If it felt like a tsunami was headed for Republicans at the end of the year, now it’s looking more like a normal wave. Under the radar, a flurry of new public polls points to incremental improvements in GOP fortunes and challenges the narrative that has been gelling in most […] Read more »
White Women in the Rustbelt Are Turning on Trump
A massive new measure of state-by-state attitudes toward Donald Trump offers important clues about the pressure points that could tip the 2018 elections. Last week, Gallup released Trump’s average approval rating in all 50 states in 2017, based on more than 171,000 survey interviews it conducted over the course of […] Read more »
A Viewer’s Guide to ‘Special Election Watch’
Today starts a regular feature of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab called “Special Election Watch.” The idea is to follow special elections in 2018 as a guide to the extent of the Democratic swing in the November 2018 election. First, a couple of words of background, and then […] Read more »
Senate 2018: Republicans Still Have Plenty of Targets
The victory by Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) in a special election in December did provide Democrats a potential path to a Senate majority, albeit a narrow one. The Democrats need to defend all 26 of the 34 seats they currently hold, and then flip two of the eight Republican-held seats. […] Read more »
The GOP Catch-22 — Donald Trump
Even if you think Republican leaders in Congress have shown no spine in responding to President Donald Trump’s more outrageous and inappropriate comments, you ought to be willing to acknowledge that GOP legislators are caught in a no-win situation. It’s always tempting to tell incumbents of an unpopular president’s party […] Read more »
Taking back the House will be harder than Democrats think
Democrats are feeling cheery at the prospect that this fall will bring an end to the power outage they suffered in 2016 and the near-irrelevance they have endured since. Conditions look particularly good for taking back the House. Off-year elections in a president’s first term nearly always cost his party […] Read more »