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By Kevin Robillard | 03/06/2017 10:01 AM EDT


With Daniel Strauss and Scott Bland

The following newsletter is an abridged version of Campaign Pro's Morning Score. For an earlier morning read on exponentially more races - and for a more comprehensive aggregation of the day's most important campaign news - sign up for Campaign Pro today. (http://www.politicopro.com/proinfo)

SPECIAL ELECTION WATCH - Montana Democrats pick Quist as their candidate: Montana Democrats have picked Rob Quist, a musician best known for his time in the Mission Mountain Wood Band, has their candidate in the special election to replace Rep. Ryan Zinke. Quist, a Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries who had the backing of former Gov. Brian Schweitzer, won the election on the fourth ballot. He'll try to run in the same populist style that's helped Schweitzer, Gov. Steve Bullock and Sen. Jon Tester succeed in the state.

- NEW THIS A.M. - Congressional Leadership Fund goes on the attack in Montana: And the GOP's biggest House super PAC is wasting no time trying to bury Quist's underdog campaign. Congressional Leadership Fund, which dropped $1.1 million in the Georgia special election, is now spending $700,000 attacking Quist as too liberal on health care -- he supports single-payer -- and on defense spending. "Rob Quist may be entertaining, but on the issues, he's out of tune with Montana," a female narrator says. Watch the ad here.

- Gianforte also hits TV: Billionaire businessman Greg Gianforte, who hasn't yet won the Republican nomination (their convention is today), has started airing a 60-second biographical TV ad, in a show of confidence about his chances on Monday evening. Gianforte, who lost to Bullock in November in the governor's race, promises to "stand up to the D.C. establishment and drain the swamp." Watch the ad here.

- ICYMI - Ossoff starts running ads in GA-06 special. Full story.

DEMOCRATS ADOPT SANDERS POSITION ON COLLEGE - Governors (and candidates) embrace free college plans, from your Morning Score host: "Bernie Sanders-inspired plans for free college tuition have become must-haves for Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates around the country in 2017. The free-college plans cross the ideological spectrum within the Democratic Party. Two of the party's leading moderate governors, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, have rolled out their own plans to give students two years of free college. But plans related to Sanders' college policies ... are also popping up in open Democratic primaries, featuring candidates trying to show
their progressive bona fides to party voters. 'It's nearly impossible for someone to get a good job in America today unless they have some degree past high school,' Raimondo said in an interview, adding later: 'When people say the system's rigged, they're right. It's not a level playing field if you don't have a degree past high school.'" Full story.

TRUMP SETS THE BAR HIGH - President tells donors he wants 60 Senate seats in 2016: Here's a tidbit from Darren Samuelsohn and Marc Caputo's report on the president's fundraiser on Friday in Palm Beach: "Trump ... told them to focus on what he needs most: campaign cash to win 60 Republican-held seats in the U.S. Senate in 2018." While there had been talk of Republicans winning a supermajority in 2018 before the 2016 elections, that talk has died down significantly since November. Read more here.

Days until the 2017 election: 246.

Days until the 2018 election: 610.

Thanks for joining us. You can email tips to the Campaign Pro team at sbland@politico.com, eschneider@politico.com, krobillard@politico.com and dstrauss@politico.com.

You can also follow us on Twitter, where we tweet about campaigns and unusual judicial opinions: @politicoscott, @ec_schneider, @politicokevin and @danielstrauss4.

HOPE SPRINGS SPECIAL - Do Democratic performances in post-Trump special elections tell us anything? Via POLITICO's Gabrield Debenedetti: "Nine special elections, all for state legislative seats, have taken place since Donald Trump was elected president in November. In seven of them, Democrats ran ahead of Hillary Clinton's performance. ... The nine state legislative elections aren't exactly a representative sample - they've taken place in just four states. They're not even all Democratic wins - the party won five of the contests, and Republicans captured four. But the common denominator was unusually high Democratic turnout, as well as a spike in Democratic performance over past elections
for those seats. It's leading some to question whether the party brand is as damaged as some have feared - or whether the Democratic presidential nominee was the problem." Read more here.

REDISTRICTING WATCH - Georgia Republicans change district lines: "Georgia House Republicans made a late bid Friday to change the district boundaries for eight Republicans and one Democrat. The one Democrat, Rep. Sheila Jones, D-Atlanta, is not happy," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Aaron Gould Shenin writes. The line changes moved more white and conservative voters into several Republican-held districts that have become more competitive while moving more black voters into Jones' district. Read more here.

- The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jeff Schapiro chronicles the state GOP's ongoing redistricting fight: "House Republicans are spending taxpayer money: at least $2.6 million so far for private lawyers to defend their hyperpartisan gerrymandering. That bill will balloon the longer Republicans litigate - the longer they refuse to legislate a remedy to a problem the public increasingly recognizes as an obstacle to managing the people's business. This past week, a Richmond trial court and the U.S. Supreme Court, through important procedural and technical decisions, nudged Virginia closer to removing naked partisanship from the process of drawing legislative lines - and stripping Republicans of
the artificial advantage with which they retain the statehouse even as they endure a long, bitter retreat statewide." Read more here.

GILLESPIE WINS STRAW POLL IN STEWART'S BACKYARD - Political operative and 2014 Senate nominee Ed Gillespie won the GOP gubernatorial straw poll at the Prince William County Lincoln-Reagan dinner on Saturday night, defeating Prince William County Board of Supervisors Chair Corey Stewart. Gillespie earned 165 votes to Stewart's 65, followed by distillery owner Denver Riggleman's 23 votes and 8 votes for state Sen. Frank Wagner. Stewart did not take his loss lightly. "I won in PWC 4 elections in a row - hundreds of thousands of votes. #EstablishmentEd has never won an election. Easy to buy a straw poll," he wrote on Twitter. "#EstablishmentEd bused in his high dollar Fairfax supporters for the
PWC Lincoln Dinner. Tickets were $85 a piece. #Rigged."

HOUSE WATCH - Second Democrat files for Issa's CA-49: With his slim 2016 margin of victory and President Donald Trump's 2016 loss in his fast-changing district, GOP Rep. Darrell Issa may have started this cycle as the most endangered Republican incumbent in the House. And it looks like that status has drawn in another Democrat in addition to 2016 nominee Doug Applegate. Mike Levin, a clean-energy businessman who was on Hillary Clinton's national finance committee in 2016, has filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC to run in the district.

ADMINISTRATION SPEED READ - "Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump's Wiretapping Claim," by The New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt and Michael D. Shear: "The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump's assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump's phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement. Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock
down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said. ... Mr. Comey's request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation's top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump's truthfulness." Read more here.

- "Knives are out for Reince," by POLITICO's Alex Isenstadt and Josh Dawsey: "In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House. They described a micro-manager who sprints from one West Wing meeting to another, inserting himself into conversations big and small and leaving many staffers feeling as if he's trying to block their access to Trump. They vented about his determination to fill the administration with his political allies. And they expressed alarm at what they say are directionless morning staff meetings Priebus oversees that could
otherwise be used to rigorously set the day's agenda and counterbalance the president's own unpredictability. ... 'It's sheer incompetence,' said another White House official. 'There's a lack of management, and a lack of strategy.'" Read more here.

- "Inside Trump's fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations," by the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker: "his latest unfounded accusation - that Barack Obama tapped Trump's phones during last fall's campaign - had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans. When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. 'This will be investigated,' Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. 'It will all come out. I will be proven right.' 'He was pissed,' said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. 'I haven't seen him this angry.'"
Read more here.

CODA - QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I've played a lot of poker in my life." - DSCC Chair Chris Van Hollen, explaining to Ozy how he managed to snag a seat on the Appropriations Committee in exchange for becoming DSCC Chair.

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