Ron Elving

President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. NPR's Ron Elving says Garland has been held up as an "exemplar of the kind of person who ought to be" in these positions.

With the latest round of voting, we can see a trajectory and a timetable for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to reach their goals: amassing the needed number of delegates before convention time.

The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates await results in the Ohio and North Carolina primary contests.

The consensus going into Tuesday's primaries is that last week's confrontations at Trump events will alienate some potential supporters but also galvanize the heart of the Trump movement.

History is in the balance: It has become almost a commonplace to say the coming clash in Cleveland may determine not only the 2016 nominee but the survival of the Republican Party as we know it.

Again and again since 1912, splits between establishment GOP figures and the party's most ardent conservatives have hobbled the party's performance in November.

Although at least one more debate is scheduled for March 21, Thursday's had the feeling of a finale. The themes were mostly policy oriented, with a few tiffs over who's likeliest to win in November.

Despite Clinton's lead in delegates, Sanders' narrow win in Michigan changed the narrative again and raised questions about the reliability of polls in other states where Clinton seems to be ahead.

The latest day of primary voting was bad news for one leading candidate, good news for another and a setback for popular campaign narratives in both parties.

You may have heard that Hillary Clinton was about to extend her Super Tuesday dominance to Mississippi and Michigan, putting the campaign of ...

African-American voters have consistently supported the former senator and secretary of State in the South, says Ron Elving, and that appears to be the case again tonight.

A large turnout among evangelicals didn't stop Trump in the southern state, while a strong performance among African-American voters gave Clinton another win.

In their seventh debate, this time in Flint, Mich., Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders agreed on the root causes of that city's drinking water crisis. They both called for a massive federal intervention and investigation of the lead poisoning there and urged that the state's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, either ...

Voters in five states get their chance to weigh in on election 2016. Caucuses and primaries are being held in Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Maine and Louisiana.

Something is happening in the Republican Party that has not happened in living memory.

The party of unity, tradition, order and hierarchy is breaking apart over one man who personifies the concept of disruption.

Donald Trump's so-far inexorable advance toward the Republican presidential nomination has divided the party. This divide ...

The results of the biggest voting day in the presidential contest thus far may not have been everything that front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had hoped, but they were enough to set the course for the remainder of the nominating season.

And they were surely enough to intensify the ...

On the Republican side, Donald Trump is projected to win in Georgia. For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton takes Georgia and Virginia, while Bernie Sanders won in his home state of Vermont.

Donald Trump is projected to win the Republican primary in Georgia. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Ron Nehring, California chairman for the Ted Cruz campaign and formerly the California GOP chairman.

Polls begin to close in about a dozen states voting in the Super Tuesday primaries.

Washington was actually talking about someone other than Donald Trump on Monday, and that someone was not another presidential candidate. It was Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.

People were talking about Thomas because Thomas was talking. In the Supreme Court chamber, during oral arguments, the 67-year-old Thomas asked multiple ...

With every state that voted in February, the contours of the 2016 presidential election changed. Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada all transformed the landscape in both parties.

On Saturday night, in South Carolina, the Earth moved once again. Hillary Clinton won, as expected, but the breadth and depth of her ...