Slate has just published a new Politics essay from me. It looks at what the losses by Mike Castle and Trey Grayson mean for the possibility of campaign finance reform and election reform legislation in the next Congress. It concludes:

The bottom line is that it when it comes to election reform, it doesn’t really matter whether the Democrats keep the House in November. Without moderates like Castle and Grayson, they will not have the votes to overcome a Senate filibuster and get cracking. This is one of those issues to which few people pay attention until the machines break and the chads hang, or a secretly funded “Swift boat” attack launches, and then everyone wonders why we’re still in a mess. It is going to take hard work and bipartisanship to fix our elections. Both just got a whole lot tougher to come by.