The President and senior Administration officials have met with lots and lots of people about the fiscal slope in the wake of the election. Everyone, in fact, but most of the House Republican deciders who will determine the bulk of the deal. But as it turns out, many of the meeting attendees included Obama campaign [...]

It’s been amusing to see the Republican base recognize that they’ve been had in this election, their money stolen by big-talking operatives. I think Rick Perlstein put it best in his story in The Baffler that conservatism has become an elaborate mail-order scam, directed at the target demographic for such scams, gullible seniors. When the [...]

Just a brief postscript to the House elections, which as I said were really decided in Republican state legislatures in 2011 during the redistricting process. It turns out that, on a vote-by-vote basis, more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans for Congressional seats, currently by about half a million votes. That’s subject to change once [...]

Here’s a sad postscript that shows once again the power of dark money in off-the-radar races. The silver lining amidst the clouds of the recall election in Wisconsin was that Democrats at least “took over” the state Senate. “Took over” was a bit of a strong word, because they won a majority in the chamber [...]

The more important point is that dark money does work. It works in the House. SuperPACs and independent expenditure groups wasted historic amounts of money running into a demographic brick wall at the national level. Even at the statewide level, Democrats could withstand the attacks. But in the House, late money that poured into a discrete number of seats had a real impact. Winnable seats turned sour, even in places where Democrats did well.

One big question in the aftermath of this election will be whether the power of big money will be seen as impotent. We’ve heard these stories of SuperPAC money migrating into safe red and blue states at the end of the election because there was literally no time left on the air in the swing [...]

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission forced a mysterious $11 million donor to two ballot measures to reveal its secret funding sources today, and the result showed how most of these independent ex

The campaign finance system in this country is so self-evidently broken. As Steven Colbert brilliantly pointed out in his year-long satire of the SuperPAC process, “illegal coordination” is so easily skirted that the rules might as well be meaningless. We saw more evidence of this today. Politico unearthed a document from the NRCC, the Republican [...]

The new report that campaign spending in the 2012 cycle will reach $6 billion has come as depressing news to many despairing over the purchasing of our democracy. Some have held out hope that the sheer numbers will provide a wake-up call to all Americans that something must be done to take this democracy back. [...]

Hopes that we are at the end of the cycle of state budget cutbacks dragging on overall growth may be dashed if Proposition 30, a measure that would increase taxes mostly on the wealthiest Californians making over $250,000, fails at the ballot box in two weeks. And two polls out today find support tanking for [...]

Jonathan Chait wonders why the expected campaign finance imbalance between the Presidential candidates hasn’t panned out. It turns out that Obama has out-advertised Romney in the swing states, which is not quite the same as outspending him. One of the reasons is a little-known campaign finance law which mandates that political campaigns get the lowest [...]