Politics

Oh, OK. You’re not too concerned about the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 4. You don’t mind sitting this cycle out because you’ve convinced yourself that presidential elections are what matters the most. Think again. In addition to a slate of U.S. Senate races that could determine which party controls Congress for the next two…

With his first-100-days marker past, Newark, N.J.’s new mayor, Ras Baraka, is trying a variety of actions to keep crime down in his bullet-riddled city. And variety means not just within the range of conventional, public-official thinking: Last week he had a secret meeting with gang leaders in a city church, with inside security provided…

A political ad aired by the National Republican Congressional Committee is being called out by many as racist. The ad, which has political circles buzzing and has gone viral, with more than 150,000 views on YouTube, has political observers pointing out that it’s effectively a duplicate of the infamous Willie Horton spot from 1988. That ad was…

It’s bad enough only 15 percent of us will be passing through the polling station for one of the most important elections of our time. You can imagine that barely a slice of voters know or care about the local prosecutor running for office. And yet that position commands as much control over our daily…

With all the talk about how Hispanics will be the majority ethnic group in the U.S. in the near future, and all the studies that have, as a result, examined the political and economic power that they will wield, it’s surprising to hear that Republican candidates running for congressional seats don’t need a single Latino vote to be victorious in…

It’s hard not to see this coming. Democrats will be popping Tylenols in bed the morning of Nov. 5—only hours after election-night returns stream in. And once political junkies sort out the scorched earth, some will point not only to the absence of usually reliable, Democratic-leaning black voters at the polls but also to the…

In an effort to tamp down fear about the spread of Ebola in the U.S., President Barack Obama on Saturday urged Americans not to give in to hysteria or fear. “This is a serious disease, but we can’t give in to hysteria or fear—because that only makes it harder to get people the accurate information…

As conventional (and political) wisdom goes, black Americans, on average, typically vote for Democrats, and so when the Call & Post, a Cleveland newspaper that targets African-American readers, endorsed Ohio’s Republican governor for re-election on Tuesday, it represented a slight change of course in the stream of racial politics. Although it’s not the first time…

Editor’s note: According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,​ Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp claimed that nearly 40,000 voter-registration applications in Georgia that were supposedly unaccounted for have been found and processed, and those applicants are now registered to vote. Kemp also said on Thursday that another 10,000 or so applications need more information about the identities of the applicants before they are cleared.…