In 2004, Senator Reid got a majority of the white vote (58 percent) against a weak opponent (Richard Ziser). Senator Kerry, on the other hand, only got 43 percent of the white vote in Nevada. Given that whites were 77 percent of the 2004 electorate, Reid won (61 percent to 35 percent) and Kerry lost […]

Today, Politico asked, “What does Obama gain by calling bankers ‘fat cats?’” Here was my response:
When I was Deputy Corporations Commissioner for the State of California, I learned that if there was one thing that our licensees wanted from their financial regulator, it was consistency. The number of players and moving parts in the financial […]

Politico has an on-line debate called “The Arena,” a place where they ask political professionals about the day’s news. Today, they asked me and others about the meaning Obama’s declining approval ratings (chart above). Here was my response:
The predictive value of Obama’s declining job performance numbers is not deep. All the numbers say is that […]

More than three years ago, I wrote about a client’s attempt to get government to wake up to the need for cyber-security:
The work that CSIA does goes beyond just making your computer safe from viruses. The Executive Director, Paul Kurtz, and I have had discussions of the larger issue here: our ever-increasing connectedness, from information […]

Five of my campaign clients had elections yesterday. Four won; one (Joe Alioto, San Francisco supervisorial candidate) is awaiting a final vote count.
Here are the winners:
LAUSD — It was interesting to see many press stories over the past couple months suggesting that Measure Q, a $7 billion school bond, was in trouble because voters would […]

Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and Gary Toebben, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, join together in endorsing Measure Q:
Rare is the opportunity to reap immediate economic benefits and realize long-term societal gains. This opportunity lies before Los Angeles voters Tuesday in […]

I thought I would highlight some of the endorsements received by my current campaign clients, starting with the most recent.
In endorsing Barack Obama, the New York Times also does an interesting series on previous endorsements going back to Abraham Lincoln.
About Senator Obama, they write:
Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader […]

Former California Assemblyman Rod Wright and current Missouri State Representative Robin Wright-Jones were both running in state senate Democratic primaries in their respective states. In both races, I was brought on by independent expenditure committees to test the viability of their candidacies. Coincidentally, my polls showed that my clients’ preferred candidates were down — in […]

It seems like I get asked a lot more about the effect of cell phones on polling than I do about the different languages American voters speak. I’ve written before about the problem with polling Latino voters in English only. But a recent poll of mine — mentioned in a Matier and Ross column — […]

Conservative columnist David Brooks is usually a worthy and insightful adversary. So I was surprised by his attempt in today’s column to portray Senator Obama’s rhetorical skills as a net negative.
The basic argument went something like this:
Sure, he’s a great speaker… “When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa,” Brooks writes, […]