Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, and Poizner, who made a fortune in Silicon Valley before winning election as the state's insurance commissioner in 2006, are both seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination in the June 8 primary. Whitman has already spent $64 million of her own money, while Poizner has thrown down $17.7 million of his own.

They’re walking in the footsteps of several high-profile self-funding failures, though. Michael Huffington, then a one-term congressman, dumped $28 million of his own money in a bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994. He lost by 2 points. Four years later, Al Checchi, the former chairman of Northwest Airlines, ponied up $40 million to run for governor -- only to lose in the Democratic primary to then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis (who raised $7 million the old-fashioned way).

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Lincoln's lead in the most recent polls tends to be in the 10-point ballpark. She was ahead of Halter 46-37 percent in a Research 2000 poll this week and 44-32 in a Mason-Dixon survey two weeks ago. Her real challenge on Tuesday, though, isn't to outpoll Halter -- it's to clear the 50 percent mark, in order to avoid a runoff. (Arkansas is one of 10 states, almost all located in the South, that requires the top two finishers in a primary to go to a runoff if nobody breaks a certain percentge.)

In a two-person race, the winner would, naturally, break 50 percent. However, unbeknownst to many national observers, this is a three-person race: The other candidate is D.C. Morrison, who’s been running to Lincoln’s right and employing a variety of Tea Party-ish talking points. Morrison polled at 6 percent in the Research 2000 survey and at 7 in Mason-Dixon's.

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Three months after the earthquake in Haiti, it is clear that it's not only domestic problems that  receive this kind of attention. Indeed, a comparison of New York Times stories about three recent natural disasters -- Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, and the earthquake in Haiti -- shows that the issue-attention cycle characterizes news coverage of each.

The graph below begins seven days before each disaster and continues for 90 days thereafter. With the exception of Hurricane Katrina, which garnered a few stories as it approached the Gulf Coast, coverage began in earnest right after each disaster struck. In each case, it then quickly reached a peak (which is, unsurprisingly, highest for Katrina, the lone domestic disaster) before quickly declining. In the case of Haiti, it declined to a trickle, with perhaps one story a day.

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His collapse has been epic.  A Quinnipiac poll from last week showed Crist trailing his Republican foe, Marco Rubio, by an unsalvageable 56-33 percent. Compare that to a Quinnipiac poll from almost a year ago, when Crist led Rubio 54-8!

Two things tripped up Crist during his victory lap: 1) Florida’s once-humming economy collapsed, as its unemployment rate (currently 12.2 percent) became one of the nation’s worst; and 2) Rubio, the conservative and charismatic former state House speaker, caught on with Tea Party activists, who'd been looking for a vehicle to take on Crist (who infuriated them when he literally embraced President Obama and promoted his stimulus package last year).

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A comprehensive poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News and released late Monday CBS News/New York Times essentially found what anyone watching a couple minutes of news footage of a rally would intuit: the 18 percent of the nation that identifies with the Tea Party movement tends to be white, male, older than 45 and Republican. And also hypocritical: despite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government’s most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers’ average age).

Interestingly, despite the frequent framing of the Tea Partiers as a predominantly blue-collar, the NYT poll also found that they are wealthier and better-educated than the public as a whole. And half of them think the Obama administration’s policies favor the poor.

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Reid’s purported confidence stems from the prospect two other candidates on the fall ballot eating up the rest of the electorate’s votes.

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As Salon's Mike Madden has already noted, "That doesn't sound like code for, 'Go ahead, Mr. President, don't let us get in your way.'"

Still, history says it will be just about impossible for the GOP to thwart whomever President Obama tabs as Stevens' successor -- unless some sort of personal scandal erupts.

Only one nominee in the last 25 years has been defeated by the Senate: Robert Bork, a conservative hero nominated by Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1987. A hero to the right, Bork had left an extensive paper trail of highly provocative (and very conservative) opinions about sensitive subjects, particularly the right to privacy. The left mobilized to stop him and, with Reagan's clout diminished by the then-unfolding Iran-Contra scandal, the Democratic Senate rejected Bork on a 58-42 vote. (One Republican, Arlen Specter, also voted no.)

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But so far, polling and fundraising numbers offer a mixed outlook for the party. On the plus side, one of the three surveys released in the last week, from Quinnipiac University, gave each of the prospective Democratic candidates -- Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner -- slight leads over Republican Rob Portman, a former congressman and Bush administration official. The other two, from Public Policy Polling and Rasmussen Reports, showed Portman only narrowly ahead. In Ohio, where the economic decline centers on the collapse of the manufacturing sector, the ardent free-trader Portman comes with ready-made weaknesses for the Democratic nominee to exploit.

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The freshness test, developed by National Journal writer Jonathan Rauch, posits that “no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson — elected to the vice presidency in 1960, 23 years after winning his first campaign for the U.S. House — is the only modern president to defy it. All the others have climbed the ladder faster — sometimes much faster. Barack Obama, for instance, won the White House just four years after claiming a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. Bill Clinton, who was elected president 14 years after winning his first term as governor of Arkansas, took longer — but still met the freshness test.

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But several polls released this week suggest that the only thing new about the tea party movement might be its name – and that the tea partiers themselves are simply the loudest, most revved-up subset of Republicans.

Quinnipiac’s March 24 survey found that, contrary to the notion that they’re a newly mobilized force of previously apolitical independents, tea party supporters represent the right-most flank of the Republican core. Tea partiers, who made up 13 percent of Quinnipiac’s nationwide sample, approved of the Republican Party by a 60 to 20 percent margin; among independents, by contrast, the GOP’s approval was 28-42 percent.

74 percent of tea partiers identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent said they were Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Only 15 percent voted for Barack Obama, while 77 percent went for John McCain (suggesting little of the allegedly rampant “buyer’s remorse”). And while Sarah Palin has an upside-down favorable rating (33-51 percent) among all voters, tea partiers view her favorably by a 72-14 percent spread.

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On Monday, a small band of Nebraskans, angered by Sen. Ben Nelson’s healthcare vote, began organizing a ballot initiative to add recall elections to the state’s constitution. If they can collect 113,000 signatures by July 2, the question will reach voters in November and Nebraska might become the 20th state to permit the recall of elected officials by petition.

Nelson, of course, probably shouldn’t be sweating this one. Eighteen states now have provisions for recall elections. (The 19th, Virginia, allows for recall trials.) And while recall elections are regularly held at the local level in these states, there have only been three successful statewide recall efforts in American history: in North Dakota in 1921, Arizona in 1988, and California in 2003. (While the Arizona petitioners qualified to recall Gov. Evan Mecham, he was impeached before the scheduled election could be held.)

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But not all of the Democrats who voted against reform come from Republican-friendly districts or face tough opposition in November. Several of them actually come from solidly Democratic urban districts. And not every Democrat who voted yes hails from a safe seat.

The chart below seeks to identify the 10 most courageous and the 10 most cowardly healthcare votes from House Democrats. The formula is simple: The courageous list is composed of pro-reform Democrats from districts with the least Democratic-friendly PVI ratings (which measure a district's partisan tendencies). The cowardly list is of anti-reform Democrats from the most Democratic-friendly districts. (An explanation of PVI ratings can be found here.)

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But recent history suggests they shouldn’t get too excited.

Believe it or not, it’s been almost nine years since the GOP picked up a previously Democratic-held House seat through a special election. Democrats, by contrast, have won six GOP-held seats in special elections in that time. And it’s not as if the Democrats were picking off low-hanging fruit: All but one of those victories came in districts that vote reliably for Republicans at the presidential level.

There are several reasons for the Democrats’ special election success. The most obvious is that many of the pickups came when George W. Bush’s popularity was at its lowest and voters were eager to take out their frustrations on Republican candidates.

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Arlen Specter is stuck in a deep hole as he seeks a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. No, wait -- he’s actually in decent shape, running ahead of his potential Republican opponent. Both of these statements are actually supported by the numbers. It just depends which pollster you believe.

Specter, should he prevail against Rep. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic primary, will face former GOP Rep. Pat Toomey this fall. Specter barely beat Toomey in the 2004 GOP primary, and the prospect of a rematch against an even-stronger Toomey this year helped prompt Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party a year ago.

At first, Specter’s plan seemed to backfire. Polls started showing him losing the general election to Toomey -- although many of these surveys came from  Rasmussen Reports, an outfit that, some have noted, has a knack for portraying the GOP’s poll standing in rather favorable light.

Rasmussen’s most recent poll of the race, conducted on Feb. 8, showed Specter losing to Toomey, 47 to 38 percent.  But then, a twist: A March 2 survey from the more reputable (if less prolific) Quinnipiac Polling Institute gave Specter the lead, 49-42 percent.

So, which poll is right? Actually, they both might be (at least for now). The reason has to do with the one major difference in their methodologies: likely voters vs. registered voters.

Many pollsters are reluctant to sample "likely voters" this far from an election, as it’s hard to predict who’s planning to show up. Quinnipiac falls into this category; it sampled "registered voters," without asking who’s likely to vote. Rasmussen, however, has been using "likely voters" for all of its (many) polls this campaign cycle.

Notably, a third polling organization, from Franklin & Marshall College, was in the field around the same time as Rasmussen and Quinnipiac.

F&M offered both likely voter and registered voter models, and found Specter leading Toomey 44-40 percent among the broad pool of registered voters, and Toomey ahead of Specter 44-34 percent among the narrower likely voter pool.

This suggests a serious problem for Democrats this fall. The “unlikely voters” who are weeded out from registered voter polls are the young, the poor and people of color. When these constituencies show up, the results are usually good for Democrats (as in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory). But when they stay home, it gives the GOP an opportunity to achieve a 1994-like result.

To survive 2010, then, the challenge for Democrats is clear: They must turn unlikely voters into likely voters. And the clock is ticking.

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This may be the most consistent quirk of National Journal's scoring system: The members of Congress who are typically portrayed in the media as the most extreme and polarizing ideologues often fall somewhere in the middle of the list.

Consider Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is generally regarded as one of the most liberal politicians in the nation, let alone Congress. And yet he finished in 160th place in the "most liberal" rankings. Or there’s netroots heroes Alan Grayson (170th place in the House) and Russ Feingold (55th most liberal in the Senate).

The same holds on the other end of the spectrum. Rep. Ron Paul, who finished first in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2012 presidential straw poll just a few weeks ago, is rated as the 140th most conservative member of the House. And bomb-thrower Michele Bachmann is stuck in 28th place.

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An astounding number of Democrats – 68, to be exact – currently represent districts that are “naturally” Republican, while only eight Republicans hail from Democratic districts. With the national climate already favoring them – thanks to surging unemployment and popular frustration with the ruling Democrats – this imbalance creates the potential for an extra-large GOP wave in November.

These numbers are based on the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, an excellent barometer of a congressional district’s partisan leanings. A district’s PVI is derived by comparing the performance of presidential candidates nationally with how they do in each district. So if a district has a PVI of D+4, for instance, it means that the Democratic presidential candidate performed 4 points above his national average in the last two cycles.

Of the 68 Democrats who represent GOP-friendly districts, a whopping 43 are from districts where the PVI is R+5 or greater. Much of this imbalance can be chalked up to the 2006 and 2008 elections, when Democrats harnessed the nation’s profound Bush fatigue to make impressive incursions into GOP territory.

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Actually, it is.

It’s true that Reid, the Senate majority leader, has had some close calls in the past -- like when he edged out then-Rep. John Ensign by a scant 428 votes in 1998. But there was a big difference between that race and this one: Reid wasn’t running from behind.

At the end of February '98, an independent poll actually put Reid 9 points ahead of Ensign, 45 to 36 percent. By contrast, the three most recent independent polls this year have shown Reid trailing the current GOP front-runner, Sue Lowden, by 6, 9 and 10 points. (Although there’s also a recent poll that showed the gap narrowing when a third party candidate from the tea party movement was included.)

When it comes to polling, Reid is actually in unique -- and ominous -- territory for an incumbent senator. A Salon review found that since 1984, 10 Senate incumbents have found themselves consistently trailing by significant margins at this stage of the campaign -- and eight of them were defeated in November.

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(Credit: John Sides)

NOTE: This article has been corrrected.

Conservatives agree that the government spends too much. But ask them what to cut ...

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty called on the attendees to imitate the wife of Tiger Woods: "We should take a page out of her playbook and take a nine iron and smash the window out of big government in this country."

But there’s a problem for Pawlenty and the activists who cheered him: Rank-and-file conservatives actually like big government.

In 2008, the American National Election Study asked a national sample whether federal spending on 12 different programs should be increased, decreased or kept about the same.

As the graph above illustrates, the respondents who identified themselves as "conservative" or "extremely conservative" had little appetite for specific spending cuts.

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