Thomas Schaller

Electoral forecaster Stu Rothenberg recently updated his “dozen most vulnerable open House seats,” including the first three he deems “likely to go Democratic and…in a class of their own.” Of the remaining nine, all but two are Republican open seats.You can read the whole column, which originally appeared in Roll Call, here, but the following […]

Contra my predicted-the-2006-midterms-pretty-damn-well Contra my predicted-the-2006-midterms-pretty-damn-well book, might there just be a 2008 resurgence for Democrats in southern House seats? I’m not convinced yet. But two recent polls of upcoming special election races, both by Anzalone Liszt Research, suggest even in the Republicans’ strongest strongholds may be weakening. In MS-01, Democrat Travis Childers is basically […]

LifetimeTV has a new poll out reporting women’s attitudes on the presidential candidates. The big story? If she’s not careful, Hillary Clinton, to borrow a self-destructive line Barack Obama used back in New Hampshire, may be slipping into the “likeable enough” range among women: Hillary Clinton was the only candidate who registered a significant net […]

Mike Madden of Salon has a great takedown on Mark Penn and the costs (financial and otherwise) Penn and his firm’s consultancy created for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The sums boggle the mind, but Madden’s string of rhetorical questions, as Chazz Michael Michaels might say, “bottle” the mind: [W]hat are [donors to the campaign] getting […]

In the next two weeks there will be both a Keystone primary and a touchstone contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And one may affect the other. After stalling for three long, post-Ohio, Jeremiah Wright-filled weeks during which Obama made no movement on his deficit margin of about three dozen superdelegates, in the past […]

Few bloggers cover electoral politics as smartly and thoroughly as Chris Bowers. So, under normal circumstances I would scoff and just keep moving to the next post over at OpenLeft upon stumbling on Bowers’ speculation that the turnout rate in the upcoming 2008 presidential might drop compared to 2004–especially since the past two cycles have […]

Following up on my Following up on my post about Electoral College reform, yesterday came news that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich joins his counterparts in Maryland and New Jersey in signing his state on as the newest, third member of the National Popular Vote Compact. As Adam Doster at Progress Illinois notes, the three states […]

So I just got back from the Midwest Political Science Association meetings in Chicago this past weekend, and I was pleasantly embarrassed to learn something about the Electoral College from The New Yorker’s Hendrick Hertzberg during a Friday morning panel about the presidential race that also included NBC’s Chuck Todd and Salon’s incomparable Walter Shapiro: […]

In addition to In addition to David Sirota’s piece which I mentioned yesterday, I see that In These Times also has a profile by Adam Doster of the cousins Udall — Tom and Mark — running for Senate in New Mexico and Colorado respectively (Doster says they get along like brothers). As I wrote a […]

David Sirota has a compelling piece in this month’s In These Times about how Hillary Clinton’s primary and caucus performance is tied to a state’s share of black voters. The relationship is curvilinear — she does poorly where there are low percentages of African Americans and where there are high percentages, but well in the […]