Actually, they were the same "ridiculous" comments of why liberal secularists and statists invoke a minority in the self-serving pursuit to redefine human and societal institutions and to enforce their new laws against competing influences of public morality (family, churches).

Had he been telling me that Romney was in the driver's seat, I would have gone into Tuesday thinking that Romney was probably going to win.

You are a typical politician who implies something without really saying it, but when gets called on it, says I really didn't say that.

Pundits are quickly turning to immigration to explain the Republicans’ Latino problem and to offer a possible cure, but the reality is that the rot cuts much deeper. The GOP doesn’t have a problem with Latino voters per se. Rather, it has a problem with a broad spectrum of voters who simply don’t feel that it’s speaking to their economic concerns. The GOP has an economic agenda tilted strongly to the benefit of elites, and it has preserved support for that agenda—even though it disserves the majority of GOP voters—with implicit racial politics.

Consider the GOP’s deeply racialized campaign against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. What was so surprising about this—and I know I’m not the only fair-skinned English-dominant person with a Spanish surname who was genuinely shocked—was that conservatives could have easily opposed her purely on policy grounds. Sotamayor is a fairly conventional Democrat on constitutional issues, and that would have been ample reason for conservatives to criticize her.

Indeed, Justice Elena Kagan was attacked on precisely those grounds. But rather than tempering opposition with at least some recognition that Sotomayor’s life story might be a great example for immigrant parents trying to raise children in difficult circumstances, the country was treated to a mass racial panic in which Anglo America was about to be stomped by the boot of Sotomayor’s ethnic prejudice. The graduate of Princeton and Yale Law, former prosecutor, and longtime federal judge was somehow not just too liberal for conservatives’ taste but a “lightweight” who’d been coasting her whole life on the enormous privilege of growing up poor in the South Bronx.

is joe biden running for president in 2016 even potentially a real thing?

Polls overall tended to be biased in favor of Romney! Some of the top performers were internet polls and Gallup, the biggest name in polling, was easily the worst of this election.

He ran for President in 2008. I can't see why he wouldn't even try to get the nomination in 2012.

Already known as the state that refused to recognize Martin Luther King Day, drafted the notorious SB 1070 immigration law and banned ethnic studies in its schools, Arizona again finds itself in the news.

State Rep. Cecil Ash, sensing that whites will soon be a minority says he is in favor of creating a day where white people are celebrated, similar to how blacks and Hispanics are recognized on various "heritage" days.

Ash made his feelings known after Democrats in the state proposed a Latino American day.

“I’m supportive of this proposition," he says. "I just want them to assure me that when we do become in the minority you’ll have a day for us.”

Republican-led Bill Bans Use of Welfare Funds at Strip Clubs

Rep. Charles Boustany, (R-LA), who introduced the bill, said the measure would be a way to prevent wasteful spending and reports of “fraudulent misuse of funds” under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF), which provides grants for welfare systems to states, The Hill reported.

Although the same measure was presented before the House before, Republicans would like to attach the ban, also coined as the “strip-club loophole,” to broader payroll tax cut legislation, which has been in negotiations.

"We have an obligation to root out any kind of fraud and abuse and waste of taxpayer dollars," bill sponsor Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) told The Huffington Post. "At a time you want to insure that every federal program we have has proper integrity and the money is actually getting to needy families, to needy children, this is something we need to act upon."

State Rep. Cecil Ash, sensing that whites will soon be a minority says he is in favor of creating a day where white people are celebrated, similar to how blacks and Hispanics are recognized on various "heritage" days.

The racial slant of the right's attack on Sotomayor is part of why I don't think the GOP will readily change course any time soon on immigration. It's not posturing for gain, but rather is ingrained, and ingrained deeply.

I've seen this graphic bouncing around about Gary Johnson and his "scam".

The problem with this critique is that the GOP's argument against Sotomayor was true. Sotomayor was given a boost every step along the way because of affirmative action, and was given a job that a white male of equal talents wouldn't have gotten. To call that a racist attack is to say that disagreement with affirmative action is racist.

Sotomayor was given a boost every step along the way because of affirmative action, and was given a job that a white male of equal talents wouldn't have gotten.

There are also rumblings about requiring that recipients of public assistance be tested for illegal drug use.

//19 of 23 polling firms had a Republican bias, including PPP.

And in fact Sotomayor wound up graduating summa cum laude at Princeton, which put her in the top 5% of her graduating class, and later was an editor at the Yale Law Journal.

Well, Dan is truly a man of a thousand handles, but I've never noticed he was any particular fan of public morality.

I would like to see both parties nominate some more elected politicians with reasonable legal backgrounds. It'd be bad perhaps to have all 9 people from that background, but there's no reason to think that a few people who were governors or senators wouldn't make for an interesting mix. Deval Patrick is obviously going to be a candidate for one and Napolitano has been mentioned.

State Rep. Cecil Ash, sensing that whites will soon be a minority says he is in favor of creating a day where white people are celebrated, similar to how blacks and Hispanics are recognized on various "heritage" days.

Isn't this just Columbus Day?

I thought that was for Italians.

There are also rumblings about requiring that recipients of public assistance be tested for illegal drug use.

I also love that this is the first topic Silver gets to cover under the new, heightened attention being paid to his work. Not that it will ever stop partisans from sifting the polls in search of the most encouraging result for their side, but maybe it'll nudge the media's coverage of the next supposedly "razor-thin race."

And then there's this: as refreshing as Nate's data-driven approach might be, it fuels and fetishizes horserace coverage, rather than providing any sort of alternative to it.

As long as there exists infotainment the election will be covered as a horse race. Which is *fine.* I'd *rather* the infotainment clowns cover the horse race. They're not good at it, but they're better at that than they are at presenting policy arguments in trite, meaningless, intentionally misleading 30 second sound bites.

Sure, I'd prefer to live in a republic where the electorate tuned in for two riveting hours of Charlie Rose and Jim Leher digging the details on a PBS policy debate or something. But alas, we are presented with an electorate made up of not only human beings, but that particularly flighty subset of humanity called "Americans" instead.

It's okay to report on a "neck and neck" race if there actually is one - it's creating the meme from whole cloth that is the problem. The media used #2 (bad data) to support their conjured reporting of #1 (a horserace). If they had decent data from Nate et al to support their conclusion, I can't see that as undermining much of anything.

What Silver says or thinks about the punditocracy (or the pollsters) is neither here nor there, since his numbers (and the results) speak for themselves.

I personally loved how all the Republicans kept saying things like "you think Dem turnout is going to be the same as 2008? Come on" despite poll after poll after poll confirming that yes the Dems were going to turnout in roughly the same numbers. hubris.

Back in 2008 I remember the NYT quoting someone or other to the effect that 'no woman with Obama's resume could have run', that the lack of gravitas many voters impute to women would be all the more difficult to overcome in the absence of a long resume. If true, that might rule out all the women in Cilliza's list except for Clinton.

I just saw Noonan on the CBS Sunday show. She was saying Petraeus' resignation was "mysterious," and she doesn't understand why he had to step down.

Why would you (or Nate) think those same people who aren't ready for complex policy arguments are ready for a nuanced, data-driven approach to horserace coverage? As we saw in this go-around, the data then becomes politicized, another issue that requires "balanced" coverage-- because anything else would require those talking heads to evaluate evidence rather than simply just presenting diametrically opposed opinions about it.

This might be selection bias on my part-- but it seemed like in the televised interviews I saw of Silver, he was hitting the horserace journalism critique out of the ballpark. And then, in the next breath, giving more horserace coverage. You might not agree that the horserace thing is an issue, but Nate clearly does.

I don't think it's quite the binary you're making it out to be, and I'm also not comfortable with the "TV news just gives people what they want to watch" reductionism.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled nor reflected a Republican resurgence.

All the vibrations are right.

Sotomayor was given a boost every step along the way because of affirmative action, and was given a job that a white male <strike>of equal talents wouldn't</strike> would have typically have gotten

All the vibrations are right.

it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

But the Democrats have to realize that all that wasted Super-PAC money was just chump change to those contributors, and they're certainly not going away anytime soon.

Back in 2008 I remember the NYT quoting someone or other to the effect that 'no woman with Obama's resume could have run', that the lack of gravitas many voters impute to women would be all the more difficult to overcome in the absence of a long resume. If true, that might rule out all the women in Cilliza's list except for Clinton.

That'd be a great point, if Clinton had had more on her resume than Obama did in the year they both ran. Which she didn't.

....Crossroads also is likely to invest more deeply in organizations such as the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has been trying to build a more appealing GOP farm team by, among other things, recruiting Hispanic candidates to run for state-level office.

And it is raising money to run advertising shoring up the congressional Republicans during the upcoming negotiations to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

For Crossroads, 2012 was a $300 million learning experience....

He noted [Crossroads] has a relatively small staff of 19 and said it pays its ad makers only 3 percent of the amount spent, the bottom in an industry where 10 and 15 percent fees used to be common. Ninety-five cents out of every dollar that Crossroads spends “goes onto the target,” he said.

And his wealthy donors? “They all went into this eyes wide open,” Rove said, “and their attitude is, beat them next time.”

“We’ve got to carefully examine, as we did after 2010, an after-action report looking at everything with fresh eyes and questioning and figuring out what worked and what didn’t work,” Rove said.

Redistricting. Republicans ran the process, and isolated the Democratic hot spots (e.g. Philadelphia), while splitting up midlevel Democratic districts and attaching the halves to heavily red territory. The opposite dynamic can be seen in California.

Obama had four years in the senate when he was elected POTUS. In 2016, Klobuchar will have 10 years, and Gillibrand will have 8.

California had an independent citizen's commission do this decade's districts. There's simply a lot more registered Democrats than Republicans now.

The only way I can see this ending is if they're forced by law to come out from hiding, and face the consequences of their choices.

Who's hiding? Certainly not the Koch brothers

That'd be a great point, if Clinton had had more on her resume than Obama did in the year they both ran. Which she didn't.

Nats_Homer_in_DC I assumed was Joey, but I suppose it could be another reactionary Nats fan. Maybe his brother?

West’s campaign has raised questions about how ballots were cast in St. Lucie County, which Murphy won. Edson told AP that the campaign wants to see documentation and is prepared to sue if the numbers don’t add up or if documentation isn’t provided.

At this point, West’s only recourse will be in the courts. But a Florida judge on Friday denied his request to impound ballots and voting machines.

Murphy declared victory early Wednesday morning and has been moving forward as if he will replace West.

Pennsylvania is a somewhat auto-gerrymandered state. Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle. Ring a bell? Republican controlled redistricting no doubt had an effect, but Obama carried Philadelphia by 465,000 votes, and it would be pretty damned hard to divide that advantage up in a way that would make Congressional districts in other parts of the state more favorable for Democrats.

And in fact Sotomayor wound up graduating summa cum laude at Princeton, which put her in the top 5% of her graduating class, and later was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. I wonder how that compares to Clarence Thomas's rank at Holy Cross, or how it stacks up against Charles Whittaker, an Eisenhower appointee who got into Kansas City School of Law only after obtaining his previously lacking high school degree. As Greg (not from UK) points out, the idea that only brilliant minds qualify for the Supreme Court is something that seems to be applied selectively, to say the least. By every existing standard, the idea that Sotomayor was unqualified is laughable

Sotomayor is unqualified based upon the recent record of non-AA appointees to the Court. She's about as qualified as Harriet Miers or, now that I think about it, my father. To be fair, my father is a successful and accomplished attorney, but he doesn't belong on the Supreme Court and neither does Sonia Sotomayor. Nearly all the conservative lawyers I know are just as disdainful of Thomas's "qualifications" as they are of Sotomayor; he's further proof that affirmative action hires don't have any place on the Supreme Court.