Once they won the Democratic presidential nomination. But do their endorsements matter now? Unless your name is Barack Obama, not really. A national USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll asked likely Democratic voters whom among the party’s past presidential nominees would have the most influence on their vote today. Two-thirds named former president […] Read more »
The Clinton Legacy: Impeachment Hurts the President
Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican Party suffered a big political penalty for impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998. But that’s not quite right. Republicans paid a modest, short-term penalty, while the costs to the Democratic Party appear to have been larger and longer-lasting. … Two decades ago, the Republicans’ decision […] Read more »
Why it’s back to the future in the Democratic presidential race
The wine track and the beer track are back. The leading candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential race are assembling coalitions of support through the early primary polling that are reminiscent of the patterns that repeatedly shaped the struggles for the party’s nomination in the last decades of the 20th […] Read more »
Democrats Learned the Wrong Lesson From Clinton’s Impeachment
Democrats debating whether to impeach Donald Trump may be misreading the evidence from the last time the House tried to remove a president. It’s become conventional wisdom—not only among Democrats but also among many political analysts—that House Republicans paid a severe electoral price for moving against Bill Clinton in 1998, […] Read more »
Trump’s Pre-Inauguration Favorables Remain Historically Low
President-elect Donald Trump approaches Inauguration Day with a significantly lower favorable rating than his three immediate predecessors received when they were presidents-elect. Trump’s 40% favorable rating is roughly half of what Barack Obama enjoyed before his inauguration in 2009 (78%) and is much lower than the pre-inaugural ratings for George […] Read more »
In Sanders vs. Clinton, New Hampshire replays past splits
The political headlines out of New Hampshire this weekend bear an eerie resemblance to those of September 1999: an underdog senator overtaking a prohibitive front-runner in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. In that case it was then-Sen. Bill Bradley surging ahead of then-Vice President Al Gore. Today it’s […] Read more »