Jay Cost is a conservative political analyst and writer who was a prolific staff contributor at The Weekly Standard, where he covered American elections, party politics, and the dynamics of political power throughout the Obama era and beyond. He wrote extensively on congressional races, presidential campaigns, and the shifting coalitions within both major parties. Cost is also the author of several books on American political history, including "A Republic No More" and "The Price of Greatness."
President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 in part on a pledge to “drain the swamp,” to eliminate the corruption that many Americans have come to believe dominates our politics. Here, Hillary Clinton served as a perfect foil, a stand-in for all the politicians who have gone to Washington to do good…
State legislative elections are easily overlooked, but they can carry enormous consequences for policy and politics, even on the national level. Democrats were reminded of this truth the hard way in 2010, when Republicans took control of state governments across the country amid the Tea Party wave.…
No president has been so consistently unpopular so early in his term as Donald Trump. Though there are three years left to improve them, these weak numbers are a bad sign for his reelection prospects. The political betting marketplace PredictIt gives him just 1-in-3 odds of winning in 2020.
Contrary to the dire warnings of Democrats, Republican-backed tax reform has not brought about the end of the republic. Instead, most voters are discovering that their take home pay is on the rise, as the government is withholding less from working Americans.
It is remarkable that the January 20-22 government shutdown was greeted with a collective shrug from the public. Compared to Newt Gingrich’s epic 1995-96 tussle with Bill Clinton and Ted Cruz’s showdown with Barack Obama in October 2013, this one barely registered on the national radar.
'Do you know," Thomas Jefferson wrote tantalizingly to John Adams in the summer of 1815, “that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed, of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia?” Unfortunately for him, Adams never had occasion to read these…
Last month, the New York Times reported what appeared to be a bombshell: The United States Department of Defense had squirreled away $22 million to fund the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This “shadowy” program—run from “the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze,” as…
In the wake of Democrat Doug Jones’s surprise win over Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate, pundits and prognosticators were scrambling to make sense of the new political landscape. The verdict was almost all bad for the Republican party.
Ever since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, book buyers have been treated to the quadrennial offerings of presidential-campaign tell-alls. Many of these offer very little beyond cheap political thrills—White’s 1960 book reads like JFK fan fiction—but the genre is not without…
Republicans in Alabama are facing a nightmare scenario in their upcoming special election—either they elect to the Senate Doug Jones, a Democrat who does not share their values on important issues like abortion, or Roy Moore, a Republican who has been credibly accused of sexual improprieties with…
Having failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, congressional Republicans have turned their attention to tax reform. Given the disappointing track record of the 115th Congress, a victory on taxes is a political must-win. However, the history of tax reform is mostly one of failure and suggests that…
The biggest scandal that nobody is talking about has nothing to do with the Donald Trump White House or the connection between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Russia dossier. It involves New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, who stands accused by the federal government of bribery,…
The biggest scandal that nobody is talking about has nothing to do with the Donald Trump White House or the connection between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Russia dossier. It involves New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, who stands accused by the federal government of bribery,…
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which University of Wisconsin professor William Whitford and a group of plaintiffs (all Democratic voters in the state) contend that the drawing up of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts was an…
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which University of Wisconsin professor William Whitford and a group of plaintiffs (all Democratic voters in the state) contend that the drawing up of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts was an…
Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…
Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…
President Donald Trump’s new willingness to deal with Democratic leaders of Congress has conservatives worried. Is the president really with us anymore? Is he going to help his fellow partisans in Congress hold the line of spending, or is he going to become a Rockefeller-style Republican, cutting…
A year from now will mark the start of the traditional campaign season for the 2018 midterms—which will see all the seats in the House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate up for grabs. Obviously, these contests are too far away to estimate results, but a general outline is coming into…
A year from now will mark the start of the traditional campaign season for the 2018 midterms—which will see all the seats in the House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate up for grabs. Obviously, these contests are too far away to estimate results, but a general outline is coming into…
Since the defeat of the Obamacare repeal effort in the Senate, President Donald Trump has seemed to be on the warpath against the upper chamber. He has made negative comments about a number of Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Some reports suggest he may strike out on…
Last week, insurance giant Anthem announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges in Nevada, leaving most of the counties within the state without even one insurer to cover demand in the individual marketplace. This latest development only increases the pressure on Congress to do something.
Last week, insurance giant Anthem announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges in Nevada, leaving most of the counties within the state without even one insurer to cover demand in the individual marketplace. This latest development only increases the pressure on Congress to do something.
In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other…
In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other…
As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a…
As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a…
The effort by congressional Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare hit a major roadblock last week, as GOP senators on the left and right sides of the caucus declared their opposition to majority leader Mitch McConnell’s latest proposal. It is hard to blame them for their unease. Obamacare was…
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and fellow Republican lawmakers, there has understandably been a debate about the tenor of our political discourse. Is it too nasty? Does heated rhetoric incite violence? Do we all need to tone down the hyperbole?
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and fellow Republican lawmakers, there has understandably been a debate about the tenor of our political discourse. Is it too nasty? Does heated rhetoric incite violence? Do we all need to tone down the hyperbole?
Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…
Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…
Twitter has a remarkable power to make well-credentialed people look like fools. Case in point: Joyce Chaplin, who is theJames Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.
Last week the Washington Free Beacon reported that roughly half of Congressman Luis Gutiérrez's campaign expenditures were paid to his wife, who serves as his campaign manager. What is most noteworthy about this is that Gutiérrez does not really need to worry about campaigning.
President Donald Trump seems to be suffering a political death of a thousand cuts—from anonymous sources throughout the government providing information to the press about his missteps, misjudgments, and misbehavior. The Trump administration and its allies are up in arms, blaming an unprecedented…
President Donald Trump seems to be suffering a political death of a thousand cuts—from anonymous sources throughout the government providing information to the press about his missteps, misjudgments, and misbehavior. The Trump administration and its allies are up in arms, blaming an unprecedented…
Ever since the founding, the people of the United States have been particularly interested in their own history. The first collected edition of the Federalist Papers was published shortly after the originals were first printed. In the early days of the republic, newspapers would print transcripts…
President Donald Trump passed the 100-day mark in office last week. While the West Wing staff tried furiously to spin his executive pronouncements as a demonstration that he has kept his campaign promises, he can so far boast of zero legislative accomplishments of note. Worse, no prospective…
In mid-December, Jeb Bush announced his intention to explore a presidential bid. If he runs and wins the Republican nomination and then the election, he will be the third President Bush in 25 years. That unprecedented prospect has left many wondering: In a republic like ours, is it proper for one…
President Donald Trump passed the 100-day mark in office last week. While the West Wing staff tried furiously to spin his executive pronouncements as a demonstration that he has kept his campaign promises, he can so far boast of zero legislative accomplishments of note. Worse, no prospective…
In the heart of Wall Street, a new statue is causing quite a kerfuffle. Sponsored by State Street Global Advisors, one of the world’s largest asset-management firms, the "Fearless Girl" was installed earlier this year to stand in front of the famous "Charging Bull" in Bowling Green Park, just a…
In the heart of Wall Street, a new statue is causing quite a kerfuffle. Sponsored by State Street Global Advisors, one of the world's largest asset-management firms, the "Fearless Girl" was installed earlier this year to stand in front of the famous "Charging Bull" in Bowling Green Park, just a…
One of the most tedious aspects of our politics is partisan battles over legislative procedure. To hear each side tell it, the opposition never hesitates to employ unprecedented tactics to further narrow political goals at great cost to the republic. Such arguments are almost always disingenuous.…
One of the most tedious aspects of our politics is partisan battles over legislative procedure. To hear each side tell it, the opposition never hesitates to employ unprecedented tactics to further narrow political goals at great cost to the republic. Such arguments are almost always disingenuous.…
After the failure of the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—the House Republican alternative to Obamacare—there was plenty of blame to go around. President Donald Trump pointed his finger at the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the group of 30 or so conservatives who largely opposed the bill, tweeting,…
After the failure of the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—the House Republican alternative to Obamacare—there was plenty of blame to go around. President Donald Trump pointed his finger at the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the group of 30 or so conservatives who largely opposed the bill, tweeting,…
Earlier this month, the Trump White House unveiled its budget blueprint, which shifts federal spending priorities from domestic programs to national defense. The Office of Management and Budget proposed cuts of $54 billion to departments like Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and…
Earlier this month, the Trump White House unveiled its budget blueprint, which shifts federal spending priorities from domestic programs to national defense. The Office of Management and Budget proposed cuts of $54 billion to departments like Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and…
As the Republican alternative to Obamacare winds its tortuous way through Congress, the parallels with the big mistake President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats made eight years ago are unmistakable. Such large changes to society should only be done with a broad coalition, otherwise they…
As the Republican alternative to Obamacare winds its tortuous way through Congress, the parallels with the big mistake President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats made eight years ago are unmistakable. Such large changes to society should only be done with a broad coalition, otherwise they…
Civic dissatisfaction is a widespread, bipartisan phenomenon these days. Polls regularly find that a large percentage of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and confidence in public institutions remains anemic.
Civic dissatisfaction is a widespread, bipartisan phenomenon these days. Polls regularly find that a large percentage of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and confidence in public institutions remains anemic.
Donald Trump declared in a tweet on February 17 that the mainstream press is "the enemy of the American People." This inflammatory remark was greeted by outrage mixed with anxiety. Chuck Todd of NBC's Meet the Press spoke for many journalists when he responded, "This is not a laughing matter. I'm…
Donald Trump declared in a tweet on February 17 that the mainstream press is “the enemy of the American People." This inflammatory remark was greeted by outrage mixed with anxiety. Chuck Todd of NBC's Meet the Press spoke for many journalists when he responded, "This is not a laughing matter. I'm…
Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We'd play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state,…
Yale University last week announced that it will rechristen Calhoun College, named after alumnus John C. Calhoun (class of 1804), the famous and powerful statesman from the antebellum period. Yale president Peter Salovey stated, “The decision to change a college's name is not one we take lightly,…
Yale University last week announced that it will rechristen Calhoun College, named after alumnus John C. Calhoun (class of 1804), the famous and powerful statesman from the antebellum period. Yale president Peter Salovey stated, “The decision to change a college's name is not one we take lightly,…
Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We’d play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state,…
President Donald Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the late Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court seat is bound to provoke yet another political brawl. The conventional wisdom is that this is a bad thing. The increasingly bitter fights over the High Court are a sign that our system of government…
President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the late Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court seat is bound to provoke yet another political brawl. The conventional wisdom is that this is a bad thing. The increasingly bitter fights over the High Court are a sign that our system of government…
For starters, he wants to cut taxes—"big league." The Tax Foundation estimates that the Trump plan would reduce federal revenues by $4.4 to $5.9 trillion over the course of a decade. Under dynamic scoring, whereby the growth of the economy is factored into the analysis, that number drops to…
As a candidate for president, Donald Trump did not offer much in the way of specific policies. Still, based on the handful of details he did present, it is pretty clear he wants to spend money, a lot of money.
Last week, I finally defended my dissertation at the University of Chicago.
January 20 will be a banner day for the Republican party. On the steps of the Capitol, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the nation’s 45th president. In the building behind the ceremony, his party will be ready to enact his program with a sturdy congressional majority. The GOP is in historically…
January 20 will be a banner day for the Republican party. On the steps of the Capitol, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the nation’s 45th president. In the building behind the ceremony, his party will be ready to enact his program with a sturdy congressional majority. The GOP is in historically…
January 20 will be a banner day for the Republican party. On the steps of the Capitol, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the nation’s 45th president. In the building behind the ceremony, his party will be ready to enact his program with a sturdy congressional majority. The GOP is in historically…
With just under a month until Donald Trump's inauguration, many liberals have ratcheted up the hyperbole to the point of derangement. The New York Times editorial board has called for the abolition of the Electoral College, dismissing it as nothing more than an artifact of slavery. This came on the…
Though civic education among the public has sunk to embarrassing levels, there has of late been an explosion in scholarship on the Founding Fathers. The intellectual giants of the revolutionary era are again all the rage among literary types, academic and otherwise.
Though civic education among the public has sunk to embarrassing levels, there has of late been an explosion in scholarship on the Founding Fathers. The intellectual giants of the revolutionary era are again all the rage among literary types, academic and otherwise.
With just under a month until Donald Trump’s inauguration, many liberals have ratcheted up the hyperbole to the point of derangement. The New York Times editorial board has called for the abolition of the Electoral College, dismissing it as nothing more than an artifact of slavery. This came on the…
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised sweeping change in the way Washington functions. He would tell voters that the system is rigged, it's broken, it's run by losers, and only he could fix it. And yet, for all this rhetoric, it is striking how typical his presidential appointments have been: Jeff…
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised sweeping change in the way Washington functions. He would tell voters that the system is rigged, it’s broken, it's run by losers, and only he could fix it. And yet, for all this rhetoric, it is striking how typical his presidential appointments have been: Jeff…
President Barack Obama has declared he might not follow the tradition of ex-presidents refusing to comment publicly on their successors. In a postelection press conference, he said:
President Barack Obama has declared he might not follow the tradition of ex-presidents refusing to comment publicly on their successors. In a postelection press conference, he said:
On November 8, Donald Trump won a decisive victory in the Electoral College, capturing 306 of its 538 votes, more than any Republican in nearly thirty years. Even so, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Ballots are still being counted, but the latest tally by Dave Wasserman of the Cook…
Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side's voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a…
Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side's voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a…
With fewer than 24 hours until Election Day polls open, the race for control of the United States Senate is as tight as can be. Republicans face substantial structural challenges. They are defending more seats this cycle, and the nomination of Donald Trump has turned a winnable presidential…
The presidential race continues to be the main focus of most pundits, but next week the country will vote for the entire House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate. What is the state of play in these races? Over the course of this week, I'm going to outline where things stand, starting…
The Republican National Committee has mishandled the Donald Trump situation from the word "go". Rather than recognizing him for what he was—a toxic interloper who would rain destruction upon the party brand—it instead treated him just like any other candidate.
The Framers of the Constitution envisioned Congress as the keystone of our political architecture, but Americans today do not see it that way. For the last 100 years or so, people have tended to pay almost exclusive attention to the executive. In presidential election years, this means people have…
In a recent essay for Bloomberg entitled "Why Populists Lose Elections," Pankaj Mishra reviews John Judis's new book The Populist Explosion, identifying Donald Trump as a right-wing populist who has riled up disaffected, working class whites. This is reminiscent of a summer essay for the Wall…
The Framers of the Constitution envisioned Congress as the keystone of our political architecture, but Americans today do not see it that way. For the last 100 years or so, people have tended to pay almost exclusive attention to the executive. In presidential election years, this means people have…
Hillary Clinton gave a perfunctory debate performance Wednesday night. Facing criticism for her private email server, her record at the State Department, and the Clinton Foundation, she leaned heavily on tiresome talking points, the kind she has repeated again and again on the stump for 18 months.
Any effort to reform the Republican nomination process is going to have to go through the Republican National Committee, and, by extension, the state parties whose members comprise it.
Political scientists usually define a party as a team united around common principles for the purposes of winning elections.
The Libertarian party seemed to have a once-in-a-generation opportunity this cycle. The public hates both the major-party nominees, and Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, seemed to fill a real niche.
This election has made all the so-called political experts look like fools. Most of us thought that Trump would not enter the presidential race at all, that if he did he could not win the Republican nomination, and that if he nonetheless managed all that, he would still lose to Hillary Clinton in a…
Quinnipiac University released several swing state polls on Monday that were, on balance, good news for Hillary Clinton. She had leads in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—which suggests a fairly comfortable Electoral College win. Yet Donald Trump was shown with a five-percentage point lead…
Since Donald Trump's debate performance on Monday, he and his surrogates have teased the idea that they might attack Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton's past infidelities. Let's put aside the propriety of this attack, and analyze it strictly as a political maneuver. It is dubious whether this would…
This election has made all the so-called political experts look like fools. Most of us thought that Trump would not enter the presidential race at all, that if he did he could not win the Republican nomination, and that if he nonetheless managed all that, he would still lose to Hillary Clinton in a…
After the debate, Donald Trump and his campaign have claimed that the Republican nominee won— according to all the polls. One new press release from Trump's campaign says he "leads post-debate surveys." It's not true. CNN and YouGov gave the win to Hillary Clinton, while the Drudge Report poll,…
Monday evening, Hillary Clinton was the archetypical post-New Deal liberal. Ever confident of the power of the federal government to tinker, she intends to grow the economy out "from the center" by strategically investing in clean energy, new social welfare programs, making the rich pay their fair…
History will not end on November 8, 2016. The next day, the party that loses will pick itself up, dust itself off, and try again—in just 24 short months. That's how politics in a democratic republic works. While claiming that the Battle of Armageddon is upon us helps gin up turnout every two years,…
With the election now a virtual dead heat, conservative opponents to Donald Trump have never faced greater pressure to support him. Capitulation is needed, it is said, because the survival of the republic is at stake. If we allow Hillary Clinton to win the presidency, our constitutional system of…
Saturday we celebrated "Constitution Day", the day (September 17, 1787) when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the final document and sent it off to the states for ratification.
The presidential election has taken up most of the public's attention, but it is not the only interesting political battle this cycle. While the House of Representatives will likely remain in Republican hands, the Senate is up for grabs. The outlook at this point is roughly 50-50 for either party…
There has been a lot of squawking of late from the pro-Trump crowd that #NeverTrump conservatives need to put aside their doubts and support the Republican nominee.
During Tuesday's WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, I made a point that requires some amplification. The polls consistently show that the vast majority of voters—about 130 million in total—do not like either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, who were selected by just over 30 million people. There must be…
Right now, Hillary Clinton has roughly a seven-point lead over Donald Trump in the head-to-head polls, but this shrinks to a five-point lead when voters are allowed to choose somebody else. Third-party candidates (especially Gary Johnson, the Libertarian, and Jill Stein, the Green) are combining…
In this week's magazine, Steve Hayes has an excellent article about how Hillary Clinton's tenure at the State Department intersected with her husband's dealings at the Clinton Foundation. I highly suggest you read the whole thing, but here is the bottom line:
The refrain from Donald Trump backers of late is that the polls are systematically underrepresenting them, thus making it seem like the real estate mogul is behind Hillary Clinton when he is in fact ahead. What to make of this?
Donald Trump looks set to lose the presidential election to Hillary Clinton by a fair margin. But what about Congress?
The national polls paint a grim portrait for the Donald Trump campaign. The current Real Clear Politics average of the two-way polls shows Hillary Clinton with a commanding 6.8 percent lead. While there is still plenty of time left in the campaign, it is difficult to overcome such a large deficit…
Who's in the mood for some good news?
This weekend's ABC News/Washington Post poll was very bad news for the Donald Trump campaign. Not only did it have Hillary Clinton with a comfortable, 50-42, lead over Trump in the head-to-head matchup, it provided more evidence that the Clinton campaign has done a better job corralling the core…
A spate of polls taken over the weekend show Hillary Clinton enjoying a healthy bounce coming out of the Democratic National Convention. This is to be expected. What is unusual is that the Democratic party is substantially more unified than the Republican party. Indeed, the GOP electorate looks to…
Hillary Clinton officially secured the Democratic party’s nomination for president last week, placing her one step closer to the job she has been doggedly pursuing for almost 20 years.
Have you ever stayed at a hotel that was so dingy, dirty, and broken down that, when you returned home, you felt like you just had to take a shower? I did—last weekend, in fact. And this one bears the name of the GOP's nominee for president of the United States of America.
Ted Cruz's speech Wednesday night was an impressive endorsement of conservatism, the Constitution, and liberty—and an equally impressive non-endorsement of Donald Trump. It was, in other words, a conservative version of Ted Kennedy's "Dream Will Never Die" speech, given at the 1980 Democratic…
Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, has published a predictive model of presidential elections for decades. Through three simple factors—economic growth, presidential job approval, and tenure of the incumbent party—Abramowitz explains most of the variation in presidential…
In my last essay, I made the moral case for why the delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland should feel free to reject Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Their function is not to reflexively obey the 45 percent of primary voters who supported Trump, sacrificing their best judgment for the…
The Trump campaign and the leadership of the Republican National Committee are working hard to pressure delegates to vote for Trump. The race is over, they say. The voters have rendered their judgment. Delegates do not have the right to nullify this verdict. Now is the time to rally around Trump…
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on the Republican National Committee's efforts to squelch the "Dump Trump" movement among delegates. The article ended with this ominous line:
Our Constitution distributes power broadly across three branches of government, and the federal, state, and local levels. Yet during presidential campaigns, candidates for offices across the country unite behind their party’s presidential nominee. This person becomes the representative of the…
Donald Trump is on course to be routed at the ballot box in November. He trails Hillary Clinton by 12 points in the latest Bloomberg News national poll, and has only led her in four polls out of thirty three since April, according to Real Clear Politics. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds…
"I'm going to be your champion," Donald Trump declared after he won the California primary last week. "I'm going to be America's champion. Because, you see, this election isn't about Republican or Democrat. It's about who runs this country, the special interests or the people—and I mean the…
Dear Governor Romney,
Since he began his campaign, Donald Trump has been defying the conventional norms of politics. Many smart people thought he would not enter the race at all, for fear he would have to reveal he wasn’t as wealthy as he claimed. Instead, Trump eagerly joined the battle and declared a net worth that…
The 2014 midterm elections were a referendum on Barack Obama’s performance as president. He has done a bad job, and most Americans know it. Accordingly, the American people used the only means they had of making good their disapproval: They elected Republicans.
Now that Donald Trump is the Republican party’s presumptive nominee, there is pressure on conservatives to support him. The people have rendered their verdict, and elitist Republicans should respect the will of the voters, or so goes the much-repeated refrain. But have the people really spoken?…
With Donald Trump the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, conservatives face their biggest crisis in generations. Professional Republicans are mostly boarding the “Trump Train," convinced their self-interest requires party unity, but principled conservatives find the choice between the…
As the Trump campaign steamrolls ahead, most of us are still scratching our heads. How could this have happened? The usual answer focuses on the grievances of the Trump voter: economic anxiety, frustration with the status quo in politics, the desire to see somebody “tell it like it is," and so on.
Writing in the Washington Post, former senator Jim Webb laments the announcement that Andrew Jackson will be taken off the $20 bill, and heaps unwarranted praise upon America's seventh president. Webb writes:
After Ted Cruz won every delegate up for grabs at the Colorado Republican convention, Donald Trump began complaining that the process at such conventions is unfair. His claim is that party insiders should not be making these choices, but rather that the power should be vested with the voters. As a…
With Ted Cruz’s victory in last week's Wisconsin primary, the odds are rising that the Republican party will have a "contested" or "brokered" convention in Cleveland this summer. That presents a host of questions, not only about how such a process would work but whether it would be legitimate.
The end of the Age of Obama. It began with high hopes on a winter’s night in Iowa in 2008 and ended in disappointment on a crisp fall day nearly seven years later.
According to Nate Silver, the current delegate count for the Republican nomination is:
With Super Tuesday just days away, Donald Trump is set to win a large number of contests. However, the delegate math means it is unlikely he will walk away with so many delegates as to make him unstoppable.
Donald Trump looks to be cruising to a solid victory in the South Carolina primary, but there is evidence that his debate performance might have hurt him—at least on the margins. Seven pollsters* have conducted surveys that were in the field mostly after the debate, and the average result is:
Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary, but his coalition in New Hampshire does not appear much larger than what Pat Buchanan garnered in 1992 or 1996. He is pulling in the same basic coalition, which had a ceiling of about 30 percent nationwide.
At a country club (of all places!) in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Monday, Jeb Bush articulated what might be the worst idea for campaign finance reform I have ever heard. John McCormack has the details:
The political “establishment" has become a kind of four-letter word, a catchall derogation of those who maintain the status quo in Washington. Alas, this phrase has come to confuse more than clarify.
Donald Trump sits atop national polls for the Republican nomination, with supporters arguing he is precisely the person to fight special interests, return power to the people, and “make America great again." If he were alive today, James Madison would surely disagree. The writings of the nation's…
In a three-part series on the Trump phenomenon, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics argues that Donald Trump is the avatar of working-class anxieties within the Republican party. As he sees it, Trump is potentially “a more credible Santorum/Huckabee candidate." That's why poll after poll shows, "he…
Over the weekend, Stephen Hayes pointed out that the Jeb Bush campaign has basically “cleared the way for Donald Trump" by spending an inordinate sum against Marco Rubio. Yesterday, from John McCormack, we saw the extent to which this effort has gone—an attack on Rubio's use of a Florida GOP credit…
Donald Trump is not a conservative. He is only recently a Republican. He is losing in the polls to Hillary Clinton. He is mean and abrasive, and he manifestly lacks the temperament to be president of the United States.
The conventional wisdom about Republican presidential nominations goes something like this: Either (1) a single candidate wins Iowa and New Hampshire, then sweeps the rest of the field; or (2) the winner in Iowa fails to take New Hampshire, and we wait a few weeks for South Carolina and Nevada to…
The battle between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has finally begun. A few thoughts on this long-anticipated fight:
After nearly a year of buildup, the Republican nomination process is finally set to begin. What do we know about how things will unfold?
With just over a month until the Iowa caucuses, the Republican nomination field is taking clearer form. Of the original 17 candidates, only 4 can be said to remain in top contention: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson.
If you were to acquire political information only from former and current officials of the Obama administration, you would think the Republican party is borderline seditious. President Obama himself regularly castigates Republican motives as un-American. Last week, in a typical tweet aimed at…
The Trump phenomenon continues apace, immune to the boorishness and ignorance of its avatar. It does not seem to matter what Donald Trump says or does—he continues to lead the Republican field by a wide margin.
The mainstream media, liberal pundits, and even some conservative analysts gave Hillary Clinton high marks for her performance at the October 22 hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and they scored congressional Republicans negatively. The day was widely deemed a huge win for Clinton…
We hear endlessly these days from the left and the right that our political system is “broken.” The left’s principal complaint is that it is too hard to pass their desired legislation. Liberals pine for a parliamentary system, where the majority party in the legislature controls public policy. Our…
Late in yesterday’s Benghazi testimony — well after most of the media declared Hillary Clinton the runaway “winner” — there was an illuminating exchange about her email correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal.
The latest political happenings—the rise of Donald Trump, John Boehner’s surprise resignation as speaker of the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton’s slide against the septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders—remind me of a verse from the old Rolling Stones song “Jigsaw Puzzle”:
By most accounts, Joe Biden is very close to running for president. His entry would shake up the Democratic race. But could he possibly defeat Hillary Clinton?
Judging by the number of House and Senate seats, governorships, and state legislative seats it holds, the Republican party is stronger than at any point since the 1920s. Yet, going by the presidential nomination battle alone, the party is a mess. There are too many candidates, a few of whom are…
The Donald Trump candidacy has inspired a hundred writers to pen a thousand think pieces about the meaning of it all. Is Trump’s surge the sign of a new breed of populism? Is it the Tea Party reborn? Is it the reemergence of the old Ross Perot-Pat Buchanan strand of protectionism? Does it signal a…
Hillary Clinton is a scandalous candidate for president of the United States. Most people acknowledge this, at least judging by her plummeting poll numbers. A raft of stories gives the distinct impression that she and her husband have been running an elaborate pay-to-play operation. Donations to…
Donald Trump’s campaign web page is telling. There is a biography of the candidate, an extensive news page where his clippings are available, a store where one can buy plenty of Trump-branded merchandise, and only one issue brief, on immigration. If this is not the best illustration of his…
With South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from its capitol grounds, state and local Democratic parties seem to have developed an urge to purge. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on an effort to get rid of the party’s founders:
Donald Trump is not going to be the next nominee of the Republican party. The flamboyant businessman has made billions in real estate, but politics is another matter. He manifestly lacks the temperament to be president, and his conversion to the Republican party is of recent vintage. As the field…
Barack Obama is not popular. This plain and simple fact may surprise those who read only legacy journalists, who often elide this inconvenient truth. A recent Associated Press write-up is illustrative:
Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is surging in the polls against Hillary Clinton. A Quinnipiac University survey has him within 20 points in Iowa, while three of the last four polls have found him within 15 points in New Hampshire. Judging by state polls alone, Sanders is in…
In 1969, a young Hillary Rodham was chosen to give a commencement address to the graduating class of Wellesley College, and she used the occasion to deliver some fairly radical remarks. She spoke of her generation feeling “that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including…
It has never been easy to be a conservative in “polite” society, but these days it seems to be getting harder. We live in an age when opposition to liberalism is increasingly deemed illegitimate.
Speaking at the historically black Texas Southern University earlier this month, Hillary Clinton gave a fiery speech on voting rights. She accused Republicans of spearheading “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our…
On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that after 2020, the image of Alexander Hamilton will share a place on the $10 bill with a to-be-determined woman. It has yet to be decided if Hamilton will share each bill with the yet-unnamed woman, or if there will be multiple series of $10 bills…
Writing recently in the Daily Beast, John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, a conservative reform group, offered an interesting proposal for improving our campaign finance system. He suggested that each political donor receive a tax credit worth up to $200:
Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not…
In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of…
Last week, Fox News announced its guidelines for the first debate among presidential contenders endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC). The network plans to invite the top 10 candidates, with the ranking determined by an average of the five most recent national opinion polls before the…
Conservatives have been disappointed with the track record of Republicans in Congress since their 2010 takeover of the House. There have been a few bright spots—the cuts in domestic discretionary spending brought about by the sequester, for instance—but from Obamacare to Iran to taxes to financial…
Hillary Clinton has been an international celebrity for a quarter-century, and since Bill Clinton left office, the two of them have monetized their worldwide renown to a mind-boggling extent. In her last official filing for the State Department, Clinton listed her net worth as between $5 and
At this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama’s comic routine seemed to have some nasty implications about his political opponents. After reviewing the speech in depth, Byron York reads this between the lines:
In The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss details how Richard Nixon’s handlers micromanaged every aspect of his public persona in 1968, to craft an image for a fickle public that had rejected the longtime politician eight years before.
On March 23, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a permanent “doc fix.” Now it heads to the Senate, where it is expected to pass easily. This bipartisan effort will end the yearly ritual of bypassing Medicare reforms imposed by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Much of professional…
Mike Huckabee, who may declare his intention to run for president soon, has some very ill-advised opinions about Medicare and Social Security. In an interview with a small group of reporters, he said the following:
If one were to deny Barack Obama the use of straw-man attacks, misrepresentation of facts, accusations that opponents are operating in bad faith, and other non-sequiturs, one would hear mostly silence coming from the White House. This administration is chronically incapable of having a serious…
Last week, to much fanfare, Glenn Beck declared that he was leaving the Republican party and becoming an independent. During a Tuesday night appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, Beck explained his decision thusly:
Charles Krauthammer articulated a major hurdle that Ted Cruz will face as he runs for the presidency:
Hillary Clinton is a fairly weak candidate for the presidency, in many ways:
In an interview with Vice, Barack Obama struck his favorite pose -- that of disinterested, objective observer on the passing political scene. Asked about congressional resistance to cap and trade, our social-critic-in-chief responded:
On Tuesday, Republican congressman Aaron Schock announced his resignation in the wake of several damaging revelations. Politico reported that Schock billed his campaign for 90,000 miles that he never actually drove. The Chicago Tribune reported that property Schock owned was tied up in a…
Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian regime has spurred furious blowback from liberals. They want the president to cut a deal with Iran, and Cotton’s letter gets in the way; thus, they’ve engaged in a specious fight over inter-branch protocol. Never mind that the president is looking to sign an…
Three recent news items to consider:
Just a few weeks ago, everybody thought Hillary Clinton would cruise to the Democratic nomination. But with recent revelations -- the private email account, the foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation -- where does she stand now?
In Clinton, Inc., Daniel Halper exposes how Bill and Hillary Clinton went about systematically rebuilding their brand in pursuit of a Hillary Clinton presidency. “Clinton, Inc.” is a great metaphor, but it is perhaps the subtitle of the book that is more resonant today: The Audacious Rebranding of…
Today, the Republican nomination process is a muddle. The Washington Post recently christened Jeb Bush the frontrunner, and for good reason. He is pulling in the top Republican talent -- the donors, consultants, and various policy advisors necessary to fund and run a top-notch campaign.
Since the founding of our nation, political defeat has been a catalyst for innovation. Federalist triumphs in 1796 and 1798 prompted the Jeffersonian opposition to develop the first party organization. The collapse of the Whig party, morally ambivalent on the issue of slavery, in the early 1850s…
It is said that history is written by the victors. Maybe so, but in the United States over the last century, history has largely been written by the liberals. This inevitably leads to bias, which inevitably operates on even the most impartial of minds. While most historians try to be fair and…
Michael Brendan Doughtery had an interesting piece at The Week, in which he calls Andrew Jackson “The Worst Great President.” He writes:
Our perceptions of current events are so conditioned by the 24/7 news cycle that we are wont to think of political time in tiny increments. For instance, Barack Obama is up in the polls over the last few weeks, so he is “winning,” in some ephemeral sense. Congressional Republicans are struggling to…
House conservatives complained loudly about the Export-Import Bank during last year’s midterm campaign. The hope was, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, that conservatives could find the will to kill the program -- which, by the way, should be relatively easy. If Congress does…
I have just finished a new book on political corruption. The book takes a broad overview of corruption, across the whole history of the nation, explaining its typical patterns over time.The most pertinent revelation is how the government captures private interests, which in turn capture the…
In last week’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama came across as the ultimate class warrior. His domestic agenda consists of more spending on roads and infrastructure, new entitlement programs for community college and preschool, and tax preferences targeted to low- and…
This item from Mike Allen is simply gobstopping:
News today came that Marco Rubio looks likely to run for president. What to make of this?
President Obama talked about spending a lot of money tonight -- on preschool care, community college, new infrastructure, and a variety of tax preferences for middle- and lower-income earners. All financed by new taxes, primarily on the wealthy.
Traditionally, the new year is a time for reflection on the year that ended and predictions about the one to come. Conservatives had an excellent 2014, as the Republican party gained control of the Senate, won more House seats than at any time since the Great Depression, and made historic gains in…
Last week, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren threatened to derail the omnibus continuing resolution (“cromnibus”) that funds most of the government through the end of the fiscal year. She objected to the elimination of an obscure rule in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law known as “push-out.”…
For responding to a president who defies his constitutional limits, Congress is said to possess four powers: to impeach, to defund, to investigate, and to withhold confirmation of nominees.
After the 2012 presidential election, Republican donors were left scratching their heads, thinking: how could we spend all that money and fall so short?
Early voting in North Carolina is now over, and the results are interesting. One might be tempted to compare early voting in 2014 to 2010, as both were midterms. But the latter was an easy win for Richard Burr, and this year’s battle in the Senate is shaping up to be a close race, much like 2012.
With about a week to go until the midterm election, Republicans stand to make gains in the House and generally hold the line in governorships. The battle for the Senate has been the locus of attention for most people engaged in the campaign.
Since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, immigration reform has been at the top of the national agenda. Of course, very little has come of it—apart from some legally dubious executive actions, as well as a lot of blather from pundits, left and right, who seem to have no understanding of the…
Chuck Todd of NBC News is traveling the country, talking to voters, and generally filing interesting reports. But in his report on Arkansas, he repeats a familiar, and false, trope:
With about three weeks to go until the midterm elections, where does the battle for Congress stand?
Yesterday, Politico’s Manu Raju filed a report on the independent candidacy of Greg Orman, who is challenging Kansas Republican Pat Roberts for a Senate seat. If you follow the race closely, it does not provide much new information: Orman is cagey about where he stands but clearly goes left; he has…
There has not been a liberal coalition in this country broad and deep enough to enact sweeping leftist legislation since 1937, when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, the last of the New Deal reforms. Beginning in 1938 the country began a 20-year shift to the right. And, contra the…
One of the most interesting aspects of the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Ken Cuccinelli was an ad sponsored by the Conservative War Chest tagging McAuliffe as part of the “Gang of Five.” According to the ad, this group -- Democratic party leaders,…
In recent days, Republicans appear to have opened up leads in several key Senate battles, including Alaska,Colorado, and Iowa. Add those to their already established edges in Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia -- and the GOP right now has the lead in about eight…
Pundits throw out all sorts of numbers to explain the Republican defeat in the 2012 presidential election. So here’s our number: $65,000. That is a rough estimate of the household income of the average 2012 voter. Republicans lost because Mitt Romney did not do well enough with this voter or those…
Well, this was predictable. House Republicans last week acceded to an extension of the Export-Import Bank for at least the next nine months. The Export-Import Bank is far from the worst example of government-business cronyism. I just completed a history of American political corruption and actually…
All things being equal, Republicans should feel reasonably good about winning the Senate in seven weeks. They currently hold a polling lead in six Democratic-held seats. They are within five points in another four seats, and mid-September polling often underestimates the position of the ultimate…
Labor Day marks the traditional start of the fall campaign season, and Republicans appear to be in a good position for the upcoming midterm elections. No serious political analyst believes that the House of Representatives is in danger of falling to the Democrats; more likely, Republicans will pick…
The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll came out yesterday and it offers brutal news for President Obama and Democrats. It is worth looking at it in some depth.
Analysts (including myself) have often noted that congressional Democrats have higher favorable numbers than Republicans. Frequently, this is taken to suggest an electoral advantage for Democrats.
By all accounts, 2014 looks to be a very good year for the Republican party. The average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics shows the GOP leading in seven Democratic-held Senate seats, while they are behind in none of their own; the party is also within striking distance in another four…
Toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, a friend of Vice President Bush encouraged him to think carefully about what a Bush presidency should look like. According to Time, Bush responded, “Oh, the vision thing.” Fairly or unfairly, this phrase came to characterize the Bush 41 tenure. Despite…
The rollout of Hillary Clinton’s new memoirs, Hard Choices, was not a resounding success for the former secretary of state. She stuck her foot in her mouth regarding her family’s vast fortune. She had trouble answering questions about her evolution on gay marriage. Critics, on the whole, found the…
A friend of mine and I were discussing Hillary Clinton’s putative presidential candidacy over email, and he flagged for me a YouTube video of a debate from the fall of 2007. In it, Tim Russert queried her thusly:
Writing at the New York Times, Thomas Edsall makes a provocative and counterintuitive argument about earmarks:
Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) has released a new poll of the North Carolina Senate race, featuring Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan squaring off against Republican state house speaker Thom Tillis, with ostensibly good news for the Democrat: She’s up seven points and expanded on…
President Barack Obama’s job approval seems to be slipping again. After a brutal couple of months following the failed launch of HealthCare.gov, the Real Clear Politics average of opinion polls found his approval at 40 percent in December. But the government claimed to have fixed HealthCare.gov,…
Despite Hillary Clinton’s disappointing book sales, and a gaffe-prone publicity tour, she remains the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination. If anything, the last few weeks have only confirmed her advantage. Despite these disappointments and mis-steps, there is no substantial…
On balance the Republican “establishment” has done fairly well this primary season. Its favored candidate in the Nebraska Senate race lost, and of course Eric Cantor went down to defeat, but Thad Cochran, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell all hung on. So, all is right in the world, right?
House majority leader Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss to Dave Brat, an underfunded, virtually unknown challenger, has a simple explanation: Republican voters don’t much care for their own party’s politicians these days. That’s why they keep losing to amateurs and upstarts.
Earlier this year, Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton—now locked in a toss-up Senate race with Democrat Mark Pryor—voted against the farm bill. According to politicos and pundits in Washington, D.C., this is a politically dangerous vote to have cast. This recent article from Politico mentions his farm…
Hillary Clinton is back in the news, facing questions about her health and lingering doubts about what exactly happened in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attack. Meanwhile, some Democrats—Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont most notable among them—have been making noises about challenging…
With enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges now closed, Democrats and their friends in the media are ebullient. Obamacare is an enormous success, they say, and conservatives have been humiliated. On closer inspection, however, things seem decidedly less bullish for President Obama’s signature…
Humana joined the ranks of insurers warning about the potential for large premium increases on next year's Obamacare exchanges. In a conference call discussing its first quarter earning results, Bruce D. Broussard, CEO of Humana, said: "we can see pricing levels anywhere in the single digits to the…
Jeb Bush’s recent musings on a possible presidential run—and his comments on immigration, rankling many in the Republican grassroots—sparked a familiar clash. Jeb, the establishment’s preferred candidate, some said, could neutralize the fiery GOP base in 2016. Conservatives shot back that Jeb would…
Since Obamacare “hit” its “enrollment” “target,” Democrats, liberals, and their friends in the press have enjoyed some old-fashioned taunting of Republicans. This would be justifiable if a.) Republicans had destroyed the website that needed fixing or b.) predicted that nobody would sign up for the…
The Hill reports:
What do Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia have in common? For one, none has a city larger than 400,000 people. For another, they all voted for John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. For yet another, they are the most likely places for Republicans to pick up…
It was interesting to juxtapose yesterday's Obamacare celebration with this story from my local newspaper:
Today is the last day of open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges. Last week the administration had announced six million enrollments, with about five days left to go. If they enroll new people into the system at the same rate as they had the previous 10 days, that would put the final, nominal…
When pundits talk about the Republican party’s troubles with the “nonwhite” vote, they usually mean the Latino vote. There are reasons for this. In 2004 George W. Bush won an estimated 44 percent of the Latino vote; in 2012 Mitt Romney won just 27 percent. What’s more, the Latino share of the…
"Ready for Hillary” is the rather ominous name given to the super-PAC working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s putative presidential campaign. One group that appears to be ready for Hillary, according to the Hill, is the vast array of lobbyists known as K Street:
Another week, another Obamacare delay, improvised by the administration. The latest is particularly laughable. It seems the administration miscalculated when it first decided to delay Obamacare’s mandated minimum coverage requirements for health insurance. According to the Hill: “A one-year…
Historically, potent third parties or outside political movements have had one of two origins. On the one hand, they were driven by powerful personalities who did not fit cleanly within either of the major parties: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), George Wallace (1968), and H. Ross Perot (1992, 1996) are…
On February 4 the Congressional Budget Office dropped a bombshell. Analysts there found that Obamacare’s structure will create an enormous implicit tax on work, such that people on the lower end of the economic scale will have an incentive to quit their jobs or scale back to part time to maximize…
Last month, the House Republican leadership released its guiding principles on immigration reform. While mostly boilerplate, the document suggests that the House GOP envisions a bill similar to last year’s Senate compromise spearheaded by Marco Rubio: enhanced border security in exchange for…
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that enrollment in the Obamacare private exchanges increased by 1,146,071 in January. In December, HHS reported 1,788,000 enrollees in the month of December. That suggests a drop-off of approximately 500,000, or 29 percent. (See…
Barack Obama’s latest State of the Union address was a dreary, tiresome affair—which, to be fair, could be said of most such addresses by most modern presidents. The only real surprise was how he soft-pedaled the problem of inequality. Pre-speech hype had promised this would be the centerpiece…
Another poll shows Hillary Clinton leading the pack of would-be Democratic nominees by an outsized margin. This one is courtesy of ABC News-Washington Post, which has her at 73 percent support among would-be Democratic voters—with Joe Biden trailing at just 12 percent.
To appreciate the Senate race shaping up in Arkansas between two-term incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor and freshman Republican House member Tom Cotton, it’s useful to review the state’s particular variant of Southern politics.
Regularly scheduled elections are a hallmark of the American political system. In 18th-century Britain, the monarch could call new elections on a whim, and our Founders saw in that arrangement a seed of tyranny. The Constitution they designed requires elections for Congress every two years, and the…
In The Price of Politics, journalist Bob Woodward describes the toll that politics took on the presidency and public image of Barack Obama during the budget battle of 2011. Elected as an outsider with little experience in governing and none in executive leadership, Woodward’s Obama is ill-equipped…
The governorship of Virginia has been held by some of the most eminent men in American history: Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, Henry Lee, James Monroe. And now, Terry McAuliffe will sit in their chair. Depressing? Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that for about half a…
At the start of last month’s government shutdown, a mostly overlooked message emanated from the Twitter account of Michelle Obama, informing her followers: “Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited.” The conventions of American…
The recent government shutdown illustrated a lot of political truths. For starters, people are unhappy when the government is shut down, and they naturally tend to blame the party of less government. The media instinctively help them conclude that the Republicans are at fault.
Earlier this month, California congressman George Miller took to the floor of the House of Represent-atives and, in a vitriolic speech, shouted that the Republicans were shutting down the government because of a “jihad” against Obama-care. Miller is a far-left liberal, but he is no backbencher. A…
The findings of the newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are simply brutal for congressional Republicans. Not only are they getting the lion's share of the blame for the government shutdown, but President Obama's numbers have actually improved. Worse, Obamacare's numbers are improving,…
Obamacare remains decisively unpopular with the American people, and most Republicans are staunchly committed to its repeal. And why shouldn’t they be? The ideological core of the bill runs contrary to the vision of limited government, market-based solutions, and individual choice that has formed…
In the wake of last week’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, as first responders were tending the victims, police were searching for more culprits, and the nation’s capital was entering lockdown, President Barack Obama gave a speech. This normally would not be news. After all, the…
Hillary Clinton is the prohibitive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president—just as she was eight years ago today. If she were to succeed this time around, what would her chances be for a general election victory? Obviously, it is far too early to reach anything approaching a…
In conservative circles of late there has been an ongoing conversation about a (seemingly) new approach to governance, “libertarian populism.” Timothy P. Carney, a senior columnist for the Washington Examiner, argues that “conservatives need to turn to the working class as the swing population that…
When he was sworn in for a second term in January, Barack Obama’s political standing was the best it had been in years. His job approval had climbed into the mid-50s—not extraordinary but solid—and he seemed to have the wind at his back as he called for a new era of liberal governance. Six months…
In The Semi-Sovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schattschneider asked the question: Of all the potential political conflicts within society, why do only a few become active? His answer has to do with the power to set the agenda. He wrote, “Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate…
Last week, in remarks about further increasing efficiency in government after having “made huge swaths of your government more efficient and more transparent, and more accountable than ever before,” President Barack Obama said:
In the wake of the 2012 election, Republicans have been treated to seemingly endless prophecies of doom. Many have come from liberal Democrats, who would happily see the demise of the GOP. But more than a few Republicans have also made the case that the party must either change or disappear, and…
With so many scandals swirling around the Obama administration, it is hard to identify which is the most politically damaging for the president. But there’s no doubt which one should trouble constitutionalists the most. The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups raises core…
Former senator and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole had some harsh words for his political party recently. In a Fox News Sunday interview, Chris Wallace asked, “You describe the GOP of your generation as Eisenhower Republicans, moderate Republicans. Could people like Bob Dole, even Ronald…
The news of the Internal Revenue Service targeting Tea Party groups has Americans spooked. We’re supposed to be a republic, in which everyone is treated equally. So how is it that the federal government has abused so egregiously its taxing power, one of the most potent tools at its disposal?
The state of the union today is uneasy, at best. Washington is crippled by gridlock while Americans across the country feel alienated from their government, so much so that the president feels compelled to remind them that the government is “us.” But is it really so, in a meaningful sense? Sure,…
Two recent news items highlight the issue of income inequality in America. First, a study by the Pew Research Center found that the net worth of the upper 7 percent has risen by 28 percent since 2009 while the net worth of everybody else has dropped by 4 percent. Second, a recent poll conducted by…
Earlier this month, President Obama released his fiscal year 2014 budget, which calls for $1.1 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade, cuts of $400 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, and alterations to Social Security’s benefit rate worth about $130 billion.
The 2012 national election continues to be a puzzle. Barack Obama won reelection with a solid 51 percent of the vote, and Democrats picked up 2 Senate seats, expanding their majority to 55-45. Yet the House of Representatives remained in Republican control, 234-201, yielding the divided government…
With the Supreme Court decision upholding President Obama’s health care law last summer and his reelection in November, liberals are triumphant, convinced that Obamacare is here to stay. When pressed on this matter, they point to the political success of Medicare to show how quickly new…
This week Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee is set to release its fiscal year 2014 budget, which promises to balance Uncle Sam’s books in 10 years. Ryan’s offering will elicit lamentations from the usual quarters of the mainstream media: House Republicans have lurched sharply to the right,…
The recent inaugural festivities would have seemed more than a little strange to the Framers of the Constitution, had they been on hand to see the show. After all, here was their “republic” unified in celebration of vast executive powers being vested in a single human being. Did they not wage a…
Last week the 113th Congress met for the first time, with Republicans in control of the House and Democrats in charge of the Senate. The Obama administration is optimistic that it can work its will over this legislature, driving a hard bargain on sequestration and the debt ceiling and pushing…
For years, liberal pundits and Senate Democrats have talked about altering the filibuster, the procedural rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority to end debate in the U.S. Senate. The device has been a burden for majority leaders for generations, and it dogged Majority Leader Harry Reid and…
Liberal historians of American politics have long held, at least implicitly, a teleological view of our history. The assumption is that America is slowly moving toward a more “progressive” (read: statist) society, and the only thing the right can do is slow the movement. Conservatives cannot stop…
Barack Obama is now the first president in American history to win a second term with a smaller share of the electoral vote, a smaller share of the popular vote, and a smaller aggregate vote than when he was first elected. There are still votes to be counted, but as of this writing he actually has…
With a week to go until the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney has a decided leg up on President Barack Obama.
The Romney campaign seems to have committed to a late push into Pennsylvania, to the derision of Team Obama. The latter sees this as a desperation ploy by a foundering campaign, similar to John McCain’s late entrance into the Keystone State in 2008. Is that right?
Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say you want to do a quality poll of 1,000 likely voters. How many people would you have to contact?
When I started making election predictions eight years ago, I had a very different perspective than I do today. I knew relatively little about the history of presidential elections or the geography of American politics. I had a good background in political science and statistics. So, unsurprisingly…
There is a peculiar divergence between various public opinion polls at the moment. On the one hand, Mitt Romney has built a narrow but durable lead in the national polls, averaging around a 1 percent advantage over the last three weeks. This has cheered the hearts of conservatives everywhere.
Elections these days are determined in part by the swing of unaffiliated voters, which both sides closely contest. They also hinge on how strongly each party’s base turns out to vote.
Naturally, there has been plenty of talk this week about who won the debate. As I mentioned in my own recap, I thought that though Obama won more “points,” Romney did a better job advancing his argument for election.
Some quick thoughts on the debate:
Since about the beginning of President Obama’s tenure, the Gallup poll has generally been one of the least positive polls for the Democratic party. This has prompted outrage and pressure from the left--even from presidential advisor David Axelrod.
So where are we, four weeks out? Romney suddenly finds himself with a lead in the polls, making liberals panicked and conservatives jubilant -- an interesting change of pace.
Most of the post-debate punditry has focused on Barack Obama’s failure to win last week's head-to-head match-up. Both the left and right seem to agree that Obama lost, with disagreement as to why that happened, naturally.
October in an election year tends to be a bad month for incumbents seeking reelection. Going back fifty years, we have six decent comparisons to this cycle – 1956, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1996, and 2004. On average, the late September margin in the Gallup poll of registered voters closed by six to seven…
The most recent RealClearPolitics average of the national polls shows President Obama holding a 3.1 point lead over Mitt Romney, 49.1 to 46.0. Additionally, his net job approval rating is now back to about even, 48.8 approve to 48.5 disapprove.
Republicans, by and large, are frustrated with recent polls of the presidential election because they think Democrats are being oversampled. Many pollsters respond by saying that “weighting” the polls for partisan identification creates its own problems and might end up skewing the polls in the…
Conservatives are growing worried, and Democrats gleeful, about Obama’s lead in the polls, basically for the same reason: it is late in the season (or so it seems), and the incumbent president has a lead. That is a good thing for Obama.
The media tut-tuts about the ebbs and flows of the polls in the presidential race because – well, because that’s what the media does. But, in fact, if you look at every presidential race going back over the years when the incumbent party was defeated or almost defeated – 1948, 1968, 1976, 1980,…
The gap between the way the media characterizes the presidential race and what is actually happening is growing larger by the day. In particular, we see a systematic emphasis on news items that favor the president and a discounting of evidence that disfavor him.
Since arriving on the scene in 2008, psephologist Nate Silver has been widely hailed as a “statistics guru.” That phrase is a good fit for what Silver does. While his writing style often mimics the technical wonkery one sees in political science journals, his work differs from science in important…
As we wait to see the extent and duration of Barack Obama’s post-convention bounce, it makes sense to do a little analytical house cleaning. In particular, a meme developed over the summer that Barack Obama was a strong favorite to win reelection, thanks to a sustained and substantial lead over his…
On Wednesday night, former president Bill Clinton assured us that nobody could have managed the Great Recession better than Barack Obama. He compared Obama’s tenure to the period between 1993 and 1996, when the economy was recovering but people were not yet feeling it. He assured us that, soon…
Last night, Barack Obama proved why he is the most partisan and divisive president in the modern era. Just as he has throughout most of his term, Obama accused the Republican party and American conservatism of being fundamentally un-American--and though he never came right out and said it, he left…
Over Labor Day weekend, three different theories of the 2012 presidential race were offered, all from Team Obama.
With just over two months until Election Day, Barack Obama holds a narrow lead over Mitt Romney in the race for the presidency. The lead is shallow, however, and a careful look at the landscape reveals significant weaknesses for the president. The key question remains whether Romney can capitalize…
Shortly after Paul Ryan’s speech ended last night, the left wing blogosphere and commentariat launched an attack on the vice presidential nominee for his supposed mendacity. They attacked from many angles, but the most substantial assault was on Medicare.
During the primetime speeches last night by Ann Romney and Chris Christie, something peculiar did not happen. Barack Obama’s name was not mentioned. Why?
In every presidential cycle, there is a debate about partisan identification in polling. Conservatives complain about too few Republicans being sampled; pollsters, journalists, and liberals respond by saying it is inappropriate to weigh polls by party identification.
Earlier this week, we received final fundraising totals for the month of July – and the numbers were quite a shocker. The Republican side of the campaign (a joint effort between Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee) raised a total of $101.3 million dollars, and has $185.9 million in…
What to make of Joe Biden’s apparent racial demagoguery this week in Danville, Virginia? Team Obama dismissed it as having nothing to do with race, but this is likely wrong: Biden certainly seemed to be referencing slavery, was doing so in a Southern dialect, and speaking in a city that is roughly…
The conventional wisdom on the state of the 2012 presidential race is that, thanks to his endorsement of the House GOP Budget and his selection of Paul Ryan to be his running mate, Mitt Romney has opened himself up to one of the Democrats' favorite attacks -- fear-mongering over Medicare, or…
Last night on Twitter, New York Times blogger Nate Silver said, "I think Ryan pick ...indicates (a) bearish view from Romney campaign." Silver elaborates here, saying that Romney picked Ryan in part because he believes "he had a losing position" against President Obama.
The conventional wisdom in the presidential race is that President Obama is a clear favorite. We hear this from the pundits in the press, we see it in the InTrade odds, and various predictive models built around the polling averages tell us this.
Over the last six weeks, President Obama has launched a sustained advertising blitz focused primarily in nine swing states – Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Everybody is wondering: has it moved the needle in his direction?
A topic that inevitably receives a lot of focus during election season is the partisan spread of the major media polls. Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats.
Most journalists will swear that, despite the fact they vote Democratic, they treat both sides fairly. Indeed, it is a rare event to read a news article that directly attacks the Republican party or one that praises the Democratic party.
Conservatives are increasingly frustrated by the vagueness of Mitt Romney’s campaign, which perhaps can be best summed up by his non-sequitur of a slogan, “Believe In America.” Romney has to put down some detailed policy proposals to win, the argument goes.
When you see a new poll, what do you look at first? With the general election campaign nominally underway, most people would say that they look at the head-to-head matchup between President Obama and Mitt Romney.
Give the media enough time, and they will spin straw into gold – for Democrats, naturally. And so it has been over the last two weeks since the Obamacare ruling was handed down. We have seen media pundits debate whether the ruling hurts Mitt Romney. We have seen them criticize Team Romney for not…
The Hill reports:
Many conservatives are feeling betrayed by the chief justice's vote to uphold Obamacare. But there's a counterintuitive case to be made that John Roberts's decision is largely a victory for conservatives.
Was today's Supreme Court Obamacare decision a win for conservatives or a loss? It depends on what you were rooting for.
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its ruling on Obamacare--and, in particular, the individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance whether they want it or not.
Over the weekend, Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post published a lengthy review of the Gallup poll’s methodology. It is a technical read, but I encourage you to give it a careful look.
What does Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s smashing victory in the recall election mean for November? Republicans, naturally, are triumphant, seeing proof that conservative enthusiasm is maintaining its 2010 levels as well as a successful trial run for their get-out-the-vote operations in the…
There is a persistent theme in liberal circles that President Obama tried to reason with the Republican party, but they are now so extreme and so politicized that it was all for naught. This is essentially the thesis of the recent book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, which I reviewed here, and…
Political winds are funny things. When they are blowing in from behind, leaders look poised, in control, and powerful. When they are blowing into their face, they look overwhelmed, out of their depth, and utterly impotent. We have seen this time and again over the years with presidents.
President Obama’s gaffe in Friday’s press conference caught the attention of the media, the blogosphere, and the public in general. I thought it was a telling example of how bad this president is at communicating when he is off script, but there is a bigger story to tell.
Remember this, from a few years back?
This write-up from the Hill on a recent Pennsylvania poll is pretty similar to many others these days:
Last night the first draft of the exit polls were wrong. Again. This is actually a pretty common occurrence -- they were off in 2010, 2004, and 2000. Each time leaning toward the Democrats. And don't forget the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic exit poll--those were also off.
The early draft of the exit polls this morning showed a 50-50 tie in the Wisconsin recall race. It's still early, but the best bet is that Scott Walker meets or exceeds his margins relative to 2010, which points to a 5-point win or better. This suggests that the early draft of the exit polls were…
Today is the Wisconsin recall election. If Republican governor Scott Walker prevails, so will conservatives, since his reforms of collective bargaining will survive, and he shall have curbed some of the worst excesses of the American labor movement.
I have been reading A Time for Choosing, the wonderful new e-book from RCP’s Carl Cannon and Tom Bevan about the 2012 campaign, and was really struck by this passage about the Democratic counter-punch to Team Romney. Cannon and Bevan note how Democrats decided to attack Romney as:
The Illinois-based pollster We Ask America reports that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has a 54-42 lead among likely voters in the recall election, despite a strong debate performance by Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett. This figure is identical to its poll taken in late May. Nevertheless, the pollster…
Over at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s website, Christian Schneider notices something funky about that new PPP poll:
Perhaps I’m not in the best position to offer the White House and Democrats the best advice, but, c’mon gang, this just ain’t gonna cut it. From the White House:
The May jobs report came out today and showed an economy barely adding any jobs: Just 69,000 were added last month, and the unemployment rate increased. This follows news yesterday that GDP was revised downward for the first quarter, and a report today that real incomes remain essentially unchanged.
The Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore offers a typically dyspeptic response to my piece about Clintonism in the Democratic party.
Yesterday, we got word that Artur Davis, the former Democratic representative from Alabama’s majority-black Seventh Congressional District and failed 2010 gubernatorial candidate, jumped from the Democratic party to the Republican party. What to make of this?
This campaign season, President Barack Obama has run across the country – often on the taxpayer’s dime – to rail against the privileged station of the wealthy. It is Obama and the Democrats who will cut down on the power of the elite and restore the egalitarian ideals of the country’s founding.…
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its first estimate of jobs created during the month of May. The consensus estimate is for about 150,000 total jobs to have been added to the economy, barely enough to keep up with population growth and certainly insufficient to reduce the…
At the beginning of John Heilemann’s sprawling, 6,500-word essay on Team Obama’s reelection strategy are these telling paragraphs:
Now that Mitt Romney has sewn up the Republican presidential nomination, the general election battle has begun. Team Obama obviously recognizes this; since Romney basically sealed the deal after the Wisconsin primary in April, the president and his team have launched a series of attacks designed to…
I received this smart email from a reader:
In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated his “War on Poverty,” he travelled to the heart of coal country in eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest regions in the country. It was, until recently, most reliably Democratic: In the 20th century when Democrats won the presidency, they almost…
Looking at the electoral map this cycle, the focus has mostly been on Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. But what about the Mountain West? The assumption is that Obama has a virtual lock on Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, but is this valid?
Everybody is worried about the nation’s dismal employment situation, and that worry has prompted news organizations, pundits, market watchers, and others to focus intently upon any and all economic metrics that gauge the problem. On the first Friday of every month, the non-farm payroll report from…
Increasingly, pundits are incorporating statistical models into their analysis of the 2012 election. While I was once a purveyor of such predictive models, I really am not anymore. I don't want to bore you with all the wonky details of my flip-flop, but I do want to give you an example of why you…
There is dissension in the Democratic ranks on President Obama’s reelection strategy. His campaign team has decided to focus on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital – which ended over a decade ago – as an illustration of what a Romney presidency might look like. Loose-lipped Democrats like Harold…
My goodness. This story is just plain nuts:
I really enjoyed the boss's argument for dumping Joe Biden from the ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton:
For some reason, the ABC News/Washington Post poll really gets the tongues wagging. I'm not exactly sure why; as polls go, it is one of my least favorite, in part because it often has a ridiculous tilt toward the Democrats. I suppose because it is the Post poll, and that's the newspaper of record…
Earlier this month, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein made quite a splash with a lengthy piece that, when boiled down to essentials, blamed the Republican party for what’s gone wrong in Washington, D.C. This weekend, they were back with a list of reforms to fix the problem.
The Obama-Biden campaign made quite a splash recently when it released a new web ad called “The Life of Julia.” This unusual piece of campaign propaganda tracks the life of a fictional character named Julia and enumerates the benefits she would receive from the government at successive ages should…
This story got me thinking about the GOP's complicated relationship with the big banks:
In a report called, "Messina dismisses doubts about Obama chances of winning North Carolina," the Hill has this to say about Obama campaign manager Jim Messina:
Since Obama’s flip flop on gay marriage earlier this month (he supported it in 1996, before opposing it for 8 years starting in 2004), there has been a lot of talk about whether he will lose support with African Americans in the fall. African American voters, after all, are both a core Democratic…
Regarding Dick Lugar’s loss to Richard Murdock, the Old Gray Lady wants you to know one thing: He went down because he was just too gosh-darned moderate and sensible for those insane Tea Party Republicans in Indiana and the dastardly outside groups that targeted him:
Like many others, I was quite struck by the images of a partially empty stadium for President Obama’s campaign kickoff rally in Columbus. Media reports put the crowd at roughly 75 percent capacity, with the “nosebleed” sections largely unfilled.
Another terrible jobs report today: The establishment survey reported the economy added just 115,000 jobs. While the unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent, according to the household survey, it was once again for the wrong reason. The unemployment rate is simply a ratio – the number of people…
Writing on Monday, Michael Goodwin blasted Team Obama for its Osama bin Laden reelection campaign ad:
On Wednesday I argued that only a tiny swath of the actual electorate – maybe 10 percent – will be up for grabs in November. Today, I want to answer the obvious follow-up question: what are these voters thinking?
An emerging genre in popular commentary on politics is the use of statistical models to predict election results. Once the domain of academics writing for the scholarly journal P.S., it has become very widespread in recent years. And now, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein offers up his own model:
The conventional wisdom in American politics is that Democrats win poor voters, Republicans win the rich, and the two sides battle over the middle class. That used to be true – indeed, that was basically the case during the earliest Whig-Democratic battles in the 1830s and 1840s, and the…
Sadly, Levon Helm – the drummer for the Band – died this afternoon at age 71. A terrible day for music fans everywhere, indeed. But let’s stop to appreciate Helm's great influence on American music.
Sean Trende has an important column that connects presidential job approval to reelection results. You really should read the whole thing, but here is the big take home point:
Karl Rove had a spot-on column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. He wrote, in part:
Sean Trende wrote an important column yesterday connecting presidential job approval to reelection results. You really should read the whole thing, but here is the big take home point.
Yesterday, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll seemed to confirm the meme that Barack Obama is pummeling Mitt Romney among women, helping the former open up a 7-point lead in the general election horse race.
Many commentators have expressed outrage over the president criticizing Paul Ryan and demagoguing the Supreme Court. Personally, I can't muster outrage. I think it's just a sorry spectacle.
Mitt Romney won a clean sweep Tuesday night, with victories in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Wisconsin. It is the latter state I want to focus on, as it was the most important of the bunch (from a political standpoint), and caps off an interesting back-and-forth between Romney and Rick…
The month of April is a big one in the GOP nomination battle, with major states in the Midwest and Northeast up for grabs, and more than 300 delegates at stake.
This week has really reminded me of Election Day 2004. Liberals, then, were just plain convinced John Kerry was going to be elected president, so much so Bob Shrum actually called Kerry, “Mr. President.” The left had convinced itself Bush was unpopular, Kerry had closed the deal, and everything…
Today, I want to talk about a group of voters in the GOP primary process that I call the “Post Office” Republicans.
Mitt Romney won a solid victory last night in the Land of Lincoln. Let’s take a close look at how he pulled it off.
It is true that Mitt Romney is a weak frontrunner who simply cannot close the deal against two opponents who have both little money and organizational support. (After all, even Bob Dole and John McCain had it in the bag by mid-March.) But one explanation has to do with the primary calendar this…
Rick Santorum won two surprise victories last night in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, and he did so by poaching voters from Newt Gingrich’s coalition. To appreciate this, let’s take a look at some data.
Today is a relatively big day in the GOP nomination battle -- with caucuses in American Samoa and Hawaii and primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. The main story is in the South, though. And although this Southern Super Tuesday has relatively few delegates at stake – just 84 are up for grabs…
Super Tuesday confirmed two trends that had been somewhat evident prior to yesterday. First, while there is an ideological dimension to this contest – with very conservative voters backing Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich and less conservative voters backing Mitt Romney – there is also a regional…
Mitt Romney won solid victories Tuesday night in Arizona and Michigan, two important swing states. How did he do it, and what does it mean?
What happened to Rick Santorum on Wednesday night?
As the nomination battle on the Republican side drags on, with no ostensible end in sight, I can’t help but ask myself: Who is responsible for the Republican party? What person or group is out there to make sure that the GOP does not shoot itself in the foot before November? Who is there to…
Late last month, Gallup published a summary of President Obama’s job approval ratings for 2011. The pollster’s findings were stunning: Eighty percent of Democrats approved of the president’s performance through 2011, as did just 12 percent of Repub-licans. The difference between these two…
Two news stories from this week underscored the most important development in Democratic party politics in the last thirty years. First, from the Washington Free Beacon:
Sarah Palin recently suggested that a brokered convention could be a good thing for the Republican party. This view seconds the attitude of several commentators, who suspect that the GOP’s position could be enhanced by a battle in Tampa over who will be the next nominee.
Some people were surprised by the Obama administration’s ruling on contraceptive provision by religious institutions. I was not one of those people.
Last Friday’s jobs report generated a great deal of chatter among politicos, many of whom viewed it as a turning point for the president in his quest for reelection. I discussed some of the technicals of the report over the weekend, but today I want to step back and look at the bigger picture on…
Mitt Romney won another decisive victory in Nevada over the weekend, his third out of a total of five contests to date. In what might be a surprise to many, he carried the Silver State caucuses with strong support from conservatives – winning 57 percent of the “somewhat conservative” voters and 48…
There's been a great deal of sound and fury over the jobs report. Here are two thoughts that come to mind.
Mitt Romney won a decisive victory last night in Florida, carrying 46 percent of the vote. Let’s take a close look at how he did it.
In his latest Bloomberg column, Ezra Klein pushes back on the GOP critique of the president. As far as he is concerned, the president is really a pragmatic center-leftist.
In his last work, The Responsible Electorate (1966), the great scholar V.O. Key argued against the thinking of political scientists of his age that the mass public was too ill-informed to make wise decisions:
Newt Gingrich won a decisive victory in South Carolina tonight, defeating Mitt Romney by more than 10 points, after having been down by 10 points just a week ago.
You might have noticed recently that Barack Obama’s job approval has ticked up slightly in the last few weeks. What to make of this?
Mitt Romney won a decisive victory in New Hampshire, carrying over 39 percent of the vote, a slightly better result than John McCain’s 37 percent in 2008.
Based off last Friday’s jobs report, Jonathan Chait thinks the answer to the title question might be “Yes:”
Big buzz today over the jobs number. The unemployment rate declined from 8.7 percent to 8.5 percent, a number derived from the so-called "household" survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the "establishment" survey saw an increase of 200,000 jobs.
Republicans all across America like to think of their coalition as the “party of Ronald Reagan,” but have you noticed how frequently the party nominates somebody who opposed Ronald Reagan in 1980?Since Reagan’s last nomination in 1984 the GOP has nominated four men to lead the Republican party into…
Mitt Romney received eight more votes in the Iowa caucuses than Rick Santorum. The media is spinning this as if it matters who actually receives more votes. It really doesn't. This is a battle for delegates -- a long one. It's not a winner take all election to serve as Iowa governor, senator, or…
We are just days away from the start of the caucus and primary season, and while many questions remain, it is nevertheless possible to get a sense of where we have been, where we are going, and what all of this means for the Republican party.
We’re just a few short days away from the Iowa caucuses. And with that in mind, here are five big points to consider about the caucus, and what they mean for the GOP nomination battle.
Clouds so swift, rain won't lift.Gates won't close, railings froze.Get your mind off winter time.You ain't going nowhere. And so begins “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” the opening track of the Byrds’ classic album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and an apt description of the year that was 2011.
We are a little over 10 months from Election Day, and the Christmas hope of many conservatives is that voters next November will deliver a decisive rebuke to President Barack Obama. Obviously, a lot can happen in 10 months. Nevertheless, many of the fundamentals of the race are already in place.…
With last week’s GOP presidential debate, we have virtually come to the end of the pre-primary season--that 12-month process of posturing and policticking between the various candidates leading up to the first contests in January. This cycle’s experience has been a sour one for me, as I have come…
1. I thought Newt Gingrich did not do well. Not just when he defended his (essentially indefensible) work at Freddie Mac, but also when he cited FDR as a model for how he would handle the court. Terrible argument, one that any self-proclaimed constitutional conservative should be concerned about.
One of the classic tropes of romantic movies is meeting atop the Empire State Building or some other famous landmark. That, of course, is what is supposed to happen in An Affair to Remember, when Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr planned to meet there six months after a whirlwind romance. The concept has…
Across a series of news articles (e.g., this story by Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler and this one by Jim Rutenberg), blog posts (e.g., this piece by Thomas Edsall and this one by Josh Kraushaar), and analyses (e.g., this paper by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers), it has become clear how Team Obama…
Throughout this pre-primary season, I’ve argued that the number one priority for Republicans is to find a conservative who can articulate the party’s beliefs in a way that appeals to independent, middle-of-the-road voters. Now that Newt Gingrich has surged to the top of the polls, it is fair to ask…
Earlier this month, I looked at the Democratic campaign argument. Today, I’m going to look more closely at the GOP’s.
We are just a few weeks from the first primaries and caucuses, when Republican voters will begin choosing a nominee. In light of this, I'd like to offer some advice for their consideration -- specifically, four enduring truths of American elections that conservatives and Republicans would do well…
The conventional wisdom about Barack Obama’s path to reelection is that, though the president is unpopular, he will run a strongly negative campaign against the GOP nominee – tarring him as a radical or (in the case of Mitt Romney) an unprincipled flip-flopper. Thus, voters who might not be happy…
There is great consternation among many Republicans over the prospects of a Mitt Romney nomination. I’ve heard various opinions, ranging from “I guess I can live with him” to “I really can’t stand him!” Among the latter camp, there is widespread sentiment out there that the inevitability of the…
Over the last week, Barack Obama’s job approval rating has ticked up slightly, as this graph from RealClearPolitics shows:
What to make of this whole Politico-Cain dustup?
The prospect of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination has many conservatives anxious. AWR Hawkins of BigGovernment sums up the sentiment well when he writes:
Harry Reid said something colossally stupid this week: “The massive layoffs we’ve had in America today—of course, they’re rooted in the last administration—and it’s very clear that private sector jobs are doing just fine. It's the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that's what…
The Obama administration’s abandonment of its efforts to implement the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act underscores something that conservatives have been arguing for two years: Regardless of what you think about more or less government regulation of health care,…
Over the last 50 years, we have seen a remarkable transformation of the American electorate. The percentage of people identifying as Democrats has been cut nearly in half – from 51 percent in 1961 to 30 percent in 2011. Republicans have seen some gains from this, but the biggest jump has been in…
The United States is just over a year from choosing the next leader of the free world. So why was one side of the battle totally hung up on whether Rick Perry would make any gaffes in last night’s debate? Isn’t that more than a little ridiculous? Is this what the framers of the Constitution had in…
What to make of these anti-Wall Street protests? The Democrats seem to think they can tap into the anti-banking sentiment these protesters embody … to attack the Republicans:
Despite continued claims that he’s not running for the White House, credible news outlets continue to report that Chris Christie is still considering running for president. But should he run?
After a well-received debate performance last week, Herman Cain surprised everybody by finishing atop the Florida straw poll. This week, he's finally seeing traction in the polls, and now serious people are starting to take him seriously. It's far past time for us to take a closer look at Cain, who…
Over the last few days, Joan Walsh of Salon and Melissa Harris-Perry of the Nation have been debating if and when a white liberal is being racist for souring on Barack Obama.
We’re just a few months away from the start of primary elections, and the Republican race is clearly shaping up as a two-man contest between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. And, so far, all signs point to Florida being a big deal this cycle, perhaps the decisive battle.
So, it appears that the president has decided to channel the candidacy of Walter Mondale from 1984. Here’s President Obama, on Monday:
A year from now, the presidential election campaign will be in full swing. Obama and the Republican nominee will be touring the country at a feverish pace, trying hard to convince swing voters to go their way. Obviously, we’re still too far out from November 2012 to know what will happen, but we’re…
In a column titled "Democrats Plagued By Ingratitude," Byron York poses these questions:
I couldn’t help but take note of this video:
The president sure seems excited about his jobs bill, as he runs around the country like it’s a political game-changer. Liberals seem pretty jazzed about it, too. They all appear to think that this is just the tonic the White House needed: an obviously excellent proposal that will reveal…
First, we had the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. Now, we have the American Jobs Act, or AJA.
Since Rick Perry has surged to the front of the GOP pack, questions have been raised about his past membership in the Democratic party, which ended in 1989. Ron Paul recently posted a pretty hard-hitting web video blasting Perry for having backed Al Gore in 1988, and Joe Scarborough – MSNBC’s token…
It’s often been said that Barack Obama is an audacious leader. But perhaps it's better to consider the possibility that he is just a politician who lacks a sense of irony, at least when it comes to himself. For example, last weekend in Detroit, the president said:
You don't suppose the White House believes this nonsense, do you?
Earlier this week, Gallup published a sobering graph:
In a recent interview with CBS, President Obama said:
Check out this short clip from MSNBC’s Hardball (h/t Allahpundit):
When discussing the Republican nomination battle, it is critically important to understand the invisible primary that happens between now and the Iowa caucuses in early January and how it will affect the nomination.
With President Obama’s job approval ratings falling to new lows, liberal thinkers are rushing forward to offer the president some free advice.
The following facts about the federal budget deficit are, as far as I know, widely accepted:
Yesterday, I argued there is no reason to expect that a serious Democratic candidate would primary Obama. Today, I’ll make the case that, in the 2012 general election, Obama will get the full, unequivocal support of the left.
Froma Harrop wrote a column this week, arguing that Democrats should primary Obama:
For the last four hours, the president's Twitter feed has been encouraging followers to tweet Republicans with the Obama talking points. Some examples:
Liberals are unhappy with the president over the debt ceiling battle.
The next presidential election is about fifteen months away. And even though the outcome is highly uncertain, we nevertheless can get an early read on the “fundamentals”--and these do not look good for President Obama.
Watching Obama's press conference this afternoon, I was reminded of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech.
Steve Wynn’s comments about the Obama administration caused quite a stir this week. The Las Vegas tycoon said:
As the debt limit battle drags on, my mind has gone back to the two previous instances in the postwar era when a Republican Congress was forced to square off against a Democratic president. The first was in 1947-1948, when Harry Truman was pitted against the 80th Congress. The second was 1995-1996…
Contemporary journalism is much more episodic than systematic, focusing on one-off events and the colorful personalities involved rather than the long-term trends that brought about the current situation. Beltway reporting on the current debt ceiling battle has been no exception, relentlessly…
Pity poor John Boehner: He really, truly is fine with hiking taxes by $800 billion, but his political coalition – hijacked by those deranged Tea Partiers – has moved his party so far to the right that he just can’t agree to such a hike! This is the 10-cent version of Dana Milbank’s latest column,…
On Wednesday, Peter Wehner drew an interesting contrast between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama:
Eugene Robinson is outrageously outraged over Republican perfidy:
In Wednesday’s press conference, Barack Obama said:
The Des Moines Register poll of Republicans caused quite a stir this week. The congresswoman from Minnesota could not have asked for a better piece of news to correspond with her official announcement: It showed Michele Bachmann down just one point to Mitt Romney in Iowa. Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty…
All reports from the Obama campaign suggest strongly that the president and his advisors will run a very intensive base mobilization strategy. There is good reason for this electoral strategy.
Last week, in a piece entitled “The right really, really wants Obama to be Jimmy Carter,” Salon’s Steve Kornacki cited my item on Carter as the prime example of a systematic effort on the right to invoke Carter as a bogeyman to “fill the GOP base with resentment and hostility, which translates into…
In my column on Wednesday, I drew a comparison between the Obama administration and the Jimmy Carter administration of 1977-1981, arguing that both were engaging in political theater in lieu of real power to affect the fundamentals of the American economy. Other analysts have also drawn the…
And so the great machinery of the Obama-Biden campaign has slowly begun now to turn. Consider the following:
Looks like we're in for nasty weather. One eye is taken for an eye... There's a bad moon on the rise. -Creedence Clearwater Revival
With Mitch Daniels having taken himself out of the GOP nomination battle, the field has come into sharp focus, and the view is not good for President Obama and the Democrats.
Earlier this year, Fox News switched its polling firm from Opinion Dynamics to Anderson Robbins Research (D)/Shaw and Company Research (R), a joint bipartisan collaboration.
Lately I have been writing a lot about the Republican nomination battle, and every time I do I receive a good number of emails from readers who are worried that there is no candidate who really enthuses the party. I thought it would be good to dedicate a whole column to the question: when and how…
This "Age of Obama" is exhausting. Ever since Barack Obama stepped onto the stage at the DNC in 2004, it's as if we've all been stuck as bit players in the "Obama Show," which has by now become very tiresome in its seventh season. Everything all the time invariably is interpreted through this…
There is definite discontent among plugged-in Republicans about the GOP field. From what I gather, lots of people feel as though no candidate offers the right combination of conservatism, authenticity, and excitement. Those seem to be the main grievance points.
Reading a short AP story on the new Dick Cheney book, I couldn't help but note this line:
Mitt Romney brings out strong feelings among Republicans. Some see him as the conservative exemplar, the man who can return the party to its pro-business, fiscal conservative roots. Others see him as an “establishment RINO” who says what needs to be said in order to win a political…
On Sunday, Byron York offered a fascinating report on the thinking among Republican insiders in South Carolina:
I have noticed something unsettling in my own life lately: I know a lot of people who are on food stamps or some kind of extraordinary government assistance. The count right now stands around 10 people, which is a lot for a small town denizen such as myself.
The conventional wisdom is that the emerging Republican field for 2012 is a very weak one. However, like so much else in the topsy-turvy age of Obama, the conventional wisdom on this one is completely upside down. The idea of a weak GOP field is almost as ridiculous as a debate about a…
In Obama’s speech on the budget deficit earlier this month, the president went out of his way to praise the free market, but balanced it against the need for collective action sponsored by the government:
On Tuesday, MSNBC’s First Read posed this question:
Picture yourself, for a moment, in a version of John Rawls’s original position. You’ve been tasked with selecting the next president of the United States, only you have no idea what political party he/she is from, or his/her ideological beliefs. You only have knowledge of his/her background and…
Lately, I’ve been staying up late at night because I’m just too stressed over the state of the union. Unable to sleep, I often find myself toggling between scores of Excel spreadsheets, crunching all sorts of numbers to get my mind around the gaping budget deficit that is threatening the country.…
Presidential résumés have run the gamut -- from commanding general of the United States Army (Ulysses S. Grant) all the way down to collector of the Port of New York (Chester A. Arthur). Unfortunately, since George McGovern ruined the presidential nominating system in 1971, there has been a new…
Donald Trump going after Obama on the Today Show strikes me as a big deal. A lot of the attention from the various Trump interviews has been directed at his unsubstantiated comments about Obama’s birth certificate. However, I think there is another angle here worth considering. Put those comments…
A media meme has developed about the economy and the 2012 election: if Barack Obama gets the unemployment rate at or below 8 percent, he will be well positioned to win reelection. To that end, the press greeted last Friday’s jobs report (the addition of 216,000 jobs, and unemployment falling to 8.8…
It's difficult at this point to try to determine who has the best chance to be the Republican candidate in the 2012 election. Still, it's fair to say that Tim Pawlenty could pursue a potentially successful "Goldilocks Strategy" for the nomination.
On the Fox New Sunday panel last weekend, there was an interesting discussion about Obamacare, a year after the controversial bill became law. Nina Easton said:
There are three significant issues or factors that will keep President Obama from forging a coalition of almost-everybody, à la Reagan in 1984 or Johnson in 1964, in the 2012 election. The first is the continuing weakness of the economy. Obviously, jobs remain a problem – and this weakness is also…
In the pre-reform age of presidential nominating politics (1831-1968), when the quadrennial convention was actually a meeting of party leaders to select a nominee, a guy like Tim Pawlenty might have been an ideal compromise choice between various factions of the Republican party. Here is a two-term…
The invisible phase of the presidential campaign is upon us, as prospective GOP nominees are travelling to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, meeting with donors, and of course making appearances on Sunday news programs to deny that they have any interest in the party nomination. And with all…
As the world goes topsy-turvy, what has President Obama been doing lately? One thing is for sure: the president has not been hammering out a compromise on the deficit:
Modern presidents are often most remembered for single, iconic moments. Some are good. FDR's inaugural address proclaimed we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Kennedy's challenged us to ask not what we can do for ourselves, but for our country. Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanded…
On Monday, Jim Geraghty offered a thought experiment about the nascent candidacy of Jon Huntsman:
This item from Reuters caught my eye:
This story from Politico on Monday has been making the rounds:
On Wednesday, Nate Silver – in a piece playfully entitled “Is Mississippi The New New Hampshire?” – presented an interesting analysis of Gallup’s recent data dump on statewide changes in President Obama’s job approval. Silver rightly notes that the president’s job approval – measured against his…
As we all know, Mitch Daniels has advocated a “truce” on social issues. This edition of Morning Jay will offer a defense of that idea, arguing that, given the unique circumstances of next year's election, such a proposition could increase the chances of Republican victory in 2012.
For all of its complexities, American politics is sometimes reducible to a single enduring conflict, symbolized by the historic battle between Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay in the election of 1832.
The Hill rightly characterizes John Thune's talk about a 2012 bid as a "long-winded deflection."
This item from Politico caught my eye:
In the Sunday Washington Post, Chris Cillizza asked an interesting question:
1. Who's Extreme? For decades now, we have been told that the extremism of the conservative movement is so beyond the boundaries of rational political discourse that the Grand Old Party is set to fall into a pathetic, rump minority. Not coincidentally, these warnings have corresponded to the period…
The first poll I look to for presidential job approval is the Gallup poll. I don't know whether Gallup offers the best gauge of presidential support. Indeed, nobody can really know: the poll surveys support/opposition among all adults, and there is no independent arbiter to decide which pollster…
1. Make no mistake: Obamacare is in trouble. For the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to go fully into effect, two things need to happen. First, the Democrats need to hold the presidency and the Senate in 2012. According to Keith Hennessey, Republicans can repeal most of Obamacare via…
Welcome to the return of Morning Jay! From a civic perspective, I have mixed feelings (at best) about the permanent campaign, but from a professional point of view, it's awesome! We're just three months off the last election, and already there is so much to discuss about the next one! For the time…
Some of the commentary I have read from the left on President Obama's State of the Union address seems to praise it in the same way that Ed Kilgore of the New Republic does:
At one point, it seemed as though Barack Obama was set to become the great Democratic leader for the 21st century. Here is a man who was able to ride an impossibly good angle into the White House -- in just four years, he went from being an obscure state senator to president of the United States.…
CNN apparently liked its polling results from earlier this month -- finding the president's approval at 53 percent from January 14-16 -- that it decided to go back into the field ... a week later! They found Obama's approval at 55 percent from January 21-23. I'm not sure why another poll was called…
There's been a noticeable uptick in President Obama's approval ratings this month, which has gotten the media talking about a shift in momentum from the Republicans back to the Democrats. Maybe that's the case. But this poll question from CNN is worth bearing in mind:
The announcement this week that both Kent Conrad and Joe Lieberman will not be seeking reelection is a stark reminder of how polarized American politics is today, as well as why it has gotten that way.
American political parties are loose associations that lack any kind of formal structures. The two parties stretch across three broad categories -- the electorate, the party organization in place to facilitate the campaign, and the government. None of these parts of the party is formally connected…
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty has been doing the rounds lately, promoting his new book and signaling quite clearly that he is going to run for president. He's still pretty much an unknown quantity among the mass public, but I think there are a lot of reasons for conservatives to take a…
Good news for the president. After nearly two years of sliding downward, his job approval numbers have ticked up a little bit. The average of major media polls in December had him clocking in with a job approval of about 45 percent. As of early January, his numbers are up to about 49 percent. The…
Over the weekend, Jeb Bush wrote a very insightful editorial for the Miami Herald:
The mayor of Boston doubts that Scott Brown can lose next year:
In John McCormack's interview with Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee said: "Tell me what election we lost because I gave $15,000 to Guam."
The latest edition of Newsweek says that Jon Huntsman might be interested in running for president:
As legend has it, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillian was once asked what he most feared, to which he responded, "Events, dear boy, events." That, essentially, is the point that the enigmatic but always insightful "Karl," who regularly blogs at HotAir's GreenRoom, made in response to my item…
The Republican National Committee will meet in January to choose a new chairman, and the reporters at Hotline's On Call blog have been keeping a running total of how many votes each candidate has been able to announce publicly. Michael Steele has publicly secured 15 delegates (85 are needed for…
At the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby makes the case for expanding the size of the House of Representatives:
Liberals seem to be pretty gosh darned unhappy with the state of the political alignment these days. They were miserable during the Bush years, and they have grown quite ornery with the Obama administration, despite the fact that the 44th president delivered Obamacare. It's been a long time in the…
The latest CNN/Opinion Research poll of national adults finds Barack Obama's job approval split -- 48 percent approve and 48 percent disapprove. This is up substantially from September, when the poll found 42 percent of adults approving and 54 percent disapproving The shift was enough to prompt a…
Tomorrow's Census Bureau report on House district apportionment is set to be good news for the Republican Party:
Last night's vote in the House of Representatives to extend the current tax rates marked an ironic end for the 111th House of Representatives. As unpopular as she has become, House speaker Nancy Pelosi did an extraordinary job of holding her caucus together for tough votes. However, last night the…
The new numbers from Gallup on congressional job approval are simply stunning. The latest reading finds that just 13 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with a whopping 83 percent disapproving. Almost all of the decline in the last month has been among self-identified…
We've been here before. Back in mid-2007, the political world was swirling with talk of a third-party presidential run by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. And on this week's Meet the Press, the subject came up once again as David Gregory interviewed Mr. Will-He-Or-Won't-He:
We've been here before. Back in mid-2007, the political world was swirling with talk of a third-party presidential run by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. And on this week's Meet the Press, the subject came up once again as David Gregory interviewed Mr. Will-He-Or-Won't-He:
It was reported over the weekend that Michael Steele, the current chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), will not be seeking another term. This is not a huge surprise. Steele had long been criticized for his role as the chairman of the RNC, and already several alternative candidates…
As liberals this week publicly question whether some Democrat should primary President Obama, conservatives and Republicans should resist the temptation to become overconfident. If the 2012 presidential election were held today, President Obama would lose, but he wouldn't lose by much -- and more…
Liberals are not pleased with President Obama's tax deal with congressional Republicans. There have been multiple suggestions that he risks a liberal revolt, and that he could wind up like Jimmy Carter. Matt Bai of the New York Times writes:
I was reminded yesterday of the single greatest public relations coup of the 20th century. Late last month, the Gallup poll asked Americans to evaluate how recent presidents handled their job in the White House. The big news for the political class was that 47 percent of respondents approved of…
Recently, Ed Kilgore took to the pages of the New Republic to say that Obama couldn't be successfully primaried. Writes Kilgore:
Last night the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to censure Representative Charlie Rangel (D-NY), 333-79. Only two Republicans (Peter King of New York and Don Young of Alaska) voted against the censure resolution, but Democrats were more evenly divided, with 170 supporting the…
While the Senate electoral field in 2012 is tilted heavily toward the Republicans (Democrats must defend 23 seats to the GOP's 10), there is at least one Republican who will have to mount a serious reelection campaign: Scott Brown of Massachusetts. PPP reports that he's in good shape, at least for…
Over at NRO, Michael Tanner runs down the big problem with a potential Mitt Romney candidacy:
Well, this is just depressing:
Over the weekend, Texas Republican representative Lamar Smith penned an interesting column for the Washington Post arguing that the GOP's haul among Hispanic voters was "historically robust." Is this conclusion correct? If so, what does it mean, about both 2010 and the future of the Republican…
On Election Night a few weeks back, several races remained outstanding. In the weeks that have followed, all but one of the contests has been settled, with the final one (NY-1) now being tended to by a judge. Let's run down the results.
This story caught my eye yesterday:
The 2010 midterm election saw a historically large percentage of voters claim to be conservative – 42 percent, compared to 32 percent in 2006 and 37 percent in 1994. Unsurprisingly, this has not escaped the notice of liberal analysts who promulgate the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis, which…
Today's entry is the last in our series reviewing the 2010 midterm electoral results. Our final chapter covers the Midwest. This region has been swinging electoral outcomes in the United States for more than 200 years. It was a key element in the Jeffersonian majority from 1800 to 1824, then it was…
Today we continue our post-election overview by looking at the West. Historically, the West has been a fairly volatile region. In the 1880s the Republican Party figured that the West would be a GOP bastion, and accordingly the 51st Congress (1889-90) added four western states to the Union (plus…
Today we continue our post-election review with an examination of the Northeast. Let’s start with a look at the region-wide House map. Here are the results at the end of 2008.
Today's post is the first entry in a four-part series analyzing the 2010 midterm election. My plan is to break it down by region, and I begin today with the South – or more specifically, the 11 states that made up the old Confederacy.
Conservatives nationwide must still be in shock over this news:
One of the most important results of Tuesday's election occurred below the governor, Senate, and House lines on the ballot. The Republicans overwhelmed the Democrats in state legislative races all across the country, picking up more than 500 seats and flipping a dozen and a half legislative…
Last night, the Republicans made history in the House of Representatives. As of this writing, the GOP has been declared the winner in or is winning in 243 House districts. If this number holds, it would exceed any Republican majority since 1946.
There's been lots of talk about what the GOP needs tonight for a big, huge win. One big factor is Republican turnout. Higher than normal - that would be great. Also, the independent vote should come in big for the GOP.
Man oh man, I've been looking forward to this moment.
1. Intro. I have to say that I am of two minds about this midterm election. On the one hand, it is great to see the Republican party in resurgence. And not just in terms of raw politics: The Tea Party movement has given the GOP a sense of meaning and purpose in the domestic political debate that it…
My internal conflict between “Bruce Banner,” who predicts a 1994-style scenario, and “The Incredible Hulk,” who thinks 2010 will be as Republican as anything since the 1920s, has been resolved.
November 2nd is going to be a great day for Republicans. You can feel the good vibrations coming through strong now.
1. Senate Outlook. Last week I wrote that the Senate outlook was still cloudy. This week it has cleared up a bit, as expected. Mixed results for the Grand Old Party. The good news is that the Republican position in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Nevada has firmed up a bit.
1. An Unsustainable Strategy. It’s become increasingly clear that one strategy of the White House this midterm is to amp up African-American and Hispanic turnout, and this has occasionally gone so far as to include pitting ethnic groups against each other.
I have to admit, I’m of two minds about this midterm election. There’s Bruce Banner and there is the Incredible Hulk.
1. Are State Polls Underestimating Republican Strength? Yes, says Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics. He writes:
1. The House. The following chart reviews the independent vote in the polls in the RealClearPolitics average of the generic ballot:
Increasingly, House Democrats from moderate districts are calling on the enormously unpopular Nancy Pelosi not to run for speaker next year. The latest comes from Jason Altmire:
1. Senate Races Get Closer. Public Policy Polling made big headlines yesterday with a poll showing Democrat Joe Sestak in the lead over Pat Toomey in the Pennsylvania Senate battle. Last week, Hotline On Call noticed the NRSC starting to amp up its commitment to Toomey. Late last night, a new…
Another week, another outlying Gallup generic ballot result. Gallup finds the Republicans with either an 11- or 17-point lead, depending upon the likely voter screen. Compare that to a Republican advantage of a little under 7 points in the RealClearPolitics average.
1. Obama’s Dime Store Sociology. This recent story from Politico caught my attention.
Politico reports:
We’re a little more than two weeks out from the election, and now is a good time to check in with electoral prognosticators to see what they think is going to happen.
1. OFA To GOTV? This story from Matt Bai caught my attention:
My goal between now and Election Day is to run through the major regions of the country to explain the political dynamic in each. Yesterday, I looked at the Great Lakes Region. Today, I want to look at the South.
"They're counting on your silence. They're counting on your amnesia. They're counting on your apathy. They're counting on young people staying home and union members staying home and black folks staying home and middle-class families staying home." President Obama made this comment at a rally in…
1. Can John Dingell Be Defeated This Cycle? On Friday, a poll from Rossman/Team TelCom reported that Republican challenger Rob Steele is running ahead of Democratic John Dingell in Michigan’s 15th congressional district. Dingell has been in Congress since 1955, replacing his father who was swept…
1. Will the GOP Take Control of the Senate? It's looking better and better for Republicans in the upper chamber. While some factors are still variable – like how the unusually large number of undecideds break in Illinois – their path to a Senate majority is getting clearer every day.
In a tartly worded column this week, Washington Post writer Dana Milbank bemoans the conservative “cannibalizing…of Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Bennett of Utah.” He runs through the American Conservative Union (ACU) ratings for historical Republican leaders, compares them to…
1. The Latest Sign of the Dem-Pocalypse. Today’s sign of Democratic doom comes from the Penn Schoen Berland polling outfit, which is conducting a series of polls sponsored by The Hill and America’s Natural Gas Alliance (huh?).The first round of polling is of freshmen House Democrats, and the…
1. Obama’s Job Approval in Comparative Perspective. A key factor in the congressional midterm is the standing of the president. Even though he is not on the ballot, the president is seen as the leader of the government and a political party, and candidates from that party are inevitably viewed in…
1. Generic Ballot. Conflicting numbers last night from Gallup and Rasmussen on the generic ballot. Rasmussen finds a tighter race than earlier, with the GOP holding a three-point lead. Gallup, meanwhile, says that if the election were held today, the Democrats might be on track for a 1920-style…
Normally, I use this space to run down various news items related to the campaign, but today I am going to deviate from that practice to offer a snapshot of where I think the midterm battle stands.
1. Obama’s Best Pick. Yesterday, Gallup found that Barack Obama has just a 15-point lead over Hillary Clinton for the 2012 Democratic nomination, with 10 percent undecided. Yikes. Gallup accurately notes:
Earlier this week, Rolling Stone published an extensive interview with President Obama in which the commander in chief went after his Republican opponents with notable venom. The interview sadly confirms what many of us have long known: President Obama's transformation from post-partisan healer to…
1. CNN/Time Oversamples Democrats in California? Yesterday evening, the CNN/Time poll of the California Senate race found Barbara Boxer up nine points among likely voters over Carly Fiorina.
1. Does Linda McMahon Stand a Chance in Connecticut? Rasmussen and Quinnipiac both find the Republican nominee for Senate in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, well within striking distance of Democrat Richard Blumenthal. Can she pull this off, or is this a dead cat bounce?
1. How To Read The Polls, Part 2 of a Series. Here’s another tip for consuming the polls: From this point forward, likely voter polls are really a requirement.
1. Obama's Falling Numbers. Barack Obama’s job approval numbers reached a new low over the weekend in the RealClearPolitics average. Generally, I’ve seen two types of explanations for the president's decline. One is a structural account that asserts that the president is largely a prisoner of…
With the midterm elections less than two months away, the prospects for a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives are very good. But could they be better? Shouldn’t the party put forward a positive agenda, akin to 1994’s Contract with America, if it wants to repeat the sweeping…
1. Goodbye To The Clinton Majority? Recently, Franklin & Marshall College put out a poll of Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, in the Philadelphia suburbs, that shows incumbent Democrat Patrick Murphy down an eye-popping 14 points to his Republican challenger, former Republican…
Recently, I strongly criticized the Obama administration for considering a political ad campaign against the Tea Partiers, suggesting that it was demagogic. They didn’t like that over at the New Republic! Jonathan Chait agreed with my basic take on the midterm dynamic, but said my…
1. A Pledge To America. That’s the title of a leaked draft of the Republican congressional agenda. As it currently is outlined, "A Pledge To America" contains four main sections: a plan to jumpstart the economy, cut spending, repeal Obamacare, and reform Congress. It does a very good job of…
Nate Silver wrote an interesting column this week, arguing that the generic ballot might be underestimating the Democratic position right now. Silver writes:
1. Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia! The blogosphere was abuzz with talk of the PPP poll showing Republican candidate John Raese ahead of Democrat Joe Manchin, 46-43, in the Senate battle in West Virginia, the Mountain State.
1. A Note on the Latest Generic Ballot Numbers. Gallup just released its latest generic ballot number, still of registered voters, and finds the Democrats up one over the Republicans. Generally speaking, the RealClearPolitics generic ballot average has shown some tightening in the last week. Is…
1. Desperately Seeking Strawmen. One of President Obama’s chief rhetorical tricks since he was inaugurated has been to attack strawmen, tendentiously drawn caricatures against whom Obama can contrast himself. Usually, the president does this to create the false impression that he is a centrist –…
The outlook for Republicans in November is very good—at least as favorable as in 1994, and possibly more so than at any point since 1928. Several factors account for the positive environment.
1. Pennsylvania poised to go for the GOP? My goodness, are the polls for Democrats in Pennsylvania just terrible, or what? It’s as if Pennsylvania and Ohio are in a pitched battle to see which one will swing the farthest away from the Democrats this November.
1. NRSC To Back O’Donnell? That was the story yesterday morning. So says NRSC chairman John Cornyn:
Delaware Senate. It wasn’t even close. Republican Christine O’Donnell jumped out to a lead against Mike Castle right away last night and did not look back. Final result: O’Donnell 53 percent, Castle 47 percent, with a little more than 3,500 votes separating the two. Turnout was 32 percent of…
...but not for the Senate seat. But for the House at-large district. Establishment-backed Michele Rollins is behind insurgent Glen Urquhart by about 600 votes out of 51,000 counted so far. Just 5 precincts left to go. No winner called yet.
Early results in Maryland GOP governor's race shows Bob Ehrlich out to an early lead, holding 83 percent of the vote with 6/1829 precincts reporting.
Delaware GOP results, with 14 percent of precincts in: O'Donnell is in the lead by a couple points. Unfortunately, the Delaware secretary of state's site appears to have crashed. Interest is high!
These are the times, in EST, of the polls closing tonight:
For those not concerned about character, the Castle/O'Donnell issue in the Delaware Senate race comes down to a straightforward calculus of electability versus ideology. The implicit argument from some has been that they cancel each other out in this case. Castle is a useless RINO and O'Donnell…
1. Fun Facts about Delaware. The GOP circular firing squad is finally set to begin shooting today, as Delaware will hold its primary vote to decide between moderate Republican Mike Castle and Tea Party Express-backed Christine O’Donnell.
1. Delaware Primary. The stakes are high in Delaware as First State Republicans are set to choose between moderate Republican Mike Castle and conservative, Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell. PPP is now finding a statistical tie between the two, and the battle has turned conservative allies…
1. Latest signs of the Dem-Pocalypse. PPP polls Maine and finds both Democratic incumbents under 50%. In ME-1, Democrat Chellie Pingree leads Republican Dean Scontras 47-38. In ME-02, Democrat Michael Michaud leads Republican Jason Levesque 45-38. This is despite the fact that the Republican…
1. The limits of base politics. Yesterday, I noted the apparent decision of the Obama White House to focus aggressively on mobilizing its base in advance of the midterm. I concluded that the pursuit of this strategy so late in the cycle suggests party leaders recognize that the House is slipping…
What keeps White House adviser David Axelrod up at night? The answer to that question is clearly suggested by the Associated Press:
1. C'mon, you knew this would happen, right? Gallup finds a 10-point shift in party preferences toward the Democrats in the last week, which nobody else found:
Everybody wants to know what will happen in November before November actually comes. To satisfy this demand, there is a cottage industry of statistical modeling that will predict -- with eye-poppingly high degrees of (promised) accuracy -- just what will happen. Nate Silver of the popular…
1. Latest Sign of the Dempocalypse. CNN's generic ballot numbers are just rotten for Democrats. The GOP leads 52-45 among registered voters. Republicans even have a lead of 49-44 among "adults." Unfortunately, there are no cross-tabs breaking down support by party affiliation, but you can't…
Happy Labor Day! Easily the most ironic holiday on the American calendar, today is the day we all celebrate work by ... taking off work!
Liberal Susan Estrich makes her side's case that all is not lost for the Democrats in the lower chamber. She makes some good points, but I have to disagree with this:
In a recent interview with Human Events, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour talks about the rise of Southern Republicans, arguing that it had to do with generational and economic transformations. Liberal bloggers Steve Benen and Steve Kornacki reject this argument in separate posts, arguing instead…
Welcome! Lots of stuff to cover, so let's get to it.
Welcome. This is a regular feature I'll be offering every weekday, first thing in the morning. Basically, what I'll do is flag the most notable stories of the 2010 midterm campaign, and provide my two cents on what's really happening.
American politics is cruelly unforgiving. Political parties work assiduously to take control of the country's governing institutions. The task of governance, however, is an awful one: Eventually, the majority party is overwhelmed by our unruly system and is unceremoniously tossed from power. The…