This week has been a big one for state legislative endorsements in Iowa. Sen. Joe Biden’s campaign announced State Rep. McKinley Bailey’s endorsement Thursday. Bailey is a veteran of the Iraq War, but he isn’t the only Iraq vet to endorse this week: State Rep. Ray Zirkelbach, who served in Iraq during the [...]

Although almost every Democratic presidential candidate has taken his or her name off the Michigan ballot today (the deadline is at 3PM central — a little under an hour from now), Sen. Hillary Clinton will not. Keeping her name on the ballot does not technically violate the early state pledge she and the other [...]

NBC Nightly News is reporting right now that the Iowa Caucuses are going to be held January 3. No one I know in Iowa thinks the date is set. Yes, a majority of the members of the Iowa GOP’s State Central Committee currently supports January 3, according to State Chair Ray Hoffman, but [...]

Lynda Waddington has an interesting account of a joint appearance of former Sen. John Edwards and his outspoken wife, Elizabeth, in Cedar Rapids. An Iowan asked about whether John Edwards would fight to ensure that every vote was counted before conceding a general election (harkening back to Kerry’s concession in 2004, before irregularities in [...]

Sen. Barack Obama is traveling through Iowa for four days this week on his “Judgment and Experience” tour. Former Sen. John Edwards launches his 17-county “Take a Stand” tour today. Sen. Hillary Clinton launches her “Middle Class Express” bus trip tomorrow. Sen. Chris Dodd will host “Results Matter” town hall meetings this [...]

When Gov. Mike Huckabee’s campaign felt the need to send an email update to its list this afternoon, they must have been struggling for material. Or maybe they just don’t know the best practices for crafting campaign emails. Either way, for their future reference, you shouldn’t begin your “Iowa Update” with two-month-old news [...]

Not a whole lot of blogging time for me today, so here are some things to read:
Marc Ambinder coins the term “Doddnovations“:
Dodd has plenty of intangibles, but they’re not the intangibles this election cycle is rewarding so far. That said, his campaign itself is near flawless; his argument is pitch-perfect and attuned to his audience. [...]

I’m going to do these types of posts a lot, but I don’t want to call them “Remainders” because everybody else does that. What’s a good name? What’s in a name?
At Off The Bus, Ron Levitt talks about “shadow campaigns” being run by presidential candidate spouses in Florida, so as to avoid the [...]

In Nevada, a state Democratic party “email to supporters” that apparently wasn’t public (I’m not sure how many “supporters” the email went out to) leaked details of what may be the new primary calendar:
On Friday, the Nevada Democratic Party sent a “caucus update” e-mail to supporters. “Today, it appears that Nevada’s interests and significance in [...]

Chris Bowers at OpenLeft posted a “Nomination at a Glance” update, with this to say about Iowa:
After months of trying to force a two-person race, the established media is closer than ever to actually achieving one. While Edwards is still clearly in the game in Iowa, he has now fallen to third behind Obama. Given [...]