Success breeds failure. Policies and practices well suited to society at one juncture in history are often poorly suited to the world they have beneficially transformed. If you carry a good thing too far, it can turn out not to be a good thing anymore.
Virginia and New Jersey, the two states that voted for governor in 2025, both voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris over then-candidate Donald Trump by 52%-46% margins in 2024. Democrats ran significantly better in both states on Tuesday. One reason is that Trump Republicans, as an increasingly downscale party, see their turnout sag in off years than when the presidency is up. But that wasn't their only problem this time.
Who said this? "If you don't have any borders, you don't have a nation." The speaker went on, "Trump did a better job. I don't like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain't that hard to do. Biden didn't do it."
No two states voted more alike and closer to the national average in last year's presidential election than the two states that have gubernatorial elections in this odd-numbered year: New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey voted 51.8% for Kamala Harris and 45.9% for Donald Trump. Virginia voted 51.8% for Harris and 46.1% for Trump. Aside from the seven target states and Democratic underperformance in New Hampshire and Minnesota, these were the two closest states in the country.
"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." That was the mordant comment of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister, on the failure of a liberal reform to achieve the results promised with great assurance by the articulate liberal eminences of the day.
Why are so many Democrats fond of wishing death on their opponents? That's a question raised by two astonishing developments early this month. On Oct. 3, National Review's Audrey Fahlberg revealed texts Jay Jones had sent, perhaps mistakenly, to Virginia state Del. Carrie Coyner, bemoaning the cordial remarks then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican, was delivering after the death of a Democrat.
Whatever else you want to say about him, President Donald Trump has what Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70 called "energy in the executive." Announcing a peace plan for Israel and Hamas, ordering the dispatch of federal troops to protect immigration enforcement personnel in "sanctuary" states, authorizing his budget director to use reorganization powers available after Senate Democrats shut down the government, and announcing a pediatric cancer initiative.
We Americans, it seems, continue to live in two separate countries. Consider two items in the news this week and the inconsistent responses they evoked.
What a difference half a decade makes. This summer's prevailing ethos, zeitgeist, vibe -- call it any fancy name you want -- was sharply different from the summer, just five years ago, of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
When the Irish comedian Graham Linehan arrived at London Heathrow Airport this past weekend, he was greeted by five armed British police officers who arrested him for -- get this -- three rude tweets.
The Constitution of the United States lays out a complex scheme of governance that has mostly worked for the 237 years since it became effective with the ratification of the ninth state, New Hampshire, in 1788.
The extraordinary pair of meetings in the past week -- the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday and Donald Trump's hosting of the leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Finland, as well as the NATO alliance and the European Commission -- were prompted by the latest iteration of a continuing source of instability over hundreds of years.
In assessing the current controversy over Texas Republicans' proposed redistricting of the state's U.S. House seats, two historic facts should be considered.
When debating current issues, it's helpful to avoid inaccurate depictions of past policy, especially on immigration, in which both opponents and advocates of President Donald Trump's policies have views based on not altogether accurate renditions of the past.
Here's a clue that the off-year elections in November 2026 may not go the way conventional wisdom suggests. That conventional wisdom is that the president's party almost always loses the House and, slightly less often, Senate seats.
For a generation, Americans have had a historically large number of ex-presidents around, a possible source of counsel from one of only 45 people who have exercised the broad powers conferred by Article II of the Constitution.
Nine months after the 2024 election, we've been graced with definitive dissections of the electorate and how it has changed since that escalator ride 10 years and one month ago. There's wide agreement in the analyses of the Associated Press/Fox News Vote Cast, the Democratic firm Catalist's What Happened and the Pew Research Center analysis.
Not many people today remember the exhilaration so many Americans felt after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967. The liberal folks around me at work and law school then had been frustrated and puzzled at the lack of progress being made in Vietnam by the 448,000 U.S. troops stationed there, and the sudden and astonishing success of the Israel Defense Forces, symbolized by the eye-patched Gen. Moshe Dayan, was a refreshing contrast. No talk then of Israelis as colonialist settler oppressors.
Zohran Mamdani's lead in first choices in New York City's ranked-choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he'll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation's largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November.
Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed -- significantly.
