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Stillwater Mining Company, the largest public corporation in Montana and one of the state's largest employers, announced Monday that former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer was elected chairman of the company's board. He will help lead a search to replace the company's longtime CEO, Frank McAllister, several weeks after Schweitzer and three other outsiders were elected to the eight-member board in a takeover attempt.

Former lawmakers are helping their children in so many races this year that we might as well dub next Election Day Take Your Kid to Congress Day.

Don't think it's a done deal that Sen. David Vitter will be Louisiana's next governor; he still has to get through Lieutenant Gov. Jay Dardenne. And Dardenne is making moves to show he's ready for a fight.

Former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez on Friday will launch his first television ad of the general election, emphasizing his military background. "I had a calling from an early age to serve my family's adopted country," Gomez says in the spot after introducing himself in Spanish. The ad does not mention Democratic Rep. Edward Markey, Gomez's opponent in the special election to replace Secretary of State John Kerry.

Trailing badly in the polls, New Jersey state Sen. Barbara Buono, the likely Democratic nominee for governor in the fall, is doing her best to link Gov. Chris Christie to the national GOP. “I didn’t think the Republicans could find anybody that was as out of touch with middle class values as, you know, Mitt Romney was,” Buono told Talking Points Memo earlier this month. “But I think they found somebody in Chris Christie.”

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe has taken a slight lead over Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia's gubernatorial race, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday morning. McAuliffe leads Cuccinelli, 43 percent to 38 percent, with 17 percent of voters undecided, a minor boost for McAuliffe, who has been statistically tied with Cuccinelli in each of the university's three polls this year, while other public polling has shown diverging results.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has purchased TV advertising time for the next two weeks with a Minneapolis station, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission.

Cory Booker is quite popular in Hollywood. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported his week that guests at a recent Los Angeles fundraiser for the Newark Mayor included Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis. He previously has received contributions from directors Ron Howard and Rob Reiner. But Booker's big-name supporters don't only come from the movie-making business: He's also a hit with athletes.

Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii, may not be running for governor of her state, but she's still running against Gov. Neil Abercrombie as she gears up for a 2014 Senate primary.

It must feel good to be drafted to run for office. But it may feel less good to be drafted explicitly as a back-up plan.

Anthony Weiner is still mulling whether to mount a run for mayor of New York this fall, and the former Democratic congressman's latest campaign filings do not indicate any concrete movement in that direction that haven't previously been disclosed.

Who says bipartisanship is dead? Not GOP Rep. Fred Upton or former Rep. Bart Stupak. Upton raised almost half a million dollars last quarter, the largest haul in the Michigan delegation. Nestled amid the political action committees and industry bigwigs who donated to Upton earlier this year is a $500 contribution from Stupak, the Democrat who represented Michigan's Upper Peninsula before retiring in 2011.

In less than a week's time, Democrats in South Dakota went from debating which of their top-tier candidates would run for retiring Sen. Tim Johnson's seat to wondering whether they'll be competitive at all.

Fewer than two months since the Republican National Committee unveiled a series of five recommendations to address inaccurate poll numbers collected during the 2012 election cycle, the RNC is inviting the party's pollsters to their headquarters on Capitol Hill next week.

If you're between the ages of 18 and 24, chances are you registered to vote when you visited the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you're over the age of 65, you probably registered to vote at some other government office.

Those are the findings of a new Census Bureau survey that asked Americans how they registered to vote. As it turns out, younger voters are much more likely to register when they get a driver's license, at their school or university campus, or online.

Contrary to popular belief, which suggests same-day voter registration overwhelmingly helps younger voters -- particularly college students -- sign up to cast a ballot, it turns out that a higher percentage of seniors register on Election Day than younger voters. More than seven percent of voters over the age of 65 said they had registered on Election Day, compared with 5.3 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24.



Midwesterners are the most likely to have registered to cast a ballot on Election Day. Three of the eight states that allow same-day registration -- Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin -- are in the Midwest, where almost 14 percent of voters said they took advantage of those late registration laws. Less than 5 percent of voters in the Northeast, South or West registered on Election Day.

The Census data show that registering at the DMV is by far the most common way we sign up to vote; nearly a quarter of all voters said they had registered while getting a license, a function of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. That law, commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, requires states to make voter registration forms available at the DMV.

The data also show that white voters are two and a half times more likely to register at a county or government office than Asian or Hispanic Americans, while those minority groups tend to register most by mailing in a form.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia allow voters to register entirely online, though that practice is still catching on slowly, according to the Census data. About 5 percent of those between 18 and 44 years old have registered online, and those who have lived in their present home for less than two years are more than three times as likely to have signed up to vote on a computer than those who have lived in a home for longer than three years (Not surprising, given that online registration is still relatively new). Westerners are twice as likely to have registered online as residents of any other region; Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, new Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington are among the 17 states that allow voters to register online, and Hawaii will soon implement online registration.