Today is Election Day and all across the nation, people are queuing up to make their voices heard, from the storm battered Northeast to the desert West. The sheer size of our country, and the diversity of its electorate, geography and polling process makes today a huge logistical challenge, with...

For quite some time now Mitt Romney has been living in a parallel universe. He was for a women's right to choose before he was against it. For reasonable immigration reform before the Republican primaries made him against it and, for that matter, he was for reason before he became...

Mitt Romney may be the GOP's best actor. He has a foot in every camp, and a position or three on every issue. But as Hurricane Sandy showed this week, the job he's auditioning for so earnestly for demands more than posturing and prose, it demands decisions. It demands a...

Sometimes the evolution of a candidate can be a good thing. Take President Lincoln's evolution on the meaning of emancipation or RFK's views on the war in Vietnam.

But those evolutions occurred over time, through internal conflict and reflection.

And let's be honest, Mitt Romney is...

Conventional wisdom tells us that vice presidential debates don't do anything to swing elections. Don't tell that to the estimated 43 million people that watched the debate.

And let's be honest, there is nothing conventional about this race.

On the face of it, Romney should be walking away...

I'm pretty sure the Obama campaign will trade a debate loss for an electoral win. And if the campaign plays it right that is exactly what will happen.

After all, sometimes you need events like this to refocus a campaign.

You needn't look further than the Romney campaign....

There is nothing the media likes more than a good story, even if the story has to be exaggerated a bit. And the story the media will create tonight will be of Mitt Romney: The Other Comeback Kid.

News reports are already showing the media...

There is a tradition in campaigns that occurs a few weeks before Election Day: convincing the world that your candidate isn't very good at public speaking.

In campaign speak it's called "managing expectations." The tradition, before the presidential debates, is where campaign surrogates tell you the other guy rocks and...

This election is Mitt Romney's to lose, and it looks like he's lost it.

In 60 days, when all the votes are counted, political analysts will be able to look to the day Barack Obama delivered his speech to the Democratic Convention as the day he won the election....

Nothing spells fear more than irrationality.

And there is nothing safe or rational about choosing Paul Ryan as your running mate.

Historically, a vice presidential selection has little impact on the outcome of a race. But it does give you a significant window into the thinking of a...

In the 1967 blockbuster film Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman takes his final stand by telling the prison warden, "what we have here is a failure to communicate!" Little did he know that he could have been speaking in part about the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

After all, in...

Over the coming months pundits will slice and dice polling data, census information and the unemployment numbers of soccer moms to see whether President Obama has a clear path to victory. While I agree it's important to understand the electoral math, and it appears that the 2012 map will be...

Conventional wisdom has it that people don't start paying attention to campaigns until Labor Day; that is Labor Day next year. But in three easy steps Obama's campaign could save a lot of headaches by simply winning the election right now. How is this possible?

Step One: Help establish...

May this be the year that Democrats finally figure out branding -- and see how effectively Republicans have been using it against them.

As Marilyn Serafini notes in the Washington Post, much of the difficulty of passing health care reform had nothing to do with its merits, and...

In the weeks following Republican gains in Congress the left has made much ado about something -- just what that something is, though, is up for interpretation. Blaming the Obama Administration for everything from triangulation to compromise to what OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers asked recently: "Isn't there ever...

What do enhancements to food safety, paycheck equity and small business lending have in common? Hard as it is to believe, they've been targeted by the Republican filibuster. If the GOP had its way, the country would have nothing to show for the first two years of the Obama presidency.

As we've noted before, the market-driven Republican Party wants to make reality itself negotiable. But in the race for California's Attorney General, reality is proving stubbornly simple: Kamala Harris has won. Overcoming the opposing campaign's best efforts to game the vote count, plus a million dollar...

Ben Franklin said that nothing is certain except death and taxes -- but then Ben lived before there was a Republican Party to make the political dirty trick every bit as predictable.

We predicted what would happen as the race for the California attorney general took a swing...

Reporters, pundits and even some Democratic leaders are starting to adopt as conventional wisdom that there must be some policy lesson in the results from November 2.

But the Democratic record didn't actually matter much in the mid-terms. It couldn't have, because most voters don't actually know what that record...

As we watch the final vote count in the oh-so-close contest between Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris, watch for a California replay of Bush-Gore 2000. Already, Cooley consultant Kevin Spillane has promised to fight any supposed "manipulations of the ballot counting process by the Harris campaign."

There is...