… In his eight years in office, Obama oversaw the rapid erosion of the Democratic Party’s political power in state legislatures, congressional districts and governor’s mansions. At the beginning of Obama’s term, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent, the lowest percentage for […] Read more »
How the mantra of centrism gave populism its big break
For just under a quarter of a century, British politics has been dominated by what might be called, paradoxically, a “theology of centrism” – the belief that most people were more concerned with what works than ideology, and that politics should principally be the art of improving the delivery of […] Read more »
The Collapse of the Voting Structure — Possible Big Trouble Ahead
Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States next Friday, 20 January 2017. This surprised most analysts including ourselves! We expected to be writing posts during 2017 about splits in the Republican Party due to President Hillary Clinton’s pressing a legislative program that would have been […] Read more »
Rigid Partisans, Flexible Ideologues
It’s no secret that our partisanship affects how we view the world. Political science has hundreds of findings supporting this conclusion. But many of us had assumed some sort of ceiling for this effect, a limit on what our partisanship could ask us to do or believe. The events of […] Read more »
How Trump Can Solidify a New Majority Coalition
As we enter the first week of 2017, it’s important to put aside some of the myths from 2016 and look at what’s really at stake in the new year for President-elect Donald Trump and the nation. CONT. John McLaughlin & Jim McLaughlin (McLaughlin & Assoc.), National Review Read more »
What Does Your Party Want?
How do Republicans hold on to the voters Donald Trump brought to the party? Securing the loyalty of the millions of white working-class Americans who lined up behind Trump will require that all three wings of the Republican Party — its business faction, its ideological purists and its cultural traditionalists […] Read more »