Tim Fernholz

Doing my daily 1 p.m. Gallup poll check (McCain’s lead is shrinking), I discovered that the generic congressional poll that measures party preference, where the Democrats have been leading steadily by approximately 10 points since 2006, had shifted, giving the GOP a small deficit among registered voters and a lead in the likely voter model. […]

The 9/11 truce ended at 5:54 a.m., with both campaigns releasing new ads (after the jump). This is Barack Obama’s campaign’s attempt to take control again and move on to the offensive; they’re coupling it with a Joe Biden led surrogate operation. The first Obama ad is simple and direct: He’s telling you what he’ll […]

Graphics do cut to the chase, and this one from Gristmill is no exception. When you hear the reasons why it’s silly to expand domestic drilling as the primary solution — nothing will change until 2020, the overall impact will be negligible — you can understand the problem intellectually. But the picture hits you in […]

It’s worth remembering how much everything changed seven years ago. The country has gone from a presidential election where the Social Security lockbox and Al Gore‘s earth tones were major issues to another, this year’s, where it seems the future of the nation is on the line. As Matt notes, who would have believed seven […]

I interviewed John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief-of-staff and current president of the Center for American Progress, for my old friends at Campus Progress. We talked about his views on religion and politics, what the new progressive movement needs to do to succeed, and why Bill is a progressive. Check it out — here’s an […]

In today’s New York Times, there is a great display of the dynamics that created the poor-quality horse-race reporting that has defined this campaign season. Here’s the lede: Responding to criticism from Democrats, campaign aides to Gov. Sarah Palin on Tuesday defended her practice of billing Alaska taxpayers for more than 300 nights she spent […]

Though all of Katherine Marsh’s article arguing that Sarah Palin is not, in fact, the ideal everywoman is quite smart, one statistic jumped out at me: Due to women being paid less than men for equal work, “on average, the families of working women lose nearly $10, 000 a year because of the earnings gap.” […]

The latest dish from the Think Tank community on Chinese democracy, American plutocracy and our not-so-swell pedagogy. Documentary studies. [PDF] In China, political candidates are lobbying, campaigning, vote buying, and throwing personal attacks at their opponents … just like their primary school students. Today, the Brookings Institution published a paper on the state of the […]

Looking down ticket, it appears John McCain might have done his Republican Senate colleagues a favor when he picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for his ticket. It looked like Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich would upend indicted Senator Ted Stevens — leading by 13 to 17 points at times. But two polls that have come out […]