The election of a Democratic majority to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 110th Congress paved the way for Nancy Pelosi of California to become the first woman speaker. As the incumbent Democratic leader, Pelosi was well known on Capitol Hill. Yet as the incoming speaker, and the first woman speaker, she faced the certainty of receiving extensive media scrutiny in the run up to the 2006 election, during the transition period, and during her first year in office. How would she become viewed by the American people? And who would shape the public's perception of her? What role would gender and her status as the historic first woman speaker play in focusing the lens of media attention?

For years voters and political pundits have grumbled about the lack of real choice between Republicans and Democrats. Scholars have examined party behavior and suggested reasons for concern. Determining whether there is a real ideological and policy difference between U.S. political parties, and the nature of that difference, is important for political science and for democratic politics generally. Ultimately, democracy is about choices, and where choices are few, democracy is degraded. One way to examine the choices that political parties offer voters is by assessing their political platforms. Even in an era of candidate-centric politics, political party platforms spell out the general programs offered by the parties, and the platforms are heavily influenced by the policy positions of the candidates themselves. In addition, the political platform is the one document that spells out the entire program of the party. Individual candidate speeches capture only snippets (at best) of the policy choices offered to voters. Recent innovations in computerized content analysis make it possible to analyze large bodies of text such as party platforms in a systematic way by treating words as data, then analyzing them statistically.

This paper applies the forecasting models of Klarner and Buchanan (2006a) for the U.S. Senate and Klarner and Buchanan (2006b) for the U.S. House of Representatives to the upcoming 2008 elections. Forecasts are also conducted for the 2008 presidential race at the state level. The forecasts presented in this article, made July 28, 2008 (99 days before the election), predicted an 11-seat gain for the Democrats in the House of Representatives, a three-seat gain for the Democrats in the Senate, and that Barack Obama would obtain 53.0% of the popular vote and 346 electoral votes. Furthermore, Obama was forecast to have an 83.6% chance of winning the White House and an 85.9% chance of winning the popular vote.

The quality of representation the citizenry receives from its political leaders is central to evaluating the character of any democratic institution. Moreover, the number of elected members that comprise an institution can be vital in determining whether citizens have access to and can influence the decisions of their representatives (Dahl and Tufte 1973). The United States House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members for almost a century. This durability of this alignment is astonishing; in its first century of existence, the U.S. House experienced a virtually uninterrupted string of decennial increases in its membership. Despite the magnitude of the effects of this stasis on representation, political scientists have not extensively examined this subject (Squire and Hamm 2005). While the House has remained constant in size for nearly 100 years, the nation's population has grown by more than 200% over this duration. Members of the House on average represent more than 600,000 citizens; a figure that increases with population growth as long as the size of the body remains constant. This development has sparked a debate among some observers about whether it is time to increase the size of the House of Representatives.

The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien (2007) point out, these early polls, suitably adjusted, are good predictors of the November vote. As of late July, bettors at intrade.com put the probability of the Democrats retaining a majority at about 95% (Intrade.com 2008). Elsewhere in this symposium, Klarner (2008) predicts an 11-seat gain for the Democrats, while Lockerbie (2008) forecasts a 25-seat pickup.

It is clear from the presidential primary campaign that 2008 can legitimately be labeled “the year of the spouse as surrogate.” The sheer number of candidates on both sides of the aisle and the heavily front-loaded campaign season have made using the wives—and husband—of the candidates a “must.” Never before has media attention been so heavily focused on the spouses. In fact, they have often been an equal, or in some cases, bigger story than the candidates themselves. The same pattern will characterize the spouses of the vice presidential candidates. The bottom line is that use of presidential and vice presidential spouses has become an integral part of presidential campaigns. In this article, we detail how the Bush and Kerry camps strategically scheduled spouses in the final days of the campaign—from Labor Day until Election Day. We conclude with some thoughts about what to expect in 2008.

Since public election financing was first implemented during the wave of post-Watergate reforms, the burning question has been, “does it work?” Evaluations of public financing have focused on its primary objectives, which are designed to address familiar grievances: Elections are too expensive and not competitive enough. Corporate PACs and other “special interests” contribute disproportionately to incumbents because they are interested in purchasing influence. Candidates must devote so much time to fundraising that little is left for other campaign tasks. Lost in these considerations, however, is the fact that mandated financial parity changes the strategic environment candidates function in, altering their decision making and potentially changing the nature of elections. As fully subsidized elections gain increasing ubiquity in the United States, reformers must decide whether this is a cost worth bearing.

In the week following the November 2006 midterm elections, which gave the Democratic Party control of Congress, both parties in the House held elections for various leadership offices. A total of six positions in both parties were contested, an unusually large number, but the campaign for one office—the Democratic majority leader—garnered the most attention. That race pitted two moderate Democrats against each other, threatened to split the party, and featured a remarkable intervention by the incoming speaker.Thanks to Doug Harris, Jeffrey Lewis, Keith Poole, and Eric Powers for their valuable suggestions and assistance.

The 2008 presidential election has been widely touted as historic because a woman and an African American became viable candidates for a major party, thereby thrusting gender and race into the spotlight. Of course, gender and race have always been present as informal criteria for U.S. presidential candidates. At the constitutional founding, only white propertied men with sufficient affluence to be gentlemen of leisure were deemed suitable for national office (Wood 1991). Following the traditions of kings and military leaders, the executive was assumed to be an elite man and the institution itself became associated with men and fashioned in the preferences of its founders (March and Olsen 1989). For the presidency, founding fathers sought a heroic man, capable of leading in the extra-legal realm that they recognized could not be fully anticipated in law (Kann 1998). Since then, presidential campaigns have always been about what kind of man should hold an office predicated upon masculinity. While certainly presidential candidates' characters have been most discussed, the quality of each candidate's masculinity has been embedded in the sizing up of presidential timber, character, and the person.

If challenged to do so, relatively few Americans could probably find North and South Dakota on a map, let alone correctly name, spell, and pronounce the capitals of the two states. Nor would they be able to recall anything interesting about the Dakotas, whose main tourist attractions, besides Mount Rushmore, are a drug store, a civic arena festooned in corn, and a peace garden. Although one of the Dakotas bills itself as “The Land of Infinite Variety,” its sociocultural diversity consists primarily of different synods of Lutherans who engage in endless disputation with one another because they are so similar. Dakotans prefer their food bland—they consider ketchup daringly spicy—and their politicians low-key. When they encounter something new, they call it “different,” which they rarely mean as a compliment, and they wait for it to go away—which, because there is so little to hold it in the Dakotas, it probably will do. They keep their opinions to themselves (a typical Dakotan being the fellow from Sioux Falls who loved his wife so much that he almost told her), and they do not like it when people make a fuss about themselves or anything else. Thus, when South Dakotans perceived the previously popular Senator George McGovern as having gotten too big for his britches by seeking the presidency in 1972, they saw to it that he would fail to carry his home state, and three decades later they voted long-time Senator Tom Daschle out of office as soon as he repeated McGovern's mistake of seeing a president whenever he gazed into a mirror.

Stephen Colbert hosts a comedy television program called The Colbert Report (the t at the end is silent—both of them!) in which he parodies personality-based news shows like The O'Reilly Factor that have become popular during the last 10 years. In an effort to make fun of these (usually conservative) personalities who engage in non-stop self-promotion, Colbert frequently trades outlandish claims for laughs. Among these is the claim that anyone who comes on the Report receives the “Colbert bump,” immediately vaulting the guest to stardom, fame, and fortune. Like Midas turning everything he touches to gold, Stephen Colbert can turn losers into winners, just by interviewing them on his show (but, ahem, he would never actually interview a loser now would he?).

The 2006 midterm elections were nothing short of stunning. Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress. More surprising than Democratic gains in the House were their gains in the Senate. In order to achieve a majority in the Senate the Democrats needed to reelect all of their incumbents and elect Democrats in three out of four competitive states, all of which had supported George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential elections (Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, and Virginia). Riding a wave of public discontent associated with the president's Iraq War policy, Democrats beat incumbents in Missouri, Montana, and Virginia to take a slim one-seat majority in the Senate. Democrats organized the Senate in the 110th Congress, with the support of two independents—Bernie Sanders (VT) and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman (CT).The authors thank Doug Harris for encouraging us to pursue this project and including it in the forum. Our analysis benefits from our separate experiences as participant-observers in the Senate. While a Presidential Management Intern, Frisch served in the Senate Office of Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ); Kelly was an APSA Congressional Fellow and worked for the Senate Democratic Leadership in the Democratic Policy Committee. nominate data used in this paper are made available by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal at www.voteview.com. Data on campaign contributions were supplied by Jamie Pimlott to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

In the 2004 presidential election, perhaps 54% of the nation's youngest cohort—dubbed “Generation Next” by some pollsters—cast a vote. This was a substantial increase over the 42% of eligible 18–25-year-olds who voted in the 2000 election (U.S. Census Bureau 2005; Pew Center 2007). Still, youth voting rates lagged behind the voting rates of those citizens older than 25–66% made their way to the polls on Election Day in 2004 (Lopez, Kirby, and Sagoff 2005). It is likely that voting rates will increase in the current youth cohort as they age, as has happened in both the Baby Boomer and Generation X cohorts. But transforming more of the large Generation Next cohort into voters earlier in adulthood could substantially increase democratic participation in upcoming elections and for decades to come, as habits of civic participation developed in youth often last a lifetime (Miller and Shanks 1996). Two-thirds of young people now enroll in some form of higher education. Colleges and universities of all types would therefore seem to be natural sites to mount efforts to improve youth voter turnout. And because interest in voting among the youngest adult cohort seems to be on the rise, this would seem to be the time to encourage more of such behavior. But how can institutions of higher learning best promote democratic participation, especially voting?

The 11 years from 1994 to 2005 comprised the second-longest period without an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court (Epstein et al. 2003, 353). The nominations of John Roberts in 2005 and Samuel Alito in 2006 were met with enthusiasm by conservatives, foreboding by liberals, and great interest by political scientists concerned with the Court's future and with changes in the appointment process since Stephen Breyer's appointment in 1994.

When Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was well on his way to claiming the open U.S. Senate seat once held by the only other black Democratic senator since Reconstruction, Carol Moseley-Braun. Although mostly unknown, the self-professed “skinny guy with the funny name,” made a lasting impression. Secure in his own Senate race, Obama, a rising political star, spent much of the fall traveling the country as a surrogate for Democratic candidates.

During the 2006 campaign, many on the political right expressed anxiety about the slate of Democratic representatives and senators poised to become committee chairs in the event of a Democratic victory. After the election, despite post-election promises of “unity” and “bipartisanship” among congressional Democrats, the question remained: How well would this progressive group of “old bulls” work with the new majority, the existence of which was due in part to the 61 Democrats representing House districts that President George W. Bush won in 2004? (Greenblatt 2007, 524) In this paper, we investigate the claim that Democratic committee leaders in the 110th Congress are out of step with their party caucus by comparing the ideological leadership profiles of chairs in the 110th Congress with those of their Republican predecessors in the 109th, as well as those of Democratic chairs from the “Textbook,” “Reform,” and early “Post-reform” eras. We show that Democratic chairs in the 110th Congress are primarily drawn from the most liberal ranks of the Democratic Caucus, particularly in the House.The authors wish to thank Sara Callow for her excellent and timely research assistance.

In recent years, evolving communication technologies have produced dramatic changes in how scholars communicate. Through mechanisms such as e-mail, wireless networks, and mobile communication networks, the volume of information that scholars can send—and the range of people to whom information can be sent—are radically different today than they were for previous generations. These changes in communicative capacity raise expectations of what scholars can accomplish. One source of raised expectations is the possibility for dynamic, large-scale, geographically dispersed collaboratories that evolving communication technologies allow. The promise is that large groups of researchers, working together, can generate insights more effectively and efficiently than they would if they worked alone or only with people in their own geographic proximity.

“Clinton Eclipses Obama and Edwards on Leadership” a Gallup Poll report headlined in January 2007. Gallup chose eight characteristics to determine this assessment, including being most qualified to be president, is the strongest leader, would be the best in a crisis, would manage the government most effectively, and would work the best with Congress. In a summary of its findings, the report concludes: “Among the characteristics and qualities tested, Clinton's strong points are almost uniformly related to presidential leadership. She holds a formidable lead on many items in this category, including being qualified to be president and being a strong leader” (Saad 2007).

On Election Night activists on the left eagerly awaited the results hoping their hard work in the election would produce a favorable shift in the balance of power in Washington. When the votes were all counted and Democrats Jim Webb (VA) and Jon Tester (MT) were finally declared the winners of Senate seats in two of the closest races, the Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since the Republican takeover of 1994. As a result of the election, one set of interest groups would fall out of favor and another set would find new access on the Hill. Pharmaceutical firms, oil and gas companies, and student loan providers, targets of the Democrats' populist “100 Hours” agenda and big contributors to the Republicans, were instantly thrown on the defensive. Anti-war groups, environmental groups, and labor unions with weak ties to the Republican leadership and strong relationships with the incoming Democratic leaders, were newly empowered. As the legislative director for one of the largest unions, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, observed a few months into the 110th Congress, “It's a whole new ball game. Key leaders on the Hill are much more receptive, and I look 10 years younger.”

Almost all economic indicators show that the rise of China is all but inevitable. Many argue that it is already happening. China may rank as the second, or the third, or the fourth largest world economic power, depending on how one does the counting, after enjoying an average annual GDP growth rate of nearly 10% in the past quarter of a century (1983–2007) (National Bureau of Statistics of China). China currently has the largest foreign currency reserve in the world, reaching one trillion U.S. dollars (People's Bank of China) and China became the second largest trade country after the U.S. in 2007 (Wenweipo 2007). In fact, no discussion of world economy is adequate without talking about China. Even though the United States is currently embroiled in Iraq and the war on terror, there is no question that the rise of China is still very much in back of the minds of American foreign policy makers and political elites, especially during the current presidential campaigns. For instance, one survey of American international relations scholars reveals that while 58% of the scholars believe that the greatest strategically important region for the United States is the Middle East right now, 60% of them think it will be China and East Asia in 20 years (Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak 2005). A public survey shows that a majority of the citizens in many developing countries think it would be a good thing if China were to become as large a military power as the United States (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2005).We would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also want express our gratitude to the 132 scholars who participated in our survey.