Making sense of high-profile House, Senate and gubernatorial races this tight will mean breaking down every voting bloc into the microscopic bits of data to parse through in the postmortem. And of all the big mysteries that will be closely watched and dissected on Nov. 4, few will be as anxiously anticipated as the exit polling for women voters—since they were 53 percent of the electorate in 2012. 

Thus far, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, each side has been able to stop the other one cold.  Nearly everything that passes in the House is dead on arrival in the Senate.  And just about anything that attracts enough votes to get out of the Senate is dead as a mackerel in the House.  As a result, the Congress of the United States has accomplished absolutely nothing of substance.

There are real uncertainties about how rapidly the real-world changing demographic profile of U.S. communities will affect national politics and the extent to which right-wing anti-immigrant politicians in Congress can continue to perpetuate de facto segregation on the basis of immigration status. But in California and in other states (including those in the South and the Midwest), as increasing numbers of U.S.-born children of Latino immigrant parents reach voting age, their votes will very soon tip the balance toward social policies that more fairly and inclusively represent community perspectives. 

Translated for a state that was once the Confederate capital, states’ rights nostalgia equals Voter-ID restrictions; Judeo-Christian principles means Bible-thumping; and free market sounds like predatory lending and sticking it to the working and middle class. That’s reason enough that African-American voters in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District should and can try to win that seat back for Democrats.

If these trends are more than a benign anomaly, they would not only ease pressure on the Medicare budget, but would moderate government health spending generally, a development that could vaporize concerns about the growing cost of entitlement programs.  As analysts of all political stripes have been saying, America’s government doesn’t have a spending problem; it has a health spending problem.  

The number of African Americans who lacked health insurance dropped dramatically in 2014's first quarter compared to 2013's fourth quarter thanks to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Republicans threaten to repeal if they win control of both houses of Congress in November's national elections. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index reported on Monday that the uninsured rate for African Americans fell from 20.9 percent in 2013's fourth quarter to 17.6 percent in 2014's first quarter, a drop of 3.3 percentage points.

The populations most vulnerable to those outrages are hardly aware of the Koch brothers. I believe only a minuscule number of Democrats and Independents know of the very real threat to our country’s decency – and our base responsibility to those less advantaged – posed by Sheldon Adelson and Koch brother types out there wielding hundreds of millions of dollars in what I call “The Dark Campaign”.So the intent of the Democratic campaign organizations to shine a light on those threats and that Dark Campaign is commendable.

For quite a while it has become a foregone conclusion to many that Hillary Clinton is Barack Obama’s natural successor and the inevitable Democratic nominee in 2016. Although she was also seen as the frontrunner in the lead up to the 2008 election the sentiment was no means as widespread as it is today.Her 2002 vote in favor of authorizing the disastrous Iraq War was fresh in the minds of many Democrats and ultimately was probably the deciding factor in the hotly contested primary against Obama. These days, however, that vote is a distant memory.  

There was a fairly recent time when the word most associated with the chairmanship of a major committee in the House of Representatives was powerful.  Retiring Representatives Dingell and Waxman enjoyed the aura that came with the gavel.That was then.  Confirmation of how things have changed came this week when the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee unveil a tax reform plan that everyone agrees is both credible and going nowhere.

The logic of much lobbying is a two-step process.  It begins with the golf aphorism that every act leaves someone happy and someone sad.  Among the sad are potential clients.  Typically, there are two groups of sad people – one poor but sympathetic (perhaps people who’ve been denied a prescription drug they’re comfortable with because it has been found no more effective than cheaper options) and the other rich (perhaps the pharmaceutical firms making the expensive drugs) who are willing to spend to protect profits.