Features

Al Garcia is one frustrated Democratic campaign manager. A criminal defense lawyer by trade and a 20-year veteran of Minnesota politics, he ran two candidates for the state assembly in 1998. Both were in Anoka County, ground zero of the Jesse Ventura vote. One candidate, Jerry Newton, a decorated Vietnam veteran and small-business owner, fiscally […]

Let’s get one thing straight right from the get-go. We would rather be last in reporting returns than be wrong… . If we say somebody has carried a state, you can pretty much take it to the bank, book it that that’s true. –Dan Rather, CBS News, early evening, November 7 We’ve always said, you […]

As the U.S. Senate gears up for a vote this spring on the campaign finance reform bill drafted by Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold, it would do well to consider a lament from one of its recent escapees: “Today’s campaigns function as collection agencies for broadcasters,” Bill Bradley observed a few […]

There are basically two kinds of New Hampshire voters. The first kind–not very different from those in the rest of the country–is represented by Frank Claik, a local dignitary from Littleton, who recently shook hands with George W. Bush. Claik is a former Democrat who switched parties out of disgust with Bill Clinton; he now […]

T he presidential debates this year were a failure by the standard we use to measure our public entertainments: their ratings were abysmally low. It was not really the candidates’ fault. Boredom with elections is one of the luxuries of our time. Not only have long prosperity and a seemingly unthreatened peace lulled us into […]

March 7 is primary day in California, Ohio, New York, and most of New England; it could all but decide who will be the major party presidential candidates this fall. But of all the states, as one campaign consultant said, California “is the killer.” And California this year will conduct one of the more extraordinary […]

It’s a lead-pipe cinch that this year’s election reform panels, hearings, briefs, and reports will feature many attempts to summarize neatly the American experience with voting rights. Most of these sketches are likely to be wrong. If you read The Right to Vote, you will know why. The standard history of voting in America goes […]

The Congressional Black Caucus and the AFL-CIO have both made reform of the country’s election machinery a top priority. A number of committees and commissions–such as the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford–have already formed to propose remedies for the nation’s election practices. Congress is awash in bills, […]

As we go to press, polls show Al Gore running as much as eight points behind George W. Bush nationally, and behind among every major age group except for voters over 65. This is truly remarkable. The economy is strong, the Republicans got the worst of the impeachment scandal, there are no serious foreign-policy problems, […]

A ccording to the Voter News Service numbers, Al Gore beat George W. Bush among 18- to 29-year-old voters by a mere 2 percentage points (48 to 46), a gigantic drop in this age group from Bill Clinton’s 19-point margin over Bob Dole in 1996 (53 to 34) and 11-point margin over George Bush the […]