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The main talk of the 2014 election has been which political party will control the Senate after the votes have been counted. Democrats have been on defense throughout most of the country as President Obama's approval rating remains low. So with just a week to go before Election Day, how will the numbers fall? Here are my predictions. In this election cycle, Democrats have 38 seats that are safe or not up for re-election while Republicans have 42. So that is where my numbers start.Democrats are

No matter what political ideology a voter identifies with, every single election comes down to one thing: voter turnout. If voters don't go to the polls to cast ballots, their party affiliation, or lack thereof, doesn't matter. But which states have the worst turnouts and why?According to Nonprofit Vote, a group that works with nonprofit organizations to increase voting opportunities, in 2010, there were about 91 million votes cast across the country, which means that approximately 42 percent o

It seems almost crazy to bring up an Aesop's fable in a series about the Founding Father's legacy to America -- but the fable of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse really exemplifies many of the problems the Founders faced when drafting a Constitution that served the whole United States, not just one aspect, demographic, or region. Examining this can give us very good insight into the modern political dilemma, and shows us that the Founders faced the same voting issues that the parties scanda

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation , then by deflation , the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” - Thomas Jefferson Picture yourself in this situation: You are experiencing severe abdominal pains so you visit with your doctor. Your doctor does a perfunctory examination and announces that he wi

How many times have we heard variations of the following soundbites from enterprising political candidates: “My business experience has prepared me to be an effective leader.” “Because of my business experience, I know how to balance a budget, not spend more money than I have, and create jobs.” “It’s time to apply good business practices to Washington.” Etcetera. Etcetera. Voters could recite them as thoughtlessly as a child singing an advertisement jingle. Yet, for all the repetition, these st

1. Opinion piece in the Montgomery Advertiser advocates adopting a nonpartisan, top-two open primary system in Alabama. "Even more importantly, however, this eliminates the unfair choices that some voters have to make under the current system. Because they can only vote in one party's primary, voters are sometimes forced to choose between voting in a local race contested in one primary or a district or statewide race contested in the other primary." Alabama currently has an open partisan prima

During Clinton’s uphill re-election campaign in 1996, the president relied heavily on the aid of pollsters. With the help of strategists such as Doug Schoen, Dick Morris, and Mark Penn, the president identified the concerns and personalities of swing voters (such as whether they preferred the TV shows Friends or Home Improvement) and sampled slogans -- even entire paragraphs of speeches -- in order to discover how to appeal to them. In the midst of this re-branding of the president and the stra

In American folklore, it is President Grant who coined the term “lobbyists” to designate those influence peddlers who attempted to bribe him with whiskey and cigars during his jaunts to the Willard Hotel in exchange for political favors. The term, in fact, is much older -- as is the practice itself. In 1792, for instance, veterans of the Continental Army from Virginia sent one William Hull to Washington, D.C. to petition for higher compensation. Lobbying went unregulated until 1946, when Congr

In June, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, weighed in on the always controversial issue of immigration reform. The libertarian-leaning darling of the tea party tread into precarious territory by supporting efforts to reform the country's immigration system, something that some say cost his colleague, U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), dearly. Paul reportedly took part in a conference call with the Partnership for the New American Economy, a pro-reform group, on June 11, prompt

In a probing and preliminary survey conducted by Harper in February 2013, a mere one percent of likely Democratic primary voters declared their preference for Tom Wolf, who had yet to officially announce his candidacy for governor of the Keystone State. A Quinnipiac poll a month later found that a full 85 percent of Pennsylvanians had not heard enough of Tom Wolf to determine whether they viewed him favorably or unfavorably. The York-based businessman, once he did formally enter the race in Apr