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A year ago in these pages, I described the 2000 contest as a “parliamentary election.” With both the House and Senate so near the tipping point, the legislature and executive are genuinely at stake at the same time, as they typically are, though in a different way, in parliamentary systems. Indeed, with the Supreme Court […]

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 […]

The Republicans had their time. Then AT&T, Lockheed Martin, and Microsoft packed up the trade show we still call a “political convention” and moved it over to Los Angeles. This year’s conventions will cost an estimated $85 million–$25 million more than they did in 1996–and the long list of corporate sponsors to the convention’s “host […]

With Republicans in narrow control of Congress, Democrats should think big.

Considering the almost hour-by-hour polling of the nation’s voters, it’s amazing how little is done to survey the views and backgrounds of the people who really matter in American politics: the elite class of political donors. Thus, an unusual survey conducted this summer is worth hailing. The poll compared a sample of 200 political contributors […]

As the Democrats’ legal hurricane rages across the citrus orchards of the Sunshine State, a stench is emanating from the orange groves–and it isn’t the smell of the Everglades. The Gore campaign has sunk to new lows by turning to the federal judiciary in a blatantly partisan effort to defy the recount process unanimously approved […]

The electoral circus in Florida shined a klieg light on the need to overhaul our elections across the nation. The debacle yielded a chorus of reform pledges from politicians. As if to prove they meant it, they introduced enough bills to level a small forest: at last count, more than 1,500 in state legislatures and […]

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 […]

Colin Goldman is trying very hard to break the law. But it hasn’t been easy. In the months leading up to the election, Goldman, a libertarian candidate for the California assembly, has been running an election sweepstakes. He promises a $1,000-cash prize to one lucky winner to be chosen from those who sign up on […]

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 […]