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Texas Governor-elect Greg Abbott (R) says he will sign a bill to legalize the open carry of handguns as soon as the legislation reaches his desk. Abbott spoke to reporters in Austin the morning after he won the Lone Star State's gubernatorial election. According to WFAA 8 ABC, Abbot said: "If an open carry bill is passed by the House and Senate, I will sign it into law." Abbott added, "If open carry is good enough for Massachusetts, it's good enough for Texas."(continued)

West Virginia University student Saira Blair (R) will become the youngest person to ever serve in the West Virginia state legislature after getting elected Tuesday. Blair, an 18-year-old freshman, was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates from the 59th district after beating her two opponents by a landslide. Blair received more than twice the votes of her main opponent, Democratic Party candidate Layne Dieh. “It was amazing to see that the 59th district had so much faith in me,” Blair said shortly after getting the results. Blair celebrated the victory at Buffalo Wild Wings before heading to...

I'm having a hard time deciding which of Wendy Davis's concession speeches makes me laugh more. Maybe y'all can help.

No one expected this race to be this close. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Ed Gillespie are nearly tied in Virginia’s Senate race, according to early returns. With 99 percent of precincts in, Warner leads with 49.1 percent to Gillespie’s 48.5 percent. Speaking to supporters late Tuesday, Gillespie said he wasn’t ready to concede. “We’re going to be patient here. And I believe we need to be respectful of the voters.” “This race is not going to be decided until the last vote is counted,” adviser Mark Obenshain added at the election night celebration. Gillespie shocked observers by...

He will soon be back to his same old - same old:"

As the world is about to read the Democrats’ obituary for the 2014 Election, an autopsy has already begun to find the why’s and wherefore’s. Of course, there are several reasons for the leading party’s defeat despite its demographic advantage. In a nutshell, here’s the crux: passivity. Passion (on the right) vs. passivity (on the left): which do you think will win? The right expresses passion – however unfounded and artificial it may be – while the left shows passivity. When and why did Democrats become passive about so many issues? The year was 1968 when the party reacted to...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)If Republicans regain control of the Senate on Tuesday night, they will have good reason to gloat. They recruited much stronger, more sensible nominees this year -- no more candidates riding broomsticks or hurling insults at women. They also smartly accepted President Barack Obama's implicit challenge to make his record their centerpiece. But when they wake up from their celebrations, top GOP strategists such as Karl Rove will surely warn them: "Don't over-read this election. Yes, it opens up great opportunities for the next two years, but it does not open a clear path to seizing the White House and...

By this point in an election year, when polls are coming in by the bucketload late in the evening, you can get a sense for which pollsters are taking fresh samples of public opinion and which are herding toward the conventional wisdom. J. Ann Selzer, whose firm Selzer & Company conducts the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, is in the former group: She’s always been one to trust what her data is telling her. On Dec. 31, 2007, Selzer’s poll was among the first to show a large lead for Barack Obama in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — most other...

When Democrats pushed through mail-in voting for Colorado, Republicans objected over the potential for vote fraud. So far, though, the GOP has become its biggest beneficiary. Late yesterday, a report from the Secretary of State showed Republicans with a 104,000-ballot lead, giving them a nine-point edge in early voting: Republicans are blowing out Democrats in Colorado early voting, the secretary of State there says. … The AP said that 41 percent of the 1.1 million early ballots were from Republicans, with roughly a third coming from Democrats and a quarter from independent voters. Colorado’s voters are basically evenly split among...

Buried under a dozen paragraphs is a fascinating little factoid the mainstream media never talks about and doesn’t want to talk about: Democrats haven't won a majority of the white women vote since 1992: In Arkansas, the Republican candidate, Tom Cotton, was tied with Senator Mark Pryor among women in a poll of likely voters conducted Oct. 4-7 by Fox News. Yet Mr. Pryor had an 11-point edge among women in an Oct. 19-23 poll for NBC News and Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion. “On balance, I am not convinced the Democrats will make sufficient inroads with white women...

DENVER (AP) -- Republicans are taking a big lead in early voting in Colorado. A report from the Secretary of State on Friday showed that 104,000 more Republicans than Democrats had cast their ballots as the state conducts its first major mail-in election. Voters can also drop off ballots at polling stations and register through Election Day....

Not only have women been a majority of the voters in recent elections (53% in 2012), they also kept President Obama in the Oval Office (55% of those women — nearly 30% of all voters — voted for President Obama in 2012). Obviously, women — specifically, unmarried women — decided the 2012 election. According to exit polls from 2012 conducted by Edison Research, Obama’s margin among unmarried women was 67 percent to Romney’s 31 percent, giving him more than 11 million more unmarried women’s votes than Romney’s total; Romney’s 53 percent of married women’s votes compared to Obama’s 46 percent...

Oh, OK. You’re not too concerned about the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 4. You don’t mind sitting this cycle out because you’ve convinced yourself that presidential elections are what matters the most. Think again. In addition to a slate of U.S. Senate races that could determine which party controls Congress for the next two years, there are dozens of statewide positions that voters will be able to cast a ballot for on Tuesday, and the individuals who are elected to those posts have the power to affect your life, at times more directly than the president or Congress. Here...

Via Tom Elia and Becket Adams, I feel like this campaign can’t end until Wendy herself delivers an impassioned plea from the Capitol steps: “For God’s sake, he can’t even walk.” Until then, though, she’s got more important points to make: When Stewart asked why Democrats can’t turn Texas blue, Davis blamed congressional redistricting. Saying, “It’s on its way, it really is on its way. And what we’ve suffered from here for quite a while is two decades of Republican led redistricting that have created very purely drawn Republican districts and a few very purely drawn Democratic ones. And so...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, says she hopes to run for office again and is urging GOP leaders to have "more guts" as they pursue their agenda. Palin said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Tuesday that she is invigorated by her critics, who make her "want to work so hard for justice in this country." "The more they're pouring on the more I'm going to bug the crap out of them by being out there with a voice, with the message, hopefully running for office in the future, too," Palin said....

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — The two winning primary candidates for St. Louis County executive anticipated a general election campaign heavy on the nuts and bolts of local government: taxes, roads, parks and schools. Then came Ferguson. Sparking a national debate over race relations and police killings, the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black, by a white municipal police officer in early August also transformed a local election that typically draws little attention outside of St. Louis....

“Do you really think Wendy Davis is going to win?” I asked Jenn Brown, the executive director of Battleground Texas. “I sure do,” she replied. Brown and her top staff may be the only people in Texas who think that Democrat Davis, who is running for governor, can defeat Republican Greg Abbott next week. But the larger question is whether Battleground Texas’s strategy of turning Texas Blue, which is currently married to Davis’s candidacy, can over the next two, four, or six years make Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, or voted for a Democratic...

More GOP cavalry arrived in Georgia today as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stumped with David Perdue and Gov. Nathan Deal in Canton, invoking memories of long gas lines and stagflation as he attacked their Democratic rivals. “Here in Georgia, we’ve got on the ballot Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn,” he said. “It’s like ‘That 70’s Show.'” The Texas firebrand echoed Perdue’s talking points by saying that an election of Michelle Nunn, the Democratic nominee, equals a stamp of approval for President Barack Obama’s agenda. Republicans need a net gain of six Senate seats to take control of the chamber, and...

Low African American voter turnout helped create Ferguson’s mostly white government. Black leaders nationwide are using that fact to get their constituents to the polls.For many African Americans, this is shaping up to be the Ferguson Election. Around the country, black voters are being mobilized to vote in the 2014 midterms with the argument that the death of Michael Brown resulted, in part, from lack of black civic participation. While the population of Ferguson is nearly 70 percent African American, only 6 percent cast a ballot in the last municipal elections. This led to a majority-black city where the mayor...

And we’re 2 years and 2 weeks out? WTF? The super-PAC is building a list of supporters that is already hovering around 3 million. Hillary Clinton’s friendly super-PAC is spending roughly $23,000 a day – nearly as much as it’s bringing in – as it builds a database of supporters and donors for a possible 2016 Democratic presidential bid. Viewed another way: Getting Ready for Hillary costs her supporters about $2 million per quarter, covering expenses for everything from political consultants to voter databases to Des Moines hotel rooms, according to disclosure reports released October 15. “Rather than building up...