Having worked in the Mexican presidential election of 2000, I find many amateur politicos here in LA coming up to me and telling me with total conviction who is going to win this weekend. My wife’s and my friend, Ana Maria Salazar, blogs on that phenomenon from her point of view as an analyst, talk […]

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post blogs on the winners and losers as a result of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting:
WINNERS
Former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D): Rodriguez’s political career, which seemed all but over following his primary loss earlier this year to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D), has new life. Assuming the courts […]

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee opines about how it looks from the top these days in the California legislature:

Jesse Unruh and his one-time protégé, Willie Brown, are widely regarded as the most influential speakers of the state Assembly.
Unruh made the speakership a center of political power second only to the governorship in the 1960s. […]

I’ve never been to Brazil, but I remember doing polls in the poorest shantytowns of Mexico City and having my friend Kristin Coelho - who has been all over South America - telling me I didn’t know desperation until I experienced the favelas of Rio. And I was as haunted as anyone by Fernando Meirelles’ […]

The LA Times op-ed page - perhaps in a bid to boost today’s newsstand sales among local talk radio listeners - gives top-rated KFI 640 AM host John Ziegler a forum to make the case that since Mexican-Americans were paying more attention to the World Cup team of Mexico than the U.S. team, they are […]

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declares that his city “is going to be the first city in America to achieve universal health care access.” Meanwhile, in the LA Times: “After tough negotiations with powerful teachers unions, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa struck a compromise today that would give him significant sway over the troubled Los Angeles Unified […]

The survey I conducted in April for the Cyber Security Industry Alliance demonstrated that privacy and data security were poised to become serious political issues in the November elections for Congress. Reinforcing that point is a recent story in The Hill - “The Newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress” - reporting on the recent […]

Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times reports on the various advice groups looking to rescue the Democratic Party:
Has anyone canvassed Dr. Phil? Or checked in with Dear Abby?
They may be the last two self-help gurus who haven’t weighed in recently with guidance for the nation’s oldest political party.
For Democrats, apparently, this is advice month.
…
On Monday, […]

Much has been made of the fact that Latino voters are not particularly permissive when it comes to immigration. Whether it’s border security or English as a national language, Latinos seem to surprise some observers by taking a hard line in polls. Not only does this not surprise me, but it also obscures a more […]

Democracy Corps (aka Greenberg Research) recently completed a nationwide poll of 984 Latino voters who are likely to vote in this year’s election for Congress. If I had given Stan Greenberg a dollar every time I quoted a finding from last year’s version of the same survey, I would have already paid back the salary […]