The Republican establishment went into last week’s off-year elections believing that the tea party insurrectionists who have ripped apart the GOP in recent years would suffer enough damage to force them into some kind of retreat. But no one thinks that happened. The expectation now is that the long-running internal […] Read more »
Victory Is in the Eye of the Beholder in New Jersey, Virginia and Alabama
Tuesday’s election results offer something for everyone. Democrats can look at Virginia and conclude that Republican “extremism” on social issues like abortion, contraception and guns, combined with the deep divisions that appeared in the Alabama 1st District GOP primary results, continue to offer them opportunities for 2014 and virtually guarantee […] Read more »
No Easy Road for Christie
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had a good week. Tuesday brought his easy re-election to a second term, leading to more talk about his enhanced place in the Republican 2016 presidential pecking order. But Tuesday night’s numbers may not tell us as much about Mr. Christie’s 2016 possibilities as some […] Read more »
The GOP Still Hasn’t Figured Out How to Get On With the Tea Party
Postmortems of odd-year and special elections often suffer from overly broad generalizations that push a particular narrative while overlooking any arguments that get in the way. The instant analyses also tend to suffer from the impulse to extrapolate results and divine great meaning, as if they foreshadow the future. I’ll […] Read more »
What Democrats have going for them? Republicans
… Conservatives are already explaining away the Cuccinelli defeat. He was vastly outspent by McAuliffe. He was tarnished the incumbent Republican governor’s ethics scandal. He was hurt by the government shutdown — which was, of course, engineered by Tea Party Republicans. One in three Virginia voters said someone in their household […] Read more »
Lessons for 2014 and beyond from the 2013 Elections
The great thing about elections is that they have a definitive conclusion. People win. People lose. Even so, everyone has a different definition of what the results actually “mean.” Here’s how I see it: CONT. Amy Walter, Cook Political Report Read more »