It’s been a turbulent last few days on the campaign trail. On Tuesday, Indiana Republicans drove six-term Sen. Richard Lugar from office in favor of hard-core conservative state treasurer Richard Mourdock. While Lugar’s loss seemed inevitable well before primary day, the margin of his defeat—61-39—was shocking given his relatively conservative voting record over decades, and his staunch orthodoxy over the usual hot-button issues like abortion and taxes. Mourdock’s many out-of-state backers, including the Club for Growth, Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund, and virtually every right-wing blogger on the planet, made it abundantly clear that getting rid of Lugar was intended to teach the national Republican Party a lesson about the price involved in disrespecting the Tea Party Movement (Lugar had never even attempted to pander to them) and sticking to the outmoded traditions of Senate bipartisanship.

The day after the primary Mourdock reinforced the “lesson” by calmly telling Chuck Todd that he defined “bipartisanship” as “Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”

While Indiana’s current pro-GOP tilt makes Mourdock a slight favorite in a general election contest with Rep. Joe Donnelly, the unexpected vulnerability of the seat has scrambled many early assumptions about the 2012 Senate election landscape, particularly when combined with Olympia Snowe’s recent surprise retirement. Today the Washington Post’s Paul Kane published an overview of Senate races quoting several leading handicappers as giving Democrats a slight edge in their battle to hang onto control of the chamber; it all may come down to the vice president’s tie-breaking vote.

Continue reading “Election Watch: Obama Makes History” →

The presidential contest executed a rare turn into foreign policy this week, with a flurry of controversy around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Having already made it clear that he would not be shy to claim this event as a personal and administration success story, the president and his team upped the ante with a web video (narrated by Bill Clinton, no less) that noted a 2007 remark by Mitt Romney dismissing any focus on the pursuit of bin Laden as a waste of time and money (Romney was at the time supporting the Bush administration’s “wider war on terror” policy and also responding to criticism from Democrats—including Obama—that the administration had diverted vital resources from Afghanistan in order to prosecute a failed war in Iraq). Romney and other Republicans reacted angrily to the ad, suggesting that Obama was “politicizing” the operation that killed Osama, and arguing that “even Jimmy Carter” would have given the order to proceed with it. After some shots back and forth, the president’s surprise trip to Afghanistan, and televised address on a new security pact with the Afghans, seem to have convinced Republicans they were simply drawing fresh attention to Obama’s top national security accomplishment, and so sought to change the subject.

Continue reading “Election Watch: The Political Cycle Heats Up” →

It appeared that the 2012 Republican presidential nominating process would come to a formal close this week (given Ron Paul’s lack of interest in officially withdrawing until the Convention), and after Newt Gingrich broadly hinted he needed an upset win in Delaware to stay in the race. He subsequently lost by 29 points, and indicated he intended to withdraw quite soon. Instead, he decamped to North Carolina, and for all the world looked like he was continuing the campaign, albeit in a desultory manner. But now comes word that his Secret Service Protection has been withdrawn, making his continued campaigning look even more absurd, so he’ll probably pull the plug before running up even more debts.

Speaking of North Carolina, the president was in Chapel Hill this week in an appearance (subsequently attacked by Republican groups, in what was probably just a shot across the bow, that he was misusing official resources for a de facto campaign appearance) that illustrated the interaction of various issues in potentially close states this year. He spoke to a receptive campus crowd about his proposal to retain a freeze on student loan interest rates, currently the subject of complex partisan maneuvering in Congress. But he did not speak of an issue on the minds of many college students in the state: Amendment One, the draconian constitutional amendment banning not only same-sex marriage but legal recognition of all same-sex relationships, which will appear on the North Carolina primary ballot on May 8.

Continue reading “Election Watch: Upcoming Political Obstacles” →

In just the latest sign of how gridlocked Washington has become, Congress is currently failing to pass even the most reliable of legislative standbys: naming post offices and federal buildings.

For each of the last several Congresses, naming post-offices has been a staple of Congress’s work. In the 109th Congress, for example, 98 of the 482 laws passed by Congress—or 1 in 5—were post-office naming bills.

But so far, the current Congress has managed to name just 17 post offices and federal buildings, plus one national refuge (the “Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge”).

Why the naming deficit?

Continue reading “How Unproductive Is Congress? It’s Not Even Naming Post Offices” →

So it’s finally, incontrovertibly over.

Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidential race on Tuesday saved Mitt Romney and his friends many millions of dollars and additional heartburn from charges that he’s not a “true conservative,” and gave his campaign much more time to plan the convention and the general election. Even though Romney had the nomination all but locked, and might have knocked Santorum out of the race on April 24 with a big win in Pennsylvania, Santorum had a lot of incentive to stay in the race until May, when a bunch of primaries in states with large evangelical populations were to vote. One theory holds that the cold water the RNC poured on an effort by Rick’s allies in Texas to change that state’s delegate allocation from a proportional to a winner-take-all system was the clincher, since that was the only scenario under which Santorum might have denied Romney a majority of delegates.

Continue reading “Election Watch: The End of the Beginning” →

Tuesday’s primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and D.C. were a clean sweep for Mitt Romney, who also won 86 of the 95 pledged delegates at stake in the three states.

According to everybody’s estimates (other than those of the Santorum campaign), Romney is now well over half-way to the goal of the 1144 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination.  An especially credible estimate made by Ryan Lizza, Josh Putnam and Andrew Prokop for The New Yorker even before Tuesday’s votes were counted showed Romney as certain to get very close to the magic number at the end of the contested primaries, needing only a tiny sliver of the unpledged delegates to get over the top. At worst, Mitt’s in the situation Barack Obama faced late in the 2008 Democratic contest, when the only scenario that could have prevented his nomination was an unlikely and almost unanimous revolt among unpledged super-delegates. But any such comparison suggests that Rick Santorum could have Hillary Clinton’s staying power and ability to win heavily in late primaries, and that’s more than a stretch.

From a more practical perspective, the question going into the April 2 primaries was whether Santorum could somehow survive until May, when a string of southern and midwestern primaries could provide him with the sort of demographic landscape in which he has done well so far. But even if that happens, the June calendar represents a Romney firewall of delegate-rich primaries in New Jersey, California and Utah that now look likely to officially put the front-runner over the top–that is, even if Santorum fights on to the bitter end.

Continue reading “Election Watch: A Conservative Romney Emerges” →

On one level, Rick Santorum’s campaign got a desperately needed boost from his win in Louisiana’s primary last Saturday. But all the other signs about the campaign indicate a party ready to end the primary season.

Santorum got his ideal electorate in Louisiana, a low-turnout affair in which half the voters were self-identified “very conservative” voters, and half called themselves “strong supporters” of the Tea Party movement.  Two-thirds say they attend worship services weekly or more.

Just as importantly, Newt Gingrich, who was running very well in Louisiana polls not that long ago, saw his support-levels shrink along with his campaign budget.

Continue reading “Election Watch: The Beginning of the End?” →