Episode #84: N.H. GOP race, 7 months out

The Republican presidential field, currently at 14, will grow to 17 within the next month.  And in New Hampshire, site of the first-in-the-nation primary on February 9, no one is breaking out of the pack.  Fergus Cullen, the former chair of the state GOP, assesses the field.  And while there is so much uncertainty in the race so far, one thing he is certain of:  the candidacy of Donald Trump is not going to go anywhere, despite his standing in the recent polls. On the Democratic side, the field is also growing.  But their number is five.  Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb became the most recent Democrat in the race and, probably, the last one.  Andrew Cain, the politics editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, assesses Webb's career and weighs the pros and cons of his presidential effort. It's much simpler in Nevada, which is holding a high profile Senate race next year to replace the retiring Harry Reid.  Congressman Joe Heck, a three-term Republican with good ties to both the tea party and establishment wings of the GOP, entered the race last week and is seen as the all-but-certain Republican nominee.  Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Reid and his machine are solidly behind former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto, who is the clear consensus for her party's nomination and if elected would be the nation's first Latina senator.  Jon Ralston, the premier expert of Nevada politics, talks about Heck's career and explains why, at this point anyway, it's a tossup of a race. And in our "this week in political history" feature, we go back 11 years to 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in waiting, named his former rival, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, as his running mate.  Bob Shrum, the Democratic strategist who was a key player in the Kerry campaign, talks about why Edwards was chosen and what they hoped he would accomplish.  And why the campaign was ultimately disappointed. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License