The Lobbyists Blocking Nancy Pelosi and Her New Majority

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the idealistic class of 64 Democratic House freshmen are armed with a reform agenda. This includes H.R. 1, a 571-page bill that addresses voting rights, corruption, gerrymandering and campaign finance reform as well as the creation of a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis — a […] Read more »

The 5 Key Constituencies Of The 2020 Democratic Primary

Over the long course of the Republican presidential nomination process in 2015 and 2016, we frequently featured a diagram called “The Republicans’ Five-Ring Circus.” The chart was based on the idea that the GOP essentially consisted of five different constituencies: the establishment wing, the moderate wing, the tea party, libertarians […] Read more »

Tennessee Politics: From Boss Crump to Howard Baker to . . . Marsha Blackburn?

Only one chapter in V.O. Key’s classic 1949 book Southern Politics in State and Nation named an individual in its title: “Tennessee: The Civil War and Mr. Crump.” Key described an era in Tennessee history when the Democratic primary decided who controlled statewide politics and Memphis political boss E.H. Crump […] Read more »

After a Rocky 2018, Populism Is Down but Far From Out in the West

President Trump’s push for a border wall hints at a problem that populist leaders are facing across the Western world. After a year of setbacks, populist leaders and parties are trying to rejuvenate their fortunes by revitalizing the sense of crisis on which they thrive. But as with Mr. Trump’s […] Read more »