Campaign

I’m not a pundit or operative. I’ve got no dog in any fight that will culminate with Tuesday’s elections, and, maybe, in recounts.

I’m a former sports writer who stumbled into covering the 2008 U.S. Senate recount in Minnesota. After following the eight-month-long saga, I wrote a book about it all called, “This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won The Minnesota Senate Recount.”

http://www.thisisnotflorida.com

It’s been favorably reviewed and, as far as I can tell, not challenged for its factual reporting by Minnesota or national Republicans.

That’s why I found Michael Thielen’s post last week to be so inaccurate as it pertained to the Minnesota experience:

This time, the odds are that the House will shift party control but the Senate will not.  If that happens, it will set a precedent.  Since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, bringing the popular election of senators, the House has never shifted party control in an election without the Senate simultaneously shifting also.    

The bulk of attention this political season is on powerful tides that could transform the national political landscape, reversing the Democratic surge of ‘06 and ‘08. But the vagaries of the electoral calendar, the varied targets of voter discontent, and local conditions affecting turnout may act as breakwaters in many states, including Montana.

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The 2010 midterms are finally upon us.  While in some ways, we have borne witness to a wild, unpredictable, chaotic, and exciting election season, the 2010 midterms are shaping up to look exactly as political scientists expected them to look back in July, long before any declarations of in-Tea-pendence, witchcraft, write-in-candidacies from incumbent senators, and Democratic candidates telling the Democratic president to “shove it.”  The candidate and media-created claims about why the election is shaping up as it is are generally the stuff myths are made of while the reality of the 2010 election results is not that electrifying.

No matter what else happens on Election Day, one thing is certain: a lot of the punditocracy will completely overreact.

Certainly it seems likely that the Republicans will win a major victory.  But do not let anyone fool you into thinking this is the forerunner to a new Republican majority or that the election results are a prologue to massive policy changes.  Neither one of those futures is at all likely. Read more...

Some of the nation's top political commentators, legislators and intellectuals offer insight into the biggest questions burning up the blogosphere today.

Today's question:

Which congressional race says the most about the nation's political climate?

Before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Democrats in the South conspired to intimidate and disenfranchise the African American vote.  Democrat machines, like those run by then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, conspired to steal elections starting with Johnson’s own first election to the Senate where dead people voted in alphabetical order and all other types of vote fraud took place.

Austin-based Global Language Monitor (GLM) today announced its Midterm Election Buzzword Awards that link the most prominent narratives to the candidates’ actions. The awards are presented the week preceding the actual elections.

The electorate is bitter and angry. It’s no wonder. Foreclosures rise while Wall Street bankers, whose recklessness caused this grave recession, grab million dollar bonuses. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, but corporations continue to ship jobs overseas.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are a community to be reckoned with in American politics, John Feehery correctly posited in The Hill's Pundit Blog publishing of "Asian American Republicans" on Oct. 25, 2010. There are currently over 16 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US, and our community's rate of naturalization and political participation is drastically increasing. Feehery errs, however, when he argues that the Republican Party is the one that draws the support of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

As vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, I know that he is irrefutably mistaken.