ArcaMax

Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.

And it was a loss across the board, not just this year. As RealClearPolitics' Sean Trende has argued, 2024's voting patterns were a "...Read more

Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?

Opponents and commentators blandly call ...Read more

Here's another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It's the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it's hard to find a time when a party's leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, ...Read more

Here are some observations on what you didn't hear on election night. Most networks' focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- to ...Read more

"The only garbage I see out there is his supporters," said President Joe Biden on Tuesday evening, referencing a comedian's comment at former President Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, as Vice President Kamala Harris delivered on the Ellipse, visible from the White House windows, what her campaign has described as her "closing ...Read more

Was it just a coincidence that Vice President Kamala Harris showed up, 15 minutes late, to be interviewed by Fox News' Bret Baier a day before Nate Silver's poll aggregation website showed her chances of winning the election slipping below 50%? Probably not.

What may link Harris' slide in the polls and her tardy appearance for an interview in ...Read more

Not everything significant politically is happening just in the target states.

"Never seen anything like this in thirty years," said California Republican consultant Mike Madrid in an X post, referencing the sharp increase in Republican registration among California's minority voters, including the state's numerous Latinos, growing numbers of ...Read more

Jonathan Draeger, reporter for RealClearPolitics, wrote Tuesday that "the 2024 presidential contest couldn't be tighter." Unless, of course, it turns out not to be nearly as close as this season's run of polls suggests it is.

One indication that it might not be was a New York Times-Siena poll released this week showing Donald Trump leading ...Read more

Vice presidential debates don't matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.

All that said, the ...Read more

In my time as a political consultant, I observed that carrying out a campaign strategy was surprisingly simple. You settled on a basic strategy, emphasizing the candidate's strong points on issues and character, framing the election in terms favorable to most voters. Then you just carried it out.

Almost always, events would intrude -- ...Read more

Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday's front page, has any proposals to cut the rapidly increasing national debt. Instead, both are proposing to hand out goodies to strategically positioned voters.

Harris, with an eye on polls showing young voters not as pro-...Read more

When I was in the polling business many years ago, our reports always started with the mood of the electorate, whether things were moving in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track, then moved to two sections on character and issues.

Usually those sections were pretty balanced. We advised candidates on which character traits and...Read more

As I try to understand public opinion in yet another presidential election year with former President Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, I see an anomaly.

On one hand, the polls look very much like the 2020 and 2016 election results. Trump trails Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.9 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of ...Read more