There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the schism in the Republican Party, with the “Stop the Steal” wing, steadfastly loyal to former President Trump, on one side, and what one Republican pollster referred to me last week as the “reality-based” wing on the other. The […] Read more »
Republican Governors’ Conundrum
Most of the states with low vaccination rates have Republican Governors. That is because they have majority Republican constituencies who don’t like government telling them what to do. There are a lot of reasons people are not getting vaccinated. There are still some access issues and not everyone knows the […] Read more »
Why ‘moderation’ doesn’t guarantee electoral success for Biden and the Democrats
There is a general theory of how politics works in the United States right now that goes something like this: Democrats and Republicans advance policy agendas that are covered in a straightforward manner by the media and broadly digested by voters. Based on their views of these agendas, most voters […] Read more »
Democratic leaders are increasingly at odds with their own voters
Democrats are a Shontel Brown party stuck in a Cori Bush world. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a week in which a pragmatic Democratic candidate (Brown) achieved a come-from-behind primary victory against a left-wing Bernie Sanders acolyte (Nina Turner), all while Democratic leaders fell all over themselves to […] Read more »
What some progressive activists fail to realize: Democrats like their party
Mainstream Democrats have been winning a lot of big primaries in 2021. Their latest win came on Tuesday in the primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District special election: local legislator and party chair Shontel Brown – backed by South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton – […] Read more »
In Democratic contests, the moderates strike back
When New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political world by unseating a 10-term incumbent in a Democratic primary in 2018, some analysts believed the victory might foreshadow a party shift to progressivism. But three years later, the evidence for the great turn leftward is scant. In fact, looking at […] Read more »