Democratic Party

An intra-Democratic fight over border security portends a power struggle in the upcoming Congress.

Why I think his odds have dropped in the last two years.

As a confirmed "Never Trumper," I would be thrilled, if there were no other considerations, to see Donald Trump’s Republican Party get blitzed in these elections and Trump therefore be humiliated.

The casual political observer in Indiana would be confused.

The Democrat turned Republican turned Independent re-registers as a Democrat with 2020 on his mind.

The chairman of the Democratic National Party, Tom Perez, on Tuesday said socialist political candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the "future" of the party.

In Connecticut, a populist pitbull battles a preppy plutocrat.

Americans work hard for their money and expect their tax dollars to be spent wisely. Yet most Americans would be rightly upset to learn that Washington has allocated billions of dollars to be spent on autopilot for programs that are no longer necessary or even in use.

Democrats are largely opposed to Trump’s pick for secretary of state. Do they think they will get someone better?

Millennial women are leaving the Republican Party in droves in recent years, with less than a quarter of younger women voters now identifying as Republicans.

For much of December and early January, Democrats held a double digit lead in the RealClearPolitics average for the generic ballot–a poll that basically asks a national sample of voters which party they intend to vote for in the upcoming congressional elections. Today, that advantage is down to…

Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing for Democrats in special elections this year. Political observers had built up Tuesday’s Alabama Senate vote as yet another put-up-or-shut-up moment for Washington’s minority party, suggesting that a loss by Doug Jones there would be another…

Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would be more likable were it not for the fact they’re craven opportunists.

Democratic euphoria over the party’s sweeping November 7 election triumph in Virginia lasted, undisturbed, for all of four days—until the airing of that week’s installment of Saturday Night Live jarringly altered the mood. SNL, which, in the Trump era, has seemed like the comedy auxiliary of the…

California representative Linda Sanchez, a member of the House minority leadership, says in an interview set to air Sunday on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers that it’s time for a new generation of Democrats to replace Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Thursday, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein argue that the “path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.” Penn…

The firm that created the now-infamous "Russian dossier" on President Trump published before his inauguration is stonewalling investigators who want to know more about its connections to the Democratic Party and the FBI is refusing to confirm if it has documents showing a relationship with the firm.

Six thoughts about Georgia’s 6th congressional district:

In the wake of Wednesday's shooting at a practice for the congressional baseball game, politicians and pundits—appropriately—have made much ado about renewing bipartisanship and mutual respect in politics. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi made statements of unity that were roundly praised; Bernie Sanders…

Arlington, Va.

Amid a tense Democratic debate over whether pro-lifers have any place inside the party, Nancy Pelosi delivered a blunt message to her fellow Democrats: Trump won because of the party's rigid stance on abortion and other social issues.

Former Democratic governor Steve Beshear sat inside a Kentucky diner and drawled a picture of Obamacare's benefits to his state on Tuesday night. Meanwhile, minority congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer attacked President Donald Trump for being a corporate sellout despite his…

Tom Perriello, the one-term Democratic congressman from Virginia, will run for governor in this year's election. Jonathan Martin at the New York Times reports:

"Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month's presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News," according to a report today in the Detroit newspaper. "Detailed…

Andy Puzder, Donald Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary, is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which operates Hardee's and Carl's Jr. When attempting to foist his garbage food on the public, Puzder's company has often employed racy—if not outright sexist—advertising. (Here's an example.)

The New York Times's Jonathan Martin reports that congressman Keith Ellison is "facing increasingly vocal resistance" from influential groups within the party over the Minnesotan's effort to become Democratic National Committee chairman. That resistance apparently includes Jewish organizations like…

Fred Barnes, the WEEKLY STANDARD executive editor, joined the Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel Tuesday for the paper's Opinion Journal webcast. Barnes discussed his recent Journal op-ed about how incoming Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has the unenviable task of defending Barack Obama's…

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:

Over the weekend Ross Douthat had an interesting column about the"crisis of liberalism." "The 2016 campaign was a crisis for conservatism," he writes, "its aftermath is a crisis for liberalism."

In the state of Oregon, the secretary of state is charged with auditing public accounts, managing elections, and administering public records. It's a glorified administrative role, which for whatever reason is an elected office in the Pacific Northwestern state.

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…

We've heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.

A top staffer at the progressive advocacy group Americans United for Change was fired from his post on Tuesday after he was caught on camera claiming the organization paid mentally ill people to instigate violence at campaign events for Donald Trump.

Kenneth Woodward's new book Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama is out, winning a positive review from D.G. Hart in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "His subject is how Americans get religion, and the author's own formation as a Catholic both…

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…

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,…

"Democrats believe that we need to give Americans affordable banking options, including by empowering the United States Postal Service to facilitate the delivery of basic banking services." That's a statement on page twelve of the 2016 Democratic party platform. At first I thought it was a joke—a…

During an appearance on Russia Today, a television network funded by the Russian government, Donald Trump said Thursday that it was "pretty unlikely" that the Kremlin is interfering in the 2016 election, though U.S. intelligence officials have claimed otherwise.

During Barack Obama's tenure in the White House, he has stacked the deck at the National Labor Relations Board with officials sympathetic to unions. (At one point, a unanimous Supreme Court decision ruled that Obama's recess appointments to the board were illegal.) The NLRB has in turn issued all…

Just as the hippies made peace with material prosperity, the Democratic party has increasingly reached out to corporate America. The potential alliance between progressivism and big business could have major implications for American politics. If Republicans fail to offer an optimistic alternative…

Hillary Clinton has built-in advantages in the presidential race. The media's liberal bias that benefits her campaign has been on display for months. After her coast-to-coast fundraising whirl last week, Clinton's war chest is overflowing. She "is pushing the boundaries of fundraising further than…

The low point for Marco Rubio came on March 15 when he was trounced in the Republican presidential primary in Florida, his home state, by Donald Trump, 46 to 27 percent. At that point, it appeared Rubio would finish his Senate career at the end of the year and leave politics behind.

Hillary Clinton has built-in advantages in the presidential race. The media's liberal bias that benefits her campaign has been on display for months. After her coast-to-coast fundraising whirl last week, Clinton's war chest is overflowing. She "is pushing the boundaries of fundraising further than…

I admire Tom Edsall a ton. Like Robert Putnam and Phil Longman, he's smart and honest and interesting and you don't have to be a fellow-traveler to profit from reading him.

Clinton ally and Pennsylvania attorney general Kathleen Kane was forced to resign from her post Tuesday after a jury found her guilty of nine criminal offenses.

Police were called to a meeting of the Multnomah County, Oregon, Democrats late last week. According to the Oregonian, a "scuffle" broke out when a handful of Bernie Sanders supporters, led by one Leigh LaFleur (a prominent Wiccan supporter of the Vermont senator) disrupted the meeting by shouting.…

At this late hour, there is a chance—admittedly a very slim one—that Donald Trump might wish to avoid a catastrophic loss to Hillary Clinton, or that Republican leaders might petition him to step aside as their nominee. There is time enough yet for such a thing to happen, and there is a remote—a…

Democrats would not comment on the circumstances surrounding the appearance of Seddique Mateen, the father of mass shooter Omar Mateen, at a Hillary Clinton rally in Florida Monday.

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…

The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked…

The same day the Hillary Clinton campaign store introduced a new collection of pins designed by various artists and graphic designers, The Forty-Five Pin Project, the collection is already one short. Within hours of listing the collection Thursday, the pins designated by Polish artist Agniezka…

Many sorrowful conservatives observed after President Obama’s speech Wednesday night that Democrats, not Republicans, are the party trumpeting American greatness and optimism this year. To hear some tell it, John Winthrop was in the house. "American exceptionalism and greatness, shining city on…

For generations now, "If They'd Only Listened to Me" has served as the mythical title of the ultimate Washington memoir. The staffer/speechwriter/advisor/ex-close friend of a president/senator/ambassador lands a book contract and agrees to look back over his government service more in sorrow than…

Polls show that we are approaching our date with the November 8 election as a 50-50 America when it comes to choosing between a self-styled billionaire who might initiate a major war if some foreign leader insults him, and a woman whom the FBI has demonstrated has not even a passing acquaintance…

Whether Donald Trump emerges from the Republican convention as the GOP presidential nominee is an open question at the moment. I happen to believe that he will; but it is theoretically possible that he will not—and we might well see a brokered convention, or a fractured convention, in Cleveland…

The Democratic party published a draft of its official platform last week that continues the Obama administration's attack on for-profit higher education. The relevant section of the platform reduces the entire for-profit university industry to the Trump University case, claiming that the school…

Democrats are using their party platform to affirm abortion rights more than ever before.

How bad is Hillary Clinton, really?

Cornel West and James Zogby lobbied to include the term Israeli "occupation" in the official Democratic platform during a meeting of the party's platform drafting committee last week.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders reaffirmed his progressive platform and vowed to stay in the Democratic presidential primary after meeting with President Obama at the White House Thursday. But the self-proclaimed socialist signaled he may be inching towards realizing the calls from many Democrats…

If politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck once said, then The Scrapbook’s corollary is especially germane these days: Politics is the art of getting away with as much hypocrisy as possible. Both parties are prone to this annoying habit, of course; but in the week since the sudden death of…

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid took to the pages of the Washington Post recently to write about Republican efforts to block any nominee to replace Justice Scalia. In drearily predictable fashion, the op-ed is headlined, "For the good of the country, stop your nakedly partisan obstruction."

Hillary Clinton’s loss to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary wasn't as bad as she'd feared. It was worse. Sanders's margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn't a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was…

An ambitious liberal Democrat — some even call him a socialist — is knocking Hillary Clinton for her past support of the Iraq War. His name is not Barack Obama, and the year is not 2008. It's Bernie Sanders, it's 2016, and the presidential campaign's only contender to have voted for the use of…

Democrats have won votes by alleging that Republican positions amount to a "war on women." Yet politicians and pundits are now saying that a constellation of liberal policies favored by Democrats, on issues ranging from entitlements and healthcare to education and the economy, constitutes a war on…