be much tougher than it ought to be. The mistakes of the leadership rubs off on the rank-and-file.

Reinvigorating a big slice of now-demoralized voters who poured out in droves in 2008 – that is, bridging what Robert Reich calls “the enthusiasm gap” – will depend on having several more challengers like Bill Halter reminding everyone of what being a fighting Democrat is all about. For many vulnerable incumbent Democrats, persuading voters that they are fighters for middle/working-class Americans will be next to impossible to sell. Their record on this score, to put it charitably, registers an epic fail. But others can prove Dean right if they use the eight months they have left to demonstrate they’re not just more of the same old, same old now armed with Twitter accounts. The place to do that is not so much on the campaign trail but in Congress itself.

AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison conceded the Republican nomination for Texas governor to Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday following a heated primary battle that highlighted the growing anti-Washington mood among voters in midterm ele…

The 2010 midterm election season has been officially underway for almost a month now (Illinois’ primary was February 2). But for many on the Left,…

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, you’re up….

Wasn’t it just a week ago that David Paterson said he’d leave Albany at the polls or in a box? City Room reports:

Gov. David A. Paterson is set to announce that he will not seek election in the wake of reports that he and the State Police intervened in a domestic-assault case against a senior aide, according to a person told about the plans.

He is expected to make the announcement this afternoon.

I don’t know about you, but I blame Eliot Spitzer. If he had kept his pants on (instead of just his socks), Paterson never would have been thrown into a job he wasn’t prepared for.

In any event, the taint of New York’s former attorney general is washing away. So all eyes now turn to New York’s current attorney general. The Daily News says:

The decision clears the way for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who is the favorite of many Democrats, to seek the nomination unimpeded.

Maybe the current AG will be better at following the law than the last two New York governors?

Paterson to Drop Out of Race for Governor [City Room]
Gov. David Paterson pulls plug on election bid, but will not resign [Daily News]
New York’s Paterson Won’t Seek New Term [Wall Street Journal]

New York – David Paterson – United States – Politics – Attorney general

What could go wrong?

Bipartisan.

This week has offered a handful of examples of a continuing phenomenon in the 2010 election cycle–candidates jumping from one campaign to another, often totally by surprise. Just in the past five days, we have seen Indiana Congressman Brad Ellsworth express interest in jumping over to the U.S. Senate vacancy created by Evan Bayh’s retirement, while we also watched Ohio GOP Senate candidate Tom Ganley, a wealthy self-funder, take his million-plus warchest to a challenge to Democratic Congresswoman Betty Sutton (OH-13).

They are hardly the first–perhaps the best case would be Pennsylvania House candidate Steven Welch, who jumped from the open-seat 7th district House race to the (briefly) open-seat 6th district to off the ballot altogether, all in the span of several months.

This has, for a number of reasons, been a very unique election cycle. Some of the eccentricities of this cycle are the probable causes for the game of political musical chairs that has been perpetuated throughout the cycle and continues unabated.

1. Unexpected Developments

Part of this fluidity between races can be owed to the fact that there have been a series of unexpected political developments that have added a lot of opportunities for ambitious politicos.

This phenomenon began actually on Election Day, 2008. With the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the Presidency, it created the first two open-seats of Election 2010: the Senate seats being vacated by President-elect Obama and Vice-President-elect Biden. In Illinois, the prospect of an open Senate seat tempted Chicagoland Republican Congressman Mark Kirk, who might have been further encouraged to switch race because of the increasing fragile hold his party has on his suburban 10th district. Meanwhile, in Joe Biden’s Delaware, the prospect of an open Senate race lured Mike Castle, the Republican that has held down the state’s sole House seat for nearly two decades, to leave his safe House seat and run for the Senate.

Retirements have also played a role. While there have not been an unusually high number of retirement announcements, there have been some interesting ones that created political opportunities. Nearly every race in Kansas is open, for example, because Senator Sam Brownback (perhaps eyeing a future presidential run) is leaving the Senate to seek his state’s governorship. It’s been fourteen years since a Senate seat has come open in the state, which might explain why two of the state’s three GOP Congressman (Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt) elected to take the plunge and seek the promotion.

2. Party Preferences

One of the reasons the Florida Senate race proved so interesting in its early stages was the emergence of Marco Rubio as a viable challenger to Charlie Crist. The emergence of Rubio was notable because it ran so counter to the clear wishes of the NRSC, which caught ten types of Hell from the activist wing of the party for making an endorsement of Crist (which it then was forced to retract).

This has led to the delicate dance of the 2010 election cycle, where the party apparatus tries to advance the causes of their most electable candidates without being too overt in their interference.

Take Pennsylvania, where Congressman Jim Gerlach made a long-term commitment to seeking the Governorship of the Keystone State, only to backtrack and announce that he will seek re-election to the House, instead.

Now, part of this might be owed to the shifting political winds (more on this in a bit), but a big part of it was owed to the fact that there was a clear preference, both in public opinion polls and among the PA GOP party faithful, for another candidate–state Attorney General Tom Corbett. Deprived of any political oxygen, Gerlach made the calculation that even a 50/50 House race was preferable to a near-certain defeat to Corbett.

This also undoubtedly played a role in Ganley’s decision this week to jump from a Senate race to a House race. The NRSC, leery of formal endorsements in the wake of the Crist/Rubio debacle, still found ways to make it clear that their preferred candidate was not Ganley, but rather former Congressman (and consummate insider) Rob Portman. Indeed, Senator John Cornyn, the head of the NRSC, appeared at a November fundraiser on Portman’s behalf, little more than a week after the NRSC also promoted a fundraiser conducted by the U.S. Chamber PAC.

3. Climate Change

The shifting political winds have certainly played a role, as well, in particular on the Republican side.

Particularly in the wake of the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, GOP spirits have been buoyed to the extent that several among the party faithful no longer believe that there is such a thing as an electoral victory being “out of their reach”, no matter how historically inhospitable the district.

Ryan Frazier might well be the exemplar of this phenomenon. Frazier, a young (32) and ambitious city councilman from Aurora, Colorado, announced a long-shot Republican bid for the U.S. Senate in early 2009. After about six months running for the U.S. Senate, he announced in October that he would instead challenge sophomore Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter.

Frazier was far from the favored candidate in the Senate field, especially after the entrance of former Lt. Governor Jane Norton on the GOP side. But the change in electoral climate had given Frazier a fallback position in the 7th district. The district leaned heavily in the favor of Democrats in 2008 (Obama carried the district 59-40 while Perlmutter was elected easily with 63% of the vote). But it is also a district that went just 51-48 for John Kerry in 2004, while at the same time re-electing a Republican Congressman (Bob Beauprez).

Perlmutter is still a considerable favorite in the race, but Frazier was able to take a sizeable statewide warchest (nearly half a million dollars) over to a House bid, and he will be considerably stronger than either Republican Perlmutter has defeated to date.

The shifting nature of partisan strength also, without question, played a role in the Ganley and Gerlach decisions, as well.

Ganley certainly has the highest wall to climb. Sophomore Rep. Betty Sutton has easily won both of her House bids, and her district went for both Kerry and Obama by doule digit margins. Furthermore, this is a district that has not seen a competitive House race in nearly two decades. Helping him scale that wall, however, will be the million-plus warchest he brings over from his Senate campaign, as well as the opportunity for continued self-funding.

Gerlach, on the other hand, still must contend with an inhospitable district (the PA-06th went for Barack Obama by a 58-41 margin) that only gave him a four point win over an underfunded Bob Roggio in 2008. The seemingly favorable GOP tide, however, might be the cushion necessary to help him avoid political defeat at the hands of a capable Democratic challenger (and there are a couple of them waiting in the wings).

Set nothing in stone in this 2010 election cycle. With so many variables at work, not only are the outcomes of the cycle very much in doubt, even the players on the scorecard are not etched in granite.

As they always used to say on television, stay tuned.

Wow. Talk about taking one for the team:

As election officials across Illinois continued to tally the final trickle of uncounted ballots in the disputed Republican governor race today, state Sen. Kirk Dillard indicated he would not push for a recount unless he trailed rival state Sen. Bill Brady by 100 votes or less.

But Dillard could face difficulties getting that close. The Hinsdale lawmaker contended he had cut in half Brady’s 420-vote lead as election offices went through final absentee ballots and provisional ballots cast by voters who were not on registration lists, but claimed they met voting requirements.

“I want to do everything possible to avoid a recount,” Dillard said. “But if it’s around a hundred votes or less, then a recount is a possibility.”

Given that over three-quarters of a million votes were cast in the February 2nd primary, it would not have been unseemly for Dillard to request the recount, given that the current margin is about six-hundredths of a percentage point.

However, it is worth noting that in the state of Illinois, the onus (and more importantly, the expense) of the recount process falls on the challenging party. This, it goes without saying, might go a long way towards explaining Dillard’s reluctance.

Dillard could ask for a “discovery recount” of up to 25% of the precincts in a jurisdiction, and then he can head to court if anything turns up. The expense in such a move would easily head into the six figures.

On balance, this is a loss and a win for Governor Pat Quinn, the Democratic nominee. It is a loss in that Quinn could have benefitted from being able to hang onto his resources while the GOP nomination process played itself out in a protracted fashion. On the other hand, it is a win because it gives him, if recent polling is to be believed, an incrementally more beatable Republican nominee. Dillard, who famously appeared in an early Obama for President television ad singing the Democrat’s praises, is probably the more electable of the Republicans both geographically (hailing from the vote-rich Chicagoland suburbs) and ideologically.

A poll released last week in the wake of the primaries gave Quinn an eleven-point (42-31) edge over Brady, and a considerably tighter six-point (40-34) edge over Dillard.

Senate Republicans will lay out a 10-point election year agenda later this spring, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested on Tuesday morning.