Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli announced today that he would be seeking a legislative solution to the problems encountered by the Perry and Gingrich campaigns in the Old Dominion: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is intervening in the Virginia presidential primary dispute and plans to file emergency legislation to address the inability of most Republican [...]

For a guy who says he dislikes “activist judges,” Rick Perry sure wants a certain Federal Judge in Virginia to be an activist.

The Gingrich campaign yesterday blamed its failure to make the Virginia ballot on fraud by a paid signature gatherer: A worker collecting signatures to get Republican GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on the Virginia primary ballot turned in fraudulent signatures, Gingrich told a woman at a campaign stop in Iowa on Wednesday. Gingrich spokesman R.C. [...]

Virginia has helped winnow the Republican field. You’re welcome America.

The Gingrich campaign’s response to being excluded from the Virginia ballot is, well, rather interesting: A write-in campaign is what Gingrich is planning. “We will work with the Republican Party of Virginia to pursue an aggressive write-in campaign to make sure that all the voters of Virginia are able to vote for the candidate of [...]

When Barack Obama won Virginia in 2008, it was the first time a Democratic candidate for President had won the state since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964. The President was able to pull this off largely because of his ability to attract support from the white, middle class, independent voters in population rich Northern Virginia. [...]

It’s very easy to create a “balanced budget” when you cook the books.

In 2008, Virginia gave its Electoral Votes to a Democrat for the first time since 1964. Just a year later, though, saw Republicans sweep all three statewide elected offices, and last year the GOP picked up three Congressional seats from the Democrats. It’s inevitable, then, that the state will be on everyone’s radar next year, [...]

And, as has become typical of politics lately, he announced it first on Twitter and YouTube: This will be an interesting race to watch since it will most likely set up a race between two of the three most popular former Governor’s in recent Virginia political history (the other one, Mark Warner, is already in [...]

Virginia Senator Jim Webb is the last of a dying breed of Democrats, but his party may need him if it wants to remain competitive anywhere outside of a Blue State.

A while back, I explored “Why College Tuition is Growing So Fast” through the lens of MIT artificial intelligence guru Patrick Henry Winston‘s writings.   He argued that administrative costs are skyrocketing and that higher education was one of the few industries not taking advantage of the advances in technology, particularly computers, to increase efficiency. My [...]

Pennsylvania is Reapportionment’s version of the Biggest Loser. If projections hold, Pennsylvania will lose Congressional seats for the ninth straight Census. Smart Politics: Several projections have been conducted by experts during the last few years – with Texas and Arizona universally considered to be the big winners of multiple seats, with the remaining gains coming [...]

Most of us who live in the area call the nation’s capitol “DC” or “the District” or, less often, “Washington.”   But, officially, of course, it’s “Washington, District of Columbia” or “Washington, DC” for short.  The Constitutional origins of the “District” part are well known and the “Columbia” part isn’t all that interesting; they had to [...]

For whatever reason, my home state of Virginia leads the nation in vanity plates.    Heck, I’ve got one that says “OTB.”   But, apparently, the DMV frowns on tags that spout racist messages, even exceedingly cryptic ones. Brigid Schulte for WaPo: The owner of a Ford truck bearing the license plate 14CV88 will have to find [...]

My governor has opened up an old wound, declaring April Confederate History Month. Anita Kumar and Rosalind S. Helderman seem to have broken the story for WaPo’s Virginia Politics Blog: Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark [...]

Now that health care reform has been revived from its near death experience, it appears that it will face a series of Constitutional challenges.  My home state of Virginia has fired the opening shot. Via Twitter, no less. To emphasize how ready Virginia is to take the health care overhaul to court, take a look [...]

Senator Jim Webb says it’s time to drop General Order No. 1, which bans alcohol consumption, gambling, and pornography in hostile fire zones. In part, the order is out of sensitivity to “host-nation” culture. But it’s also a major safety issue. Alcohol, firearms and heavy machinery don’t mix, and the Department of Defense doesn’t want [...]

Virginia’s new Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, reversed his predecessor’s order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.   It happened twelve days ago but no one apparently noticed until TPM’s Christina Bellantoni broke the story: Gay and lesbian state workers in Virginia are no longer specifically protected against discrimination, thanks to a little-noticed change made [...]

It’s official: DC has had more snow this winter than any in recorded history. The Washington region broke a century old record of most snow in a season about 2 p.m., and soon after the snow storm slowly began moving away to the north and east. Now the damage reports are starting to come in. [...]

The world’s tallest female econoblogger, Megan McArdle, is experiencing her first major DC snowstorm and is, shall we say, not impressed. You have never seen a city as completely incompetent at dealing with snow as Washington DC. I mean, two feet of snow is inconvenient anywhere.  But in DC, only the main streets have been [...]

There was talk over the last few days, from Nancy Pelosi and others, that the Democrats might use parliamentary tricks and outright chicanery to ram a healthcare bill through even if Scott Brown won in Massachusetts and take the party coalition down to 59.   Thankfully, cooler heads seem to have prevailed and that looks quite [...]

One of my commenters brought to my attention an issue that’s not receiving much attention:  Residents of several U.S. states could have to show their passports for domestic travel — or to enter a federal government building — starting January 1 because of the REAL ID Act.  Chris Strohm for Congress Daily: More than half [...]

Pollster Glen Bolger (a founding partner at my wife’s firm) looks at the data in the Virginia governor’s race and concludes that Barack Obama hurt Democrat Creigh Deeds. At the end of tracking, we added some questions paid for by the Republican National Committee specifically to measure the Obama effect. [...] The dominant national issue [...]

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran argues that the Defense Department ought to step up and pay for the increased traffic BRAC is about to bring to his district: The latest round of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing) moves is poised to create a daytime nightmare of traffic congestion for Northern Virginia. Over the next two years, [...]

Tyler Cowen points me to an interesting discussion on the subject “Why So Few D.C. Residents Are Married.” Washington City Paper‘s Amanda Hess cites a Pew survey finding that “Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. [...]

Yesterday, Radley Balko passed on the story of Eric Williamson, the Springfield, Virginia man who has been charged with indecent exposure for being naked in his own house.    According to Williamson’s version of events, he was making coffee at 5:30 in the morning when a woman and her 7-year-old cut across his yard and spied [...]

Virginia GOP Gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell is taking quite a bit of flak for a thesis he wrote in college in 1989. The media spotlight is on gubernatorial hopeful Robert McDonnell who is currently launching his 2009 campaign for governor of Virginia. McDonnell finds himself in hot water for his 1989 thesis, which outlines a [...]

When Republicans controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in the House and Senate, I often read calls from bloggers on my side of the aisle for purging the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) from the ranks.  After all, the likes of Arlen Specter and  Lincoln Chaffee were a giant pain in the butt and [...]

This map resulting from a Gallup poll on party identification is making the rounds: The lede from Jeffrey Jone’s write-up: An analysis of Gallup Poll Daily tracking data from the first six months of 2009 finds Massachusetts to be the most Democratic state in the nation, along with the District of Columbia. Utah and Wyoming [...]

Glenn Reynolds points to a story by Doug Winship about Washington State’s liquor stores running out of, um, liquor just in time for the July 4th weekend during which all good Americans celebrate their country’s independence by getting hammered. Naturally, all liquor stores in Washington State are run by the government of the state of [...]

Matt Yglesias has discovered the facts that 1) each state gets two Senators and 2) some states are bigger than others, a condition that has obtained since the inception of our current system in 1789.  There was, as some may recall having read, this thing called the Great Compromise whereby delegates representing sovereign states under [...]

While I live in Virginia, I’ve paid only scant attention to what has been a lackluster governor’s race. But the polls suddenly shifted a couple days ago and it appears that the general election will be interesting, indeed. Running with the least money and fewest ties to vote-rich Northern Virginia, State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds [...]

To illustrate that US professional sports have a lot of “hilariously anticompetitive interferences in the market” compared to the English Premier League, Daniel Davies constructs an artificial sports league based on all major professional teams in “Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC” in order to achieve a comparable population [...]

We’re in Asheville, North Carolina for a couple of days, the first stop on a road trip to see friends and family. I awoke to find a copy of the Asheville Citizen-Times at the door with a headline I thought I’d never see: “NC approves ban on smoking.” North Carolina, a state built on tobacco, [...]

Taegan Goddard passes on word that Tom Ridge, once Pennsylvania’s governor and putatively contemplating running for Arlen Specter’s seat representing that state in the Senate, is a resident of Maryland for the purposes of federal tax and lobbying filings. Do these sort of things matter in statewide elections?   Is anyone otherwise disposed to vote for [...]

Radley Balko has a new column at Fox on “Washington’s Wealth Boom.” The new top three [wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income] are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were [...]

One of the side discussions over the Blair House brouhaha has been that having the Obamas stay at the Hay-Adams Hotel would pose a major inconvenience for those who drive through that part of the District of Columbia, as roads around the hotel would be closed for security reasons.    With the hotel only three blocks [...]

Republicans may be in the midst of a losing at the polls but they continue to pick up seats in the House and Electoral College thanks to the decennial census. Texas will lose some influence in Washington when President George W. Bush leaves the White House, but a new study finds that the Lone Star [...]

Larry Bartels examines the voting behavior of white Americans on Election Day and finds that, as he expected, we were very, very racist: According to the exit polls, Obama outpolled the previous Democratic nominee, John Kerry, among people from small towns and rural areas and among gun owners. He also did better than Kerry among [...]

My Palin Derangement Syndrome post got a number of thoughtful responses, especially for a weekend post. My fellow Jacksonville State alumnus Stacy McCain, a Palin fan, thinks the internal debate on her role in last week’s defeat and her future as a Republican Party standard bearer is one we should have.  He objects strenuously, though, [...]

I’ve been waiting to hand out recognition for correctly predicting the Electoral map until all states have been decided.  Missouri still hasn’t been called, although it’s likely to fall into McCain’s camp.  North Carolina has been called for Obama, who also picked up one elector in Nebraska, the first time either Maine or Nebraska has [...]

The country has elected Barack Obama as president and broken the recent cycle of close contests decided by one state.  The Democrats have expanded their margins in the House and Senate but with less of a landslide than many predicted and have thus been denied the fabled “filibuster-proof” majority. The pre-election polls, once again, were [...]

Both CNN and Fox are projecting that Mark Warner has defeated Jim Gilmore for the open Senate seat caused by the retirement of Republican John Warner (no relation).   This was widely expected.  Gilmore barely campaigned while Warner has been out in force for months.  Warner was a very popular governor, while Gilmore was largely an [...]

Matt Yglesias offers these Pew poll results as a rejoinder to those of us who think a win for Obama isn’t a mandate for his policies. Says Matt, “The voters felt they had a choice between a liberal and a conservative, and felt they preferred the liberal and his policy agenda.” Well . . . [...]

Steven Taylor notes that, Barack Obama notwithstanding, change isn’t always a good thing.  He breezed through the lines in Montgomery, Alabama. Speaking of optical scan ballots—thank goodness for them, or we would have likely had to wait for hours. Had we had to use voting machines (as we did in 2004), there would have been [...]

Somebody, whether Drudge or some other site, will likely leak the election results sometime this afternoon.  While they’re impossible to ignore, you should do exactly that. Rasmussen reminds us: The bottom line is that in every state we polled–Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia– Democrats are a lot more eager to take exit [...]

Stories from RedState, Strata-Sphere and elsewhere that the massive early voting so far isn’t going overwhelmingly for Barack Obama as expected have Memeorandum abuzz. While it’s understandable that John McCain supporters are grasping for any good news they can find, the idea that California is “very tight,” let alone that “in the less liberal states [...]

My home county is routinely throwing out absentee ballots from overseas military because of a technicality in the law. Fairfax General Registrar Rokey Suleman said Thursday that he had had to reject some of the ballots because of a Virginia law passed in 2002. That law — then called Senate Bill 113, sponsored by then-state [...]

A story in the print edition of Sports Illustrated on the sale of Brett Favre’s house in Green Bay captured my attention.  I can’t find it online but it appears to have taken its cue from an October 2 piece in the Green Bay Press-Gazette. There’s no “for sale” sign in front of the ranch-style [...]

It never fails that, as Election Day draws close, the supporters of the candidate trailing in the polls start telling us that the polls aren’t accurate.  Part of this is Pauline Kaelism, with most people associating with likeminded people and therefore floored that more than half the country could possibly prefer the other guy when [...]