For all the passionate words President Joe Biden delivered in defense of voting rights in his speech yesterday, it was the one word he never mentioned that provoked the strongest response from civil-rights advocates: filibuster. Nowhere in his remarks did Biden utter what may go down as the political word […] Read more »
The Intensity Factor
One of the hardest things to do in politics is to keep your voters engaged and motivated to vote in the midterm elections after your party wins a presidential election. This is especially true if your party controls all three branches of government. In midterm years, only the most committed […] Read more »
How the stained-glass divide is straining American politics
New county-level findings on Americans’ religious affiliations show the two parties glaring across a deep chasm in America’s changing spiritual landscape. The religious fault line between the two sides is only deepening, adding another explosive dimension to the volatile separation between red and blue America. Whites who identify as Christians […] Read more »
Why comparing the 2022 midterm dynamics to 1966 is risky
Democrats lost 47 House seats in the 1966 midterm elections, and that result still “haunts” them, wrote Washington Post columnist Charles Lane recently. But should it? After noting President Joe Biden’s solid job approval numbers and widespread predictions of a strong economic recovery over the next year and a half, […] Read more »
New polling shows Democrats alarmed about crime, too
… The increased salience of crime, as the rate of homicides and other incidents of violence skyrocket across the country, is now a threat to Democrats’ congressional majorities in next year’s midterms. The party’s left-wing activists advanced “defunding the police” as a campaign slogan throughout much of 2020, without much […] Read more »
Why America’s Most Popular Party Isn’t Getting More Done
… It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, with the Democrats relying on wishful thinking and vague threats to fulfill their biggest campaign promises. Didn’t Joe Biden win the Presidency with a 7 million vote popular majority? Didn’t Democrats win both houses of Congress? If there’s anything more unnerving and […] Read more »