At about 7:45pm on Pennsylvania's primary day, at the eastern edge of Hunting Park in northern North Philadelphia, I knocked on a voter's door with a last-minute reminder to get down to the polls only three blocks over. "You mean the voting is still open?" the woman asked. Yes,...

I got my first overtly racist anti-Obama comment today while phoning central Pennsylvania. It was a 62-year-old man, who said, simply, "I'm not voting for the black man." I moved to end the call, but he continued, "I've worked with hundreds of black people." He meant that as a defense...

While Senator Obama's address on Tuesday has largely been received as a call to national dialogue about race, the 37-minute speech also revealed much about his religious and spiritual views. In it, Obama clearly invokes core Christian principles and beliefs, from original sin to God's grace. "Perfection" was his refrain...

I spent this past weekend stomping through snowy Vermont, going door-to-door in St. Johnsbury on Saturday and Barre ("Barry") on Sunday. (Last weekend we'd phonebanked to Chelsea). On arrival in St. Johnsbury, we immediately encountered the most visible sign of Ben & Jerry's endorsement of Obama: the ObamaMobile, driven by...

Many Democratic party loyalists fret that an ongoing battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will tear party unity and delay vital fundraising. But Republicans shouldn't start cheering yet. Below are three hidden benefits of an extended intramural fight for Democratic Party at the national and at the local...

Watching the Obama campaign message, "Yes we can," morph into a music video and then once again into a user-generated participatory project is to see the beginnings of Web Politics 2.0.

There won't be a singular moment that captures the ascendancy...

Mainstream coverage of electoral campaigns often focus on candidate speeches, advertising, and other mass-outreach efforts, for a myriad reasons. Volunteer citizens hardly appear on journalists' radar screens, yet actually play some of the most important roles in political campaigns. Below I'll detail one such campaign,...