Blog Posts by David Chalian

TAMPA, Fla.--Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who has spent much of this year as a leading surrogate for Mitt Romney on Capitol Hill and across the country, set a high bar for Romney to clear when he emerges from his acceptance speech on Thursday night.

"The next three nights are critical," Chaffetz said on the Yahoo! News/ABC News live stream show on the first day of the Republican National Convention when asked why Romney is not further ahead in the polls given the economic pessimism in the country.

"Now that school's back in session, the NFL is kicking off, college football is in the air, they are going to start focusing on this. You're going to see debates. You see the convention. The next three nights are critical because it's prime time, baby. No more excuses. Game on," he said.

In a break with conventional wisdom, Chaffetz also predicted that the election will not be close when the results are tallied on Nov. 6.

"I happen to think at the end of the day, you're not trying to win at Labor Day. You're trying to win on Election Day. I don't think it is going to be very close," he said.

Have you ever wondered about those adrenaline-infused moments just before or after a political heavyweight takes to the stage to deliver a high-profile speech to millions of Americans?

Wonder no more.

Not terribly unlike the E! Entertainment Television interview room where Golden Globe winners go immediately after claiming their statue, one of the Republican National Convention's digital initiatives in Tampa, Fla., will be a "conversation room" where GOP stars will go after they walk offstage at the Tampa Bay Times Forum. In this digital greenroom, program participants will tweet, post on Facebook, share an Instagram photo, or perhaps Skype into a television interview on the heels of one of the most watched moments of their career.

(OK. So it isn't really like the E! interview room much at all, but you get the idea.)

The offstage conversation room is just one of four pillars of the most concerted digital push ever implemented at a Republican National Convention.

The other major

Reuters/Darren Hauck

From the moment Mitt Romney endorsed and embraced the House Republican budget, authored by his newly announced running mate Paul Ryan, Democrats pounced, ensuring it would be known forevermore as the "Romney-Ryan" budget.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee clearly doesn't seem to mind.

As with all of the big moments in a presidential campaign, context matters most. In selecting Paul Ryan, the intellectual force of the modern conservative and Republican movement, after a very rough summer spent on the receiving end of an Obama campaign onslaught of framing and advertising, Romney is not simply picking a safe choice of a governing partner and a fellow campaigner to help amplify his message. He is, instead, looking to change the conversation.

Romney has spent much of the last two months playing defense against attacks on his days at Bain Capital, his refusal to release his tax returns, the foreign locations where he houses some of his wealth, and his job creation record in

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa walks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 7, 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

LOS ANGELES—When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gavels the 2012 Democratic National Convention into session in Charlotte, N.C., this September, his role as prominent cheerleader for President Barack Obama will be clear.

It is less clear, for now, if Villaraigosa has designs on the ultimate convention role in 2016—taking center stage to accept his party's nomination on the final night.

Despite running the country's second largest city and coming from the fastest growing voting demographic in America, the mayor himself is quick to wave off talk of a presidential run.

"The answer is no," Villaraigosa replied when asked by Yahoo News if he wanted to be president one day. "I want to finish this job with a bang. I want to go out with my head up high. I want to say to this city, 'I put everything into this job,'" he added.

"The job I've said to people I would like is I would like to be governor of the state of California," he said. (Paging Jerry Brown.)

It's easy to dismiss Villaraigosa's likelihood of capturing the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, much less the presidency, due to his rocky (and public) personal life, lack of a developed national fundraising base and occasional conflicts with portions of his political base.

But recall that Bill Clinton made it to the Oval Office with the personal baggage of infidelity and Barack Obama became the first nonwhite candidate to achieve the highest office in the land—you can begin to see how Villaraigosa's interest in a 2016 run may yet develop.

Villaraigosa's term as mayor of Los Angeles is up July 1, 2013. He says he will spend his remaining time in office bolstering his accomplishments in crime reduction (a 40.6 percent drop in violent crime, 41 percent drop in homicides), the environment (doubled the Kyoto protocol required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, bringing them down to 14 percent of 1990 levels in seven years), education (reduced schools defined as "failing" according to state scores from 33 percent to 10 percent), and transportation (more on that later). Charlotte provides an opportunity to start road testing his brand beyond Los Angeles' city limits.

The critical decision by a majority on the Supreme Court to treat the individual mandate included in President Barack Obama's health care law as a constitutionally justified tax is at direct odds with how the president defended the legislation in 2009 as he was working to wrangle sufficient votes to get it passed.

Shortly after Obama took to the House chamber to deliver a speech before a joint session of Congress in September 2009, he sat down with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos for an interview on the subject.

Stephanopoulos pressed the president on how he could keep his promise not to raise taxes on most Americans, but require they be fined if they don't carry health insurance.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate …

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: … during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't. How is that not a tax?

OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here—here's what's happening. You and I are

Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Friday, June 15, 2012, in Orlando, Fla. (John Raoux/AP)

ORLANDO, Fla. -- From the moment Barack Obama picked Joe Biden to be his running mate four years ago, the Obama political operation (and Mr. Biden himself) have been eager to play up his Scranton, Pennsylvania roots in hopes of providing an easy point of identification to many of the non-college educated whites with whom the president has struggled to bond.

Biden has long touted his credentials as a fighter for the working class, but acknowledged today that the president might tend to exaggerate his connection to that voting bloc just a bit.

"Barack makes me sound like I climbed out of a mine in Scranton, Pennsylvania carrying a lunch bucket," Biden said to laughter at the U.S. Conference of Mayors gathering here.

Despite the vice president's concession that his "dad never worked blue collar," deploying Mr. Biden to critical election battlegrounds such as Ohio and Pennsylvania because of his potential appeal to working class non-college educated whites is certainly part of the

The 2012 presidential election will most certainly be won or lost based on American voters' perception of the economy and which candidate is the more trusted steward to lead the country to sturdier economic ground.

But it will also be about the country's rapidly evolving demographics.

One week after Mitt Romney unveiled the leadership of his campaign's Hispanic outreach, two pro-Obama groups are launching a major offensive aimed at defining Romney in a negative light to U.S. Hispanics.

The pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA, and the Service Employees International Union are using Romney's own words from the 2011-2012 Republican nomination season in a new round of television and radio ads going up today and running through the summer in Florida, Colorado and Nevada, three critical battleground states where Hispanic voters will have a major impact on the outcome. The groups are spending $4 million on the ad campaign.

The Spanish language ads utilize some of Romney's more awkward moments on the stump such as when he joked about being unemployed and when he expressed his love for firing people.

Economic growth may be stagnating, high-dollar donors may be harder to woo than they were four years ago, and Mitt Romney may be narrowing the gap in public-opinion polls, but President Barack Obama has one key thing going for him at the outset of this general election season: a significant advantage in the battle for 270 electoral votes.

According to a Yahoo! News analysis of the current electoral map, President Obama begins this race within grasp of the promised land. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia are either solidly in the Obama column or leaning that way, giving Obama a total of 247 electoral votes. Mitt Romney has 23 states either solidly in the fold or leaning in his direction, for a total of 191 electoral votes.

That leaves eight battleground states up for grabs: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire. An even 100 electoral votes are available between them.

We clearly aren't the only ones who see these states as the most