Last week, I wrote a short item about reports that former Massachusetts GOP Sen. Scott P. Brown was not ruling out a run for the Senate in 2014 — in New Hampshire. I argued that the idea was a bad one and that running in the Granite State after passing on the 2013 Senate special election in Massachusetts…
Who is the most vulnerable senator seeking re-election next year? Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss might have won the distinction because of his vulnerability to a conservative primary challenger, but he has already announced he won’t seek another term. The same goes for West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller and South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson, both of whom would have…
On one level, Maine’s lone Republican in Congress, Sen. Susan Collins, looks like a defeat waiting to happen. She is a Republican from a state that went comfortably for Democrat Barack Obama twice. And she is from New England, a part of the country where the GOP is all but extinct in federal office. Collins almost appears to…
Multiple media outlets are reporting that former Massachusetts Sen. Scott P. Brown, a Republican, hasn’t ruled out a bid for the Senate next year in New Hampshire. I haven’t ruled out lots of things in my life that I don’t intend to do and am pretty sure I won’t do, and if that’s all that Brown means, fine.…
The jobs numbers just reported for March — an increase of only 88,000 jobs — are horrendous, especially coming after February’s strong job surge (236,000 new jobs revised up to 268,000). Forget the unemployment rate sliding from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent. As The Associated Press noted, that drop resulted “only because more people stopped looking for work.”…
There probably isn’t a better demonstration of the nation’s partisan political polarization than the makeup of the Senate. Only 17 states have split delegations, while 33 states have either two Republicans or two Democrats (or two senators who caucus with the same party, in the case of independents). Compare those numbers to the Senate makeup three decades ago,…
My colleague Nathan Gonzales has written a terrific piece on Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, the young Democrat mentioned as a potential challenger to veteran GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell. He explains her election as Kentucky secretary of state and her family’s connection to the Clintons, among other things. But while her position as a statewide elected…
Actress Ashley Judd is out, but that doesn’t mean Democrats are giving up on the Kentucky Senate race. Many Democrats quickly looked to Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes to take on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014. On the surface, the 34 year-old attorney is a statewide elected official without a legislative voting record who could…
Whether you are a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association or an enthusiastic backer of the effort by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein for stronger gun control laws, it now should be clear who is winning — indeed, who has won — the latest skirmish in the gun control wars. As…