In three politically important Midwest states — including two that were key in deciding the 2016 election — President Donald Trump’s job approval rating is below 40 percent, and Democrats hold a sizable lead for the upcoming congressional midterms, according to a trio of new NBC News/Marist polls. CONT. Mark […] Read more »
The Midwest eases its Trump swoon and flirts again with Democratic candidates
… Republicans made historic inroads into the Midwest in 2016 when union households and white voters who lacked college degrees abandoned the Democratic Party. Four states that had backed Barack Obama for president — Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — flipped to Trump, and a fifth, Minnesota, nearly turned red […] Read more »
How Conservatives Bet Big on Wisconsin and Won
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics By Dan Kaufman Hardcore conservatives adore infrastructure, and they’re phenomenally good at building it. This isn’t to say they’re necessarily committed to constructing roads and bridges and dams; it’s the infrastructure of their own […] Read more »
Senate 2018: Two Rust Belt Ratings Move in the Democrats’ Direction
In 2016, President Donald Trump narrowly carried Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 67,000 or so votes to defeat Hillary Clinton and carry the two states’ combined 30 electoral votes. Those victories, along with Trump’s 10,000-vote win in Michigan, seemingly signaled an end to the “Blue Wall” that supposedly gave […] Read more »
Politics as (Un)usual
In Marine Corps jargon, a “duty station” is the military base or camp where a Marine is assigned to live. Reflecting our national inclination both to romanticize what is past and to criticize what is current, Marines will regularly gripe that there is no duty station better than the one […] Read more »
Loyalty, unease in Trump’s Midwest
… Nationally, about 100 counties voted Democratic in at least five consecutive presidential elections and then flipped to Trump. Almost half of them are in four states in the Upper Midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Most of those nearly four dozen counties in the region are along or adjacent […] Read more »