Just How Competitive Is the Ohio Senate Race?
May 25, 2012 · 9:21 AM EDT
Some races are easy to handicap. Two essentially evenly matched candidates in a competitive state normally produces a tossup rating, while a popular entrenched incumbent against an under-funded, unknown challenger almost always produces something close to a safe contest for the incumbent.
But the Senate race in Ohio is more complicated. It’s certainly a competitive state, as recent presidential races have shown. And it’s regarded as one of the cycle’s tossups in the 2012 race between President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
Yet Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) knocked off then-Sen. Mike DeWine (R) six years ago, and his 9-point margin wasn’t a squeaker. Obama won the Buckeye State by more than 4 points in 2008. Brown served eight years in the Ohio House before winning two terms as Ohio’s secretary of state. He lost a bid for re-election in 1990 and two years later was elected to Congress. He served seven terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in the 2006 Democratic wave year.
Brown has a reputation as a political animal — he was often mentioned as a possible Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman but was never selected by his party’s leader for that post — and he is a relentless campaigner who runs very aggressive campaigns. In…
Texas Senate: Can Dewhurst Hit 50 Percent in Primary?
May 24, 2012 · 1:56 PM EDT
A new Public Policy Polling survey confirms what I am hearing elsewhere: Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is close – but still short – of getting more than 50 percent of the vote in Texas’ May 29 Republican Senate primary, which would allow him to avoid a runoff.
The May 22-23 survey of 482 likely GOP…
How Citizens United Is Affecting Campaigns
May 23, 2012 · 10:16 AM EDT
“It’s a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” President Barack Obama said in a statement after the Supreme Court’s January 2010…
Kentucky & Arkansas Primaries: Conservatives, Incumbents Cruise
May 23, 2012 · 10:15 AM EDT
Conservatives got their preferred candidates in open seat races in Tuesday’s primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky, but national Democrats weren’t as lucky. And results in both states demonstrate Democrats’ continued struggle to get elected in the South.
In the Bluegrass State, tea party favorite…
