The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●IL-Gov: Monday brought us our first candidate filing deadline of the 2018 election cycle, as campaigns in Illinois were required to submit petitions in order to appear on ballot for next year's primary, which will take place on March 20. We've put together a calendar of every state's filing deadlines, primaries, and (where applicable) runoffs, which you'll want to bookmark and keep handy. You can find a list of candidates who have filed in Illinois for each race here.
Campaign ActionAt Daily Kos Elections, we spend a good deal of time writing about who might or might not run for office, and filing deadlines give us a chance to take stock of where each important race stands now that their fields are set. As the deadline passes in each state, we'll review every notable Senate, gubernatorial, and House contest and give our take on the lay of the land.
However, there are a few caveats to take into account. Most importantly, a race isn't necessarily set in stone after the deadline. Illinois, in fact, regularly offers good examples of this. Because candidates have to collect a certain number of signatures from voters to qualify for the ballot, they can and do get thrown off if they don't file enough valid petitions (and often, these petitions are challenged by opponents). We regularly see this sort of thing happen in Pennsylvania, New York, and Colorado, among other states, but many others don't require signatures to get on the ballot, so these kinds of issues don't arise in most places.
Sometimes we face a very different problem: Candidates will file properly and on time, but their names won't appear on official candidate lists provided by election officials for days after the deadline. It's therefore important to recognize that bureaucratic slowness might explain the absence of a particular candidate's name on a particular state's list, rather than a shock last-minute retirement. Two of the most problematic states in this regard are New Jersey and West Virginia, but this issue can crop up anywhere.
And even after a deadline passes, candidate fields can change. Candidates can drop out, or be removed from the ballot for other reasons, such as a failure to meet residency requirements. Sometimes, a new candidate can even get swapped in after a deadline, if a nominee quits and state law provides a mechanism for substituting a replacement. We'll continue to provide updates on all such fluctuations.