ArcaMax

Among the most surprising of the multiple surprising results in this election was California's rejection of Proposition 16. The ballot measure was supported by the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature; by long-established corporations and Silicon Valley tech firms; by leaders of mainline churches and nonprofit organizations. Some ...Read more

"I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next guy," tweets mild-mannered RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende, "but there's really no getting around the fact that the 2020 polling was a pile of steaming garbage."

"The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago," writes New York Times polling guru ...Read more

1. This was not a good night for conventional polling. My review in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal of a book on the history of "polling failures" took perhaps too positive a view of contemporary polling. I find it remarkable that polling has been as accurate as it has been in a country where the completion rate for pollsters' contacts is below 10...Read more

If the final election returns, when they finally come in, match the current polls, Joe Biden's Democrats will win a trifecta: the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.

Biden currently leads Donald Trump 51% to 44% in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls and leads by a smaller margin of 49% to 46% in six target states. ...Read more

Are both presidential candidates trying to lose? Or at least pursuing campaign strategies which put them at grave risk of defeat?

In nearly four years, Donald Trump has made little effort to win over the 50%-plus of voters who didn't support him in 2016. Having proved that he could win the presidency without a plurality of the popular vote, he ...Read more

On Monday, Joe Biden finally broke his monthslong silence on court packing. Previously, he refused to take a stand -- "whatever position I take in that, that'll become the issue," he said in the Sept. 29 debate, said voters didn't "deserve to know" his position or would know it "when the election is over,"

His media cheerleaders like CNN's Don ...Read more

Now that Donald Trump exited from Walter Reed Hospital and the vice presidential debate aired, let's turn to an apolitical analyst to understand what's happening. Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia and former University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology and demography. "Nobody," ...Read more

"Chaos." "Painful." "Dispiriting." "The worst presidential debate in American history." "The lowest point in American political culture in my lifetime."

You get the idea. These are responses, from Donald Trump supporters and Donald Trump opponents, to the first 2020 presidential debate Tuesday night. I detect a note of shell shock and sickened ...Read more

Norms, we are told, matter. Violating norms, recklessly disregarding norms -- these are charges on which President Donald Trump is often arraigned in the court of public opinion.

The indictment starts with his annoying habit of inventing insulting nicknames for his opponents and critics. You can add to the list as you will and perhaps come up ...Read more

What happens if, as seems much more likely now than it did a year or six months ago, Democrats overturn the Republican majority in the Senate?

No clear answer yet, but NBC News reports Democratic senators have set up a "war room" to enable them to abolish the filibuster and quickly pass a Biden-Harris agenda. Other Democrats have urged that a ...Read more

The presidential campaign is at knife's edge. Both parties' campaigns assume that patterns of support will closely resemble those in 2016. And both are making surprisingly little effort, considering how close that contest turned out to be, with the 46 crucial electoral votes decided by just 77,744 votes, to increase their levels of support.

The...Read more

To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.

Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, "We've never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries." As I noted in May, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04% and 0.07% of the nation's ...Read more

You know the first two nights of the Republicans' virtual national convention have gone well when you see that Politico's morning Playbook leads with a lame joke about the U.S. Postal Service hiring a new lobbyist, aimed at reviving the post office non-scandal. Ho, ho, ho!

The more pertinent news is that both parties have adapted deftly to the ...Read more