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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a contributing editor for the Prospect and the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Recent Articles

Liberal Republicans—They're Alive!

Paul WaldmanMay 15, 2014
OK, maybe not quite. (Flickr/Emi Hoshi)
Until not long ago, we tended to think of Republicans as unified and focused, and Democrats as inherently fractious (see, for instance, the evergreen "Dems In Disarray" headline). These days the opposite is true—or at least it's the case that Republicans have become just as divided as Democrats. But how much of that is about Washington infighting and intraparty struggles for power, and how much is actually substantive and matters to voters? This post from The Upshot at the New York Times has some provocative hints. Using polling data from February that tested opinions on a range of issues, they found that Republicans are much less unified than Democrats when it comes to their opinions on policy: On these seven issues, 47 percent of self-identified Democrats agree with the party’s stance on at least six of them. And 66 percent agree with at least five. Republicans were less cohesive, with just 25 percent agreeing on six or more issues, and 48 percent agreeing on five. Piling on more...

A Question About Southern Culture and the Confederate Flag

Paul WaldmanMay 13, 2014
Flickr/Cyrus Farivar
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a confirmation hearing for Michael Boggs, a conservative Georgia state judge whom President Obama nominated for a federal judgeship as part of a deal to get Republicans to allow votes on some of his other nominees. (Lesson: Obstructionism works, so keep doing it!) Boggs got grilled by Democrats over some of the votes he took as a state legislator, including one to keep the Confederate stars and bars as part of the Georgia state flag. Which gives me the opportunity to get something off my chest. Before I do though, it should be noted that there are plenty of white Southerners who wish that their states had long ago put the Confederate flag issue behind them, and agree with us Yankees that it's a symbol of treason and white supremacy, and not the kind of thing you want to fly over your state house or put on a license plate, a s you can in Georgia . Boggs claimed in his hearing that he was offended by the Confederate flag, but voted for it...

Hating Hillary

Paul WaldmanMay 13, 2014
Marc Nozell/Wikimedia Commons
If you asked an average Republican why America shouldn't make Hillary Clinton president, the response you'd likely get would be, "Where do I start?" There's just so much they don't like about her, from her radical feminist schemes, to that jerk she's married to, to the way that she personally ordered her friends in Al Qaeda to kill Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi (probably, anyway—the select committee is going to find out). Hell, why not just suggest she has brain damage? That's what naughty little Karl Rove did yesterday , in reference to the incident in 2012 when Clinton fainted and knocked her head on the way down, then had a blood clot removed that doctors discovered when she went for treatment. "Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that," Rove said. Sure, it was only three days, and the glasses she wore are for people who have temporary double vision, not...

Tracing the Republican Evolution on Climate Change

Paul WaldmanMay 12, 2014
This played an unusually important role.
Over at the Washington Post today, I ran down where all the potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates stand on climate change, on the occasion of Marco Rubio's foray into denialism . Unlike in 2012, where one candidate after another had to renounce his previous belief both that climate change was occurring and that cap and trade would be a good way to deal with it, this time almost all the candidates (with the exception of Chris Christie) have comforting histories of denialism, in one variant or another. But even though climate denial now seems mandatory for GOP presidential candidates, if you look at public opinion, there's actually nothing approaching a consensus among Republican voters. And there has been a shift over time; Republicans are actually slowly growing more willing to accept the reality of climate change. Look at this graph from the Pew Research Center : Between 2006 and 2009, the number of both Republicans and independents believing there was solid evidence for...

The Politics of Polarization: Not as Simple as They Seem

Paul WaldmanMay 12, 2014
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong P olarization is everywhere these days. Voters are polarized, legislators are polarized, the courts are polarized , all perhaps to different degrees at different moments, but the movement of the parties—and those who represent them—away from each other is evident in one realm after another. But too often, journalists talk about this phenomenon as though it were symmetrical, with Republicans and Democrats moving away from the center at roughly the same rate, even though that's not true. For instance, Congress has seen asymmetrical polarization in recent years, with Democrats growing slightly more liberal and Republicans growing much, much more conservative. There are a lot of reasons that has happened, but what I want to focus on at the moment is the differing internal dynamics of the two parties that help produce it. Political scientist Hans Noel, fresh from a conference on polarization, reports that his colleagues may be paying too much attention to the...

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