Princeton Election Consortium — A first draft of electoral history. Since 2004. D.C. Republicans Hate Obamacare, but GOP Governors Have Learned to Love It - Molly Ball. Executives in Democratic states have almost all embraced the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion -- and seen their political fortunes improve.
Republicans in Congress, you may have heard, are determined to stop Obamacare. So determined are some of them that they allowed the federal government to shut down when their efforts to stop the Affordable Care Act failed. But some Republican governors have a different view: Increasingly, they’re turning to a controversial part of Obamacare to save them politically. The latest was Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, a dismally unpopular Republican who’s up for reelection next year. The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. Why Obama Doesn't Care If He's Winning or Losing the PR Battle - Garance Franke-Ruta.
You can spin a lot of things in a campaign that's a war of words and ideas, but it's a lot harder to spin a government shutdown about which Americans have increasingly direct personal experience.
Friday's campaign-style back-and-forth over who said what and who cares more about the suffering American people during the shutdown started with an anonymous senior administration official's declaration, quoted and paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal, that "'We are winning .... It doesn't really matter to us' how long the shutdown lasts 'because what matters is the end result.'" "This isn’t some damn game!
" House Speaker John Boehner exclaimed in reply, even though he knows that whatever the on-the-ground consequences, there is a lot of gamesmanship involved in apportioning blame. Today's Gallup tracking poll data showing support for Obama again reaching a nadir -- 41 percent approval to 52 percent disapproval -- makes clear just how much is at stake for his presidency here. The GOP’s bizarre ‘doomsday plan’ Typically, a "doomsday plan" is meant to help you survive the aftermath of doomsday.
During the Cold War, for instance, the U.S. had a doomsday plan meant to protect the president and ensure the continued functioning of the U.S. government in the event of a nuclear attack. U.S. Air Force via Reuters In 2005, Congress passed another doomsday plan. It was meant to ensure the legislature could conduct business in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that killed or incapacitated most of its members. This week, Washington is obsessed with another so-called "doomsday plan. " Republicans are seriously considering a Doomsday Plan if fiscal cliff talks collapse entirely.
Today, the New York Times adds more detail, including this quote from Rep. The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails. One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign.
Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. Tea Party campaigning: Americans for Prosperity have a big, well-funded operation but they are still making some basic mistakes reaching voters. Photo by David Weigel.
LEESBURG, Va. —The new Americans for Prosperity field office is a short walk from downtown, in an unusually stately office park. (Most things in Leesburg are unusually stately.) Today, National Prosperity Action Day, the red brick office is decorated with yellow balloons and loaded with trays of Famous Dave’s pork and brisket. Sixty-odd AFP activists mill inside and outside, getting to know each other before the big schlep. For one day, the Leesburg office is AFP central. In the Red Corner, Zac Moffat Leads Romney’s Digital Drive to Topple Obama. By Hamish McKenzie On September 26, 2012.
OpenGov Foundation Open Sources House Oversight's Crowdsourced Legislation Platform. Jack Dorsey Tries To Break Out Of The Bubble By Riding The Bus “Every Single Day” When Twitter struck a deal to move to San Francisco’s mid-Market neighborhood, the tradeoff seemed pretty straightforward: In exchange for relocating to an economically challenged area, the company would get significant tax breaks.
But Jack Dorsey said at the Techonomy Detroit conference today that there’s another benefit. Dorsey, who is co-founder/executive chairman/product lead at Twitter and founder and CEO at Square (which is located close to the Twitter office), spoke to reporters after his on-stage interview and said that being in the mid-Market neighborhood has a “good effect” on both companies, because it allows the team to see and try to solve “real problems.” After all, if you live and work in a Silicon Valley suburb like Palo Alto or Mountain View, you probably drive to work every day, and that means you might miss “the problems facing real Americans.” Cory Booker and the End of the New Black Politician. Reëlections are like second marriages—a portion of the pageantry, a fraction of the idealism.
The controversy now swirling around Newark Mayor Cory Booker is a reminder of that. In urging the President (and Mitt Romney) to renounce negative campaigning, Booker inadvertently offered a barometer of the difference between the Barack Obama of 2008, who strode into Washington vowing to change the tone of our politics, and the battered pol who had to produce a birth certificate to assure the public he was qualified to vote for President, let alone serve as one. Change, indeed. But in a curious way, Booker’s comments also underscored, and possibly exacerbated, his own political problems—and not simply because his attempt to stand above the fray made him look something like a guy who refuses to help a friend in a bar fight because fighting is immature.
Amateur Hour in Chicago - By Arif Rafiq. As last weekend's NATO summit made clear, President Barack Obama's Hamlet-like indecisiveness on Pakistan plagues his administration's relationship with the country and its president, Asif Ali Zardari.
Obama remains unable to effectively manage the need to both apologize to and reengage Pakistan, while at the same time moving the country away from supporting militant groups that destabilize it and the region. Since November, the Obama team has agonized over whether it should apologize for the deadly U.S. air attack on a Pakistani Salala military base along the border with Afghanistan. Twenty-four Pakistani soldiers died as U.S. helicopters fired on the Salala base for two hours, including more than an hour after Pakistani liaisons pleaded for the attacks to stop. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that planned apologies to Pakistan were aborted numerous times -- including once after Qurans were found to be desecrated by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Americans are tired of war. Study: Matching Funds Up Donor Diversity in NYC. Published Monday, the report from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI), entitled “Donor Diversity Through Public Matching Funds”, compares the 2009 City Council elections with the 2010 State Assembly elections.
The city's system matches campaign donations at a 6-to-1 ratio, up to the first $175 a person contributes to a participating candidate. No such program exists at the state level, although State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, introduced a bill to establish one in April. In their analysis, CFI and the Brennan Center found that 90 percent of census block groups in the city were home to a small donor (giving $175 or less) in the 2009 City Council elections, whereas small donors came from only 30 percent of census block groups in State Assembly elections the following year.
NYC census block groups with at least one small donor, 2010 State Assembly v. 2009 City Council.