Don McRae, one of the most formidable black leaders in St. Petersburg history – and sometimes one of its most controversial – died Sunday after a long illness. He was 78. ...more

March 16, 2009

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America's divisions - divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions - he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the "silent majority," the regular guys - white guys, it went without saying - who didn't like the social changes taking place. ...more

October 21, 2008

Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification - on the order of 49 percent to 26 percent then, far more than today. ...more

July 20, 2008