With Ranked-choice voting, Oakland voters are facing the question whether they legitimately elected an incompetent, or if they were denied the opportunity to vote for their preferred candidate for mayor.

Election Season is an exciting time to cover politics, especially when you look at all the limelight players shifting in the winds. It may be subtle, but people who want to be involved in the next White House Administration on some level must be making bold moves to capture the national spotlight right now. They [...]

Dylan Ratigan wants to get money COMPLETELY out of politics. Not just corporate money or soft money…ALL money. Pretty bold. But when you consider his stat, which is the title of this post, it’s pretty sobering to consider how much of a vice grip money has on how our political system is shaped. Because it’s [...]

During the Fox News debate last night, the GOP hopefuls were posed one of our favorite questions during the election season: “If you had to choose one of your opponents on the stage tonight to be your running mate in the 2012 election, who would you choose, and why?  And why would this person help [...]

Obama is baiting the trap and if the GOP candidate doesn’t take it in 2012, it could spell trouble for the Dems. Last night the President said this… I have no doubt that everyone will find something in this compromise that they don’t like. In fact, there are things in here that I don’t like [...]

It doesn’t look like it’ll even be close. From TPM: As the Republican wave spreads across the country, it’s time to say goodbye to one of the big-name progressive champions of the past 18 years: Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), champion of campaign finance reform and longtime opponent of the Patriot Act, has gone down in [...]

This is one seat that the Dems probably won’t get back any time soon. From LA Times: Lincoln, who reluctantly voted for Obama’s healthcare insurance overhaul, carried the flag for Democrats but often disagreed with her more liberal colleagues. For example, she was one of the few Democrats to vote for the Bush administration tax [...]

One! Two! Three! With less than 1% or precincts reporting, Blumenthal leads by 62%-36%, and has been projected as the winner by Fox News and NBC News. (Keep in mind that with so few precincts in, the margin is likely to fluctuate considerably throughout the night — the current numbers are not final.) McMahon apparently [...]

This one was close for a while, but Manchin started to pull away after he made some ads that targeted Obama and his health care bill. That apparently helped him with independents and moderate Dems. Here’s more from TPM: We now have a result in a key red state — where Democrats have been saved [...]

Kit Bond’s old seat stays with the Republicans. Robin Carnahan ran a very anemic campaign and she never really felt like a leader. This is no surprise, but at one point some thought this could be a pick up. Done and done.

Well, of course the answer is no and Nate Silver offers five reasons why. I’ll summarize here, but you should really check out this blog post. It’s pretty long, but a great read. Of course it will all be null and void in about four hours. Reason #1 – The Cell Phone Effect: This one [...]

I’ve been following an interesting multi-blog discussion trying to sort out an apparent polling discrepancy between voter attitudes and voter intentions in the midterms. We do not need to invoke “unconscious bias” to understand a straightforward preference for divided government. If you prefer the spending restraint, greater oversight, and better legislation we get as a direct consequence of a divided government state, the most rational vote is the vote most likely to create that state.

Looks like the Tea Party folks are getting a lot more push back from the GOP then they were expecting. First Mike Castle won’t endorse Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and now Lisa Murkowski is literally trying to win while not being on the ballot. From Anchorage Daily News: Murkowski said she agonized over the decision [...]

USA Today highlights an interesting trend that may be good news for the centrists, indies, moderate repubs and moderate dems out there. A taste… WARWICK, R.I. — Lincoln Chafee comes from a long line of Rhode Island governors, three in the previous four generations, all of them Republicans. Now the former Republican senator and mayor [...]

First it was the wishy-washiness of the civil rights act repeal and now it’s criticism of the administration being tough on BP? Watch the video… Here’s the thing…yes, accidents happen on offshore oil rigs. However, most damage is mitigated by appropriate safety measures being put in place to keep spills to a minimum. However, recent [...]

Forgive me, but right now all I can think of is this. You can almost hear the meeting that this was cooked up in… “All those in favor of paying homage to a terrorist to rally the anti-government right so they’ll vote for us in November say aye!” Now, before you claim the same thing [...]

Gergen served up a softball and Scott Brown knocked it out of the park. “It’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat. It’s not the Democrat’s seat. It’s the people’s seat.” If Brown wins, this may be the moment that put him over the top.

After having an electoral stake pounded through its heart last November, after being exposed to the searing media morning light of a “permanent realignment” in the “center-left” American electorate, with a silver bullet in the brain of a “broken GOP brand”, and with a garlic necklace strangling it’s “sixty’s culture war” neck, the corpse of “Divided Government” seemed dead and buried in the media for the foreseeable future. But last week the undead meme was walking again