2022’s Most Unexpected Winners and Losers

Generally, we don’t like to endorse zero-sum views of the world, but it was hard to miss the seesaw effect at play across the political landscape of 2022. So we offer for your amusement (or annoyance, depending on your political priors) 11 sets of paired winners and losers — the […] Read more »

GOP stumbles with independents contributed to midterm woes

… Republican House candidates nationwide won the support of 38% of independent voters in last month’s midterm elections, VoteCast showed. That’s far short of the 51% that Democrats scored with the same group in 2018 when they swept into power by picking up 41 seats. The GOP’s lackluster showing among […] Read more »

What to Watch in 2023

Even as we look ahead to the new year, we can be assured that the political media focus will be trained, as it has for the last five years, on Donald Trump—his continuing legal and political troubles, the ‘reckoning’ within the GOP about the former president’s role in the party’s […] Read more »

‘THE central issue’: How the fall of Roe v. Wade shook the 2022 election

… On Election Day, voters in critical states like Michigan and Pennsylvania ranked abortion — not inflation or crime — as the most important issue in the midterms, according to exit polls. The red wave never arrived. Instead, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate and Republicans, badly underperforming expectations, […] Read more »

The 5 ‘known unknowns’ that will define 2024

The powerful evidence for a possible criminal case that the bipartisan January 6, 2021, congressional committee presented against former President Donald Trump on Monday underscores the biggest uncertainty looming over the approaching 2024 presidential campaign. Many factors that will shape the 2024 contest, of course, remain impossible to know almost […] Read more »