Political Crumbs

The Iowa caucuses may have provided the most razor-thin 1-2 finish in the 2012 Republican race, with Rick Santorum edging Mitt Romney by 0.03 points (34 votes) and Ron Paul just 3.13 points back. However, the closest 1-2-3 finish that cycle was actually in Mississippi nearly two and one-half months later, where the state’s March…

Highly controversial but often forgotten presidential candidate David Duke won 7.1 percent of the vote in the 1992 South Carolina Republican primary in third place behind George H.W. Bush (66.9 percent) and Pat Buchanan (25.7 percent). That nearly equaled the support received in 2016 by three candidates, with only a fraction of their publicity and…

Rand Paul was the second of the 22 major party candidates to get into the 2016 presidential sweepstakes last year and on Wednesday became 10th to exit after 303 (seemingly joyless) days on the campaign trail. That is a far cry from the duration of his father’s two GOP White House bids. In 2008 Ron…

It has been over a century since the last time a New York Republican was elected president, but Donald Trump enters the New Year with a political half life that is seemingly long enough to at least enable him to make his mark on the Republican primary contests. Since presidential primaries were introduced in 1912,…

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory formally announced he would run for reelection in 2016 earlier this week. McCrory is the sixth governor to be elected into office after the state’s constitution was amended in the 1970s to allow governors to serve two consecutive four-year terms. All but one governor, Democrat Beverly Perdue in 2012, took…

Presuming Kansas U.S. Senator Jerry Moran wins his party’s nomination next year (it appears Milton Wolf will not challenge him), he will of course be a shoo-in to win a second term in the chamber. The real question is whether or not the Democratic Party will be able to field a nominee against him. No…

If Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner is reelected as expected to his 5th CD seat in 2016 he will become just the second Badger State U.S. Representative to win a 20th term to the chamber in state history. Sensenbrenner would join Democrat Dave Obey, who served 21 terms from Wisconsin’s 7th CD from April 1969…

Mississippi Democrats are bracing for a bloodbath next Tuesday when the party is poised to record its worst showing in a gubernatorial election there since Reconstruction with truck driver and first-time office seeker Robert Gray as its nominee. Gray shockingly won the Democratic primary this summer without spending any money (or voting in the race)…

Though it was not an official announcement, Florida Democratic U.S. Senator Bill Nelson released a statement on Monday that, in passing, stated he would be running for reelection in 2018. Nelson, who would be 76 years old on Election Day 2018, is setting his sights on becoming just the fourth Floridian to win a fourth…

While Maggie Hassan’s decision this week to not seek another term as governor of New Hampshire may seem at first blush to put Democrats at a disadvantage in holding the seat, a review of Granite State gubernatorial elections suggests that might not be the case. Over the last 185+ years since the start of the…