The first independent polling in my race was published in the News Journal over the weekend, and it shows me almost 15% ahead with only about 8% undecided. That is very good news. Our own pollster has been doing polls that show me a little further ahead than that but in the same ballpark. However, given that a pollster probably brought us New Coke (sorry, pollsters, I still love you!), it was reassuring to see it verified from the outside.

The downside of this, of course, is that the other side is going to do what other sides do when they are down by 15 points with three weeks to go: personal attack ads. It’s ok, we know what’s coming and we’re more than ready. But we are going to need everyone’s help over the next few weeks. If you can contribute or volunteer, please do so now by clicking here.

We are in the home stretch now, right where we wanted to be. Let’s finish strong and win this one for Delaware’s kids and families.

Well, my and Jack’s opponents had their third news conference yesterday.  To recap, their first news conference was to announce that they were buying into the John McCain health care reform plan, which is essentially to deregulate the insurance industry the same way George Bush did the financial services industry.  I will not dwell on why this is a bad idea; if you need clarification, walk away from your computer and turn on CNN.  Their second news conference was to accuse the bi-partisan group of Delawareans who help develop the state’s revenue projections of being dishonest, a claim that they have slowly taken back in the succeeding weeks.  And yesterday was to announce their solution to the state’s pollution and cancer problems, which is to take DNREC (the state’s environmental enforcement and natural resources agency) and turn it into two agencies, the DNR and the EC.  I am not kidding.

Not to be too glib, but the path to tougher environmental enforcement is tougher environmental enforcement.  You don’t need to add bureaucracy to enforce the laws and regulations.  It is something I came into the Insurance Department in 2005 and started doing on day one.  It hasn’t always been easy, but the results have been tangible.  Insurance companies still do plenty of things they shouldn’t in Delaware, but by almost every statistical measure, they are taking advantage of people far less than they were four years ago.  Jack Markell and I will bring that same no-nonsense attitude to environmental enforcement in our state—and we won’t create more government bureaucracy to do it.

Well, the candidates’ finance reports for 30 days prior to the election came out yesterday, and the good news is that we have substantially more money in our campaign account than the other guy.  That doesn’t mean as much as it would in a normal race—my opponent can still head over to the ATM machine and make a withdrawal on the family fortune any time he wants to, and that is what we expect over the next month.  Still, for us to be where we are today is a huge victory, and I am very grateful to everyone who has donated to get us where we are.  We still need your help—you can donate by going to http://www.mattdenn.com/getinvolved/contribute/.

Of almost equal importance in the long term, I have discovered a recipe for healthy banana bread that my kids eat like chocolate cake.  You can find it by clicking http://www.tcns.info/child_snack_recipes.htm and going to “Flaxseed Banana Bread.”

I had a great day on the campaign trail yesterday.  I don’t know how many votes I picked up, though it seemed like a good number, but I had Adam Denn as my wing man all day, and we had a blast.

There are some logistical challenges involved in having a three year old as a campaign sidekick.  Some of them involve toilets, I will not elaborate.  In Adam’s case, a long day in the car also requires updating of his soundtrack music—every few weeks, Adam has new favorite songs that need to be added to the constantly evolving CD that we play in the car.  This week, the Fifth Dimension and Nellie McKay have been rotated out, and the Doobie Brothers and Steve Winwood are in.

Adam and I first hit Coast Day in Lewes, and with our campaign director Alyssa greeted people as they came in from the parking lot.  Nobody can say “no” to a three year old who offers them a sticker.  After the crowd started to level off, we went inside so Adam could see the pirate ship, oyster shells, and the ‘critter tub.’  After seeing the signs admonishing people to disinfect their children’s hands after they stuck them in the critter tub, I decided Adam would just look at the critters.

We had some chocolate ice cream (that I had to borrow $2 from Pete Schwartzkopf to pay for), and then headed off to the Rehoboth AIDS Walk in Grove Park.  A man in a clown suit made Adam an excellent balloon hat, Adam played on the amazing park swingset, and I was able to thank many volunteers for walking.   Loyal Denn friend and supporter Fay Jacobs was also there showing the Denn colors.

We closed things out by heading back to Coast Day for a while with supervolunteer Steve Burke, and then we went down to the boardwalk for dinner.  In between, Kim Epolito gave me some samples of the homemade Markell/Denn signs and flags that she had designed—very nice work!

We got home just in time for bedtime, so Adam could tell Zach about what he done all day.  Like I said, not sure how many votes we got, but there’s nothing better than having one of the Denn boys with me all day.

I am off early again this morning, but I wanted to report that had our first Markell-Denn press conference yesterday regarding our plans to make state government work more efficiently, and it was a great success.  I ran into the Governor-to-be in the parking garage, where he was searching for his parking pass that he had dropped on the floor of his car, and as we came around the corner of the state building and saw the crowd of people standing where our press conference was supposed to be, I was briefly afraid that we had double-booked the plaza with some sort of community fair.  But everyone was there for the press conference—including over a dozen of our great candidates for the Delaware General Assembly.  It was a terrific event—you can read about it in today’s News Journal at http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20081003/NEWS02/810030327/1006/NEWS. 

Just over four weeks to go!

Well, I hate to say I told you so…but the negative campaign against me has started. I won’t bother you with the details—they will move onto another subject within a few days, so there’s almost no point. But this is what we have been expecting, and it’s what you can expect for the next month.

Some people asked me yesterday if it bothers me to have people make things up and distort things about me. And I guess the answer is that this may be the least bad time in my life for me to be the subject of a negative campaign. My kids are too young to understand it, and my wife has now been through it twice before (I haven’t managed to get through a statewide election without going through the sleaze-recipient endurance drill), so she doesn’t like it but at least she knows the drill.

As for me, I know what I am about, so it doesn’t bother me except to the extent that it affects the election outcome. So the best thing we can do is win—which we will.

I literally couldn’t watch the Eagles 2^nd and goal from the one yard line series that cost them the game last night.  I had such a sick feeling in my stomach about it that I went upstairs to do some work and kept hitting “refresh” on my ESPN.com scoreboard to blunt the impact of the inevitable.

But the rest of the day before that was terrific.  In the morning I helped Reverend Christopher Bullock break in his brand new church on Route 9 in New Castle.  He is going to do wonderful things for the community from that church, and it is a beautiful facility.  I then hopped over to Bethel AME church just in time to join Reverend Beaman for a great service he does once a year to send off the church’s children into a new school year.  And then up to the AIDS walk in Rockford Park.  I called our supervolunteer Steve Burke to tell him I was running late, and he responded “I have to call you back, I’m on top of a fire truck ladder cutting down an AIDS ribbon.”  Not exactly what we had asked him to do for me.  I was very afraid and had no idea what he was talking about until I read the newspaper today and learned that he had saved the day when the event organizers’ effort to unveil a record-sized AIDS ribbon were temporarily snarled by the Rockford Park tower.

I ran home to take the Denn boys to the library—a painful exercise because we had renewed our Clifford and Bob the Builder treasuries as many times as the library system allows and had to bring them back—and then off to the Pincus’ house for our much-vaunted fundraiser.  And what a night—we had so many people show up that we had to move the party into the back yard, and the donations exceeded our best-case projections.  We also had a terrific surprise visitor: future Governor Jack Markell.  I suggested to Bob Pincus that we offer anyone willing to give another $1,000 on the spot the right to throw Jack in the pool, but he nixed that idea.

After such a great day, a competent Eagles performance would probably been asking for too much.

In the 1970s, it was Studio 54.  In the 1990s, it was P-Diddy’s place.  But in 2008, the place where the beautiful people go to be seen is the Wilmington home of Bob and Kate Pincus.  Usually it is impossible to get into the Pincus’s house (largely because they keep their doors locked), but this Sunday from 5 to 7 p.m. presents a rare opportunity for you to hang out at their house, be chased by paparazzi, and still be home in time for kick-off of the Eagles game. 

Yes, it is the latest Denn campaign fundraiser, this one with less than 40 days to go before the election.  You can get more information by e-mailing me at mattdenn@hotmail.com. It should be a great party, and we can use your help as we prepare to answer the negative attacks that will be coming in the last few weeks of the campaign.

A lot of people on the campaign trail over the weekend have asked me how the current situation with AIG will affect Delawareans.  So I thought I would take a moment away from stories about the campaign to briefly touch on that issue.

First, the AIG insurance companies that are ‘domiciled’ in Delaware are carefully monitored and are not in financial trouble.  AIG’s parent company—which is not even an insurance company—is the entity that is being bailed out by the federal government.

Second, much of the real impact of AIG in Delaware—on life insurance policyholders with AIG and on people who are employed by AIG—is felt from AIG companies that are actually domiciled in other states.  The AIG insurance companies domiciled in Delaware have very few policyholders or employees in Delaware.  That is why I have spent so much time on the telephone with the other 49 state insurance commissioners over the past week and a half: there is a real national effort underway to ensure that the states work together to guarantee that the AIG insurance companies in each of the states remain sound.

I am going to Washington D.C this week to meet with the other 49 insurance commissioners regarding the AIG situation—which is not over yet.  There are a lot of people in Delaware whose lives are affected by the outcome, and I want to be sure that I am doing everything I can to ensure that they are protected.

If my descriptions of life on the campaign trail have seemed a little less glowing recently, it is because much of my past week has been spent begging for the money we will need to get through the next six weeks.   Most of the begging is done by phone: the sequence is roughly (1) friend answers phone, (2) Matt identifies himself, (3) friend sighs deeply and silently reminisces about when Matt used to call for something other than money, (4) friend says “I know why you are calling,” explains that other candidates have bled them so dry that they are hocking their family jewelry, and then (5) friend gives Matt something anyway because my friends are pretty good people.

We did, however, have a couple of very successful events this week.  One of them was put on by my former attorney colleagues at Young, Conaway—I had suggested “give him the money now or he’s going to lose and be back here wanting a job” as a theme, but they went in a different direction.   And the second was put on by my old law school friend Seth in New York, who gathered a few of his financial community buddies who frequently hit him up for contributions to ask that they do the same.  As I spoke, I believe that the attendees were watching the financial markets crash on their blackberries, so in a few days we will see if the Denn New York fundraising trip is one more small victim of the deregulation experiment on Wall Street.