For the second straight week, the Crystal Ball is moving a toss-up Senate race to the Republican column. Now that ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson has captured the Republican nomination in Wisconsin -- winning with 34% of the vote in a crowded, four-way field -- we are installing him as a slight...
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) got the opponent she wanted. But she still enters the general election season as an underdog. Now that the Missouri Senate primary is complete, we are downgrading the incumbent Democrat’s chances from toss-up to leans Republican. Tuesday night’s surprise Republican primary winner, Rep. Todd Akin, has...
In sports betting parlance, an "over/under" is a bet on whether there will be more or less of a given statistic in a certain game. So, in a football game, say the over/under is 50; gamblers would bet whether the total points scored would be more or less than 50....
Ohio, the great maker of presidents, remains vitally important in presidential elections because it is one of the biggest of the 10-15 truly competitive states in the Electoral College. But it does not pack the electoral punch it once did. On one hand, the Buckeye State does have the seventh-most...
The Supreme Court’s narrow decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act means that the country’s partisan battle over health care essentially remains unchanged. Conservatives hoped that the Supreme Court would throw them a lifeline by invalidating the law, which would have allowed the right to celebrate the end of Obamacare...
The conventional wisdom in the battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives is that Democrats will pick up at least some seats, perhaps netting somewhere in the high single or low double digits, but won’t pick up enough seats to seriously threaten John Boehner’s speakership. Indeed, if we...
Democrat Ron Barber will replace his old boss, Gabrielle Giffords, in the House after winning a special election Tuesday night, 52% to 45%, over Republican Jesse Kelly. The race appeared to be neck-and-neck, and Kelly narrowly won more votes cast on Election Day. But Barber built his winning margin in...
Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman (both California Democrats) were put in the same district in redistricting, and they are locked in a knock-down, drag-out intraparty fight. But it's possible that the upcoming primary is only a prelude to their real battle in November. That's because the Golden State now...
We would make a joke about President Obama only taking 59% of the West Virginia primary vote against a federal prison inmate named Keith Judd, but every possible one was exhausted on Twitter by Wednesday morning. Suffice it to say, it was an embarrassing performance for the president, albeit in...
John Adams, the Founding Father who served as the nation’s first vice president, had this to say about the No. 2 job: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Nowadays, few people --...
During the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry whipped the British in the famous Battle of Lake Erie. Nearly 200 years later, winning Lake Erie won't suffice for Democrats seeking to reclaim the House; they need to win on the shores of all five Great Lakes. Now that decennial...
Generally speaking, if members of the U.S. House of Representatives want to keep their seats, voters are happy to oblige: since the end of World War II, the lowest reelection rate for incumbent House members was 79.3% in 1948, which was a huge Democratic wave year. But those figures don’t...
We here at the Crystal Ball, and of course our readers, love politics. But Americans don’t, especially now: Congress is historically unpopular, and Americans are so sick of politics that more than two-thirds of them according to one survey wished the presidential campaign was over even before it officially started....
Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said that "There is nothing I love as much as a good fight." If so, he would’ve hated where the House is headed for the next decade, because by and large it likely won’t have all that many good fights. Instead of looking at the House...
In the last election cycle, several "non-politician politicians" -- candidates who have never held public office who ran for a major office -- went from obscurity to high office. These non-politician politicians include Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI) and Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), all 2010 winners. Bob...
