Author: Michael Barone

The results are in, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has beaten Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall election. That’s in line with pre-election polling, though not the Election Day exit poll. Even before the results came in, we knew one thing, and that is that the Democrats and the public employee unions had already […]

Demographic forecasts generally take the form of predicting more of the same. Old people have been moving to Florida for the past several years, and old people will move there for the next few years. Immigrants have been streaming in from Mexico, and they will continue to do so. You get the idea. Most of […]

“Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic.” So reads a sentence in John Heilemann’s exhaustive article on Barack Obama’s campaign in this week’s New York magazine. Heilemann is a fine reporter and was co-author with Time’s Mark Halperin of a best-selling book on the 2008 presidential campaign. While his sympathies are undoubtedly with Obama, he does […]

The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign attack ads on Mitt Romney’s former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats. And not just because they were sloppily fact-checked (the ads hit Romney for layoffs long after he left Bain) and because a leading Obama money bundler is a Bain executive himself. Chiming […]

It’s comfortable living in a cocoon — associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide. Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that […]

In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity” with Barack Obama’s economic policies. European spending cuts, the argument goes, have hurt people and are arousing political opposition, while Obama’s proposals to keep federal spending at 24 percent of gross domestic product indefinitely are likely to succeed. […]

Is it panic time at Obama headquarters in Chicago? You might get that impression from watching events — and the polls — over the past few weeks. In matchups against Mitt Romney, the president is leading by only 47 to 45 percent in the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls. A CBS/New York Times panelback poll, […]

Last week, I wrote about the standings in the presidential race and said it looked like a long, hard slog through about a dozen clearly identified target states, much like the contests in 2000 and 2004. Call it the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario. But I said there were other possible scenarios. I can think […]

Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama’s re-election — we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence — in come some poll numbers showing him behind. Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen […]

Washington Post editorial writer and liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart is puzzled. Why does the “non-issue” of Harvard Law professor and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry “require so much attention?” he asked last week. When Warren was teaching at Pennsylvania, Texas and Houston law schools, she identified herself as Indian — or, to […]

It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish. AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that […]

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning. It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, […]

The illegal immigration problem is going away. That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States. Pew’s demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, and have come up with […]

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement. As it happens, […]

Some 20 million Americans in primaries and caucuses will take part in selecting the Republican presidential nominee. One person will choose the vice presidential nominee. This has long struck me as absurd: One person choosing someone who, as a result, might become president for as long as 10 years. But just about everyone in politics […]

How much will Obamacare — call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like — cost over the next 10 years? More than you’ve been led to believe, reports Charles Blahous of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. To be specific, he projects it will add $1,160 billion to net federal spending over […]

Now that Rick Santorum has “suspended” his campaign, we can stop pretending and can say what has been clear for weeks: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president. The general election campaign has begun. In some quarters, it is assumed that Barack Obama will be re-elected without too much difficulty. There are reports […]

Time for a postmortem on the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Yes, I know Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still out there saying interesting things. And that Rick Santorum says it’s only halftime and argues he can somehow overtake Mitt Romney by carrying his home state of Pennsylvania. But polls there show a […]

How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about “investing” in education? Quite a few, if you’ve been listening to the president at all. In fact, Americans have been investing more and more in education over the years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it’s become glaringly clear that we’re getting pretty lousy […]

“I don’t worry about the Constitution,” said Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, at a town hall meeting where voters questioned his support of the legislation that became Obamacare. You can find the clip on youtube.com, where it has 462,084 hits. That was before the 2010 election, in which Hare, running for a third term […]

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” So said John Kerry, in Huntington, W.V., on Tuesday, March 16, 2004, two weeks after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by carrying every state but Vermont in the Super Tuesday primaries. Kerry was responding to an ad run by George […]

President Barack Obama’s 17-minute video, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” gives us an idea of how he wants to frame the issues in the fall election. The first thing you notice about the video is that the atmosphere is dark, wintry, minor key. You see but don’t hear the election night crowd in Grant Park, and […]

As I listened to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan describe his latest budget plan in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute this week, I couldn’t help thinking how different things will be in Britain when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne steps out of No. 11 Downing St. with a battered red briefcase […]

The 2012 congressional redistricting cycle following the 2010 Census is just about over and done with. And it seems likely to make much less difference than many of us expected. Redistricting is when state legislatures, governors and/or commissions draw new lines for congressional districts after the 435 seats in the U.S. House are reapportioned according […]

You can almost hear the note of surprise in their voices when you read the Washington Post and New York Times reporters’ stories on their papers’ latest political polls. Surprise! Just when they thought that Barack Obama was pulling ahead, with positive job ratings, and just after the mainstream media have been savaging Republicans for […]

In the cold, gray numbers of election returns and exit poll percentages, a reader with some imagination can find clues to people’s deep feelings, their hopes and fears, their self-images and moral values. This is especially true in presidential primaries. In most general elections, 80 percent of voters vote for candidates of the party they […]

Kicking the can down the road. That’s been the Obama administration’s response on issues from Iran’s nuclear weapons program to America’s entitlement systems. Start with Iran. In a statement in the Oval Office before his meeting with President Obama on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted that Obama had “reiterated yesterday” the principle that […]

Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80. His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the […]

I have long been puzzled by the enthusiasm with which many young liberal bloggers cheer on proposals to raise tax rates on high earners. I can understand why they might favor them, but not why they seem to invest so much psychic energy in the issue. Some of this may just be team ball: You […]

If you were listening reasonably carefully to last Wednesday’s Republican presidential candidate debate, you heard Rick Santorum say, “Charles Murray just wrote a book about this.” The question was about Santorum’s remarks on contraception, but his answer addressed the broader issue of “the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America.” That […]