Outside the Beltway

Fox Business Network has announced its criteria for the next GOP Debate, and it looks like Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasich will be kept off the prime time stage.

To nobody’s surprise, the third Democratic Debate received the lowest ratings yet of any debate so far this election cycle.

We won’t have Lindsey Graham to kick around anymore.

If you were looking for evidence that the race for the Democratic nomination is basically over, you need look no further than last night’s Democratic Debate.

The first post-debate polls of the GOP race have more good news for Donald Trump.

A debate schedule that seems designed to limit the ability of viewers to see candidates, and other incidents, has led Hillary Clinton’s opponents to allege that the D.N.C. is favoring Hillary Clinton.

Marco Rubio has been getting a lot of love lately from both conservatives and so-called ‘establishment’ Republicans, but his seemingly meager ground game in early states is raising doubts about his campaign.

Another set of solid ratings for the latest debate.

Donald Trump displays some appalling ignorance about an important part of America’s military, but his supporters are unlikely to care.

The Fifth Republican Debate, and the last of 2015, was marked by expected clashes between the candidates, and one that never happened.

Previewing the fifth Republican debate, and the last Republican debate of 2015.

Ohio’s Secretary of State is already precluding the possibility that Donald Trump could get on the ballot as an independent in the Buckeye State.

A pair of new national polls shows a new trend in the GOP race heading into the final debate of 2015.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul got a break today when CNN included him in the prime time debate on Tuesday even though he fell short of meeting the criteria.

Ted Cruz surges to a lead in the latest Iowa poll, setting up a seemingly inevitable showdown between the Texas Senator and Donald Trump.

Rand Paul is likely to miss the main stage for next Tuesday’s debate, so his campaign is already calling on CNN to change the rules.

The quadrennial fantasy of a brokered convention, which American politics has not seen since 1952, is rearing its head again, and it’s no more likely now than it was when we talked about this four years ago.

Donald Trump continues to have a commanding lead in the Granite State, but it’s unclear whether he can translate poll support into votes when the primary rolls around.

Donald Trump just keeps leading in the polls, and Republicans keep arguing that it can’t last.

Donald Trump’s speech yesterday at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition was as bizarre as anything else we’ve seen from him.

Mass shootings rightly grab our attention. But the obscure the overall picture of violent crime.

The latest national poll of the Republican race shows Trump continuing to lead, Ben Carson fading, and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio rising while the rest of the field is stagnant or sinking.

We still don’t know very much about Robert Dear, the man who shot and killed three people at the site of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, but that hasn’t stopped the usual suspects from politicizing the case.

Polls are quite useful in the right circumstances, but knowledge, complexity, and timing all have to be taken into account in determining what they are telling us.

The economy performed a little better than previously reported over the summer. It’s not great, but it’s probably enough to convince the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates next month.

Nate Silver reminds us all that, even when it comes to Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s much earlier than we think, and that voters are still likely to change their minds.

In the news from the campaign trail and in the polls, there are clear signs that Ben Carson’s days as a top contender in the GOP Presidential race are coming to an end.

Democrat John Bel Edwards scored an easy victory over Senator David Vitter last night in Louisiana, and Vitter announced that he’d be leaving the Senate after his term is up.

It’s Election Day in Louisiana again, and voters have the same crappy choices they usually end up with.

The United States and Europe are giving everything the perpetrators of the Paris attacks hoped for.

Different criteria than in the past, but there may not be much of a change in the participants.

Even the people hired to advice Ben Carson on foreign policy seem to recognize that he is clueless on the subject, and has no apparent desire to educate himself.

Increasingly concerned by the rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and the failure of any establishment candidates to click with voters, some top Republicans are reportedly turning their lonely eyes to Mitt.

Ratings slipped for last night’s debate, but the numbers were still very respectable.

Last night’s debate in Wisconsin was arguably the most substantive we’ve seen so far between the Republican candidates, and one that displayed quite starkly the policy differences between them.

Republicans haven’t really moved beyond the legacy of George W. Bush’s failed Administration as much as they’d like to think, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting them very much.

A Federal Judge has ruled that the N.S.A. metadata collection program is unconstitutional, but it’s unclear if the ruling will have much of an impact.

Candidates who have been excluded from tomorrow’s Fox Business Network are complaining, but their complaints ignore the fact that polling is the best objective criteria we have to determine debate eligibility.

The debate stages for both the undercard and main debate next Tuesday will look different from what we’ve become used to.

Fluctuations continue, but the Republican Presidential field appears to be sorting itself out as we near the beginning of a new phase of the campaign.

The effort to forge some kind of consensus independent of the RNC among the Republican candidates for President regarding debates appears to have failed. To the surprise of nobody who has been paying attention.

Donald Trump is refusing to sign a joint letter to debate organizers drafted by representatives of all the GOP campaigns. Instead, he wants to negotiate with the networks himself.

Representatives from most of the Republican Presidential campaigns met to discuss reforms to the debate process, but none of their ideas will actually improve the quality of debates.

A man with one of the more unique political and personal resumes in recent memory has passed away.

Another day, another military escalation in the Middle East.

In the wake of Wednesday’s debate, the Republican National Committee has suspended its partnership in a planned February debate with NBC News and Spanish language network Telemundo.

Everyone is sick of the current approach. The candidates are looking for a new one.

Several Republican candidates for President want to “fix” the debates, but they wouldn’t like the one thing that would definitely fix them.