North-South Showdowns Bring Out State's Polar Opposites
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This weekend in baseball, two teams from Northern California face two teams from Southern California and all four are in contention for a playoff spot.
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Polarized voters, almost perfectly divided between the two parties &#151; and the balance of power hanging on hard-fought, expensive campaigns in a few key areas. It's the story line of the 2004 presidential election, but it's also playing out in the battle for power in state legislatures, where Democratic and Republican control has probably never been so evenly divided.
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By John Schmid, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Feb. 9--The states of the industrial Midwest can tilt the 2008 presidential race to their advantage if they unite for the first time behind what a Brookings Institution author calls a common political agenda and near-identical industrial heritage.
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Washington&#39;s astonishingly close gubernatorial race is making people in other states nervous: Could it happen here? Any election in which the leading candidate has a margin of 0.009 percent, then 0.003 percent
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The Republican race heads south as a complete scramble.
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COLUMBIA, South Carolina  - Voters in Nevada and South Carolina make their choices on Saturday in a chaotic U.S. presidential race, with polls showing tight struggles in both states as nominating battles move to the South and West.
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The battleground now shifts to states where each of the leaders believes he holds advantages.
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Could differences in economic performance among states determine how the election shakes out? The answer is a definite maybe.
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Two teams made the trip to Mashpee with the goal of defending their South Sectional championships, while two came with the hopes of dethroning those champions.
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Voters in two states a continent apart were choosing among Republican and Democratic candidates for president in contests shadowed by racial politics and the threat of recession.
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It's a statewide tradition to be competitive over frigid-weather matters such as the record for below-zero temps.
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Florida's got the South Beach diet. Now Minnesota's got the "Northwoods Diet."
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I like politics. I follow it the way some people follow sports. The Democrat Party     and Republican Party are major league teams. They battle each other in national, state and     local contests. They have mascots, both created by the same person.     They have fanatical supporters just like any sport. Like minor league teams, there are also minor political parties to watch that sometimes play spoiler and sometimes     gain enough strength to influence the major parties. Some operate only locally, some statewide, and some try to operate     nationally.    I also enjoy following individual personalities. People love and hate them like they love and hate sports teams and athletes.     I'm sometimes startled by the degree of blind adoration or blind rage that politicians can inspire in otherwise calm,     rational people.    Lately, I've noticed that there's a growing tendency to divide the United States into red states and blue states. People seem     to think that it's possible for an entire state to be Democrat or Republican. How can that be if it's difficult to even     categorize individual Americans into definite camps? Now, although once restricted to politics, the idea is spreading to     other arenas. I saw a suggestion that Hollywood start targetting states as red or blue audiences. I've seen statistics that     compare red states versus blue states on categories such as religion, income, and even gifts to charity.    The division of the United States into red and blue states is overly simplistic and misleading.
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By JENNIFER DOBNER  SALT LAKE CITY - For nine years, the question has echoed across the high desert of southeastern Utah, hard against the corner where four states meet.
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As the courts mull whether to rerun the election, lines sharpen along the country's east-west divide.
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Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but yesterday&#39;s intersection of politics and sports at Beacon and Park streets produced an amiably awkward pairing, even by Massachusetts standards.
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Georgia vs. Southern California, it might have been a heck of game.