Author: Michael Barone

The Republican race goes on after Super Tuesday. In ordinary years, Donald Trump’s wins in seven of the 11 Super Tuesday contests after three out of four wins in February, together with his delegate lead, would make him the nominee. Politicians would hurry to back the apparent winner. But, thanks to Trump, this is not […]

In last Thursday’s slam-bang Republican debate everyone saw Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz do a fine job of demonstrating Donald Trump’s ignorance and inconsistencies. But many may not have noticed Cruz’s citation of a Feb. 9 Wall Street Journal article that casts light on the immigration issue — and suggests strongly that Cruz’s and Rubio’s […]

Does Donald Trump’s big win in the Nevada caucuses mean he’s the inevitable Republican nominee? He has made himself the favorite and could sew up the nomination with the first winner-take-all primaries March 15. But it’s not inevitable that he will become the nominee. The question is how others can prevent it. Trump won 46 […]

In 2008, Barack Obama’s great victories in February primaries — Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin — gave him an unstoppable delegate lead for the Democratic nomination. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s wins in Florida (technically on Jan. 31) and Michigan sent him on his way to the Republican nomination. This year, with the foreshortened schedule, […]

With the likelihood that the Supreme Court vacancy will not be filled this year, voters’ minds are going to turn to questions of electability, writes my Washington Examiner colleague David Drucker. The November elections will arguably determine which side will control all three branches of the federal government, and many of America’s strongly partisan voters […]

The CBS presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, started off with a moment of silence in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death was announced earlier in the day. And the debate that followed was a sort of tribute to the late jurist. Not that Scalia was much talked about. Every candidate agreed that the […]

New Hampshire voters issued a rebuke to conventional party leaders when they voted by large margins for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s primaries. But Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination, and it’s by no means certain Trump will be the Republican nominee. The results show that Hillary Clinton has a […]

Benning Wentworth is not a name you’ll run across in New Hampshire primary coverage. But he arguably did as much as anyone else to establish the political culture — or cultures — of America’s first-in-the-nation primary state. Wentworth was governor of New Hampshire from 1741 to 1766, the longest-serving colonial governor, and with his father […]

Now that the results of last Monday’s Iowa caucuses are in, speculation naturally turns to next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Will Donald Trump fail once again to receive the percentage he’s getting in polls? Will Marco Rubio build on his close third-place Iowa finish to overshadow rivals Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie, who […]

From someone whose title is senior political analyst you might be expecting a forecast of who will win the Iowa caucuses next Monday night. Will Donald Trump voters turn out in enough numbers to give him the narrow win over Ted Cruz that polls indicate he has now? Will Hillary Clinton withstand the challenge and […]

How stupid and vicious do they think we are? That’s a question that I think explains a lot of things about politics and society today — and about this year’s unpredicted presidential race. The “us” in that question are ordinary citizens and the “they” are political and media elites who hold them in contempt — […]

The economy has been staggering, with stagnant or no growth, for several years, after a financial crisis. Loud complaints have been raised against Wall Street financiers and the concentration of great wealth in few hands. Rapid technological development is generating massive economic change, with many old-line jobs vanishing. Majorities disapprove of the Democratic president, as […]

The race for president is accelerating in high gear, or, rather, the races for president — in the Republican and Democratic parties, in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and primaries and caucuses to come. How’s it going? Let’s look at these separate races. The Iowa Republican caucuses: The polls show a two-way race here […]

In his final State of the Union speech Barack Obama made at least a few bows toward the idea that America is an exceptional nation, an idea he once derided by saying, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks” — this was before […]

The Census Bureau has delivered its annual Christmas gift to demographic junkies: its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for mid-2015. They show where the nation has been growing since the April 2010 Census headcount, a period that follows the end of the 2007-2009 recession and includes three-fourths […]

Rough and tumble. Hammer and tongs. In the race for this year’s Republican nomination, Donald Trump has not hesitated to attack and ridicule many of his opponents, and some of them have teed up attacks on him, only to hold back when they seemed to help rather than hurt him. Ted Cruz is the one […]

Battening down the hatches. That’s what America and much of the rest of the world seem to be doing today, in an eerie re-enactment, though to much less of a degree, of what America and the world did in the 1930s. The result then wasn’t very pretty. The result now is unknown. One way the […]

Fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court handed down its one-person-one-vote decision, requiring that within each state congressional and legislative districts must have equal populations. That gave redistricters a relatively easy standard to meet. Census data provides block-by-block population counts every 10 years, and it’s possible now to draw lines for districts so that their populations […]

Biography is one way — often the most vivid way — in which people understand history. The beautifully written biographies of Franklin Roosevelt that rolled off the presses and rose in the bestseller lists in the 1950s and 1960s created a template in which the New Deal was central to American history. It was the […]

Some observations on the 2016 presidential race as we head into the dark period, i.e., the two weeks of Christmas and New Year’s holidays in which no one has ever dared, at least in the past, to conduct any polls. Those of us who pick over poll results will have to fly blind until the […]

All around the political blogosphere you can find folks smacking their lips over the prospect of a “brokered” Republican national convention. They look forward to the spectacle of delegates assembling in Cleveland with no candidate having a majority, of multiple ballots with governors, floor demonstrations after nominating speeches, congressmen running as favorite sons and delegates […]

On Sept. 14, 2012, three days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton appeared at Andrews air force base, where she spoke with family members of those slain. Shortly afterward, Tyrone Woods’ father reported that she told him, “We are going to have […]

As the week began, I planned to write this column about some implications of Barack Obama’s Sunday night Oval Office address. I noted that he devoted about one-fifth of this 13-minute speech to pleas that Americans not discriminate against Muslims. “It is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination,” […]

There are just eight-and-a-half weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, with two of those weeks devoted to holidays during which polling is ordinarily not conducted, and the race for the Republican presidential nomination seems to be taking perceptible shape. And it continues to defy conventional wisdom. Since mid-July Donald Trump has been leading in […]

Sometimes you can learn something about today’s world from a history book — even a book about obscure characters in a long-ago time in a far-away corner of the planet, featuring conflicts between regimes that ceased existing at least a century ago. For me, one such book has been “Agents of Empire,” by the Oxford […]

Sure, that sounds counterintuitive. Thanksgiving Thursday is the first day of a (for most of us) four-day weekend, a time devoted to gorging on comfort food and nonstop viewing of college and professional football games. It’s a time as well for contemplation, already primed by overfamiliar songs in shopping malls, of an even longer holiday […]

Each of our two political parties, ancient by world standards, seems to be facing a gathering storm. Part of the gathering storm for Republicans is Donald Trump’s candidacy and his persistent lead in most primary polls. He is given to outlandish proposals and lacks the temperamental ballast and government experience that general election voters usually […]

Three days after the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris, Americans were primed to hear their president express heartfelt anger, which he did in his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, at the end of the G-20 summit. And they did hear him describe ISIS as “this barbaric terrorist organization” and acknowledge that the “terrible events […]

Riots in black neighborhoods. Rebellions on campus. The news these past few months and particularly in the past week has been full of stories that remind us, as William Faulkner wrote a little more than half a century after the Civil War, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We’re seeing something that […]

Tuesday night’s Fox Business/Wall Street Journal debate in Milwaukee provided clues as to why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been climbing, not by wide margins but perceptibly, into the top-polling positions of the candidates behind the two poll leaders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The widespread assumption among political insiders is that in the […]