Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin are locked in a tight race for Virginia governor, with McAuliffe standing at 50 percent to 47 percent for Youngkin among likely voters in a Washington Post-Schar School poll. Among registered voters, McAuliffe has a 49 percent to 43 percent edge over Youngkin […] Read more »
Can You Be My Bellwether?
Democrats are happy — and rightly so — to have pulled out a decisive win in the recent California recall. Despite earlier signs of a Democratic enthusiasm gap, Democratic voters turned out in big numbers for this off-year election. Even a dip in President Biden’s job approval ratings didn’t have […] Read more »
The Political Winds May Blow Through California and Virginia This Fall
With our federal races becoming increasingly more parliamentary—9 out of 10 voters simply cast either Democratic or Republican votes up and down the ballot—the direction and velocity of the national political winds are becoming increasingly important. So where do we stand today, on Labor Day, 14 months before the 2022 […] Read more »
What Virginia Tells Us About the Midterms
Off-year elections are a Rosetta Stone for analysts and operatives. While their political significance is universally overstated, these elections drive media narratives and offer clues as to how the political environment is shaping up for the midterm elections in 2022. In addition to the California recall election on September 14, […] Read more »
The Trump Factor for 2021 and 2022
For the first time in more than four years, Donald Trump has receded into the background. He no longer grabs the headlines and wall-to-wall cable TV coverage that he craves. Banned from social media, his opinions on everything from the women’s national soccer team to the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, […] Read more »
How mainstream Democrats are flexing their muscle in 2021
The first five months of President Joe Biden’s term show the moderate wing of the Democratic Party still has a lot of juice left. We see that in the Senate, where moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are standing in the way of […] Read more »