ArcaMax

Will Joe Biden inevitably win the Democratic nomination for president? A month ago, many psephologists thought so, as national polls within two weeks of his April 25 announcement showed the former vice president with 41 percent of Democratic primary votes.

Four weeks later, that number has fallen to 32 percent, still formidable in a field of 24...Read more

"I'm amused," Attorney General William Barr told CBS News' Jan Crawford, "by these people who make a living by disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I'm going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods."

He went on after further questions: "...Read more

Political parties generally go unappreciated, even among those inclined to celebrate representative democracy. The Founding Fathers famously didn't like them yet found themselves forming them, not long after the First Congress assembled.

This suggests something I have come to believe while writing essays on our two long-lived American parties: ...Read more

The Big Lie is back in style. Wikipedia tells us that the term was invented by Adolf Hitler to describe what others did -- though he was the biggest liar of all. "The broad masses of a nation," he wrote in "Mein Kampf," "more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie."

No one on the political scene in this country or any democratic...Read more

If you've been paying any attention at all to journalism in recent years -- maybe not a good idea, but if you have -- you surely have noticed those stories predicting, often with a certain relish, that the United States is about to become a majority-minority country.

Such predictions, as the Obama administration Census Bureau director noted in ...Read more

Once upon a time, May 1 -- May Day -- was a day for working-class parades in factory towns. This year, it was a day for Joe Biden, to set off on his third presidential campaign in 32 years, to make news on the stump, not in a working-class venue but in the university town of Iowa City, now the state's Democratic stronghold.

Biden's claims for ...Read more

Joe Biden has been around a long time. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, at age 29 (he reached the Constitution's required age of 30 before taking office in January 1973). No one in the current Senate was there then; the current senior-most House member only arrived there after a special election two months later. Few other ...Read more

"The Mueller report makes Trump look vain, ignorant, inept, and astonishingly dishonest." So writes my Washington Examiner colleague Quin Hillyer, never an enthusiast of President Donald Trump.

He refers to many passages of the report: one that shows the president ordering his White House counsel to arrange the firing of the special counsel and...Read more

Many people, years after they graduate from high school and college, have nightmares about taking exams for a course for which they have done none of the reading and are totally unprepared. They wake up full of anxiety and relax only when they realize they left school years ago.

But increasingly, it seems like none of us ever get out of school,...Read more

What does history tell us about the 2020 presidential election? Not as much as we'd like to know. We're an old republic and our two political parties are the oldest and third oldest in the world. But we've only had a limited number of presidential elections.

Three were uncontested (1789, 1792, 1820), and six more were conducted under rules ...Read more

Which of the two dozen or so Democratic presidential candidates is going to carry black voters next year? The answer to that question is likely to be identical to the answer to the question "Which candidate is going to be the Democratic nominee, and maybe the president?"

For years, black Americans have cast about 1 out of 4 votes in Democratic ...Read more

Collusiongate is now history. The late-Friday afternoon announcement that special counsel Robert Mueller had completed his investigation and Attorney General William Barr's four-page letter released Sunday made it clear. "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government ...Read more

Success in politics -- and in political predictions -- depends on the ability to distinguish between old rules of thumb that don't apply any more and old rules of thumb that do.

Take the old rule that an officeholder's chances of re-election depend on what James Carville in 1992 took to calling "the economy, stupid."

That used to be a real ...Read more