Democratic governors in deep blue states will own the largest share of the blame in the coming electoral reckoning.
Author: Daniel McCarthy (Daniel McCarthy)
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Democrats Are at a Dead End, Unless They Learn From Trump
Democrats who hope to revitalize their party need to accept that wokeism is a dead end and learn from Trump in the same way they once learned from Reagan.
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How Politics Hasn’t Changed Since Jefferson
The election of 1800 featured many of the same elements of our politics today.
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Kamala Harris Targets Married Women
An intrusive new campaign stratagem from team Harris pits husbands and wives against each other and patronizes women at the same time.
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Vibes Turn Bad for Kamala Harris
President Trump has become the more joyful campaigner in the wake of Kamala Harris’s attempts to absorb former Republicans into the Democratic base.
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Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump
Whenever a high-profile general disparages Trump, his opinion makes headlines. The sentiments of ordinary soldiers, and veterans, get much less attention.
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How Donald Trump Can Win the Popular Vote
Trump’s chances of success in the popular vote tied to the GOP’s prospects of extending its House majority.
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Iran Targets America’s Elections—and Trump
Liberals accuse Trump of being cozy with dictators, but the dictators of Iran's cruel and corrupt regime find comfort only with Trump's Democratic opponents.
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Trump’s Would-Be Assassin’s Explanation
If Democrats don’t weigh their words more carefully, more violence will follow from the likes of Ryan Routh.
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When Character Assassination Becomes the Real Thing
Routh took both literally and seriously Democrats and progressives who say Trump is a threat to America's institutions and the rule of law itself.
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Kamala Harris Runs Like a Republican—and Misleads on Tariffs
Kamala Harris—the incumbent Democrat Vice President—frames herself as Republican challenger. This messaging is misleading, but some free-market wonks are playing along.
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On Abortion, Trump Is Moderate—While Harris Is Maximalist
The staunchest pro-lifers don't want to settle for Trump’s compromise, but the alternative on the ballot in November isn’t an absolute anti-abortion position.
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It Won’t Be Easy to Make America Great Again
Election 2024 will not end or save humanity. What’s at stake in a presidential election is something far different from the all-or-nothing outcome that the rival campaigns envision.
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Donald Trump Is Reagan’s Heir
The future of all Reagan secured for the country now hinges on what happens in this election.
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Will Voters Settle for Joe Biden’s Understudy?
Harris is a more viable candidate than Biden was in his final weeks, but she isn’t prepared to be a better president—and Democrats know it.
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Donald Trump Has to Run Like It’s 2016 Again
Social media didn’t elect Trump in 2016, showing up in the flesh did. The contours of the election have shifted and that’s what Trump needs to do again to win in 2024.
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Is Trump Running Against Harris—or Donald Trump?
Trump can regain the momentum he’s lost since the convention—but only if he defines Harris in voters’ minds, so he’s running directly against her, not his party, his allies and himself.
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Kamala Harris’s ‘Mean Girls’ Election
The trouble for Harris is that her most enthusiastic supporters are the media’s mean girls, not parents or working-class stiffs, who probably seem “weird” to the kids who support her.
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Kamala Harris Is the Opponent Donald Trump Wants
Harris is running with Biden's record and Hillary Clinton's profile—not a winning combination, but one the party's bosses have decided to settle for.
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Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack?
Republicans need to be wary about becoming complacent about their chances in November or adopting the Democrats' framework on rhetoric and violence lest they make a strength out of Biden’s mediocrity.
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Joe Biden Faces Richard Nixon’s Choice
Like Nixon, Biden must now write his last chapter—for one way or another, he’s reached the end of the book.
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Should President Biden Drop Out—or Resign?
Biden has neither the stamina nor the cogency to fulfill the duties of his office. Those calling for him to step away from the race need to be calling for him to resign.
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Separate Sexual Identity and State
What gives the LGBTQ community a right to an official presence in public that’s denied to religious believers?
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Nigel Farage Makes the Trump Moment Permanent
Brexit and Trump’s election were eight years ago, but 2016 is still the present and future of the political right.
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1984 in 2024: Orwell Was Right
Our present world feels more and more like Orwell’s dystopia but unlike in his story, we have the power to stop the party we live under.
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Virginia Turns Toward Trump
Biden received the benefit of the doubt in 2020 from suburbanites who wanted competence and calm. He won't get that this year, after the record he's run up.
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The Free-Market Populism of Javier Milei
Just as some businessmen who’ve lost their subsidies still back Milei, populist voters in the United States aren’t necessarily looking for handouts. They want a fair shake, not a New Deal.
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Trump’s Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
Trump should do everything he can to win the Sun Belt, and black and Hispanic voters, away from Biden. But his priority must be to win back the Rust Belt states and white voters he lost in 2020.
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What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
Trump’s VP contest isn’t really about the contestants; it’s about investing the audience in the drama of choosing and the man making the choice. Burgum is just plausible enough to extend that drama.
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The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden’s Party
The Democratic party only has papered over its contradictions ever since 1968. Today’s campus protests have ripped off the wrapper, and they’re forcing on Biden a choice he can’t, or won’t, make.
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Nationalists of the World, Unite?
If there's going to be any democracy in the 21st century—in America, Europe, Israel or anywhere—there must be nations and nationalists willing to stand for them.
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Foreign Policy Splits the Parties
When it comes to foreign policy America’s two political parties are split—not so much against each other—but against themselves.
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Trump and the Pro-Life Dilemma
Pro-lifers upset with Trump mistake their situation. They're not missing an opportunity to declare a universal right to life; they're rather in a pitched battle to stop the other side from reestablishing a universal right to abortion.
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PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.
In failing to mention Communism, the makers of a PBS documentary about William F. Buckley unintentionally remind viewers of why Buckley was needed in the first place—and why he still is.
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Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
Weakening House committees had the paradoxical effect of concentrating power in leadership and making the speaker more important in setting the majority’s policy direction—which only turned the speaker into the focus of every member’s discontent and created stronger opposition to him within the party.
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Trump Hunts for a VP Close to Home
There’s more than one way the GOP could wind up with a New York-Florida ticket this November.
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Princess Kate and Democracy’s Discontents
The tabloid interest in the princess’s health, is also punctuated by genuine sympathy on the part of many Brits, who see the royal family as the nation's family, too. But that's not how it should be with our elected leaders.
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Can Biden Buy the Voters?
Biden knows what he has to do to win—but the educated whites who are the backbone of his party have little in common, culturally or economically, with the lower-class whites whose interest is in work, not woke.
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Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
Small though the influence of a VP pick usually is, Trump has several ways to turn the right choice into a winning hand.
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Why Online News Isn’t Saving Journalism
Online media was never on a secure footing, dependent as it was not just on advertising—which is true for almost all media—but on the whims of Big Tech, which has its own growth worries.
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Do Americans Trust Either Party?
Americans prefer no consistent government, rapid-cycling anarchy, to everything the two parties offer: neither has made the sale.
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Is Taylor Swift Trouble for Trump?
Left-of-center social and economic attitudes are, for Millennial and Generation Z women, the closest thing to not having any politics: They are the path of least resistance—and least reflection.
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Trump’s Map to the White House
A strategic choice of VP and a party unified in the battleground states, plus Biden's dismal record, might be all it takes to turn the 2020 map back into Trump's winning 2016 map.
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Will ‘Lawfare’ Take Trump Off the Ballot?
Democrats have led their supporters to entertain a fantasy of winning by disqualifying Trump rather than beating him, but the scenarios don't work, and lawfare only breeds strife.
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Will Africa Save America?
Conservatives are right to take heart from Christianity’s growth in Africa. Yet if the civilization that Christianity created in Europe and America cannot survive here, the prospects for Christian civilization anywhere are bleak.
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‘The Sopranos’ at 25: A New World Tragedy
America hasn’t yet fulfilled Goethe’s call to find new sources for our stories—but we still have something to gain from the very best tales of knights, robbers, and ghosts.
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Trump’s Country Party Roots
Aristocracy is the problem, and Americans will fight it with any weapon at hand—including Donald Trump.
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What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
When a politician stakes his campaign on a demonstration of how thorough, consistent and philosophically pure he is, he might impress conservative journalists and policy wonks, but they don't pick the nominee.
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Biden Looks Doomed—But Is He?
Political scientists say presidential elections are referendums on the incumbent. If that’s the case next year, none of the Biden team’s grounds for optimism will matter.
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A Test for Trump and His Rivals
The path to the nomination for anyone other than Trump is exceedingly narrow. Voter composition and mobilization efforts will be key for Trump’s rivals.