Summary: The first Republican debate is over and guess who we're still talking about? That's right. Despite the litany of unflattering things Donald Trump has said about women, or his deviance from conservative positions, or his threats to run as an independent candidate, he continues to lead the pack. A longtime associate, veteran GOP strategist Roger Stone, explains Donald Mania. The two of them recently had a falling out, but Stone still supports his presidential bid. He is one of the few people who know Trump well and has lived to tell the tale. If Trump decides to bolt the Republican Party and run as an independent, he's going to have to familiarize himself with state election laws as to get on the ballot. Richard Winger, the editor and publisher of Ballot Access News, describes the hoops an independent or third-party candidate needs to jump through to make it on state ballots. Democrats in Pennsylvania celebrated their big victory last year, the ouster of GOP Gov. Tom Corbett. But they've been having their own problems lately, first with the indictment of Philadelphia congressman Chaka Fattah, and now charges against the state attorney general, Kathleen Kane. Once considered a rising star in the party, Kane is now under pressure by her fellow Democrats -- including Gov. Tom Wolf -- to leave her post. Terry Madonna, a professor of public affairs at Franklin and Marshall College, lays out the legal cases against Fattah and Kane. And in our "this week in political history" feature, we turn to Prof. Julian Zelizer of Princeton University, who talks about the 1980 Democratic convention and the fierce battle between President Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. Photo via Carl Juste/Miami Herald/MCT via Getty Images This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
