When covering the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary, it was the easiest of questions, and it seemed that many journalists couldn’t resist. Black women were tracked down in churches and beauty parlors or chased while walking down the street, and asked: Are you going to vote for race or gender, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? [...]

Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. John McCain edged past Mike Huckabee in the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday, making him the front-runner – this week. He won over a little more than a quarter of evangelicals. If Huckabee can’t win in a state with this many evangelical voters, can he win anywhere else? Who [...]

Delegate counts for Democratic presidential candidates are fiction but The Associated Press and newspapers, broadcast stations and Internet sites are reporting who is ahead in the delegate race as though it is fact. If you visit Web sites you will be told, in all seriousness, that – in convention rhetoric – “The Great State of [...]

I got this email today from somenone named Chris in Virginia, referring to my criticism last week of a Des Moines Register poll of prospective Democratic caucusgoers: “So, what do you say now about the DSM poll, which seems to have been right on the money? Is the Sussman column ‘inoperative,’ as Ron Ziegler would [...]

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, allow me to beat a dead horse and repeat a few points to help keep you sane and the news media reports intelligible as we move into 2008 and eventually elect a President. The Republican and Democratic caucus results differ in significant ways that the news media often [...]