More than two months after the race for the Republican nomination began in Iowa, the contest remains stuck. That’s both good and bad news for the leader in the Republican race. No one in the GOP contest is able to overtake Mitt Romney, but the former Massachusetts governor seems incapable of putting away his opponents […]
Republican cartographers guaranteed that one incumbent would lose in Tuesday’s primaries in Ohio when they drew two Democratic Members into the same district. But few people expected Republicans to lose one of their own. In the 9th District, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur handily defeated her colleague, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, 56 percent to 40 percent, in […]
There is no single “right” way to handicap a race. You can evaluate where the race is at a particular moment and “rate” what you see. Or, after noting the candidates’ current standing, you can make an informed projection about how the race will play out, changing your rating if and when events don’t play […]
Has the Republican race reached a tipping point, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney re-establishing himself as the solid favorite for the Republican nomination and former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) slipping awfully close to the “long shot” category? Probably. Romney has won four of the five primaries that involved […]
Latinos are growing into a powerful voting bloc, but there is the real possibility that the U.S. Senate won’t have any additional Hispanics next year. Last year, a handful of Latinos had an opportunity to get elected and join Florida’s Marco Rubio and New Jersey’s Bob Menendez as the only Hispanics in the chamber. But […]
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s last-minute reversal to get into the Nebraska Senate race is reason to re-evaluate our rating. In the last week’s edition of RPR, we moved the Nebraska race to Safe for the Republicans based on the lack of credible Democratic candidates, but we also wrote that Kerrey, 68, would have caused Republicans […]
The topsy-turvy Texas redistricting saga appears to be approaching toward a conclusion – for now. On Tuesday, a San Antonio federal court panel released a new map that is expected to be in place for the 2012 elections, but there’s still the possibility that the lines could undergo an overhaul before subsequent cycles. The release […]
Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) knows exactly where she needs to be positioned. And she has done about as good a job as possible to sell herself to Show-Me State voters as an “independent” Democrat who doesn’t always agree with her party or her president. But even veteran party operatives agree that the Senator, identified early […]
Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe’s surprise retirement announcement on Tuesday dramatically shifts her Maine seat from the Safe Republican column and places it firmly in the center of the fight for the Senate majority. The moderate Snowe had burnished her own independent credentials so deeply that the only real threat to her came from a GOP […]
In the middle of trying to win back Washington State’s governorship for the GOP for the first time in 30 years, state Attorney General Rob McKenna disagreed with former Sen. Rick Santorum’s recent criticism of President Obama and higher education. “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a […]