Author: Michael Barone

Donald Trump is the latest proof that the campaign always reflects the candidate and that the candidate is a product of his experience over the years. So, as Trump, after clinching the Republican nomination, reshuffles and rejiggers a campaign that has fallen behind Hillary Clinton, it’s instructive to look at his political ground zero. That […]

Why has the American economy had such sluggish job creation and economic growth? That’s a pretty fundamental question, and one for which most conventional economists have had unsatisfying answers. Clues can be found, I think, in the new book by the unconventional economist and blogger Arnold Kling. “Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction to Economics” is, […]

“Market Angst as U.K. Edges to Exit,” proclaims the headline on The Wall Street Journal’s lead story. The exit referred to is Britain’s departure from the European Union, a move that will be mandated if a majority votes “leave” rather than “remain” in the national referendum next Thursday. This outcome would be as astounding, to […]

Are the exit polls, on which just about every elections analyst has relied, wrong? That’s a question raised by New York Times Upshot writer Nate Cohn — a question whose answers have serious implications for how you look at the 2016 general election. Standard analysis is that Democrats have a built-in advantage because the electorate […]

Bernie Sanders is not going gently into that good night, at least not yet. After hearing Monday from the Associated Press that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, after absorbing Tuesday night a solid defeat in the California primary and losses in three other states, Sanders was still pledging to go on campaigning for the […]

No contemporary political issue has been more controversial, or has been subject to more dubious analyses, than immigration. Take Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. As I’ve pointed out, that is attacking a problem that no longer exists or that has diminished greatly. Net migration from Mexico to […]

Let’s look back on the primary campaign — completed for Republicans, still ongoing for Democrats — and see if we can identify what Sherlock Holmes referred to as dogs that didn’t bark. For what’s unusual about this campaign is not only that unexpected things happened — improbable candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders getting more […]

It was conventional wisdom among the political cognoscenti during most of the primary season that Donald Trump could not win the general election. The evidence seemed strong. Over 12 months of polling from May 2015 to April 2016, Hillary Clinton ran ahead of Trump in 63 national polls, while Trump led her in only six […]

Nearly a century ago, in 1920, the Census Bureau caused a ruckus when it announced that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in cities — even though its definition of a city included every hamlet with a population of 2,500 and above. Today a majority of Americans live in what are by […]

Women, lamented Hillary Clinton in an April 2014 tweet, make just 77 cents on the dollar to men. As a presidential candidate she has repeated that lament again and again, updating the numbers, in line with government statistics, to 78 cents in July 2015 and 79 cents this year. This injustice, she says, must be […]

University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has had “second thoughts.” Like many academic criminologists, he had pooh-poohed charges that skyrocketing murder rates in many cities in 2015 and 2016 result from a “Ferguson effect” — a skittering back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of racism like those that followed the […]

What’s your benchmark? What is the historical era with which you compare life in contemporary America? For many astute commentators on various points of the political spectrum, it is postwar America, the two decades after the United States and its allies won World War II and before Lyndon Johnson sent half a million U.S. troops […]

An irresistible force meets an immoveable object. The irresistible force is the sense of discontent with how things have been going during this young century. Americans are displeased with a sluggish economy that fell into a deep recession and with foreign policies that seem to have produced disappointing results. The immoveable object is the strong […]

John Quincy Adams, our greatest secretary of state (sorry, Hillary Clinton fans), thought that Cuba would inevitably become part of the United States. It hasn’t, at least not yet, but two Cuban-Americans were serious presidential contenders this year. Yes, neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz won the Republican nomination, instead suspending their campaigns the nights […]

So Republicans now have a presumptive nominee — one headed to a clear delegate majority without visible opposition — sooner than the Democrats. It’s another way in which this year’s presidential race has defied expectations and ignored precedent. Donald Trump will now have 10 months to stage-manage his Cleveland convention, while Hillary Clinton must spend […]

The unexpected successes, forecast by almost no one 12 months ago, of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in winning 40 percent and 42 percent in Republican and Democratic primaries and caucuses is widely taken as evidence of raging discontent among American voters. There’s something to that. But Trump’s better-than-even chance of winning the Republican nomination […]

Donald Trump has declared himself, after following up his New York win April 19 with victories in five other Northeastern states Tuesday, the “presumptive nominee” of the Republican Party. Is it a done deal? Not quite. Trump’s 40 percent of total primary votes so far have yielded him 48 percent of pledged delegates — not […]

Ethnicity still matters. That’s one lesson I draw from the results so far of this year’s Republican and Democratic primaries and caucuses. We’re encouraged to believe ethnicity doesn’t matter much anymore; only race does. This is the implicit assumption behind the analyses that divide the electorate into four racial categories: whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. […]

Home-state candidates notched up impressive victories in New York’s presidential primaries Tuesday. Donald Trump topped 50 percent for the first time — and handsomely, with 60 percent of Republican votes. And Hillary Clinton won 58 percent of Democratic votes in her adopted home state. Trump’s capture of 89 of New York’s 95 delegates gets him […]

“Gestapo tactics.” That’s how Donald Trump’s recently installed campaign manager, Paul Manafort, characterized the Ted Cruz campaign’s successful effort to win all 34 of Colorado’s pledged national convention delegates at the long-scheduled Republican congressional district and state conventions. “Today winning votes doesn’t mean anything,” Trump complained. “It’s a corrupt deal going on in this country […]

If you live any distance beyond the Capital Beltway you probably didn’t notice, but an important part of government in Washington shut down on Wednesday, March 16. That’s when the Metro subway system’s recently installed general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, ordered a one-day shutdown of the entire 117-mile system for emergency inspection of track-based power cables. […]

“Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again.” That’s the first sentence in a Trump campaign statement tweeted out Tuesday night by the Washington Post’s Robert Costa. It’s also a strange way to respond to a solid defeat, reminiscent of the Monty Python knight who insists he is winning after both his […]

What you hear when you listen to many fervent supporters of Donald Trump is that they are victims — victims of globalization and trade agreements that have sent their jobs to Mexico or China. Victims of competition from illegal immigrants from Mexico willing to work for starvation wages. Victims of a Republican establishment that promised […]

On June 23, when Donald Trump will or will not have won the 1,237 delegates he needs to be nominated, voters in Britain will decide an issue as divisive as Trump’s candidacy: whether the United Kingdom will remain in or leave the European Union. It’s not a decision that has attracted much attention in the […]

How can one make sense of the electoral divisions in this year’s Republican primaries and caucuses? The contours of Donald Trump’s support and opposition don’t fall on traditional lines. There’s not a regional division, for example. Trump’s best states have been Massachusetts, Mississippi and Arizona. We’re not seeing the divide between evangelical Christians and others […]

Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn’t appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona — 70,587 of them at […]

Can Donald Trump be stopped from winning the Republican nomination? The answer is yes. Despite his big win over Marco Rubio in Florida and his narrow wins over Ted Cruz in Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, he has not won a majority of delegates yet awarded — 661 at this writing, with several more to […]

The likely presidential nominee of the Republican Party and the certain (barring indictments) nominee of the Democratic Party have something in common, something more than residences in New York: campaign appeals based on nostalgia. Consider Donald Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” His reference point is not the Founding Fathers, whom Marco Rubio […]

Bad news for both parties in the primaries and caucuses in the seven days in March following Super Tuesday. Start with the higher-ratings, higher-turnout Republican race. Donald Trump won two solid victories in Michigan and Mississippi Tuesday, after weak showings in the five contests over the weekend. From March 2 to March 8 he netted […]

The Republican race for president last week converged, suddenly and briefly, in Detroit. In the Fox Theatre, one of the nation’s great 1920s movie palaces, the four remaining presidential candidates fought it out in the Fox News debate. Earlier that day, Mitt Romney, who grew up in Detroit and suburban Bloomfield Hills when the Motor […]