Curious what it’s like reporting from the campaign trail? We tagged along with Lloyd Grove to find out. Check the vid for a little behind-the-scenes New Hampshire campaign life.

A printer error is to blame for the cutest “I Voted” stickers ever created in lucky Dorchester County, South Carolina.

If any of you followers can track down and send nwktumblr some of these, we’ll be forever grateful.

I think that focusing so much on someone’s personal, sexual, or marital affairs is a distraction. It’s a matter of degree; if it’s above a certain point, yes. If you have someone who has lived a polygamous life, that would raise questions about their character and ability to obey the law. But the fact that somebody had been divorced and remarried—so what? Infidelity? If people want to put that into their evaluation, they have the right to do so. But the first thing I want to assess is your ability to lead and solve problems.

Herman Cain, he the one-time frontrunner of the GOP primary campaign, tells us about the role he thinks sexual behavior ought to play in evaluating candidates for public office. 

Artist: Rick Mckee

(via apsies)

I think we have to seriously consider whether there is some sort of a Bradley Effect in the polling on gay rights issues, although one of the pollsters (PPP, which had a very bad night in NY-23) got it exactly right. As for the model, I think I’ll need to look whether the urban-rural divide is a significant factor in a state in addition to its religiosity: Maine is secular, but rural. At the end of the day, it may have been too much to ask of a state to vote to approve gay marriage in an election where gay marriage itself was the headline issue on the ballot. Although the enthusiasm gap is very probably narrowing, feelings about gay marriage have traditionally been much stronger on the right than the left, and that’s what gets people up off the couch in off-year elections.

Nate Silver on Maine via (via brooklynmutt)

For me, the biggest question raised by the results is this: if the Democratic candidates had run as “Obama Democrats” (in the vein of “Reagan Republicans”) what would that campaign look like? Can the appeal of the Obama ’08 campaign – change, hope etc - even be localized? Or does its very existence revolve around the enormous possibility of the Presidency? How do congressional or state office candidates take the Obama credo and reasonably apply it to local issues, like speed limits and playgrounds?

Katie Connolly runs down last night’s results.