ArcaMax

Vice presidential debates don't matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.

All that said, the ...Read more

In my time as a political consultant, I observed that carrying out a campaign strategy was surprisingly simple. You settled on a basic strategy, emphasizing the candidate's strong points on issues and character, framing the election in terms favorable to most voters. Then you just carried it out.

Almost always, events would intrude -- ...Read more

Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday's front page, has any proposals to cut the rapidly increasing national debt. Instead, both are proposing to hand out goodies to strategically positioned voters.

Harris, with an eye on polls showing young voters not as pro-...Read more

When I was in the polling business many years ago, our reports always started with the mood of the electorate, whether things were moving in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track, then moved to two sections on character and issues.

Usually those sections were pretty balanced. We advised candidates on which character traits and...Read more

As I try to understand public opinion in yet another presidential election year with former President Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, I see an anomaly.

On one hand, the polls look very much like the 2020 and 2016 election results. Trump trails Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.9 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of ...Read more

What if they held a tumultuous election, with an early one-sided debate, a candidate substitution and third-party withdrawal, and no voters changed their minds? Well, that's not exactly what has happened in America's 60th presidential election year, but it's not so far off, either.

The public has had a chance to watch the 43rd Republican ...Read more

Learning isn't necessarily cumulative. Human experience over the centuries provides lessons, some clearer than others. But each generation has to learn lessons anew, and some do not.

The lessons about economic growth taught over the long run of history are clear. Growth is not inevitable, and while riches may be accumulated, or appropriated, ...Read more

"There's a lot of opposition to just hearing what President Trump has to say," Elon Musk said at the beginning of his two-hour interview on X with the 45th and would-be 47th president.

Musk noted, "I got a letter from the EU Commission, like, saying to not have disinformation during this discussion we're having. And there's a lot of attempts to...Read more

There is an uncanny symmetry in the two presidential candidates' choice of vice presidential running mates. There are a few superficial differences -- Republican J.D. Vance is 40, Democrat Tim Walz 60. Vance is bearded, Walz balding.

The similarities are greater, and they go beyond the fact of their military service. Both were chosen by ...Read more

Monday night's "White Dudes for Harris" Zoom call, with some 90,000 registered to participate, was surely a landmark in political history. Nearly 200 years ago, when the Democratic Party was being formed to elect and reelect Andrew Jackson, the entire American electorate, with exceptions, such as Black New Englanders, property-owning Black New ...Read more

The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America's history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee's choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary ...Read more

For those of a certain age, or with more than a woke education, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump brings back echoes of history.

Not exactly the history of the abysmal political year of 1968, which saw the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., 39, and Robert F. Kennedy, 42, riots in major cities across the nation -- ...Read more

Fourteen days after his disastrous debate, President Joe Biden is still in the race for reelection. Multiple elected Democrats, New York Times editorial writers and columnists, and Democratic Party megadonors -- "elites," sneers the perceptive David Dayen -- have called on him to step aside. A secret ballot of congressional Democrats, the ...Read more