Election Watch

Home - In July 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man reportedly selling loose cigarettes illegally, was choked to death by a New York City policeman. That August, a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. For close to two weeks, protesters battled police clad in military gear. Missouri’s governor said the city looked like a war zone. In December, an African American man with a criminal record avenged Garner’s and Brown’s deaths by murdering two New York City police officers. At the officers’ funerals, hundreds of police turned their backs on New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio. In April 2015 another young African American man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody, in Baltimore. In the chaos that followed, 200 businesses were destroyed, 113 police officers were injured, and 486 people were arrested. To avoid further violence, a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox

Home - No matter who wins the nomination battle, the Republican Party has a much bigger problem: demographics. A new report released by the  Center for American Progress  analyzed the demographic advantages for Democrats in 2016 and beyond and the results are overwhelmingly positive. And this should surprise no one. Observers on both sides have long  questioned  the Republican Party’s viability in an increasingly progressive and less white America. With every national election, it becomes more obvious that the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” which exploited racial and cultural resentment for votes, has finally backfired. As The Nation’s  William Greider  wrote in October: “The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968 – welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln – is no devouring itself in u

Home - The holiday season and a slew of major news and cultural events will be competing for voters’ attention as candidates prepare for the first round of voting in the 2016 primary season. With less than two months until the Iowa caucuses, the campaigns are aware the clock is ticking. Gov. Mike Huckabee’s campaign, for example, polled 5,000 Iowa Republicans last week on their candidate preference. But the results were anything but clear: Roughly 75 percent of respondents said they had not decided which candidate to support. Of those, another 58 percent couldn’t even name a likely favorite. “We’re a ways off from figuring this out,” said Huckabee spokesman Hogan Gidley. But in fact, voters in the key states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and the candidates courting them, have very little time left to figure everything out. Of the 45 days until the Iowa caucuses, two weeks will soon be gobbled up by the holiday season. Some lesser distractions will follow, including football pl

Home -  Is it fleeting? Or will it run right up to the nomination stage at the RNC in Cleveland? In the latest Des Moines Register poll, the Texas senator has surged way ahead of Donald Trump in Iowa, with 10 points separating them. Nationally, he still lags well behind Trump, but he’s been steadily climbing and is in second place in RealClearPolitics’ average. How did this happen? Most of all, Cruz seems to have benefited from the collapse of Ben Carson, who has slipped significantly. He’s also pulling some voters from Donald Trump—just as he predicted would happen eventually, which is why he cozied up to Trump for so long. Cruz recently pulled in the endorsement of influential Iowan Bob Vander Plaats, effectively clinching evangelical support in the state. His campaign is also trumpeting his data efforts, which seek to close the campaign technology gap between Republicans and Democrats. Read the full story here. 

Home   - At a private fundraiser in Manhattan, Cruz spoke to about 70 people about Trump and Ben Carson, two people who attended the event told The New York Times. "You look at Paris, you look at San Bernardino, it's given a seriousness to this race, that people are looking for: Who is prepared to be a commander in chief? Who understands the threats we face?" Cruz said, according to one of the sources. "Who am I comfortable having their finger on the button? Now that's a question of strength, but it's also a question of judgment. And I think that is a question that is a challenging question for both of them," Cruz added about Trump and Carson. Cruz's campaign later sent out a press release calling the Times' story "misleading" and a statement from Cruz. Read the full story here.  Home 

Donald Trump took his plan for tightening the nation's borders to a new level Monday — and drew condemnation from Republican opponents as well as Democrats —  by calling for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." The ban should apply "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" with regard to the attitudes of Muslims toward Americans and terrorism, said a statement from the Trump campaign. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life," the statement quoted Trump as saying. Trump read the press release announcing the Muslim immigration proposal at a standing-room-only rally aboard the USS Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, S.C. Much of the crowd gave the policy a 24-second standing ovation. “Thi

Republicans contend that the 2016 election will be about Americans’ desire for change after eight years of a Democratic president. Democrats hope the election will tell a different story of change: a continued march toward a more diverse electorate that is ever more hostile to the GOP’s Electoral College fortunes. We’ve built an interactive tool to help you draw your own conclusions about whether, as is often said, demographics truly are destiny. You can use it to see how changes in turnout and partisanship within five demographic groups would affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Paying homage to the BBC’s iconic tracker of vote swings in British parliamentary elections, we’re calling it the 2016 Swing-O-Matic. Check it out: Read the full story here.  Home 

The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana. At the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and off Interstate 70, you find yourself in Vigo County, with its 108,000 residents and its ho-hum county seat, Terre Haute, situated along the Wabash River. Terre Haute is the land of Clabber Girl Baking Powder—and its citizens call it the “Crossroads of America.” It’s the place where both Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and labor leader and Social Democratic Party founder Eugene Debs were born, and home to the U.S. penitentiary where the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh died. And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevens

Support for Ben Carson’s bid to be the Republican presidential nominee has faded, according to a poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University. The poll, which was conducted after the terror attacks on Paris, from 23-30 November, showed Carson tied in third place with Texas senator Ted Cruz, both attracting 16% of Republican voters. A poll by the same company last month had Carson in second place on 23%. Donald Trump, meanwhile, solidified his frontrunner status with 27% of voters, while Florida senator Marco Rubio attracted 17%. However, Trump remains the more divisive candidate: when respondents were asked if there were any candidates they definitely would not vote for, 26% of respondents selected Trump but only 5% ruled out Rubio. Hillary Clinton also widened her lead in the Democrat race by a further 12 percentage points. A total of 60% of respondents who identified as Democrat or Democratic leaning said that if the primary were to be held today, they would vote for Cli