The Incumbency- Protection Device
Because incumbents start a campaign with valuable advantages such as name recognition, challengers must often outspend incumbents to be competitive.
This may shock you. There is a bill being discussed during the 2006 legislative sessions that would take a bad idea and make it worse.
The State Board of Elections began three days of hearings Wednesday on the campaign-finance practices of House Speaker Jim Black’s political organization. The testimony was revealing.
A federal court has just upheld a ruling striking down limits on contributions to issue-advocacy groups. NC campaigns just got a lot freer -- but don't expect universal acclaim.
If N.C. House members represented the same number of citizens as do their counterparts in Vermont or New Hampshire, we could have 2,222 representatives in that body. Sound ridiculous? But the body couldn't meet often or long enough to do any real damage.