It's a good thing President Joe Biden wasn't strapped to a polygraph while giving his State of the Union speech on Thursday, because his results would have come back about as clean as O.J. Simpson's. That was especially true when he recited a lot of tall tales -- and some whoppers -- while touting his administration's alleged successes.
The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.
— Vice presidential selection season is upon us, and the early apparent resolution of the Republican presidential nomination and the fact that former President Donald Trump will be orchestrating the 2024 Veepstakes promises to make the process a long and unique episode of that quadrennial event.
— Trump is an anomalous selector, having chosen a running mate once before. If his 2016 approach is a guide, and it may not be, the conventional wisdom that he will choose one of those who is publicly most obsequious may not be accurate.
"We're building a clean energy future," says President Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is already beating Joe Biden; polls last weekend from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CBS News and Fox News all agree.
Recent polling shows President Joe Biden's open-border immigration policy is now ranked as the No. 1 or 2 problem facing America -- in part because of the havoc in our large cities where the millions of migrants are now residing.
Herewith some idiosyncratic, perhaps eccentric, observations on the electoral contests so far in this presidential cycle.
1. Turnout is down. In the first five contests -- the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan primaries -- Republican turnout was down from 2016, the most recent cycle with serious contests. That's based on precincts currently reporting and the ace New York Times number crunchers' estimates of as-yet-uncounted votes.
— This is the second part of our history of presidential-Senate split-ticket results, from World War II to now. This part covers the mid-1980s to present, a timeframe that started with many instances of split results and ended with hardly any at all.
— In 1984 and 1988, amidst large GOP victories at the presidential level, more than a dozen Republican-won states sent Democrats to the Senate both years.
— The 1990s, when Democrats were successful at the presidential level, split-ticket voting tended to benefit Republicans in the Senate, making the decade an exception in the postwar era.
— In the 2000s, Democrats were back to benefitting from the split-ticket dynamic, first under a Republican president, George W. Bush, then with a Democrat, Barack Obama.
— Montana, a state which Senate Democrats are defending this year in a Toss-up race, is the state that has split its ticket most often in the postwar era. And almost every state has split its ticket at least once during that time.
No state in modern times has transitioned from a worker freedom state to one that forces workers to join a union and pay dues to labor bosses. All the momentum across the country in the last two decades has been in the opposite direction: allowing workers the right to choose a union -- or not.
Bad news for the media often feels like good news for conservatives.
What's been missing these past couple of months from the coverage of and debate over the failed immigration bill? Some important basic facts and lots of historical context.
— In the post-World War II era, there have been nearly 200 instances of states voting for one party for president and another for Senate in presidential election years.
— This type of ticket splitting has generally been to the benefit of Democrats, who have been out of the White House for a slight majority of that timespan.
— The split-ticket trend has been declining, but Democrats will want to reverse that to some degree this year.
President Joe Biden is boasting about the recent stock market rally. He's right that stocks have been on a tear for the last 14 months. The S&P 500 hit 5,000 for the first time in history. That's up from 500 some 30 years ago.
What does America's overclass think of the rest of us? The short answer is "not much." They think ordinary people's splurging on natural resources is destroying the planet and needs to be cut back forcefully. And that the government needs to stamp down on ordinary people enjoying luxuries that, in their view, should be reserved for the top elites.
–Last week, national Republicans got their best possible Senate recruit in deep blue Maryland, with former Gov. Larry Hogan.
–Though Hogan will be hard pressed to actually win, as has been the case with some other recent “crossover” governors who’ve run in Senate races, his candidacy is notable enough that it moves Maryland onto the periphery of the competitive map.
–In Montana, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, MT-2) finally entered his state’s Senate contest, setting up a primary with Tim Sheehy, who national Republicans prefer.
— In Arizona, Kari Lake, a pro-Trump election denier, received the nod from national Republicans, though Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) plans are still not known.
— With Democrats being so exposed this cycle—they hold roughly two-thirds of the Senate seats that will be up—it’ll be important for them to minimize their losses.
On CNN, a "reporter" interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris gushes, "I'm struck, just in your presence! Looking you in the eye, with your passion ... "
Really?
Vladimir Putin is fighting a war he can't win against forces he doesn't understand.
What happens when a political party becomes demotic? Before answering the question, note that the word in question is not demonic, from the Greek word daimon, meaning a deity (remember that the Greek gods were notoriously jealous and greedy), but demotic, from the Greek word demos, meaning the people -- the same root as democratic.
