… Five years after it emerged as the most potent force in conservative American politics since the Reagan revolution, the tea party is at a crossroads — and some critics have declared the movement all but dead. Insisting that they’ve learned from the setbacks, however, stalwarts are vowing to reinvent […] Read more »
California Democrats Worry About Voter Turnout as They Gather for Convention
You’d be hard pressed to find a state deeper blue than California. Democrats dominate statewide politics, Jerry Brown seems headed for an easy re-election, and Republicans have had a tough time fielding credible statewide candidates. Yet, as Democrats gather in Los Angeles this weekend for their annual party convention, there […] Read more »
Midterm Signals and Noise
… The current consensus in Washington is that 2014 will be a Republican election – that they will gain some seats in the U.S. House, that they have a realistic chance of recapturing a bare majority in the U.S. Senate and that they will continue to enjoy a sizable edge […] Read more »
Wait, Did California Fix Political Polarization?
In recent decades, California has stood out among other states for its political dysfunction. Indeed, the Golden State has served for a while now as a cautionary example of where the nation as a whole could be heading. … Yet somehow over the past year, the state has emerged as […] Read more »
Red, blue states move in opposite directions in a new era of single-party control
Political polarization has ushered in a new era in state government, where single-party control of the levers of power has produced competing Americas. One is grounded in principles of lean and limited government and on traditional values; the other is built on a belief in the essential role of government […] Read more »
2013 Was the Year of the Dataset
This past year may end up being remembered as the year that we discovered that the NSA and telecommunications companies were gathering enormous troves of personal data on us and using it for … well, we don’t quite know what yet. But on the less nefarious side, 2013 was also […] Read more »