elections

Jim Geraghty bestows credit on the Tea Party movement for this very under-the-radar election in Tuscon, Ariz., where a safe Democratic incumbent was ousted by a Republican novice. There’s something to that, especially when you see that “the city will not have an additional $21 million to work with, since voters refused to lift the [...]

The Iowa Independent reports that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) today echoed Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s comments that yesterday’s election results should not be viewed as a referendum on the Obama presidency. From The Iowa Independent:
“I don’t think it’s a referendum on Obama,” the Republican lawmaker said in a conference call with reporters. “I [...]

Republicans have real bragging rights to the election results in Virginia and New Jersey. But I’m still struck by how the National Republican Congressional Committee spun last night’s two congressional races by talking about the governor’s races, not NY-23 and CA-10. In California, a lot of conservatives saw an opportunity to beat a carpetbagging Democrat [...]

In a full-page spread in Roll Call Wednesday Thursday, a long list of business executives are trumpeting their support for an unlikely proposal: Legislation that would rein in the influence of business over congressional lawmakers.
“We are on the receiving end of Senators’ and Representatives’ endless fund-raising calls,” the ad reads. “And trust us: we hate [...]

It’ll take about a week before we learn the results of Saturday’s provincial elections in Iraq. But until then, a really excellent blog, Musings On Iraq, has emerged this election cycle as a valuable resource, obtaining, aggregating and posting  specific, deep-in-the-weeds information about this year’s provincials. And today the blog finds something surprising:
[T[he early returns [...]

Speaking of recognizing that eight years’ worth of foreign policy has ended in total failure, an interesting item comes to me from Rice University.
Edward Djerejian is a longtime diplomat and confidant of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and consigliere to George H.W. Bush. Djerejian was an outsized figure in GOP foreign-policy [...]

Here’s a strange saga, even for a campaign year.
It seems that over the weekend officials with the Arizona Democratic Party discovered a credit card belonging to the campaign of Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) beneath a desk in their Tempe office. The find led Democratic officials to press, quite reasonably, for an explanation as to how [...]

At our sister site, The Michigan Messenger, Eartha Jane Melzer has an eye-opening piece about what could be the Republican Party’s plans to target its latest swing-state voter suppression efforts at those who have lost their homes to foreclosure.
The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Mich., a key swing county in a [...]