Parties Now See Any Electoral Victory As A Mandate

There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the schism in the Republican Party, with the “Stop the Steal” wing, steadfastly loyal to former President Trump, on one side, and what one Republican pollster referred to me last week as the “reality-based” wing on the other. The […] Read more »

Redistricting in America, Part Four: The West Coast and Southwest

Key Points• Independent redistricting commissions are most common out West.• Democrats currently dominate the House delegations from the West Coast and Southwest, and that is likely to continue.• However, Republicans may be able to make up a little ground, thanks in part to California losing a seat and Oregon gaining […] Read more »

This may be the Democrats’ last chance to recover working-class Whites

The blue-collar barricade looms as the most stubborn obstacle to President Joe Biden enlarging his base of support. … Working-class White voters constituted the bedrock of the Democratic coalition from the 1930s to the 1960s but the party has lost ground among them, largely because of issues relating to race […] Read more »

Why ‘moderation’ doesn’t guarantee electoral success for Biden and the Democrats

There is a general theory of how politics works in the United States right now that goes something like this: Democrats and Republicans advance policy agendas that are covered in a straightforward manner by the media and broadly digested by voters. Based on their views of these agendas, most voters […] Read more »

Democratic leaders are increasingly at odds with their own voters

Democrats are a Shontel Brown party stuck in a Cori Bush world. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a week in which a pragmatic Democratic candidate (Brown) achieved a come-from-behind primary victory against a left-wing Bernie Sanders acolyte (Nina Turner), all while Democratic leaders fell all over themselves to […] Read more »

What some progressive activists fail to realize: Democrats like their party

Mainstream Democrats have been winning a lot of big primaries in 2021. Their latest win came on Tuesday in the primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District special election: local legislator and party chair Shontel Brown – backed by South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton – […] Read more »