David Mark (@DavidMarkDC) is author, most recently, of Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech (with Chuck McCutcheon). He’s also a former Politico senior editor.
Republicans in 1994 had their best election cycle in decades. The GOP swept to joint majorities in Congress for the first time in 40 years. And the party picked up a net 10 governorships, giving them 30 of 50 overall. But Jeb Bush wasn’t among them. The Bush family scion came up short that year […]
Few political observers were surprised in May of 2013 when Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee completed his leftward ideological makeover and became a Democrat. During his seven years in the Senate, Chafee was consistently the most liberal Republican. Yet that only went so far with Ocean State voters, some of the nation’s most devoutly Democratic. […]
Statewide ballots in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year will look awfully familiar. First-term Republican Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are likely to face off in 2016 against the same Democratic opponents they defeated in the 2010 tea party-fueled GOP wave. That would be former Rep. Joe Sestak and ex-Sen. Russ […]
Ambitious politicians never openly root for their party’s presidential nominee to lose. Even if that’s what they probably secretly want. When Republican standard-bearer Bob Dole (predictably) came up short against President Bill Clinton in 1996, Texas Gov. George W. Bush had the most to gain. While publicly behind the Bobster, Bush — son of the […]
The 2000s were a quiet decade politically for former Vice President Dan Quayle. After flaming out early in his bid for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination the oft-ridiculed former veep repaired to a lucrative private business career and generally stayed out of the political limelight. Now Quayle is sticking his toe back in the political […]
The Last Lincolns: The Rise and Fall of a Great American Family By Charles Lachman (Union Square Press, 484 pages, $24.95) Abraham Lincoln’s last descendant died in 1985. But were Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith still alive, it’s unlikely he would have enjoyed the elaborate commemoration the 200th anniversary of the Great Emancipator’s birth. Beckwith was […]
Who wants to be governor of Rhode Island? The gig pays $117,118 a year, and while Rhode Island may be our smallest state the winner still gets to be one of only 50 governors in the nation. All of which should make the job an inviting target for ambitious pols. But the 2010 Ocean State […]
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It’s become conventional wisdom that the keys to the White House in 2008 will run through Colorado, where rapidly changing demographics give Barack Obama a serious shot at nabbing the previously reddish state’s nine Electoral College votes. Yet as Obama and Republican rival John McCain focus heavily on the Centennial state, […]
While Mark Stein’s University of Wisconsin classmates were protesting the Vietnam War, he had a different set of concerns: How come Michigan has that whole separate section that’s actually attached to Wisconsin? Why does Delaware exist and why isn’t it just part of Maryland? Such was the impetus four decades ago for Stein’s delightful new […]
For voters in Southern Indiana’s 9th Congressional District, Election Day might feel a bit like Groundhog Day. For the fourth straight election cycle Democratic Rep. Baron Hill will face off against Republican Mike Sodrel in this rural, culturally conservative Ohio River-region district. Hill has won two out of the three matches so far. First elected […]
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