… All over the country, chambers that once were up for grabs are now firmly controlled by one party holding what resembles an open-ended lease. … In American state politics these days, power results not from a contest of ideas, but rather from demographic identities. The country is divided along […] Read more »
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 »
Trump’s Wall Could Cost Him in 2020
President Donald Trump may now be talking more about steel than cement, but his proposed border wall remains the Rosetta Stone for understanding both his conception of the presidency and his political strategy. Nothing better illustrates Trump’s political calculus than his determination to build the wall, a goal that most […] Read more »
Why Fighting Fake News With the Facts Might Not Be Enough
“Alternative facts”: The term manages to be tedious, ridiculous and perilous at once — a real sign of the times. For anyone who doesn’t remember, Kellyanne Conway introduced it in early 2017 to defend the White House’s falsehoods about attendance numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration the week before. … Her […] 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 »