Not long ago, Democrats had it all: the first African-American president sitting in the Oval Office, the first female Speaker of the House and even a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Four years later, the only remaining piece - the presidency - might be taken away from them.
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Did last week's Republican Convention spell the beginning of the end for national political conventions, at least in their current form? I'm not certain, but it should.
Like the GOP's Ames straw poll, which gets a huge build-up in the media but tells us almost nothing about who…
Eight years ago, right before Republicans gathered in New York City from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 to renominate President George W. Bush for a second term, a newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed Bush vulnerable and in a dogfight against his challenger, a Massachusetts Democrat.
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As a reformed political scientist who still looks closely at polls and is always knee-deep in past electoral results, I understand that people are impressed by statistical analysis, even when it creates a faulty sense of precision. But what makes politics so fascinating is the unexpected development, the unquantifiable…
It’s time for another caution about polls and what they mean.
The most recent set of six CBS News/New York Times state polls conducted by Quinnipiac University and the latest Fox News national poll should remind us how important each survey’s sample is in understanding the ballot test.
…It’s not news that voters in presidential swing state media markets are being bombarded with political ads on television.
According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, $13.6 million in presidential ads has aired so far in the Cleveland media market, $4.6 million in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and $15.2…
Those of us who have been reporting on and discussing politics for the past few decades have come to expect rough-and-tumble campaigns. As Chicago writer Finley Peter Dunne once observed: “Politics ain’t beanbag.”
But the nature of the 2012 presidential campaign so far raises questions about how, or…
Rarely a day goes by without some journalist noting that another Member of Congress is passing up the very forgettable opportunity of attending his or her party’s convention later this summer.
The list of media outlets to report on this “development” is long and getting longer: the New…
There’s good news on the horizon for attention-deprived candidates: Millions of voters will soon be glued to their television screens in a normally dead time for campaign advertising.
The bad news is that it’s the Summer Olympics, and candidates and outside groups will have to spend a premium…
Moments after the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the health care law, observers were already assessing its political implications for the November elections.
The decision “amounts to a massive political win for the incumbent,” wrote Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post.
“The decision will certainly…
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