When reports first surfaced last Wednesday that shots had been fired on Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice, Americans expressed shock and horror. And then, many wearily braced for what they knew would happen next: Politics taking over. Data from this month’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that […] Read more »
Four more lessons from this year’s special elections
As Republicans said on Wednesday, check the scoreboard. Four congressional elections have been held in seats vacated by Republicans who joined the Trump administration. All four have been won by Republicans, albeit by single-digit margins. Democrats, who hoped to put up a win to prove that the public was rejecting […] Read more »
Trump’s core voters could suffer most under GOP health bill, but they may not punish him for it
The Senate health-care bill has sharpened the central political question surrounding the 2017 Republican agenda: Will the voters who made Donald Trump president rebel? Like the House health-care bill, the Senate version would roll back Obamacare’s expansion of insurance coverage under Medicaid. While cutting Obamacare’s taxes on the rich, it […] Read more »
Will The Senate Pass Its Health Care Bill?
… Betting markets give roughly even odds that key provisions of Obamacare, such as its employer mandate, will be repealed before the end of the year. I don’t know what probability I’d assign to the bill’s passage myself. But I do think it’s worth pausing to take an inventory of […] Read more »
No Easy Wins for GOP Lawmakers Under Trump
For congressional Republicans in the new norm of the Trump presidency, nothing is easy, and everything is hard. … Part of the difficulty has nothing to do with President Trump. The Republican majorities in the House (55 percent to 45 percent) and Senate are relatively thin, and the House and […] Read more »
NBC/WSJ Poll: It’s Trump’s Base Against Everyone Else
President Trump job-approval rating in the latest NBC/WSJ poll stands at 40% — essentially unchanged from where it was a month ago at 39%. And there’s a fascinating dynamic inside that approval rating: It’s Trump’s base vs. everyone else. Republicans support Trump by an 82%-13% clip, while Democrats disapprove of […] Read more »