Photograph by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Delegates stand at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa, Florida, on Aug. 30, 2012.

The Republican organization working to secure state offices for the party will focus on recruiting Hispanic and female candidates in the 2014 election cycle, when it plans to raise $50 million.

The Republican State Leadership Committee is “on track” to meet that fundraising goal after raising $39 million for the 2012 election, committee president Chris Jankowski told reporters today. The group focuses on state legislative races and “down-ballot” statewide contests for lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state. As a 527 organization, the RSLC can accept donations in unlimited amounts.

Fielding more Hispanic candidates is a top priority for the group. While the RSLC met its goal of recruiting more than 100 Hispanic candidates for state legislatures in 2012, Jankowski said, they won just 16 races instead of the 30 to 35 he expected.

“The biggest demographic challenge is the Hispanic challenge, but we as a party need to do better, period, and we intend to try,” Jankowski said.

President Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election, exit polls show, helping him carry politically competitive states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado while aiding Democrats down the ballot.

Jankowski said the Republican party does not always value female candidates “as much, but they are a great asset as candidates” because they “bring a different approach to campaigning.”

“We obviously need more women to enter public office and get on the escalator to higher office so that our leadership reflects stronger women in the Republican Party,” he said.

The RSLC will work to elect more Republicans to state legislatures in Virginia and New Jersey this fall. Both states also are holding elections for governor.

Republicans hold a 67-32 advantage in the Virginia House of Delegates, whose members are up for re-election this November. Each party holds 20 seats in the state Senate, whose members are next up for election in 2015.

The tie-breaking vote is held by the lieutenant governor, an office that’s up for election in November. On May 18, Republicans nominated E.W. Jackson, a black pastor who’s drawn attention for comments opposing abortion and homosexuality.

“It is very important that we can disagree without being disagreeable, that we highlight issues that are relevant and what we can actually accomplish,” Jankowski said when asked about Jackson.

All 120 state legislative seats in New Jersey are on the ballot in November. Even a landslide re-election by Republican Gov. Chris Christie over Democratic challenger Barbara Buono may not be enough to overturn Democratic majorities of 48-32 in the Assembly and 24-16 in the Senate.

Jankowski acknowledged that ”the districts are very unfavorable and present a challenge” for Republicans.

“If Christie stays strong, we think there are some excellent opportunities for pickups in the Assembly and in the Senate, and we will be very engaged to do so,” he added.

Original post is Republican Group Seeks More Hispanic and Female Candidates by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Central Intelligence Agency building in Langley, Virginia.

The Central Intelligence Agency is better known for secrecy than it is for family fun.

But tomorrow you will find spies amid the cotton candy, crafters and carnival rides at the annual McLean Day fair at Lewinsville Park, some three miles from CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

Rather than occupying an Undisclosed Secret Location, a safe house or a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, the spooks will be manning Booth 003, between Chain Bridge Bank and Post 8142 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For undisclosed reasons, the Old Dominion Animal Health Center got Booth 007.

No word, either, on whether those staffing the Agency’s booth will be using their real names or wearing their own hair.

The CIA didn’t respond to requests for comment on its participation in the event.

Original post is CIA Day at the Fair: 007 is Taken by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The U.S. Army Fife and Drum Corp. during a celebration of the 237th birthday of the U.S. Army on the grounds of George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia.

If any place in the U.S. feels the sting of federal budget cuts, it’ll be Virginia’s Fairfax County.

The home to George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Central Intelligence Agency headquarters is more dependent on the U.S. government than ever.

Federal spending as a share of Fairfax County’s economy has almost doubled since 2002, to 14.4 percent.

While less than half the size of Luxembourg at 407 square miles, the county just west of the nation’s capital boasts a $194 billion economy that is bigger than Hungary’s.

Now, Fairfax County’s 1.1 million residents are bracing for the effects of sequestration. Localities — from Fairfax to Pine Bluff, Arkansas — reliant on federal dollars will take a disproportionate hit from reductions that Goldman Sachs & Co. estimates will subtract 0.6 percentage point from U.S. economic growth this year.

“It’s become obvious that our closeness to the federal government is both good news and bad news,” said Sharon Bulova, a Democrat who has led the Fairfax Board of Supervisors since 2009.

Fairfax’s wealth and educated workforce, with median family income of $119,634 and 29 percent of its 25-and-older population holding graduate degrees, will help it avoid hard times. Still,sequestration will test those strengths.

Since 2004, Fairfax has been the nation’s top recipient of federal contract dollars, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Four of the county’s top six employers — Lockheed Martin Corp., Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and SAIC Inc. — are among the 20 biggest federal vendors.

See the full report by Bloomberg’s Lorraine Woellert.

Original post is Fairfax County: Sequestration’s Test by Political Capital.

Photograph by Everett Collection

Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles, 1974.

Congressional leaders have had a lot to say about their across the board budget cuts, also known as sequestration.

Sen. Mark Warner brought film director Mel Brooks into the discussion this morning.

Echoing remarks made by former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in the lead-up to sequestration, the Virginia Democrat compared the cuts to a scene in the classic comedy “Blazing Saddles.”

Warner explained that, in the movie, “The sheriff comes out and puts a gun to his head and all the townspeople come out and say, ‘Oh my gosh, the sheriff may pull the trigger.’ We in Congress set up that circumstance with sequester, and unfortunately two weeks ago we allowed that trigger to be pulled.”

On the big screen, the townspeople of Rock Ridge back off and let Sheriff Bart retreat into his office with town leaders imploring the crowd gathered, “Listen to him men, he’s just crazy enough to do it!”

In Warner’s version of events, Congress wasn’t smart enough to avoid the cuts.

“These cuts were set up to be the stupidest way possible,” he reminded his colleagues. “No rational group of folks would allow them to come to pass.”

Original post is Blazing Budgetary Saddles ‘Stupidest’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Sailors stand watch on the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman docked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, on Feb. 28, 2013.

That’s the share of Americans who responded with a negative word or phrase reacting to $85 billion in automatic budget cuts that began taking effect March 1, according to Gallup.

Another 24 percent responded to the open-ended question with a neutral response and 11 percent gave positive responses, according to the Gallup survey taken Feb. 25-26. Another 17 percent didn’t have an opinion and 5 percent didn’t answer the question.

During the same period, Americans by a 45 percent to 37 percent margin said they wanted their representatives in Congress to vote to avert the budget cuts rather than let them go into effect.

The spending cuts, known as sequestration, will be a “slow grind” on the economy, President Barack Obama said March 1 after meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, as Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman and Roxana Tiron reported.

The cuts will hurt states led by Virginia, which includes tens of thousands of federal workers and relies on government contracts more than any other state.

“We’re not getting crushed yet, but over the next month with these defense cuts, it’s going to have a pretty significant effect on our economy,” former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, said March 1 on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 44% by Political Capital.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Speaker of the House John Boehner, left, answers questions during a press conference with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Feb. 26, 2013 in Washington.

House Speaker John Boehner today accused President Barack Obama of using the military as a “prop” to campaign for a tax increase in the debate over federal spending cuts that will take effect March 1.

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said the House won’t act to replace the automatic cuts until the Senate “gets off their ass” to pass a plan.

“If the Senate acts, I’m sure the House will act quickly,” Boehner told reporters in Washington today

Boehner said Obama isn’t “focused” on finding a solution to averting $85 billion in federal spending cuts over the final seven months of the fiscal year, and $1.2 trillion over nine years.

Obama is traveling to a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, today to talk about the effects of the automatic spending cuts.

The president is more interested in “holding rallies” than negotiating to find a way to avert the spending reductions, Boehner said.

Jim Rowley contributed to this report.

Original post is Boehner to Senate: ‘Off Their Ass’ by Political Capital.

House Speaker William J. Howell, a Republican, ruled that the Senate redistricting plan was “not germane” because it made sweeping amendments to a House bill that made minor technical amendments to state House districts.

“This vast rewrite” by the Senate went “well beyond the original purpose” of the underlying House bill, Howell said during a state legislative session.

Senate Republicans sought to substitute their map for the one that Democrats enacted in 2011, when they held the majority. The Senate now is tied at 20-20. It passed the redistricting plan on a 20-19 vote on Jan. 21, when one Democratic senator was out of town to attend President Barack Obama’s inaugural ceremony.

The unexpected move made some Republicans uneasy, including Gov. Bob McDonnell, who’s trying to get a rewrite of transportation laws through the legislature.

The attempt to redraw district boundaries underscored how political line-drawing can be. Aided by sophisticated computer mapping software and precinct-level election results, partisan legislators reshape districts to give their side a political advantage.

Original post is Virginia Senate Redistricting Plan Axed by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg

Haley Barbour

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour is not a supporter of Republican proposals to allocate electoral votes in some states by congressional district rather than winner-take-all.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he says in an interview on “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend on Bloomberg Television.
“I don’t think anybody can predict with any form of precision who it’ll help from this election to the next.”

Republican lawmakers in several states won by Democratic President Barack Obama, including Virginia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, are discussing awarding electoral votes by congressional district rather than giving them all to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide.

Since those congressional districts were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures to favor Republicans, such a proposal would give the Republican presidential candidate some electoral votes in states that otherwise have voted for the Democratic candidate. In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell and key Republican legislators have come out against the proposal.

Original post is Barbour: Dividing Electoral Votes Wrong by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Myrtle Nora arranges flag buntings outside the Capitol prior to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington.

Guess where pay in the U.S. is up the most over the past decade.

Guessed Washington?

Guessed right.

From 2001 through 2011, the average annual wages in the nation’s capital rose by 4.1 percent a year — from $49,420 a year to $74,540 a year — according to an analysis by the Bloomberg Rankings team.

Its 10-year “State Wage Escalator” is built on cross-industry estimates and extracted from the annual mean wage for occupations within the states.

Wyoming ran second, with a 3.63 percent annual increase — yet the average annual wage in 2011 — $42,510 — stood well behind Washington, D.C.’s runaway average of $74,540 last year.

Virginia ranked second, at 3.42 percent — and the presence of federal contractors in the Washington-neighbor should be noted. Then came North Dakota, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, California, Massachusetts and New Mexico.

The national average of 2.89 percent annual growth yielded an average annual wage of $45,646 last year.

Bringing up the bottom: Michigan, at 1.86 percent. Ohio and Indiana followed close behind — signs of what happened to Midwest manufacturing during the past decade. Michigan’s average wage of $43,700 last year was $30,000 less than Washington’s.

Original post is Washington Wages: Leading the Nation by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Former President Bill Clinton, left, chats with donors as he pays a visit to a fundraiser for state Democrats, while host Terry McAuliffe, right, strains to hear a request from another donor in McLean, Virginia.

The two major contenders for the Virginia governorship this November each raised more than $1 million in the second half of 2012,  their campaigns said in reports filed yesterday with state election officials.

Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, took in $1.16 million during the six-month period, compared with $1.07 million for Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican state Attorney General.

McAuliffe’s donor list reflects his long career as a Democratic Party fundraiser and strategist with close ties to former President Bill Clinton. McAuliffe’s contributors included former Clinton White House aides Bruce Lindsey ($500) and Thomas “Mack” McLarty ($5,000), political strategist Paul Begala ($5,000) and former Reps. Tony Coelho of California ($500), Martin Frost of Texas ($100) and Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma ($250).

McAuliffe received $100,000 each from the International Association of Fire Fighters union and Sungate Real Estate. Ted Weschler, an investment manager at Berkshire Hathaway Inc., donated $25,000 to McAuliffe’s campaign. Boyd Tinsley, a member of the Dave Matthews Band, gave $10,000.

Cuccinelli’s donations included $165,000 from Liberty Now, a political committee he formed in 2010, and $50,000 each from Intrust Wealth Management of Wichita, Kansas, and Presidential Coalition LLC, an affiliate of the Washington-based advocacy group Citizens United.

Cuccinelli received $25,000 from a Virginia-based political committee of Verizon Communications Inc.

Cuccinelli began this year with $1.18 million in cash-on-hand, compared with $1.04 million for McAuliffe, the reports showed.

McAuliffe and Cuccinelli are vying to succeed Republican Hov. Bob McDonnell, who isn’t seeking re-election because of a Virginia law that bars governors from serving consecutive terms. The election is Nov. 5.

Original post is McAuliffe, Cuccinelli Top $1 Million in Late 2012 Donations for Va. Gov. by Political Capital.