Hispanic Heritage Month lumps together too many Latin American nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures to have any real meaning.

One approach for Mitt Romney would be what opponents might call a double-vanilla ticket, with another white male as vice presidential nominee. Four possibilities come to mind.

Barack Obama is obviously scrambling in his attempt to win re-election. He has proclaimed himself the underdog and has given up his pretense of being a pragmatic centrist compromiser in favor of harsh class warfare rhetoric. But it's worth taking note of what he has squandered.

Pushing government decisions down to the lowest democratic level possible — while protecting basic civil rights — guarantees that more people will have a say in how they live their lives.

In a federal republic, in which none of the GOP candidates on the stage at the Tea Party/CNN debate are currently members of the Senate, and the only two members of the House are backbenchers who often cast lonely votes in dissent, where the candidates come from and what they have had to or have chosen to do makes a significant difference, and becomes a target for opponents.

One constant factor in the 14 contests with exit polls is that Mitt Romney has tended to run best among high-income and high-education voters. His leading opponents -- Newt Gingrich in South Carolina and Georgia, Ron Paul in Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia, and Rick Santorum everywhere else -- have run best among low-income and low-education voters.

In this Bradley Lecture at AEI, Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics.com, places these elections in the larger scheme of American politics and explains how the radical shifts in our politics we've seen in the past few election cycles are really the norm and the previous stability the exception.

A now-irrelevant provision of the Voting Rights Act may soon be no more.