Statewide and local elections held in odd-numbered years are generally not predictive of the big national elections held the year following, but they can offer meaningful insights about the electorate. Tuesday’s off-year contest provided Republicans with glaring warning signs about their 2020 prospects, although it’s unclear they will be able to do anything to address them. Going into Tuesday, I … Read More
Jimmy Carter wanted to run against Ronald Reagan. Having lost the support of the public over a miserable economy and the never-ending Iranian Hostage Crisis, he understood that his path to re-election depended on having an unacceptable opponent. In Reagan, it was as if Carter’s ideal foil had been sent by Central Casting. A movement conservative who had fronted for … Read More
We are witnessing the end of a political regime in real time. It may not be fully apparent just yet, but the curtain is coming down on a forty-year political alignment that began with Ronald Reagan and will end with Donald Trump — what I will call the Ronald McDonald Era. Its replacement will look and feel different — unlike … Read More
There is opportunity in chaos. As Democrats contemplate the 2020 campaign, they should recognize that Donald Trump has shattered longstanding political alignments, giving them the chance to reassemble the pieces to form a lasting political majority. Doing this will require setting aside incremental thinking and embracing a platform of economic and social justice that would have been unthinkable in 2016. … Read More
Longtime readers of Wolves and Sheep know that I keep returning to the theme of partisan realignment, because I believe this moment of political instability shares characteristics with other realigning periods in American politics, most recently the transition between New Deal liberalism and Reagan conservatism. The potential for party realignment was a theme of my last two books on the … Read More
Every president has a base, and every president lets them down. They have no choice, because presidents have to govern broadly to survive politically. This lesson has escaped the current president, and until now you could be forgiven for believing that he had upended the laws of political gravity by governing expressly and exclusively for his core supporters. For the … Read More
When student survivors of the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida say they will not be quiet until the political class brings about meaningful reform to gun policy, you can be forgiven for believing against all historical evidence that the response to this atrocity may be long-lasting. Immediately after the shooting they began rallying the … Read More
By the summer of 1974, it was clear to leading Republicans that Richard Nixon would not be able to survive Watergate. It fell to Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona to tell the president that support among his partisans in congress had collapsed and his presidency … Read More
Political events in 2017 offer many reasons to believe that 2018 will bring a sweeping rebuke to Donald Trump at the ballot box. With the mandatory caveat that nothing should be taken for granted or regarded as predetermined, the past year has provided all the necessary preconditions for a backlash which—depending on its size—threatens to undermine or possibly eliminate the … Read More
Two items this weekend from the New York Times speak to the possibility that we are well along the road to a political realignment, a theme I have been writing about for a long time. First, a column by Frank Bruni describes Steve Bannon’s plan to destroy the Republican establishment if he is unable to reshape the party in his white nationalist … Read More