As it did four years ago, Slate is rolling out close-up looks at the swing states in the presidential election. The first two entries for this year set the scenes in Colorado and New Hampshire. (You can see what a different writer had to say about [...]
Here are two ways of looking at the results of the death penalty questions in last week's Monitor poll. No doubt the lawyers questioning potential jurors in the Addison trial have thought about the implications.
1. Those surveyed were asked whether the maximum penalty for the murder of a [...]
The Monitor's poll is one of at least five New Hampshire polls released this week. Now, thanks to an interactive graph developed by pollster.com, you can customize your own number-crunching of the various polls.
Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal:
This column has advocated injecting the money at the level of the collateral -- buying and demolishing the least-wanted, market-souring homes in the subprime hot zone of Florida and the Southwest. This solution really would be clean, quick, would minimize the subsidy to [...]
John Sununu and three other members of Congress make the case in the Wall Street Journal today for federal regulation of the insurance industry. They note that AIG, which the Fed decided last week to bail out, ended 2007 with more than $1 trillion in assets. How big is [...]
This is the fourth year that Barack Obama has served with John McCain in the Senate. According to Thomas Voting Reports, which compiles the congressional roll call summaries printed in the Sunday Monitor, here are 12 key votes where the two presidential candidates agreed.
This is the fourth year that Barack Obama has served with John McCain in the Senate. According to Thomas Voting Reports, which compiles the congressional roll call summaries printed in the Sunday Monitor, here are seven key votes where the two presidential candidates parted ways.
$70 BILLION TAX CUTS: Senators on [...]
New Hampshire's House members, Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter, were among 85 Democrats who voted with 181 Republicans in favor of a bill easing gun restrictions in Washington, D.C. The bill's future is uncertain in the Senate, according to the Washington Post: "With just over a week to [...]
John McCain knows something about people assuming a candidate has compared his opponent to a pig. Remember this?
DOVER, N.H. -- As Senator John McCain rolled down a New Hampshire highway today in his "Straight Talk Express" campaign bus, he listened to a description of the latest attack on him [...]
With such low turnout in yesterday's state primary, there aren't many numbers to crunch. With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, here's a look at how Jeb Bradley and Jennifer Horn built their margins of victory in the Republican congressional primaries. The percentages refer to the winner's share of [...]
Concord Monitor: What did you think a [...]
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which doesn't endorse presidential candidates, semi-endorses prospective running mates today:
As a young, rookie candidate running on "change," Barack Obama can help himself by choosing a safe, seasoned politician like Evan Bayh or Joe Biden. As the trailing candidate from an unpopular party, John [...]
According to a University of Wisconsin Advertising Project report, through July 26, New Hampshire ranked 15th in total presidential election campaign advertising spending by state. John McCain beat Barack Obama to TV in the state, airing his first general-election ad June 11 while Obama's first such ad aired June [...]
That's an alternative headline on the U.S. Senate portion (pdf) of the latest UNH Survey Center poll. As in:
- Definite Sununu 12%
- Lean Sununu 2%
- Undecided 72%
- Lean Shaheen 4%
- Definite Shaheen 10%
Contrast that to the standard reporting of the poll, which described a 46-42 Shaheen lead. That result, which prompted much debate [...]
David Brooks today:
When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign. But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship [...]
Public radio's Marketplace is doing a series of reports on leadership PACs. The reporters also compiled a searchable, sortable database. Here are links to the money Sen. John Sununu raised and distributed and to the money Sen. Judd Gregg raised and distributed between December 2004 [...]
Larry Sabato considers New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) one of only eight states that's a complete toss-up in the general election. The others, he says, are Colorado (9), Michigan (17), Nevada (5), Ohio (20), Pennsylvania (21), Virginia (13) and Wisconsin (10). He lists five other states as leaning to [...]
Here, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are the top contributors this cycle to the Democratic and Republican governors associations. This story in last week's Wall Street Journal made clear that the governors groups -- to which individuals may make unlimited donations -- will play an [...]
Jack Balkin, who agrees with yesterday's decision in the Second Amendment case, adds this ironic commentary:
Despite its long and occasionally dreary originalist exegesis, the Heller majority is not really defending the values of 1791. It is enforcing the values of 2008. This is no accident. Indeed, the result [...]
Justice Scalia wrote the main opinion. The Second Amendment protects an individual right. The court split 5-4. Justices Stevens and Breyer wrote dissents. More details here.
You can read the opinions (pdf) here.
John McCain's campaign plans an 11 a.m. conference call to make a campaign issue out of [...]
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will campaign together in Unity, N.H., Friday. Along with its name, the town has the distinction of having cast an equal number of votes for Obama and Clinton in the presidential primary.
John Sununu is the subject of a Weekly Standard piece by P.J. O'Rourke, who came away impressed with what he heard. A few excerpts:
I went to see Senator Sununu at his office in the Russell Building and said that I assumed he had a political [...]
Both the Chicago Tribune editorial board and John Hood of the John Locke Foundation suggest John McCain and Barack Obama deserve to be lumped together. But where the Trib sees two excellent candidates, Hood see two mediocrities.
Bob Barr is the nominee for president of the Libertarian Party. (Note the similarities in presentation between Barr's website and Ron Paul's.) According to the Barr campaign blog, he believes his support will "come from 'disaffected Republican voters, Ron Paul supporters and independent voters and Democratic [...]
Back when John McCain was rallying toward, but had not yet clinched, the Republican nomination, conservatives trying to stop him sought to make much of his alliances with Democrats: e.g. McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), McCain-Kennedy (immigration) and McCain-Lieberman (global warming). The attacks didn't derail McCain, [...]
The Hill got all 97 senators not still running for president to answer whether they would accept a vice presidential nomination:
Judd Gregg: "No. I don't like going to funerals."
John Sununu: "I am focused on my election. And frankly, I don't think John McCain should pick any member of [...]
The mud was flying between Team McCain and Team Obama yesterday, but last night candidate McCain offered a very gracious toast to candidates Obama and Clinton:
It’s a tough business. And though we are rivals, we should respect each other’s willingness to hazard it. Senator Obama is a man [...]
Peggy Noonan today:
In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, [Hillary Clinton] said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is [...]
Earlier this week John McCain gave a speech on judicial philosophy and the kind of judges he wants to appoint. Here's a key bit:
In America, the constitutional restraint on power is as fundamental as the exercise of power, and often more so. Yet the framers knew that these restraints [...]
If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a "GAS TAX HOLIDAY". You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have [...]
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an extended interview to 60 Minutes last weekend. A few weeks earlier, former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith was on the program. The two segments aren't related, but they're both compelling and provocative, and not surprisingly, both touch on topics (the role of judges, [...]
One take on what Barack Obama said and didn't say yesterday, as well as on the potential for the forthcoming movie, "Jeremiah and Barack"...
[Obama:] I'm particularly distressed that this has caused such a distraction from what this campaign should be about, which is the American people.... And the [...]
The New York Times editorial page, which endorsed Hillary Clinton, tomorrow chastises her for taking "the low road to victory" in Pennsylvania:
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right [...]
Two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, three pollsters released results today. Two of the surveys suggest the race is close between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The third suggests Clinton is headed for a landslide win.
Barack Obama's bowling futility brought to mind a story Jack Germond retold in 2002, when the Monitor celebrated the 50th anniversary of the modern New Hampshire presidential primary. It's not online -- here's the relevant part:
The Republican competition in 1968 between former vice president Richard Nixon and Gov. [...]
Three months into the Democratic Party's primary and caucus calendar, this chart of Gallup's daily national tracking poll suggests that it's been a long time since there was a fundamental shift in the opinion of Democratic voters about who should be the party's presidential nominee. By [...]
"I will not play election year politics with the housing crisis," John McCain vowed in a speech in California today. Here's more of what he had to say:
I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who [...]
Barack Obama took about three hours of questions from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times Friday. Four Sun-Times columnists report on their session, as does the Tribune editorial board and Tribune columnist John Kass.
Barack Obama won the Mississippi Democratic primary today. Vote tally here. Exit poll here.
UPDATE: The exit poll asked whether Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate (54 percent yes, 43 percent no) and whether Clinton should pick Obama (56 percent yes, 41 percent no). Also, the [...]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is staying studiously neutral in the Clinton-Obama nomination contest, nevertheless shares her opinion that the party ticket isn't big enough for the both of them.
Update: The final margin was 61-38.
Barack Obama won today's Democratic caucuses in Wyoming. With all but one county reporting results, he led Hillary Clinton 59 percent to 41 percent. More here.
Obama is projected to gain a two-delegate advantage from the state. His campaign projects that Clinton managed [...]
SurveyUSA interviewed 600 registered voters in each of the 50 states to produce familiar red-and-blue electoral maps of hypothetical match-ups of John McCain against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The maps show the following states flipping depending on the candidate (the asterisk signifies that in one of the two [...]
Daniel Henninger on Hillary Clinton's success in Ohio:
I always thought of Hillary as the Ma Barker of the Clinton gang. . . . When the going got tough, when the Feds were closing in and the boys were whimpering in the corner, Ma would slap the fight back into [...]
Morning update: Hillary Clinton won the primaries in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island yesterday. Results remained incomplete from the Texas caucuses, which are also relevant to the awarding of delegates. More here.
Clinton's margin in Ohio is 54-44 with almost all the vote counted. In Texas, it's 51-47 in [...]
John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination with wins tonight in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island. President Bush is expected to endorse him tomorrow, and Mike Huckabee, conceding defeat, promised to try to unite the party. What a turnaround, as anyone who saw this Concord appearance in [...]
UPDATE: Texas Democrats here. Rhode Island here.
Hillary Clinton is projected to win Rhode Island.
Ohio Democrats here, Republicans here.
Vermont Democrats here.
Barack Obama and John McCain are projected to win Vermont, McCain to win Ohio.
The Texas vote is being tallied here (Dem primary) and [...]
Is tomorrow Hillary Clinton's last stand? Well, if somehow she doesn't win Ohio or Texas, yes. But if she does win one or both, then what? The campaigns in Texas and Ohio could turn out to have been Barack Obama's last chance to seize victory. Michael Goodwin of the New [...]
If you buy into the premise of this Hillary Clinton ad, doesn't it make you want to vote for ... John McCain?
Meanwhile, here's Barack Obama's [updated] rebuttal:
The folks at Slate noticed some similarities between the final season of "The West Wing" and the 2008 election. (So far!)
Americans rarely choose a senator to be president. What do Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have in common?
The three leading contenders for president have less executive grounding than anyone elected to the White House in nearly a half-century. Each candidate has scored impressive achievements in life, but none [...]
The Washington Post compiles a list of the top 5 flip-flops for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton here.
His: Union contributions, public financing, Cuba embargo, employers who hire illegal immigrants and decriminalizing pot.
Hers: NAFTA, No Child Left Behind, Iraq timetables, driver's licenses for illegals and the delegates from Florida [...]
Washington Post/ABC News surveys find Hillary Clinton leading Barack Obama 50-43 among likely Democratic voters in Ohio and 48-47 among likely Democratic voters in Texas. A quarter of those surveyed in Texas and a third of those surveyed in Ohio said they could still change their minds.
Both states vote [...]
Today's Monitor carried this Washington Post story on John McCain, which mentions but is, in at least one significant respect, different from the New York Times story today on McCain. Michael Scherer of Time puts the Times story in the category of "a story that doesn't exactly say [...]
Dan Balz on why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both give the other the edge in Wisconsin today:
The Clinton campaign sees Wisconsin as a haven of progressive and independent-minded voters, the kind of people who have found Obama appealing in earlier contests. They say Wisconsin is a quirky state, [...]
David Brooks has the diagnosis here:
At first it seemed like a few random cases of lassitude among Mary Chapin Carpenter devotees in Berkeley, Cambridge and Chapel Hill. But then psychotherapists began to realize patients across the country were complaining of the same distress. They were experiencing the first hints [...]
Michael Barone has a good review of how the nomination processes have (or haven't) worked for Republicans and Democrats this year. Roger Simon raises the stakes with this:
“Delegates are NOT bound to vote for the candidate they are pledged to at the convention or on the first ballot,” [...]
The Cato Institute has created a website scoring members of Congress on how they have voted on "bills and amendments affecting the freedom of Americans to trade and invest in the global economy." The links below will take you to the presidential candidates:
Cold day in h--- alert: Newt Gingrich and the Monitor editorial page agree! Democrats in Florida and Michigan should vote again.
New Hampshire is one of 31 states (map here) supporting a federal appeals court decision striking down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban. Attorney General Kelly Ayotte signed on to the Supreme Court brief filed this week by Texas, which argues that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to [...]
From the Center for Responsive Politics:
Obama, who narrowly leads in the count of pledged, "non-super" delegates, has doled out more than $694,000 to superdelegates from his political action committee, Hope Fund, or campaign committee since 2005. Of the 81 elected officials who had announced as of Feb. 12 [...]
Wednesday update: With 96 percent of Maryland precincts reporting, Barack Obama has 60 percent of the Democratic vote (to Hillary Clinton's 36.5), and John McCain has 55 percent of the Republican vote (to Mike Huckabee's 29). Democratic turnout is more than 2.5 times Republican turnout.
All three cable networks have projected a win for Barack Obama in the Virginia Democratic primary. At 7 p.m., the Republican primary is too close to call. 8:30 p.m. update: Virginia called for McCain.
Data updated throughout: Exit polls here (Democrats) and here (Republicans).
Protest vote watch: The exit [...]
Apropos of Lauren Dorgan's look today at New Hampshire's Democratic superdelegates -- three of whom are supporting Barack Obama, two of whom are supporting Hillary Clinton and two of whom are officially neutral -- Politico has produced a nifty chart of all the superdelegates.
Imagine the Super Bowl was televised on seven different channels and the score was just a little bit (or maybe a lot) different depending on which channel you clicked on. It was the same game, with the same two teams, on all the channels, but there was no way to [...]
TUESDAY UPDATE: Gallup finds Obama's momentum has stalled. Clinton leads 47-42 in the survey conducted Saturday through Monday. McCain's edge stands at 41-24 over Romney with Huckabee at 21. More here.
Updating this post: In Gallup's national tracking, Hillary Clinton's lead over Barack Obama has closed to 44-41, [...]
Daniel Henninger has a terrific column today on the strength of John McCain's campaign: the campaigner himself:
John McCain beat Mitt Romney by 5.5 points in New Hampshire and by five again in Florida. Three months ago, Mr. McCain was a 10% cipher in Florida, with no organization and no [...]
Barack Obama's campaign will report more than $1 million a day (on average) of fundraising for the month of January. And when they're not writing checks, the Obama faithful are apparently uploading videos to YouBama.
UPDATE: It's only one method of scoring, but National Journal says Obama was the [...]
Fred Siegel pushes back against Obama-rama:
It will be ironic if in the name of post-partisanship we manage, with the contrivance of both Left and Right, to elect Oprah's candidate, a man with a narrowly partisan record who has never demonstrated a capacity (rhetoric aside) either to lead or to [...]
The Wall Street Journal, which does not endorse candidates, comes pretty close to anti-endorsing Mitt Romney today:
A major theme of his candidacy is that he'll bring that business model to a "broken" Washington, apply it to Congress and the bureaucracy, and thus triumph over gridlock and the status quo.
To [...]
Ted Olson, the lawyer who won Bush v. Gore in 2000, takes whimsical delight in imagining the lawsuits that could play a role in determining this year's Democratic nomination:
Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore [...]
Barack Obama added another weekend win, besting Hillary Clinton in the Maine Democratic caucuses. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Obama has 59.5 percent of the vote, adding to yesterday's wins in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State. More here.
For what it's worth, Obama outperformed his campaign's projections [...]
Updated: Barack Obama won the Democratic primary in Louisiana, giving him a sweep of the day's events. He also won in the Virgin Islands.
Obama's margin over Hillary Clinton in Louisiana was 57 percent to 36 percent. More here.
Updated: Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state today.
More here.
With 99 percent of the precincts reporting in Nebraska, Obama's margin over Hillary Clinton is 67 percent to 32 percent.
With 94 percent of the precincts reporting in Washington, Obama's margin is 67-31. [...]
Mike Huckabee won the Kansas Republican caucuses overwhelmingly today, besting John McCain, 59.6 percent to 23.5 percent, according to the Associated Press. Republicans were also caucusing in Washington state and holding a primary in Louisiana.
Sunday morning update: Huckabee narrowly bested McCain in Louisiana, though that primary won't determine the state's [...]
The New York Times has a pretty good explanation of how the byzantine delegate selection process used by the Democratic Party leads to very different reporting of the latest tally. In the case of the Times, the newspaper has decided not to count delegates from most (though not all!) [...]
The following mini-interviews and quotes were gathered by American University students at various polling places around Concord.
Bektash Temple, Concord
Maureen Downing 39, works in retail
Voted for Clinton
"I was going to vote for Obama, but then I decided to go for experience over youth. Plus, she [Hillary] is a [...]
Last night at Dartmouth Bill Clinton lashed out at the media for its coverage of the Democratic race and offered some of his strongest criticism to date of the Obama campaign. Here's the video:
Before the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama's national campaign manager David Plouffe refused to say how he would measure success, preferring to leave that to the media. Last night, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod showed no such reticence. "Winning is a success," he [...]
We will have continually updating election returns at concordmonitor.com as soon as the polls close this evening. We'll also be updating this blog with news and analysis throughout the night. To tide you over, check out the links to other posts on the right-hand side of the page, including a [...]
At 8:10 the cheers began at John McCain's "victory party" in Nashua as CNN and Fox News called the primary for him. Supporters, crushed into a crowded ballroom, started cheering and chanting his name, over the White Stripes song "Seven Nation Army."
UPDATE: A few minutes before the news came in, [...]
Here's what John McCain had to say to the Conservative Political Action Conference today regarding illegal immigration:
On the issue of illegal immigration, a position which provoked the outspoken opposition of many conservatives, I stood my ground aware that my position would imperil my campaign. I respect your opposition for I [...]
