Lacking Scott’s self-funding, McCollum has relied on a 527 group associated with him, Florida First Initiative, mostly to run television ads against Scott. The group had raised over $3.8 million, as of Thursday. (Statewide airtime runs at approximately $1 million a week.) While Scott has his own 527, Let’s Get to Work, its funding largely consists of $11 million from one donor — a trust in the name of Rick Scott’s wife.

The Florida First Initiative has taken contributions from groups and industries with interests in state government. In addition, the group has taken contributions from other committees. Two committees, the Florida Liberty Fund and the Freedom First Committee, associated with state Rep. Dean Cannon and state Sen. Mike Haridopolos, respectively, donate to the Florida First Initiative.

A common pattern has emerged: A company will donate to one of those committees and then the committee will transfer a similar amount of money to the Florida First Initiative within a few days. The Freedom First Committee has donated $768,000 to the Florida First Initiative, while the Florida Liberty Fund has donated $975,000.

In addition to those committees, the Florida First Initiative received $600,000 from the League of American Voters, a little-known D.C.-based group associated with former Clinton White House advisor-turned-conservative Dick Morris. The group shares an office with Grover Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform. League of American Voters has run an ad attacking Rick Scott’s tenure as CEO of Columbia/HCA. (League of American Voters did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Chamber of Commerce donated $500,000 to the Florida First Initiative the day it endorsed McCollum. The Chamber Institute for Legal Reform donated $500,000 to the Florida Liberty Fund and the Freedom First Committee, $224,000 of which was donated to Florida First Initiative two days later.

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“It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.”

The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated; Levin glowered over his spectacles.

“Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.”

She was referring to Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, which requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session. Both Levin and McCaskill had scheduled hearings that day for two-thirty. Typically, it wouldn’t be difficult to get colleagues to waive the rule; a general and an admiral had flown halfway around the world to appear before Levin’s Armed Services Committee, and McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Homeland Security Committee was investigating the training of Afghan police. But this was March 24th, the day after President Barack Obama signed the health-care-reform bill, in a victory ceremony at the White House; it was also the day that the Senate was to vote on a reconciliation bill for health-care reform, approved by the House three nights earlier, which would retroactively remove the new law’s most embarrassing sweetheart deals and complete the yearlong process of passing universal health care. Republicans, who had fought the bill as a bloc, were in no mood to make things easy.

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The following senators voted against making English the official language of America

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Amid the Democratic National Convention, Gill urged delegates to reach into their pockets and support pro-gay lawmakers in rural areas, and “eliminate” those lawmakers against gay activism.

“Just a little bit of money goes a long way,” he said.

The public appearance was rare for Gill, but proved to be a fiery one.

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I was thinking about the repercussions of this. Officially, according to my mother, I am entitled to claim minority status on job applications, college applications, anything that gives some advantage, however minor, to minorities. Yet, if I apply for a Latino scholarship, for example, and I walk into the room, they’re gonna think I’m nuts, I’ll almost certainly be rejected, and then I have a case for discrimination. This, to me, is surreal.

Truth is, based on that criteria, I could claim African-American tomorrow. What are they gonna do, research my genealogy to disprove my claims? Then I can sue them for invasion of privacy, slander, and a bunch of other stuff, and the ludicrousness mounts. Ultimeately, it comes down to “You’re just going to have to take my word for it”, and that just plain sucks. It becomes somewhat akin to the Shannon Faulkner situation at the Citadel a few years ago.

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Elizabeth Lake says she has always thought of herself as a Native American.

So two years ago, when filling out a state-government job application that asked her race or culture, she didn’t think twice about checking the box labeled “American Indian.”

She eventually landed a job with the Department of Social and Health Services. But within the first week, a supervisor pulled Lake out of a training session.

“She said she could not visibly determine my race,” recalls Lake, who has long, dark hair, dark eyes and a light complexion.

The supervisor told Lake she had been hired to meet an affirmative-action goal for American Indians, and that if she could not prove her race, the job offer would be withdrawn.

The next day, Lake brought in documents showing her great-grandfather was a member of the Chickasaw Nation.

But her supervisors told her she needed proof that she was a member of a tribe – and that she had a month to produce it.

She didn’t. She lost her job.Lake has since learned she is 1/128th Chickasaw Indian, enough for her to get a tribal-affiliation card, sufficient documentation for the state.

Now she’s suing DSHS.As her case illustrates, running and policing affirmative-action policies can be tricky.

Among the most challenging and uncomfortable tasks is verifying the race and ethnicity of applicants who get jobs through affirmative action.

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Ebbin, a Democrat who is now 44, was happy to oblige. (Full disclosure: in the mid-’90s, Ebbin and I knew each other briefly as colleagues; he sold ads for Washington City Paper, a weekly where I was a reporter.) Using Ebbin’s expertise, the gay donors — none of whom live in Virginia — began contributing to certain candidates in the state. There were five benefactors: David Bohnett of Beverly Hills, Calif., who in 1999 sold the company he had co-founded, Geo-Cities, to Yahoo! in a deal worth $5 billion on the day it was announced; Timothy Gill of Denver, another tech multimillionaire; James Hormel of San Francisco, grandson of George, who founded the famous meat company; Jon Stryker of Kalamazoo, Mich., the billionaire grandson of the founder of medical-technology giant Stryker Corp.; and Henry van Ameringen, whose father Arnold Louis van Ameringen started a Manhattan-based import company that later became the mammoth International Flavors & Fragrances.

The five men spent $138,000 in Virginia that autumn, according to state records compiled by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project. Of that, $48,000 went directly to the candidates Ebbin recommended. Ebbin got $45,000 for his PAC, the Virginia Progress Fund, so he could give to the candidates himself. Another $45,000 went to Equality Virginia, a gay-rights group that was putting money into many of the same races.

In the study, the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit research organization, examined graduation rates for students who entered college in 1999, 2000 and 2001, and found that 51 percent of those identified as Hispanic earned bachelor’s degrees in six years or less, compared with 59 percent of white students.

The researchers also found that Hispanic students trailed their white peers no matter how selective the colleges’ admissions processes.

For example, at what the researchers considered the nation’s most competitive colleges — as a yardstick, they aggregated institutions using the same six categories as a popular guidebook, Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges — the institute calculated that nearly 83 percent of Hispanic students graduated, compared with 89 percent of white students. Among colleges identified as “less competitive,” the graduation rate for Hispanic students was 33.5 percent, compared with 40.5 percent for whites.

In some ways, the report, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, echoed a study prepared seven years ago by the Pew Hispanic Center. Using census data, it described how only 16 percent of Latino high school graduates earned a bachelor’s degree by age 29, compared with 37 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 21 percent of African-Americans.

Like their counterparts at Pew, the American Enterprise Institute scholars found barriers of language and culture as impeding students from Hispanic backgrounds. The institute’s researchers specifically noted that such students’ “familial and social ties to home are particularly strong,” and that university administrators sometimes described white students as “better prepared academically and financially for college.”

But in a statement, Andrew P. Kelly, one of the lead authors, said, “This data shows quite clearly that colleges and universities cannot place all of the blame on students for failing to graduate.” (The researchers note one caveat: the federal data does not account for students who change colleges and then graduate.)

The authors cast their research as a cautionary tale for President Obama, who, they note, “has called for the United States to reclaim its position as the nation with the highest concentration of adults with post-secondary degrees in the world.”

“Given the changing demographics of the United States,” the researchers write, “this target cannot be achieved without increasing the rate at which Hispanic students obtain a college degree.” (In employing the designation “Hispanic,” the researchers note they are following the lead of both the National Center for Education Statistics and the Census Bureau, from which they drew their raw data. The center defines Hispanic as people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.)

The study recommended that colleges adopt an “institution-wide commitment to insuring that all their students graduate,” that college counselors and others disseminate “information about schools that have a successful track record with Hispanic students” and that the government tie aid to colleges “more closely to how well schools serve their students, not simply how many students they enroll.”

But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, central Harlem’s population has grown more than in any other decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population — about 77,000 in central Harlem and about twice that in greater Harlem — is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

In 2008, 22 percent of the white households in Harlem had moved to their present homes within the previous year. By comparison, only 7 percent of the black households had.

“It was a combination of location and affordability,” said Laura Murray, a 31-year-old graduate student in medical anthropology at Columbia, who moved to Sugar Hill near City College about a year ago. “I feel a community here that I don’t feel in other parts of the city.”

Change has been even more pronounced in the narrow north-south corridor defined as central Harlem, which planners roughly define as north of 110th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.

There, blacks account for 6 in 10 residents, but those born in the United States make up barely half of all residents. Since 2000, the proportion of whites living there has more than doubled, to more than one in 10 residents — the highest since the 1940s. The Hispanic population, which was concentrated in East Harlem, is now at an all-time high in central Harlem, up 27 percent since 2000.

Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a resident, “is poised again at a point of pivotal transition.”

Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhood to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space — Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.

Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.

“This place was vacated,” said Howard Dodson, director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Gentrification is about displacement.”

Meanwhile, the influx of non-Hispanic whites has escalated. The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

“There’s a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there,” said Joshua S. Bauchner, who moved to a Harlem town house in 2007 and is the only white member of Community Board 10 in central Harlem. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options.”

In 1910, blacks constituted about 10 percent of central Harlem’s population. By 1930, the beginnings of the great migration from the South and the influx from downtown Manhattan neighborhoods where blacks were feeling less welcome transformed them into a 70 percent majority. Their share of the population (98 percent) and total numbers (233,000) peaked in 1950.

In 2008, according to the census, the 77,000 blacks in central Harlem amounted to 62 percent of the population.

The number of blacks living in greater Harlem hit a high of 341,000 in 1950, but their share of the population didn’t peak until 1970, when they made up 64 percent of the residents. In 2008, there were 153,000 blacks in greater Harlem, and they made up 41 percent of the population.

About 15 percent of Harlem’s black population is foreign-born, mostly from the Caribbean, with a growing number from Africa.

Some experts say the decline in the black population may be overstated because poorer people are typically undercounted by the census, and Harlem has a disproportionate number of poor people. Others warn that proposed development and higher property values may force poor people out, and they say that when the city was the neighborhood’s leading landlord it should have increased ownership opportunities for Harlem residents .

“Gentrification — the buying up and rehabilitation of land and buildings, whether by families or developers, occupied or abandoned — means a rising rent tide for all, leading inevitably to displacement next door, down the block, or two streets away,” said Neil Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Mr. Dodson of the Schomburg Center moved from Riverside Drive to Newark not long ago. He said, “I tell people that I can’t afford to live in Harlem or in New York in the manner I deserve to.”

Other analysts point to the outflow of some blacks and the influx of others as positive evidence that barriers to integration have fallen in other neighborhoods and that Harlem has become a more attractive place to live.

“It’s a mistake to see this only as a story of racial change,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. “What’s interesting is that many African-Americans are living in Harlem by choice, not necessity.”

Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, said, “Harlem has become as it was in the early 1930s — a predominantly black neighborhood, but with other groups living there as well.”

Ronald Copney, a former limousine driver, and his two sisters share a brownstone on West 147th Street that his grandmother bought in 1929. He rents two floors to tenants, one of whom is white.

“This was always a very nice neighborhood,” he said. “In a way, it’s better now as far as property values are concerned.”

Geneva Bain, the district manager of Community Board 10, blamed the economy and the lack of jobs for the dwindling number of blacks.

She acknowledged, though, that white newcomers have sometimes been greeted ambivalently. “Integration is very subjective,” Ms. Bain said. “One person’s fellowship is another person’s antagonism. I am one who thinks that central Harlem has become a better place because of integration.”

Mr. Dodson, the Schomburg Center director, said one source of historic resentment remained: that blacks still accounted for a tiny minority of the area’s property owners.

“There are people who would like to maintain Harlem as a ‘black enclave,’ but the only way to do that is to own it,” Mr. Dodson said. “That having been said, you can’t have it both ways: You can’t on the one hand say you oppose being discriminated against by others who prevent you from living where you want to, and say out of the other side of your mouth that nobody but black people can live in Harlem.”

“The question of whether it’s a good thing or not,” he added. “I honestly can’t make that judgment yet.”

Just a few weeks ago Michael Barone, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned in The Washington Times against “the liberal thugocracy,” arguing that today’s liberals seem to be taking “marching orders” from “college and university campuses.”

But a handful of new studies have found such worries to be overwrought. Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.

If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. (Bruce L. R. Smith is the third co-author of the book.) When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.

“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study.

Their work is often cited by people on both sides of the debate, not least because Mr. Woessner describes himself as politically conservative.

No one disputes that American academia is decidedly more liberal than the rest of the population, or that there is a detectable shift to the left among students during their college years. Still, both studies in the peer-reviewed PS, for example, found that changes in political ideology could not be attributed to proselytizing professors but rather to general trends among that age group. As Mack D. Mariani at Xavier University and Gordon J. Hewitt at Hamilton College write in the current issue, “Student political orientation does not change for a majority of students while in college, and for those that do change there is evidence that other factors have an effect on that change, such as gender and socioeconomic status.”

That may be, said Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason, but those results don’t necessarily mean there isn’t a problem. Mr. Klein, whose research has shown that registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans among faculty in the humanities and social sciences at American colleges and universities, maintains that the focus on the liberal-conservative split is misdirected. Such terms are vague and can be used to describe everything from attitudes about religion and family to the arts and lifestyles, he said.

The real issue, said Mr. Klein, who calls himself a libertarian, is that social democratic ideas dominate universities — ideas that play down the importance of the individual and promote government intervention.

Such “academic groupthink” means that the works of such thinkers are not offered enough, he argues. “A major tragedy is that they’re not getting exposed to the good stuff,” he said, citing the works of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

“Even if we had hard, definite evidence that students weren’t influenced by their professors, there is still reason for great concern about the composition of the faculty,” Mr. Klein added.

K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”

“The conservative critics are inventing a straw man that doesn’t exist and are missing the real problem that does,” he added.

Anne Neal, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which closely follows this issue, agrees that “it is not about left and right.”

Many researchers and critics also agree that a better grounding in American history and politics is important. “It wasn’t too long ago that schools and universities required civic education and American history,” Mr. Fritschler noted. “Almost all of those requirements have evaporated.”

A number of organizations that have a large base of conservative supporters, like Ms. Neal’s council and the National Association of Scholars, have been promoting a return to traditional courses in western civilization and American history.

Mr. Fritschler said that perhaps the most insidious side effect of assumptions about liberal influence has been an overall disengagement on campus from civic and political affairs, and a reluctance to promote serious debate of political issues. If anything, he added, the problem is not too much politics, but too little.