GOP: It's Time to Rebrand to 'Conservative'

Candidates on both sides are doing their best to hide their party affiliation but it's the Republicans who have the most to worry about, writes Nate Silver. "The Democratic brand is marginal in about half the country, but the Republican brand is radioactive in about two-thirds of it ," Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight.com. It might even be time, Silver notes, for the party to consider rebranding itself "the Conservatives."

Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman would probably be in a much weaker position if he had won the Republican nomination in New York's 23rd district upstate, Hoffman writes. The battle there, he notes, shouldn't really be considered a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, but "a fight between the institutional Republican Party and a group of people who feel like the Republican Party may not be worth fighting for." (More Republican Party stories.)