On Election Night, networks called California's 21st congressional district for incumbent Republican David Valadao over Democratic challenger TJ Cox. The district, which encompasses parts of Fresno as well as the Central Valley, the state's largest agricultural region, has not ...read more
Last night's elections in Virginia were a stunning victory for the Democrats. As I reported on Monday, voters in the commonwealth didn't care about Donna Brazile and DNC fundraising squabbles: they were too busy organizing to usher into power their new governor, Ralph Northam, ...read more
UPDATE: While Trump managed to win the Republican primary, he is still facing utter disaster in the national election against Hillary Clinton as recent polls would suggest. One of the downfalls of living in a hyper-connected media world is that while good news travels fast, so ...read more
Even though Donald Trump has yet to be officially nominated for president, the Republican Party is already brainstorming ways to repair the broken primary process that led to Trump's unlikely ascendancy. Among other ideas, the RNC is looking at proposals which, for example, ...read more
You can't walk 10 feet in D.C. without running into a high-minded centrist extolling the virtues of moderation and reaching across the aisle. This way of thinking casts itself as above partisan nonsense and cloaks itself in intellectual rigor -- real, in the case of The New ...read more
The race for 2016 is on, and so far Team Hillary is the fastest horse out of the gate with a 'D' on its saddle. More accurately, it's the only horse, and it's going to have at least a couple billion dollars riding on it. But as any drunken loon at the racetrack would tell you, ...read more
In a nation where voting is the cornerstone of our form of government, how pathetic is it that the following cliche actually makes sense: America can put a man on the Moon, but we can't hold an election without prohibitively long lines and politically-motivated plots to ...read more
Or maybe not. At the very least, the latest ad from the Republican National Committee is designed to scare the pants off nearsighted, mouth-breathing ignoramuses who are utterly clueless about what's happening in the world and whether President Obama is legitimately to blame for ...read more
Happy hump day! It's good to know you're at least halfway through the week, so why not celebrate the small victories in life with a nice round-up of news. 1. Terry McAuliffe Clinches Governor Seat in Virginia, Chris Christie Re-elected in New Jersey McAuliffe, a democrat ...read more
Senator Ted Cruz 's Canadian birth certificate. How will the birthers react to this? After what seems to be an eternity of hearing about President Obama's birth certificate and the repeated allegations that he was born in Kenya, I have to wonder why I am only hearing crickets ...read more
Last week, I posted two articles about the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, clearing a path for the ongoing Republican effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans with Voter ID laws. And so, predictably, conservative trolls filled my ...read more
In about a week, South Carolina will pick between Mark Sanford and Elizabeth Colbert Busch. As we all know, when Mark Sanford was governor of South Carolina, he vanished for a week -- after telling staff he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail, a lie they repeated to the press. ...read more
My mother has told me a joke she heard from someone when she went to South Carolina. The SC resident and native told her, "South Carolina; too small to be its own country, too big to be a mental institution." I have spent some time in the Palmetto State and like it a lot but ...read more
It's a great sign that President Obama has been reaching across the aisle to have meetings with GOP members (and Democratic Congresspeople). One thing everyone on the Hill agreed about was the need for President Obama to spend more time on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, ...read more
And I am, well, I cannot think of anything more ridiculous than considering James O'Keefe anything but a major douchebag so you can just come up with the second part of that sentence yourself. If you have forgotten who O'Keefe is -- good for you! I'll have what you're having ...read more
In early March of 1857, the Roger B. Taney Supreme Court handed down its infamous ruling on the Scott v. Sandford case, also known as the Dred Scott decision. The Supremes decided 7-2 that African American slaves weren't citizens of the United States and therefore didn't enjoy ...read more
By Stephen Engelberg and Kim Barker: The emergence of nonprofits as the leading conduit for anonymous spending in this year's presidential campaign is often attributed to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the money spigot, allowing corporations and ...read more
Joe Klein on team Romney's extraordinary efforts to stop reporters talking to him: Mitt Romney is clearly a candidate terrified by his own mouth. What other explanation for his campaign’s extreme efforts to prevent reporters from asking him questions? I know that there isn’t ...read more
It was only a matter of time before the political and economic reality set in for team Rick Perry. Their candidate, a religious nut and corporate hack was only going to appeal to the base of the party - not the crucial middle needed to win a general election. Perry's ...read more
This says it all: Being a millionaire many times over, Romney has about as much understanding of the worries regular people face as Kim Jong Il did about North Koreans (and no, I'm not comparing Mitt Romney to Kim Jong Il). The United States is one of the most divided nations ...read more
James Fallows on the President's job speech: On both politics and substance, the President positioned himself in the only tenable way for the next months' deliberations with the Congress and next year's election campaign. Instead of asking vaguely for "consensus" or seeming ...read more
2008 Election Map, Proportional To Electoral Votes (via) Keep it up guys. McCain won the South in November, but Obama swept the rest of the country by an even bigger margin. The same pattern holds now for House and Senate seats. Republicans may continue to win governorships in ...read more
