Tom Edsall’s most recent Times column claims, “We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.” The column is based heavily on a paper by political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm entitled, “Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era.” Edsall’s […]
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Posted inTAP
The Formula for a Blue Texas
The spate of House Republican retirements in Texas—the so-called Texodus—has gotten people thinking again about Texas’s political trajectory. Is a blue Texas really on the horizon? Certainly recent trends have been very favorable. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke missed unseating Senator Ted Cruz by just 2.3 points. And, although O’Rourke fell short, Democrats picked up 12 […]
Posted inTAP
The Pointless Caucus Chaos
Caucuses are an exclusionary and inferior option for selecting political preferences. Numerous states, including Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Washington, scrapped their caucus systems for the 2020 cycle, with the DNC encouraging the switch. Only four states will use caucuses on the Democratic side. But two of them—Iowa and Nevada—happen to be the crucial early […]
Posted inTAP
Still Attacking McCain?
Donald Trump has come up with a two-fer: His administration has promulgated a new policy that both takes nativism to new heights and attacks John McCain, all in one. According to an article in today’s New York Times: Children born abroad to certain United States service members and other federal employees will no longer be […]
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Did Third Parties Sink Hillary Clinton in 2016?
People are asking this question—or flat out claiming third parties did sink her—because they are worried about how such parties might affect the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump in 2020. As one example, Josh Marshall recently stated: [I]t’s really the unusually high 5.7% of the vote going to three third party candidates—Gary Johnson, Jill Stein […]
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Trump Can Only Envy Boris Johnson
The British prime minister has just pulled off a constitutional coup. He requested the queen to suspend Parliament for about six weeks ahead of the October 31 deadline for a Brexit deal or a no-deal exit from the EU; and since the queen’s consent is a mere formality, Her Majesty complied. This ploy will drastically […]
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Latest Polling on the Democratic Nomination Race
So much data, so little time! Probably the single thing you should be sure to look at is the RealClearPolitics rolling average of candidate preference. Right now, Biden’s still ahead, of course, with almost twice the support of Sanders and Warren, who are now quite close in the polling average. Harris is a fairly distant […]
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Orban’s Own Rabbi, and Chabad’s Support for Shareholder Capitalism
Today’s Washington Post features a fascinating and revelatory story by James McAuley that illuminates the growing relationship between the Hasidic sect Chabad and the operationally anti-Semitic regime of Hungary’s Victor Orban. (“Operationally” because it’s not apparent that Orban is personally anti-Semitic, but abundantly apparent that he has resurrected a host of anti-Semitic tropes—most particularly, in […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
The Dominant, Misguided Power of Presidential Primary Debates
Jay Inslee entered the presidential race for the right reasons, and he made a profound difference by moving the Democratic field to recognize the extent of the climate crisis and the need for bold solutions. He should be applauded for his effort. The bigger thing to say about his exit, along with the other winnowing […]
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How We Should See ‘The Irishman’
The current kerfuffle over Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming picture, The Irishman, raises a lot of questions about the future of movies. As described in today’s New York Times, it pits Scorsese and theater owners against the film’s producer and funder, Netflix, over the question of how the picture is to be distributed: widely on screen, or, […]
