This post first appeared on the Nation.
Candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. House and gubernatorial nods will be decided in Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, while Washington, D.C., Democrats will nominate a mayoral candidate (and it may not be incumbent Adrian Fenty.)
Any one result could be an outlier. But the patterns of results could tell us a lot about the status and character of the two parties going into the final run toward November.
Here’s why:
1. The GOP Establishment and the Tea Party are Really Going at It.
The Republican U.S. Senate primaries in Delaware and New Hampshire are clear tests of whether the GOP strategists in Washington or the Tea Party purists are going to define the future of the party. Parties leaders want state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte to be their Senate nominee in New Hampshire and Congressman Mike Castle to be their Senate nominee in Delaware. If Ayotte gets beat by conservative stalwart Ovide Lamontagne, who has the backing of the hyper-conservative Manchester Union Leader newspaper and the Tea Partisans, that will be a big deal. (And he will have done it without the backing of Sarah Palin, who surprised a lot of people by backing Ayotte.) If Christine O’Donnell, a genuinely whacky right-winger who is running with Palin’s backing, bests Castle in Delaware, the Grand Old Party really will be the Tea Party.
New York Congressman Charles Rangel now faces 13 charges of breaking House rules as well as federal statutes.
The charges, which were formally issued Thursday by the House Ethics Panel, do not come as a surprise. As had been expected, Rangel stands accused, among other things, of improperly using “his letterhead, staff and franking privilege to solicit donations to the Charles B. Center for Public Policy at the City College of New York; of using a rent-stabilized apartment in Harlem for his campaign office; of failing to report more than $600,000 on his financial disclosure report; and of failing to pay taxes on rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.” READ FULL POST
This post originally appeared on the Nation.com.
After Tuesday, one-fifth of the 2010 primaries will be done. We’re deep into the election cycle. So where are the fireworks? They promised us fireworks. Does the show begin tonight?
Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
So far, the 2010 election cycle has added up to lots of hype and very little in the way of change.
Despite all the media focus on the Tea Party movement, Republican candidates who aligned with it fared poorly in the Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina. For the most part, establishment contenders have won key U.S. Senate, U.S. House, gubernatorial and statewide constitutional races.
