Jamelle Bouie

Today’s Washington Post has an interesting piece on the failure of wealthy and self-funded candidates to win their elections on Tuesday: The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that out of 58 candidates who used $500,000 or more of their money on federal races in 2010, fewer than one in five won. Eight of the top […]

Damian Paletta points out clues Obama left in his press conference yesterday on where he might be able to compromise with the new Republican House majority. One of them had to do with congressional earmarks: Earmarks: Mr. Obama said that this is one area where he could definitely find common ground with certain Republicans. “You […]

Wonkette points out that Alvin Greene, the Democrats’ unusual candidate in the South Carolina Senate race, picked up more votes than candidates in Nevada, West Virginia, and Arkansas, and in terms of percentage, performed better than Democratic candidates in North Dakota (22.2 percent), Idaho (25 percent), Oklahoma (26.1 percent), and Kansas (26.2 percent). If this […]

As someone pretty invested in an institutional view of politics, I should say that last night’s elections show the limits of the approach. If economic performance were the sole predictor of political results, then Sharron Angle should have won the Nevada Senate race without a problem; at 14.4 percent, the state has the highest unemployment […]

There are a few things I didn’t get to in last night’s posting on the election. First is Alex Sink‘s loss in the Florida gubernatorial race. That contest — against Republican Rick Scott — was extremely close, with neither candidate winning a majority. The black turnout promised by the Meek campaign wasn’t as strong as […]

Returns are still coming in, but Josh Kraushaar tweets that NBC has called the Massachusetts gubernatorial race for Deval Patrick, after a tough three-way race against Republican Charlie Baker and Independent Tim Cahill. With his approval ratings in the low 30s, Patrick was considered a long shot for re-election as early as last summer. But […]

With the Associated Press calling West Virginia for Gov. Joe Manchin and Connecticut for Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, we can safely say that Democrats will maintain their hold on the Senate. Nate Silver gives the GOP a 2 percent chance of winning a Senate majority, which sounds about right. With Delaware in safe Democratic hands […]

NBC News — in a complete non-surprise — has declared Republican Rand Paul the winner in the Kentucky Senate race, beating out Jack Conway with a projected 52 percent of the vote. Conway’s bid was always a long shot; Rand Paul might have had stomp-happy followers, but Kentucky is a conservative state with double-digit unemployment […]

Paul Krugman on pundits who insist that Obama should have “focused on the economy”: If there’s one piece of conventional pundit wisdom that annoys me most, it’s the constant refrain that Obama was wrong to pursue health care, that he should have focused on the economy instead. For the question people saying this never answer […]