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Will 2020 see the return of the brokered national political convention -- that is, a convention where delegates are unable to agree on a nominee during the first round of voting, making it necessary to "broker" delegates between candidates in subsequent rounds to arrive at a nominee?

It's hard to ignore the potential for a first-round deadlock at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention next July. While it's true that every four years political pundits warn of the potential for brokered convention, and it hasn't happened in over half a century, the combination of a historically large field of candidates, no clear front-runner, a heavily front-loaded primary schedule and a change in Democratic party rules means that 2020 could be the year the prediction finally comes true.

One of the reasons they are likely to stay in the race is that former Vice President Joe Biden, long the front-runner, now looks weaker than he did. For months now, Biden's national poll average has remained stuck at around 30%. Democratic primary math, by which only candidates receiving at least 15% of the vote are awarded delegates, means the percentage of delegates earned will exceed the percentage of primary votes for the top candidates. Still, it will be a stretch for Biden, or any other candidate, to go from just below 30% in the polls to the 51% of delegates required to secure the nomination.

This opinion piece was assembled using statements from Republican senators in 2016 as they were trying to prevent President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed. Senators argued the election was happening too soon (though it was almost eight months away) and that appointing a new justice would prevent Americans from having their say

Rarely does a Supreme Court vacancy occur in the final year of a presidential term.1 It makes the current presidential election all that more important, as not only are the next four years in play, but an entire generation of Americans will be impacted by the balance of the court and its rulings.2

The American people are presented with an exceedingly rare opportunity to decide, in a very real and concrete way, the direction the court will take.3

The US Senate failed to agree on language for a resolution honoring the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a sign of how divided the chamber is over the Supreme Court vacancy.

"Republicans came to us with this resolution, but it ignored Justice Ginsburg's dying wish, what she called her most 'fervent wish' that she not be replaced until a new president is installed,"

Days before her death, Ginsburg dictated to her granddaughter that her "most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," NPR reported.

President Biden on Wednesday announced three nominees to fill vacant seats on the Postal Service’s board of governors, a move to increase Democratic influence on the future of the beleaguered agency.

If the nominees are confirmed by the Senate, Democrats and Democratic appointees would gain a majority on the nine-member board.

In his opening statement on Wednesday, Mr. DeJoy offered an apology for the service’s slow delivery times during the 2020 holiday season.“We must acknowledge that during this peak season, we fell far short of meeting our service targets,” he said. “Too many Americans were left waiting for weeks for important deliveries of mail and packages. This is unacceptable, and I apologize to those customers who felt the impact of our delays.”

. It was designed to reignite Democratic activism in a city that is solidly blue but whose residents four years earlier were, at best, ambivalent about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

taking away a chance for Democrats to regain their organizing footing in Wisconsin and help build a political machine that could run up the score in a city every bit as great as its neighbor 90 minutes to the south, Chicago.

The battle for Wisconsin — a state Donald Trump won four years ago by fewer than 23,000 votes, or 1.7 percentage points — has clearly captured the attention of both national parties in 2020.

Under the Trump administration, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed 174 district court judges, 54 circuit court judges and three Supreme Court justices — shifting the balance of the highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority. During his campaign rallies and events, Trump often likes to highlight the total, though he has exaggerated it.

In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, McConnell recalled that Trump’s first candidacy had worried many conservatives at the time but that his Supreme Court list and picks had calmed their nerves and that his bargain with Trump had moved the country “right of center.”

McConnell and Trump have not spoken since late 2020, and Trump has repeatedly called for McConnell to be removed as the GOP leader of the Senate.

For the conservative rank-and-file, this should be instructive. If I'd have told them three years ago that during the 2012 election cycle, they could have a staffer at the Washington Post who would invariably write favorably and sympathetically about the Republican nominee, they'd have celebrated. As it turned out, there were some unintended consequences that they suffered -- a dearth of fair-minded coverage during the primaries, a nominee marginally more prone to believing his own bullshit every time it was echoed back to him in the Washington Post, a rank-and-file given information so unreliable that they could no longer assess reality... and for what? A perch at a center-left newspaper doesn't help conservatives persuade anyone of anything if the person holding it is widely perceived as a disingenuous mouthpiece for her favored candidate. What happens is that conservatives themselves are increasingly the only ones who are misled.

crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon

“Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

Website Goes Down At Office Of Government Ethics Amid Political Storm

The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight.

The office's director, Walter Shaub Jr., has been conducting an unusually public discussion about ethics with the president-elect and the people he has chosen for his Cabinet.

Since the 1960s, Republicans have had to battle against liberal elites’ accusations that the GOP is exclusionary, anti-immigrant, uninterested in the fate of minorities and downright racist because the party rejected top-down welfare state programs, opposed race-based quotas and did not have a lot of national nonwhite leaders. That changed somewhat under President George W. Bush, who championed education and immigration reform. He got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote and 43 percent of the Asian vote in 2004.

In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012. . . .

Although a bevy of nonwhite and/or female Republican leaders have stepped up in recent years (e.g., Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio), Republicans undid whatever progress they might have made with nonwhite voters when the House killed immigration reform and the party then nominated Donald Trump, who figuratively built his campaign on his wall, rounding up and expelling 11 million or 12 million people and banning Muslim immigration. His recent remarks about Judge Gonzalo Curiel are simply icing on the cake for Democrats, who have long claimed Republicans simply don’t like minorities.

The donors, for their part, are also starting to come around. “If Trump is the nominee, I think there would be a sufficient appetite to end the last eight years of the leftward direction and overregulated economy that the majority of donors will support him,” the veteran fundraiser Fred Malek told the Washington Post. Stan Hubbard, a billionaire from Minnesota, concurred, telling Politico, “I would kind of hold my nose doing it, but I would have to do it.”

For Trump to become acceptable to the party regulars, he will have to show he can act the part. “He’s got to do a number of things,” said Scott Reed, the chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “He’s got to build a national campaign. He’s got to unite the party. He’s got to run a convention. He’s got to go up against the Clintons.” But the first three items on that list were things he could be taught or helped with

Trump, Reed believes, will grow into the role once the nomination is in his grasp. “It’s a big responsibility, and I think he will recognize that,” he said. “He’s going to recognize that being the nominee of the Republican Party is bigger than Donald Trump. I think he’s going to mature.” He added, “That’s not based on anything factual. I just think he’ll come to that conclusion.

American politics have careened out of control, lurching from a role model of sensible policy making and civil discourse to gridlock over even modest proposals with bipartisan buy-in, and to a presidential campaign with the kind of angry populist bluster, coarse language and sectarian division formerly associated with Peron-style banana republics.

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office

On the campaign front, the emergence of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the leaders of the Republican presidential pack—one a demagogic populist outsider who has never served in public office and had no role in the party, the other an extreme right-wing ideologue whose twin calling cards are engineering a government shutdown and going on the Senate floor and calling his own leader a liar—turned conventional presidential politics on its head, leaving a Republican political establishment reeling and a broader group of concerned Americans frightened about the future.

Romney 2016: The 'definition of insanity'?

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul probably captured the sentiment of most of Mr Romney's potential presidential adversaries when he said the prospect of the 2012 Republican nominee running again and expecting a different result is the "definition of insanity".

"I think he's had his chance, and I think it's time for some fresh blood,"

the 2012 GOP nominee is nevertheless leaving the door open — just a crack — to the possibility of being drafted by his party at a contested convention in July.

don't think anyone in our party should say, 'Oh no, even if the people in the party wanted me to be the president, I would say no to it,'" Romney said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

If through the primary process Republican front-runner Donald Trump fails to collect the majority of delegates needed to secure the nomination, the result would be a contested convention.

"That is really artificial, all of those early soundings and polls," Clinton said. "Once you get into it, this is a Democratic election for our nominee and it gets really close, exciting. And it really depends upon on who can make the best case that you can be the nominee to beat whoever the Republicans put up and try to get your folks who support you to come out."

Analysis Too late to stop Trump? As he glides, other candidates fall back in debate

Donald Trump sailed above the other candidates, who mostly engaged in round-robin fighting that left each of them wounded and him largely unscathed.

the sixth in a nomination contest that has defied predictions, left a GOP establishment that fears disastrous repercussions from a Trump nomination no closer to finding a way to head him off, with the first balloting now a little more than two weeks away.