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As I predicted last month, President Barack Obama consolidated his recent gains in public opinion polling in April, and only showed very slight improvement in his job approval and job disapproval numbers. While this doesn't sound very exciting, it does show that Obama's recent gains were not temporary, but instead show some real staying power. Let's take a look at the new chart.
It is now official. Seventeen candidates ran for the Republican presidential nomination, and the sixteenth of these just suspended his campaign. This leaves Donald Trump as the last man standing. A whole lot of people who never thought we'd arrive at this point are now going to have to get used to the phrase: "Donald Trump, Republican nominee."
Indiana likes to call itself the "crossroads of America," which is understandable when you look at a map of the Interstate Highway System and how many major routes intersect in Indianapolis. But tonight, instead, it may very well be the end of the road for the entire primary season. Or, at least, the heavily-contested part of that season. Because tonight we may truly pivot to the general election and stop paying much attention to three of the five remaining candidates.
Boy, it isn't every day you get to write a headline like that! But those are the kinds of feelings Ted Cruz seems to bring out in everyone -- left, right, and center.
Having devoted yesterday's column to a look backwards at presidential races, today I'm going for a personal best in the "ridiculously early speculation" category, and examine what might happen to the Republicans and the Democrats in the next presidential race. Hey, it's been that kind of week, what can I say?
To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd have to write this article. I fully expected someone else to dig this stuff out, if the calls for Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race (or "say nice things about Hillary Clinton") began. Now that they have, I still haven't seen any detailed reminders of how the 2008 Democratic primary race ended yet. So I went ahead and dug them out on my own.
I thought I'd write the ultimate elections "process story" today -- a story about the process of the process, as it were. Mostly this is because, once again, it's hard to concentrate on anything else in the lead-up to another election night, where millions (well, at least thousands) of political wonks breathlessly wait to hear from Outer Podunk County to see who they voted for.
It's time once again to play another installment of our ongoing game of "pick the primary winners." Now, whenever multiple states hold their primaries on the same day, it has become de rigueur for the pundits to slap some cutesy name on it. This started with the granddaddy of all cute primary names, "Super Tuesday" (which was also, confusingly, known as "SEC Tuesday" this year). However, because a lot of states seem to shift around their primary dates each election cycle, new names are constantly being thought up for the new primary groupings. For tomorrow night's primary, the punditocracy seems to have settled on "Acela Tuesday," but for some reason this irks my sensibilities. Maybe it's because I never thought "Acela" was all that cool a name to begin with. It sounds like something a drug company dreamed up to hawk their newest laxative, or something.
You have to have at least a little bit of pity these days for the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus. He seems like one of those guys in a horror flick who keeps trying to convince everyone that the monster isn't real, and that everything can be explained by rational means... right up until the monster unexpectedly (for maximum shock value) rips his head clean off, in graphic 3D. The guy who has persevered in keeping his little group of teenyboppers together and somewhat sane ("If we can just get out to the barn and fire up that Model T/snowmobile/hot air balloon/mine cart/tractor... we can make it out of here to safety!"), who eventually sacrifices himself (in some horrific way) so that the rest of the group of worthless highschoolers can have a chance at survival. You know the guy, right?
What is Donald Trump's real threshold for gaining the Republican nomination on the first vote at the convention? We've all (well, the wonkier among us, to be accurate) had the number 1,237 burned into our brains from all the punditry obsession with the subject (indeed, I didn't even feel the necessity of fact-checking that number, because it has become so prevalent). But because we're so deep into the minutiae of Republican nomination practices, there's an open secret that few have yet noticed: Republicans also have "unbound" delegates at their convention. They aren't "super" (like the Democrats), since nobody gets one of these seats just for being a current member of Congress, but they are just as free to select whichever candidate they feel like. I've seen numbers from the low 100s up to about 200 for how many of these there are (again, too lazy to fact-check that one), meaning they are an extra reserve of possible votes that could be drawn upon if a candidate is close enough to the outright majority of 1,237.