This installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast deals with two mass shootings this weekend, one of which was explicitly tied to white nationalist terrorism. On Saturday, a young white man targeted immigrants and killed at least 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in an attack being investigated […] Read more »
Policy Fissures in the Debates Aren’t What Divide Voters
Hot-button ideological issues took center stage in last week’s Democratic debates, as candidates fought over things like “Medicare for all” and the decriminalization of illegal border crossings. But while Democratic candidates might be divided by ideology and policy, Democratic voters mostly are not. The Democratic electorate is not clearly or […] Read more »
A Fourth Texas Republican Congressman Plans to Retire in 2020
Representative Kenny Marchant of Texas is planning to announce his retirement on Monday, according to two Republican officials, becoming the fourth Republican House member from Texas in recent weeks to head for the exits rather than face re-election in 2020 in a state that is rapidly becoming more competitive. … […] Read more »
Trump Outperformed His Popularity in 2016. That Might Not Happen in 2020.
The specter that most haunts Democrats as we hurtle toward the 2020 election is that Donald J. Trump managed to get himself elected president in 2016 despite terrible, historically unprecedented (for a major-party presidential nominee) unpopularity, as measured by favorability ratios (Gallup had him at 36 percent favorable/61 percent unfavorable […] Read more »
The Republican Party has long been the party of stupid. Now Democrats have joined it.
… Liberated for two years from the compromises demanded of a governing party, Democrats have emerged from the wilderness enamored with a variety of big policy proposals that are deeply unpopular and completely unpractical. … Some Democrats appear to have internalized two contradictory lessons from 2016. They know that Donald […] Read more »
For Democrats, and for Republicans, a summer of discontent
This has been a rough week for Republicans and for Democrats. As the long August recess begins, these are not happy times for either political party. The Democratic presidential candidates put on two nights of debating in Detroit, producing maximum internal bickering and negativity and minimal positive or outward messaging […] Read more »