Election 2008

While the presidential race is getting all the attention, voters in Indiana and North Carolina also selected their parties' nominees for their 22 House of Representatives seats and one Senate slot on Tuesday. Each seat's incumbent is running for reelection, but this is a turbulent election year, and the three high-school teachers, three attorneys, several small business owners and elected officials, and one TV weatherman challenging them could give them a run for their money. The Democrats are defending twelve House seats to the Republicans ten, plus Elizabeth Dole's seat in the Senate.

Each candidate and incumbent has a profile within Congresspedia's Wiki the Vote project, which you can find at the Indiana and North Carolina portals, or through the full listing of the primary victors below. We need your help to find out more about these candidates, so remember that these profiles are editable by anyone and jump right in. You can always contact one of the staff editors for help.

AdAge reports that Fenton Communications and its client MoveOn.org have announced a politically liberal advertising consortium using corporate advertising executives and firms to "help change the playing field this year. ... At the moment it will go after presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain. ... [David Fenton] said the team would work for a variety of causes, not just MoveOn.org. Fenton also handles public relations for Global Green; Friends of the Earth; Bono's One Campaign; Refugees International; and Human Rights Watch, among others. 'Right now, the idea is to help win the election and talk about issues on global warming and women's rights,' he said." MoveOn's political strategist Tom Matzzie and its founder Wes Boyd also founded Campaign to Defend America, currently running advocacy TV ads against John McCain.

In addition to the presidential primaries taking place today, there are also a number of congressional contests occurring in Indiana and North Carolina. The highest-profile primary race may be in Indiana’s 7th district, where recently-elected Rep. Andre Carson will battle for a slot on the November general election ballot. In March, Carson won a special election to serve the remaining term of his grandmother, Julia Carson, who passed away last year.

The big action in Congress this week was on bills with big price tags: the $290 billion Farm Bill and a new $300 billion housing crisis bill. It also passed a law banning employers and insurers from using your genes to discriminate against you. And, of course, the race for Democratic superdelegates continues between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with both picking up several endorsements.

The 2007 Farm Bill looks like it might be ready for a final vote as the House and Senate negotiate between themselves and with President Bush to find a bill that hits all the right political constituencies and has the right price tag. The latest version of the bill, which at $290 billion over ten years is $10 billion over the congressional budget rules and $4.5 billion more than President Bush wants, contains most of the usual subsidies and conversation programs of years past but adds several key provisions. Bush is pressing Congress to lower the income limits on farmers who can receive subsidies from the current $1.95 million to $200,000, well short of Congress' currently proposed $500,000. But Bush also supports keeping $5.2 billion in direct subsidy payments to farmers despite record crop prices, so he's not exactly uniformly thrifty. Also included in the current version of the bill is a $5 billion trust fund for farmers hit by disasters including floods, droughts and fires, a key demand of farm state Democrats and Republicans alike.

However, Bush has taken a hard line on the total price tag for the bill, and has raised a veto threat that Democrats say may be designed to bolster Sen. John McCain's anti-spending credentials. While it remains to see who will blink first, the extension that funds the farm programs is running out and some type of vote is imminent in the next week or two.

For more on this week's legislation and an update on Superdelegate endorsements, click through

By Avelino Maestas

As more and more states hold their primary elections and caucuses in the Democratic presidential nominating contest, we’ve seen the importance of superdelegates grow. These individuals will undoubtedly help decide the nomination, and they’re now the focus of intense scrutiny: for who will the vote, and why?

Since we joined with our partners to begin the Superdelegate Transparency Project, we’ve seen a number of proposals on how superdelegates can follow the “will of the people.” DemConWatch characterizes one group of supers who will vote for the “pledged delegate leader” the Pelosi Club, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Representatives of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign have said she would lead in the popular vote by the time the August convention roles around, implying she would have the most legitimate support.

And while DNC rules give superdelegates unlimited freedom to vote their conscience, at least two supers are appealing directly to their constituency: college students. Lauren Wolfe and Awais Khaleel, president and vice-president (respectively) of the College Democrats of America, have recorded a YouTube video seeking direction in how they should vote:

The Center for Public Integrity has begun a five part report on the stunning impact of big money advocacy groups in electoral politics, from MoveOn to Freedom's Watch. "Their names roll off the tongue with a patriotic cadence: Freedom’s Watch, Democracy Alliance, Citizens United, Progress for America, Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America. These are the new giants of American politics, the well-funded groups organized behind a veil of secrecy to influence the voters’ choice for president of the United States in 2008. Financed by many of the nation’s wealthiest investors and business leaders, as well as millions of small donors, these organizations are responsible for a flood of political attack advertising. ... With their identities hidden under stunningly misleading names and legal technicalities, many offered questionable facts and unproven charges intended to confuse voters or appeal to their worst prejudices."

By Avelino Maestas

With voters heading to the polls in Pennsylvania today, some people might be wondering how the delegates in Pennsylvania are alloted. Well, Congresspedia has you covered! Pennsylvania will send 187 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, including 29 superdelegates that will certainly help decide the nomination. Pennsylvania voters, on the other hand, will play a role in choosing the other 158 delegates today: 103 will be allocated by congressional district, while 55 are based on the statewide vote totals.

As this CQ Politics article points out, regions in Pennsylvania that leaned toward Democrats in the most recent presidential and gubernatorial elections received more delegates from the state party. In addition, the state's 19 congressional districts use a proportional system to determine how many delegates a candidate receives at the convention. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will easily clear the 15% threshold mandated by the DNC, but the number of delegates they receive will depend on how well they perform in the districts.

The Associated Press reports, "Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are walking a delicate line as they promise to aggressively tackle global warming while trying to assure voters that they continue to believe in the future of coal," the energy source responsible for "nearly 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, each year. ... 'They keep using the term clean coal. They absolutely are pandering the coal industry's propaganda; there's no such animal as clean coal," said Brent Blackwelder, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. AP notes that Obama and Clinton's love affair with Big Coal pleases the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal industry front group formed on April 17 by the merger of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices and the Center for Energy and Economic Development.

A recent New York Times story describes the Republican-linked pro-war group Freedom's Watch as "beset by internal problems" and unclear on "what kind of role, if any, it will actually play this fall" in the U.S. presidential elections. Freedom's Watch is currently running ads in Louisiana which claim that the Democratic candidate in a special Congressional election supports higher taxes. The ads prompted a formal complaint from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, accusing Freedom's Watch of illegally coordinating with the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). The Democrats point out that the "metadata" of the ad script file identifies the NRCC as the originator, and that former NRCC employee Carl Forti -- who now works for Freedom's Watch -- was the last person to edit the script. They note that the Freedom's Watch ad and an NRCC ad for the same race use the same graphics and similar scripts, and the Freedom's Watch ad debuted the day after the NRCC stopped airing its ad. Patrick McCarthy, who wrote the ad for Freedom's Watch, said "an innocent mistake caused the document to appear as if it came from the NRCC," reported the Washington Post. McCarthy, a former NRCC employee, "said he pulled up an old ad template from his NRCC days and wrote the Louisiana ad script over it."

The big stories on Congress last week were the Senate's passage of a housing crisis bill, House Democrats delaying the U.S.-Columbia Free Trade Agreement and testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

President Bush had thrown down the gauntlet on Monday by submitting the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to Congress for approval. Under the Trade Promotion Authority (or "fast track" authority) rules in place, the House had 60 days to give the agreement an up-or-down vote and the Senate had 30 following that. House Democrats, however, were able to parry his move by invoking a part of the Trade Promotion Authority law that affirms "the constitutional right of either House to change the rules (so far as relating to the procedures of that House) at any time, in the same manner, and to the same extent as any other rule of that House," and passed a resolution removing the deadline in this case.