Summary: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in the presidential race, having made it official this week. He's number 15, if you're keeping score as to how many Republicans are running. And he's number one, if you're looking at the current polls in Iowa, home of the first contest in 2016. Chuck Quirmbach of Wisconsin Public Radio notes that Walker joined the race only after he finished with the state budget, a process that caused him more difficulties than expected. Walker's battles with the unions and Democrats are mostly behind him. But a battle over voting rights is in full bloom in North Carolina, site of a federal case that started this week over whether the Republican-run state legislature violated the rights of citizens by passing measures restricting certain voting opportunities. Fifty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act -- and two years after the Supreme Court cut back on parts of that act -- the trial is the focus of voting rights proponents nationwide. Doug Chapin, the director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration at the University of Minnesota, talks about the significance of the case. In our "this week in political history" feature, Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, a former Washington Post White House correspondent, goes back 35 years to the 1980 Republican National Convention and how Reagan used his solid acceptance speech and vice presidential pick in Detroit to bolster his chances against President Carter that year. And John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and White House chief of staff under the first President Bush, talks about his new biography of the 41st president and offers a candid assessment of the good and the bad of the brief Bush presidency. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
