In 1840 a handful of abolitionists meeting in Albany nominated James G. Birney for president under the name Liberty Party. They had no ballot lines, no money and almost no votes, under seven thousand that fall. They built the party […]
Palo Alto and Menlo Park sit on either side of San Francisquito Creek, in two counties, with two city halls about two miles apart. Each is a somewhere: a city with its own streets, its own quarrels and its own […]
On November 3, 2010, the morning after his party lost sixty-three House seats, Barack Obama stood at a White House podium and called it a shellacking. He didn’t recommend that future presidents take one, he said. Sixteen years later to […]
Texas’s 15th Congressional District runs from the eastern suburbs of San Antonio down to McAllen, and the Texas Tribune has called it Republicans’ greatest success story with Texas Latino voters. Monica De La Cruz won it by fourteen points in […]
On Sunday, two days before the vote, the national numbers look like a switchover in progress. Emerson’s last October poll has Democrats ahead on the generic House ballot 52 to 42, up from 44 percent support fifteen months ago, with […]
Montana’s Senate seat wasn’t supposed to be open. On March 4, Sen. Steve Daines withdrew from his reelection race and endorsed Kurt Alme, the U.S. attorney for Montana, who then took 77 percent in the June primary. Seth Bodnar, the […]
In October, an NPR series on swing voters reported on two online focus groups of Georgians who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2024. There were twelve of them. Eleven said they were disappointed in […]
In 1946, Earl Warren ran for reelection as governor of California and won the Republican primary. He also won the Democratic primary. On the general election ballot, he was effectively unopposed by either party. A 1913 law, written under Hiram […]
On October 27 the Associated Press reported that Republicans fear Libertarian candidates could cost them the United States Senate. The party holds fifty-three seats and can lose three and keep control with Vice President JD Vance breaking ties. The AP […]
The South Rises described four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, held by one coalition at every layer at once, and asked whether the checks built into their governments still worked once the arithmetic stopped requiring them to. November 3 […]
A New England town meeting runs off a warrant, the list of articles the selectmen post weeks ahead, and every voter in town gets a say on each one. Massachusetts voters will see something close to a statewide warrant on […]
Schisms Within ended on a question: whether a primary-season fracture costs a coalition the general election, or whether November simply reassembles what August split apart. The Great Lakes states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, vote on November 3, and […]
The South Rises took the East South Central states as a single unit because all four were governed, this year, by the same coalition with enough margin that the ordinary checks on that coalition had mostly stopped checking. The Great […]
Three regions into this beat and no two legislatures have run on the same clock. What Sacramento Is Deciding covered a state in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline. Austin's Long Recess covered one that meets once every […]
This is the first entry in a beat this site is starting: reading a state legislature's session, bill by bill, for what it actually means for social liberty, rather than waiting for the national platform fights that get all the […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding and Austin's Long Recess gave this beat two structural patterns already: a legislature in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline, and a legislature that meets once every two years and spends the other nineteen […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding opened this site's legislature beat with California, mid-session, bills moving through committee on a clock. Texas is the second region on that beat, and it immediately breaks the format that piece assumed: there is no Texas […]
Social Liberty
