Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Wald write in The New York Times, “Since last year’s elections, Republicans in Congress have struggled for traction on their legislative efforts, torn between conservatives who drove the agenda after the 2010 landslide and new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama’s re-election and the 2012 loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate.” Enter the | Read More »
Sometimes it’s all about momentum and options, and right now Mitt Romney has both. It’s a week before Election Day and it seems that the map is expanding for Governor Romney, which means that it’s contracting for President Obama. In this Election Update I’ll look at the current map and some scenarios that it suggests. I’ll also give you some ideas about how to interpret | Read More »
In the aftermath of the horrific attack in Aurora, Colorado, those on the left have taken up their usual response to such tragedies-push for more restrictions on gun rights. They didn’t wait long, the following morning found a chorus of pundits and elected officials calling for more restrictive gun control. Public opinion suggests that these calls are unlikely to be effective. In the first poll | Read More »
Earlier this week, the Obama campaign released its map of battleground states. According to the campaign Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Colorado are all toss-up territory. But the Obama campaign isn’t the only one with a hypothesis about the map. Over at the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, Nate Silver has a simulation model that seems to suggest fewer states are in the “nearly | Read More »
Asked at any point before May 1st of last year, the question above would have been ridiculous. Outside of liberal intellectuals and college students, whose idea of “restoring America’s reputation in the world” is something on the order of “surrender and tell the bad guys you want to be friends,” few would have credited the early part of the Obama Administration as a foreign policy | Read More »
After a long stretch of inactivity in terms of actually voting, the Republican nomination contest fires back up tonight with Michigan and Arizona going to the polls. Most of us won’t be able to turn anywhere tonight without seeing coverage of what happens, but here are five things we’ll be watching here at WPA that may not get a lot of reporting in the big-picture | Read More »
The early November statewide elections in Kentucky and West Virginia were something of a yawn compared to the excitement of 2009 where big Republican wins in Virginia and New Jersey presaged the 2010 wave that swept Republicans into a dominant position in the House and in states nationwide. In Kentucky, Republican nominee David Williams was never really a threat to Steve Beshear. In West Virginia | Read More »
For those who missed it last week, Doug Schoen released a fascinating poll consisting of in-person interviews of n=200 Occupy Wall Street protesters. The topline report can be found here and is worth reading in its entirety. It provides a glimpse into some of the real lunatic fringe elements that are part of (but not the whole of) the Occupy Wall Street protests. That “part | Read More »
President Obama is on the road again. Never missing an opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars in an increasingly desperate effort to get a second term, Obama will take his “pass this bill/it’s not my fault” tour to Virginia and North Carolina this week. That certainly makes sense as both are traditional swing states that Obama won in 2008 and where he is polling well below | Read More »
Almost any embattled President facing re-election is sure to stir rumors of a primary challenge. Of the past five Presidents before Obama we have seen two face either serious or at least rumored serious primary challenges. Jimmy Carter in 1979 saw Democratic legend Ted Kennedy launch a primary challenge that at least one commentator thinks came within one major event—either the Iran hostage crisis or | Read More »
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