… Kevin McCarthy’s half-hearted slap on the wrist for [Marjorie Taylor] Greene this week was a measure of the GOP’s limited appetite for constructing a clear boundary against extremism. The likelihood that the majority of Senate Republicans will soon vote to exempt Trump from any punishment for the Capitol riot […] Read more »
How The GOP Chose To Be A White Party
In general, the Republican Party gets between 5 and 10 percent of the Black vote and less than a third of the Hispanic vote nationally. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Clare Malone discusses the series of choices the GOP made, spanning decades, that made it an overwhelmingly […] Read more »
Republicans Need to Get Ready for the Trump Aftershock
This week’s cascade of Republican defections from Donald Trump has plunged the GOP into the deepest general-election divide over its presidential nominee in more than 50 years. The apex of modern GOP general-election conflict came in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, as the tribune of an emerging Sunbelt- and suburbia-based conservative […] Read more »
Goldwater and Trump: Not Two Peas in a Pod
Have you noticed all the comparisons on TV and in print between the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 and the Donald Trump campaign of 2016? It’s true both Goldwater was, and Trump is, the Republican nominee for president. And both could be fairly termed insurgent winners and highly controversial candidates. […] Read more »
Trump Leads Clinton in Historically Bad Image Ratings
Trump and Clinton are currently among the worst-rated presidential candidates of the last seven decades according to Gallup’s long-term “scalometer” trend. In the race to the bottom, however, Trump’s 42% highly unfavorable score easily outpaces Clinton’s 33%. Prior to now, 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater had the highest negative score, […] Read more »
Politics and Polls: Goldwater, Brexit, and The Party Decides
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. Could we see another landslide like this in 2016? Or does today’s political environment make that impossible? Tune in to the first episode of “Politics and Polls” as Professors Julian E. Zelizer and Sam Wang debate this issue […] Read more »