The most important election of the year, apart from the one occurring on November 8, takes place today. That’s when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan goes up against the vice president of a water filtration company, Paul Nehlen, in the first serious primary challenge that Ryan has faced in the 18 years since he was elected to Congress. The odds for Nehlen are long. Of nearly 5,000 primaries held between 1992 and 2012, only 31 challengers toppled the incumbent. Nehlen also seems a little…
First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them…
In the first five minutes of his first State of the Commonwealth address, [Virginia Gov. Terry] McAuliffe said he wanted to make Virginia the East Coast capital for agriculture and forestry. At the time, it was third behind Georgia and North Carolina; today it has overtaken North Carolina. “He is uniquely positioned to be successful at it,” said Maurice Jones, Virginia’s secretary of commerce and trade. “Why? Because he knows everybody everywhere.” McAuliffe formed many of those international relationships traveling the world with President Bill…