Donald Trump’s campaign and many of his supporters are trying to put the best spin possible on the numbers. I get that, but they are suggesting that the polls are rigged. They are not. They also say the size of Trump’s rallies, the enthusiasm at his campaign events, and his robust social media following are more predictive of Election Day turnout than independent presidential polling. That is not true. I am telling you this because I care about the American voter. I am standing up for…
“Who are Donald Trump’s supporters?” It’s a question that pundits and political analysts have been trying to answer for more than a year now, using bits of evidence of varying quality. Trump’s candidacy has been powered by explicitly nativist and nationalist themes and policies that carry a distinct aroma of prejudice, so it’s assumed that Trump voters have similar worldviews. Videos shared on Twitter of Confederate flag-sporting white guys hurling abuse at reporters and protesters tend to nurture the idea that Trump supporters are, by…
As we watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over Donald Trump, perhaps it’s time to take note of another conservative political phenomenon that the GOP nominee has utterly eclipsed: the Tea Party. The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural,…
Ever since this morning, political obsessives have been scrambling to find out any bit of information they can on Evan McMullin, a little-known former CIA officer who has decided to run for president on a platform vaguely similar to the one that Mitt Romney ran on in 2012. With no name recognition and no executive experience, there is no chance that McMullin could win. But that isn’t the point of the exercise. The McMullin candidacy, which is being pushed by the remnant of the NeverTrump…
The most important election of the year, apart from the one occurring on November 8, takes place today. That’s when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan goes up against the vice president of a water filtration company, Paul Nehlen, in the first serious primary challenge that Ryan has faced in the 18 years since he was elected to Congress. The odds for Nehlen are long. Of nearly 5,000 primaries held between 1992 and 2012, only 31 challengers toppled the incumbent. Nehlen also seems a little…
Editor’s note: This is the first of several “After Trump” pieces we will be running about how the candidacy of Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and American conservatism. Three pieces this week intertwine to present a picture of the broader challenges facing the political right at the moment: Matthew Sheffield’s important study of the conservative media, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column about the Trump campaign, and this New York Times story on the future of reform conservatism. All three touch on the crisis of paralysis facing…
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has been making a heavy play for left-leaning voters in his second run for the White House. On Wednesday, he turned that effort up a notch when asked about racial issues, a subject that has long been a difficult one for libertarians given their tendency to support almost no role for the federal government in ending private racial discrimination. Asked by a questioner during a televised town hall discussion about his thoughts concerning the “Black Lives Matter movement,” the former…
To maintain loyalty, the Democratic party incites anxiety about discrimination and exclusion. A form of reverse race-baiting, perhaps best thought of as bigot-baiting, has become crucial for sustaining the Democratic coalition, which is why we hear so much about “hate” these days. At the recent gay pride parade in New York, a few weeks after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, marchers held aloft an avenue-wide banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills!” It’s important to remember a first law of politics for…
For the past two days, I put this question specifically to delegates and staffers, to the people who ought to know: “What, at core, is the Democratic message coming out of this convention?” […] Delegates I spoke to paused, backed up, rephrased. In each case, they settled on general virtues: justice, inclusion, progress, the idea that the party was not so much associated with a particular program but with goodness itself, with a progressive sensibility that will, on the whole, produce virtuous outcomes. […] This…
Even after a charged, protracted Democratic primary season that revealed deep philosophical fractures in the party, Hillary’s willingness to cater to actors on her left remains minimal. Accordingly, the historic Sanders delegate walkout is emblematic of what should now be obvious: there is a level of hostility toward Hillary among activist-minded progressives that never existed toward Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. For one thing, the composition of the party has changed dramatically over eight years. Ideological progressives, who in 2008 yearned principally for emancipation from the…