Hotline Sort: Angus King Goes Negative

By Julie Sobel  //  October 1, 2012 | 8:27 a.m.

Welcome back to Hotline Sort. Warren edges Brown while Tisei leads Tierney in new polls, Angus King goes negative, Schwarzenegger talks secrets, and Lindsay Lohan gets into trouble with a congressional staffer.

12) Welcome to October! A New York Times rundown of potential October surprises.

11) Lindsay Lohan got into an altercation with a congressional staffer who works for Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., and is the nephew of comedian Heather McDonald. The New York Daily News:

The "Mean Girls" actress mixed it up with a starstruck congressional staffer in her Manhattan hotel early Sunday -- and now both of them are facing charges.

Cops say Lohan took Christian LaBella's cellphone so she could delete pictures of her partying -- and he got physical with her trying to get it back.

10) The National Republican Congressional Committee is up with new ads including the first commercials they've run in Ohio's 16th District (targeting Democrat Betty Sutton on the stimulus) and New York's 1st District (targeting Democrat Tim Bishop on corruption).

The NRCC also released new TV ads against the opponents of GOP Reps. Joe Heck (NV-03), Brian Bilbray (CA-52), Steve King (IA-04), Chip Cravaack (MN-08), and Sean Duffy (WI-07) as well as Democratic Reps. Bill Owens (NY-21), Lois Capps (CA-24), John Barrow (GA-12), Mike McIntyre (NC-07), and Ben Chandler (KY-06), plus open seat Democrat Bill Enyart (IL-12).

9) Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger conducted a publicity blitz on "60 Minutes" for his new autobiography Total Recall: My Unbelievably True - where he revealed that it took him seven or eight years to realize he fathered a son with the household maid.

It wasn't until the boy "started looking like me, that's when I kind of got it. I put things together," the action star and former California governor, 65, told 60 Minutes on Sunday.

Though Mildred Baena continued working in the family household and Schwarzenegger quietly began to provide financial support to her and their son Joseph, Schwarzenegger deliberately delayed revealing his secret to his wife Maria Shriver and their four children.

"It was very difficult, strange, bizarre," said Schwarzenegger. "I just said to myself, 'Okay, I'm going to put this away.' "

8) In Massachusetts' 6th District, GOP nominee Richard Tisei leads embattled Rep. John Tierney by six points in a new survey conducted for the Boston Globe.

Tisei leads Tierney, 37 percent to 31 percent, in the poll, with a very high 30 percent of voters undecided.

7) Wisconsin GOP Senate nominee Tommy Thompson tells National Review that his tough primary that left him "a million dollars in the hole."

"I was exhausted," Thompson says of the time after the primary. "I used to box in school, and there's an old adage that when you get so tired that you can't hold your arms up, you just drop them, and you hope that the other guy gets tired and stops hitting you."

Thompson says he expects to end the quarter with over $1 million in the bank.

6) Just over a month to go until Election Day, and GOP Michigan Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra spent the weekend in Israel. Hoekstra said he was spending time overseas to get the latest information on the Middle East upheaval, the Detroit News reports. But the time spent abroad means he's losing valuable time on the campaign trail to press his case against Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. Hoekstra is the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. 5) The New York Times highlights the North Dakota Senate race, and whether Democratic nominee Heidi Heitkamp's "North Dakota Nice" can trump the state's conservative moorings. 4) Independent former Maine Gov. Angus King is breaking his "no negative ads" pledge in the Senate race, going up with a spot that targets GOP opponent Charlie Summers. "My Republican opponent and I disagree on lots of things," says King in the new commercial. "Charlie signed a no taxes ever pledge that will make it impossible to solve the deficit. He doubts climate change science, favors taxpayer subsidies for big oil, and thinks Washington isn't broken." Meanwhile, the Portland Press Herald on Sunday published results of a new poll, conducted by Portland-based pollster Critical Insights, that shows King with a "commanding" lead in Maine's open-seat Senate race. King outpaces Summers, 50 percent to 28 percent, with Democrat Cynthia Dill at 12 percent. But the poll of 618 likely voters was conducted two weeks ago, from Sept. 16-18. The Press Herald "received the poll results Sept. 20 and spent the following week analyzing them, contacting respondents, interviewing experts and developing articles and graphics based on the findings," according to the newspaper story. The poll has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points. But in a clear sign the race has gotten more competitive, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee went up in the Maine Senate race with a $410,000 ad buy. The NRSC went up with a similar ad buy of their own attacking King last week. 3) Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, leads GOP Treasurer Josh Mandel 49 percent to 39 percent in a new Columbus Dispatch poll, which is conducted entirely by mail. President Obama has a similar lead of 9 points over Mitt Romney in the survey. 2) Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Elizabeth Warren will face off in their second debate at 7 p.m. tonight at UMass-Lowell. David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press, will moderate. The debate will air in Boston on WHDH-TV, on NECN, and nationwide on C-SPAN. Meanwhile, two new polls released in the last two days show Warren with a slight lead: She leads 43 percent to 38 percent, with 18 percent undecided, in a Boston Globe poll released Sunday. And in a WBUR-FM poll released Monday, Warren leads 49 percent to 45 percent. 1) Ahead of the first presidential debate Wednesday, Romney focuses in foreign policy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "A New Course for the Middle East." Scott Bland contributed

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Reid Wilson, Editor-in-Chief
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