President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party are facing difficult political headwinds less than eight months before November’s midterm elections, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Obama’s job-approval rating has dropped to a low point of 41 percent, never a good position for the party controlling the […] Read more »
Republicans could give away 2016
It’s way too early to say anything useful about the 2016 presidential election. But that’s not stopping anyone else, so I might as well chime in too. As long as we are discussing it, we might as well be honest: Nothing suggests 2016 will be easy for the Democratic nominee […] Read more »
The Four Faces of the Republican Party
… Exit and entrance polls of Republican primaries and caucuses going back to 1996 show that the Republican presidential electorate is remarkably stable. It does not divide neatly along establishment-versus-conservative lines. Rather, the GOP contains four discrete factions that are based primarily on ideology, with elements of class and religious […] Read more »
Economy Hits Dems, GOP ‘Out of Touch’ – Pushing Anti-Incumbency to a 25-Year High
Anti-incumbent sentiment has reached a 25-year high in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, with economic frustration damaging Barack Obama’s Democrats while the Republican Party labors under a broad view that it’s out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. CONT. Gary Langer, ABC News Read more »
Senate primaries test GOP establishment, insurgent wings
The tea party movement celebrated its fifth anniversary this past week, but there’s been little to celebrate lately about the performance of some of the conservatives running under the tea party banner who have mounted primary challenges to half a dozen Senate Republicans. … The tea party movement continues to […] Read more »
The tea party grows up
Ever since a wave of conservative insurgents arrived in Washington after the congressional election of 2010, Congress has careened from one tea party-inspired fiscal crisis to another, from the debt-ceiling showdown of 2011 to last year’s 16-day government shutdown. But last week, when the debt ceiling needed to be raised […] Read more »