Politics isn’t all that complicated. It’s really just math. But, as those of us who were never big fans of the subject in school can attest, sometimes math can be hard.
As I write this on Thursday, the most prominent political figure in America, Republican Kevin McCarthy, has a very big math problem. After multiple rounds of voting, the Republican leader from Bakersfield, California has been unable to find the 218 votes needed to be elected speaker. …
But, argues Mike Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director and progressive political strategist, Republicans’ math problem runs deeper than McCarthy’s failures to find 218 votes. He argues that since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, “we’ve discovered that Trump turns out more people on our side than theirs” in the battleground states. Before 2016, Podhorzer told me, it was Democrats who had the math problem. Midterm elections had been dominated by a whiter, more conservative electorate. Trump’s win in 2016, however, added a new tranche of voters to the electorate. CONTINUED
Amy Walter, Cook Political Report with Amy Walter
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