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…
First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them…
Even though immigration is a top concern of only 10 percent of Americans, ever since Donald Trump entered the Republican race talking about deporting illegal immigrants and building a “big beautiful wall,” the debate about the issue has changed dramatically, including for one candidate who’s billed himself as an implacable rock of conservative principle, Ted Cruz. Now that he’s managed to shove aside fellow Religious Right candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, Cruz is going hard after the other top-ranked candidate besides Trump, Marco Rubio. The Florida senator has…