The mark of great presidents is optimism -- visionary optimism and transformational optimism. During Tuesday night's remarkable speech before Congress, President Donald Trump was brimming with optimism from start to end. My guess is that his marvelous speech will imbue and inspire new optimism and confidence throughout the entire country.
With politicos everywhere turning their eyes to the still-distant 2018 midterm election, we thought it would be useful to review some of the basic differences and similarities between the electorates in presidential and midterm cycles. Basically, midterm electorates are smaller, older, and less diverse than presidential ones, but the demographic voting patterns and divisions that we see in midterms are quite similar to presidential contests. What follows is a look at the similarities and differences between the two kinds of national electorates. For the most part, this analysis is based on exit poll data: We used the national exit poll data for the presidential race in presidential years and the national exit poll data for the national House vote in midterm years.
Donald Trump once wanted to cut military spending.
Glam American actresses Emma Stone and Dakota Johnson adorned their pricy Oscars ceremony gowns and handbags with golden Planned Parenthood pins in the shape of the group's logo.
The president opened by celebrating Black History Month. Lady Democrats wore white.
Virtually the whole world is beating up on the Trump administration for daring to predict that low marginal tax rates, regulatory rollbacks and the repeal of Obamacare will generate 3 to 3.5 percent economic growth in the years ahead.
The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be "be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism."
As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.
Substance and style -- it's easy to get them confused or mistake one for the other. And they're never entirely unconnected, though exactly how much so is a matter of debate.
Given the Democrats’ poor down-ballot performances in the Obama years, and the Republican dominance of redistricting following the GOP’s success in the 2010 midterm, it’s somewhat fitting that arguably the Democrats’ most marquee victory in 2016 will not help them in the redistricting battles to come after the 2020 census.
"Fake News!" shouts our president, calling out CNN, The New York Times and others.
President Trump is lashing out against “fake news” in what is quite possibly the greatest civics-journalism course ever publicly taught in America.
Former Fort Worth, Texas, police officer Brian Franklin is finally free. But he is still fighting to clear his name.
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals.
When Gen. Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser, Bill Kristol purred his satisfaction, "If it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state."
Amid the turmoil of the first month of the Trump administration, with courts blocking his temporary travel ban and his national security adviser resigning after 24 days, the solid partisan divisions in the electorate -- modestly changed in 2016 from what they'd been over the previous two decades -- remain in place.
In a whirling dervish White House press conference, President Trump manhandled the press, piledrived all the fake news and reminded the world why he tore through both political parties and got elected president in the first place.
At first blush, one might think that the Democrats have a decent chance of taking control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm. After all, midterms frequently break against the president’s party, which has lost an average of four seats in the 26 midterms conducted in the era of popular Senate elections (starting with the 1914 midterm).
The resignation of national security advisor Michael Flynn has the anti-Trump media declaring the new administration a "mess," in "turmoil" and thrown into "chaos."
Republicans promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But now they are hesitating.
