Author: Michael Barone

Over the next year, we will probably see much controversy over the implementation of Obamacare. Health insurance is something that almost every adult has some acquaintance with, and there seem to be glitches aplenty in the legislation, much delay in issuing regulations and some possible changes resulting from litigation. We’re likely to see or hear […]

Demographics buffs get a special Christmas present every year courtesy of the Census Bureau: its annual estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This gives demographers a chance to see where the nation is growing and where it is not, and to get an idea of the destination of […]

There’s a natural human impulse to help people who need a hand. In the political world, that often translates to an impulse to have government help people who need a hand. Who wants to argue with that? But experience tells us that it’s not always easy to help. Individuals’ good intentions go awry. Government programs […]

In combing through the results of the 2012 election — apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact — I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004, and one enormous difference. Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were […]

Last week, Republicans proved they are not a governing party. Next week we will see whether Democrats are. A governing party would have, reluctantly, passed Speaker John Boehner’s Plan B, which would have preserved the current tax rates on everyone with incomes under $1 million. Passage would have put Senate Democrats on the spot, since […]

On Monday, the U.S. Senate got its newest member and lost its most senior member. The newest senator is South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott, whom Gov. Nikki Haley said she would appoint to fill the vacancy caused by the pending resignation of Jim DeMint. The most senior senator was Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye, who died at […]

Democrats in Washington declare that they will absolutely, positively allow no changes whatever in the nation’s unsustainable entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare. But out in the states, politicians of both parties aren’t averting their gaze from impending fiscal crises. They are working to change policies that put state governments on an unsustainable trajectory. […]

Is Barack Obama bluffing when he threatens to go over the fiscal cliff if Republicans refuse to agree to higher tax rates on high earners? Some analysts think so. Keith Hennessey, a former top staffer for the Bush White House and Senate Republicans and a veteran of budget negotiations, argues that Obama’s whole second term […]

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010. Pew said […]

The fiscal cliff negotiations seem to be foundering on Barack Obama’s insistence on higher tax rates on high earners and House Republican leaders’ insistence on opposing them. The president believes he has a mandate from voters for his position, and House Republicans believe they have a mandate from voters for theirs. The real argument here […]

Americans are very generous to people with disabilities. Since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, millions of public and private dollars have been spent on curb cuts, bus lifts and special elevators. The idea has been to enable people with disabilities to live and work with the same ease as others, as […]

In 1902, journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote a book called “The Shame of the Cities.” At the time, Americans took pride in big cities, with their towering skyscrapers, productive factories and prominent cultural institutions. Steffens showed there were some rotten things underneath the gleaming veneers — corrupt local governments and political machines, aided and abetted by […]

In Washington, Americans have two-party government, with a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House. We had it before November’s election and will have it again for the next two years. Looking back from 2014, we will have had two-party government for most of the preceding two decades, for six years of Bill Clinton’s […]

A funny thing happened as I was looking at the political map of this year’s presidential election: It began to look like the map of the presidential election of 2004. I’m not talking about the superficial similarity, the fact that in both elections an incumbent president beat a challenger from Massachusetts by a 51 to […]

In his first formal press conference in months, Barack Obama showed that getting re-elected can increase a president’s confidence and combativeness. He staked out tough stands on several issues, especially on the looming budget negotiations. Looking ahead to the “fiscal cliff” on Dec. 31, when the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire and sequestration cuts […]

Barack Obama attended more than 200 fundraisers for his presidential campaign, but he refrained from raising money for congressional Democrats. That proved to be a wise move for him, as were his strategists’ decisions to run heavy ad campaigns against Mitt Romney and to build an even more effective turnout machine in target states. But […]

Lukewarm. That’s the feeling I get from the election numbers. Turnout was apparently down, at least as a percentage of eligible voters. The president was re-elected by a reduced margin. The challenger didn’t inspire the turnout surge he needed. Every re-elected president since Andrew Jackson has won with an increased popular vote percentage. Barack Obama […]

You know who won the election (or whether we face another Florida 2000), and as I write I don’t. But whether Barack Obama is re-elected to a second term or Mitt Romney is elected the 45th president, the contours of their support during this fiercely fought campaign show that we live in Two Americas. The […]

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That’s bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents, and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president. But it’s also true that most voters oppose Obama’s major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish […]

As the East Coast recoils from Hurricane Sandy, the political news is of new states suddenly inundated with presidential campaign ads. First Wisconsin, then Pennsylvania, more recently Minnesota. Ann Romney is campaigning in Michigan; Bill Clinton in Minnesota. All these are states Barack Obama carried by 10 points or more in 2008. Why is the […]

When reading one of the endless stories about a just-released poll Thursday night, a pair of numbers struck my eye: 60 and 37. Those were the percentages of white voters supporting Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the ABC/Washington Post tracking poll. Overall, the poll showed Romney leading Obama 50 to 47 percent. The reason […]

Back in May, I wrote a column laying out possible scenarios for the 2012 campaign different from the conventional wisdom that it would be a long, hard slog through a fixed list of target states like the race in 2004. I thought alternatives were possible because partisan preferences in the half dozen years before 2004 […]

How will this election be seen in history? Obviously, it depends on who wins. If Barack Obama is defeated, the irresistible comparison will be with Jimmy Carter. A one-term president was rejected after pursuing big government programs amid high energy prices and attacks on America in the Middle East. Actually, that’s not entirely fair to […]

An interesting story from last winter: An email friend who lives in an affluent suburb far from Washington, a staunch Republican, was watching one of the Republican debates with his wife, a staunch Democrat. He was surprised by her response to Mitt Romney. “He’s a grown-up. He’s someone who is reliable,” he told me she […]

When a politician is in trouble, he usually falls back on what he knows best — the world he saw around him when he entered into political awareness as a young adult. That’s what seems to have happened to the Democratic ticket after Barack Obama’s disastrous performance in the Denver debate Oct. 3. So Obama […]

“The Illegal-Donor Loophole” is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at The New Yorker and The New York Times. The article tells how Obama.com, a website owned by an Obama fundraiser who lives in China but has visited the Obama […]

Wednesday night’s presidential debate in which Mitt Romney shellacked Barack Obama attracted the biggest audience since the debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan seven days before the 1980 election. About 70 million Americans watched, a little more than half the 131 million voter turnout in 2008. That’s an estimate, because the ratings companies don’t […]

Mitt Romney was 13 years old and Barack Obama had not been born when an energetic-looking John Kennedy, 43, and a tired-looking Richard Nixon, 47, walked into the WBBM-TV studio in Chicago for the first general election debate between presidential candidates. It is generally held that television viewers felt Kennedy won the first debate, while […]

As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters. First, some points about […]

In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin. Among older voters, Obama led McCain by 50 to 49 percent. How has Obama paid back the Millennial generation, which provided almost all his margin of victory? With what American Interest superblogger Walter Russell Mead calls “Obama’s […]