Politically, our country is divided into four camps, not two. Only one of these, largely rooted in rural America and bolstered by ideological conservatives, supports President Trump. Two of them, urban progressives and suburban moderates, strongly oppose him. The last consists of white, blue-collar voters in the industrial states who […] Read more »
A political blockade is colliding with the evidence on climate change
In rapid succession, the results of this month’s election and the release of blockbuster new scientific studies are widening the distance between the politics and science of climate change. The massive new study released by federal scientists Friday, like another landmark analysis in October from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel […] Read more »
The lesson of 2018 for Democrats is not that they need a more moderate message for rural voters
… We’re now firmly in the analysis phase of the 2018 midterm elections, an election cycle in which Democrats slightly overperformed expectations in the House while seeing a net loss in the Senate, winning two-thirds of the contested Senate seats. One of the central questions for the party centers on […] Read more »
The Suburbs Are Changing. But Not in All the Ways Liberals Hope.
… Election outcomes in America have become increasingly correlated with population density, a pattern that also appears in other industrialized countries. Rural areas are now reliably Republican, urban areas overwhelmingly Democratic. The suburbs are lodged in between, with many economically conservative but socially liberal voters who have a foot in […] Read more »
‘Never Trump’ Republicans went Democrat in 2018. Are they gone for good?
Kristin Olsen, who until 2016 led the Republican caucus in California’s state assembly, surveyed the wreckage of the recent midterms in her state and came to a bitter conclusion: “The Grand Old Party is dead,” she wrote in an op-ed. Olsen, 44, told NBC News that Republicans had already struggled […] Read more »
California Has Become a Crisis for the Republicans
For all the focus since Election Day on the Republican Party’s precipitous decline in California, the true depth of the collapse is still only coming into focus. And so are the implications of that fall for the GOP’s prospects in other western states following the same trajectory of geographic and […] Read more »