After four years of enabling and appeasing President Trump, Republicans find themselves at the end of his tenure in exactly the place they had so desperately tried to avoid: a toxic internecine brawl over his conduct and character that could badly damage their party. With their Senate power on the […] Read more »
Trumpism has never been about policy. It still isn’t.
The final week of 2020 offered clarity into the Republican Party’s future relationship with President Trump, because he’s about to lose the power that drove the GOP’s self-interested decision-making. While in the Oval Office, Trump has controlled the direction of his party, so it has made little strategic sense for […] Read more »
Does Joe Biden Understand the Modern GOP?
The dissonance between the first and second halves of Joe Biden’s landmark speech this week encapsulates a central strategic challenge he’ll face as president. During his victory speech on Monday, following the Electoral College vote, Biden denounced more forcefully than ever before the Republican Party’s legal maneuvers to overturn his […] Read more »
Four decades and counting — the GOP’s shift to the right is bigger than the Democrats’ shift left
… Today, conservatives and Republicans like to point to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the “squad” in the House to argue that Democrats have moved so far to the left that their party can’t compete for voters in the political center. There is, of course, some truth to that, but […] Read more »
Coalition Shifts in Senate Races: SC, KY, IL
Key Points• The reelection victories of three long-serving senators illustrate some of the nation’s political shifts.• Despite a well-funded Democratic challenge, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) held on in large part because of the lack of ticket splitting in his red state.• As of this election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell […] Read more »
The GOP’s Big Self-Own
Congressional Republicans may be engaged in the political equivalent of a murder-suicide by abetting Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him. By reinforcing Trump’s baseless narrative that he actually won the vote, Republicans could be suffocating President-elect Joe Biden’s already-slim chances of attracting any meaningful support from […] Read more »