Jonathan Bernstein

A Catch to my Bloomberg colleague Al Hunt for killing off an old political chestnut: the idea that winning statehouses will matter in the next presidential election. As he explains, it just doesn’t: Who wins the governorship matters a lot to citizens of Florida or Wisconsin and elsewhere, affecting important issues such as taxes and […]

So the House Republicans never got around to filing the lawsuit against the president that they were all worked up about a few months ago (a bunch of people noticed; I recommend Kevin Drum’s look at it). Rather than try to speculate on why not, I’ll just present a special House version of my occasional […]

The reason Democrats should be clamoring for a strong candidate to take on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries isn’t Whitewater. It has nothing to do with the political baggage she has been carrying during her long public life. The issue has come up because of a fuss over a Harper’s cover story (gated, alas) […]

Where are we on the Senate right now? Perhaps the biggest news over the last week is that Republican chances of holding at least 51 seats have gradually improved. Five of the six leading forecast methods now have the chances for a Republican majority at about two-thirds, while the sixth (from the political scientists at […]

A catch to Kevin Drum for his analysis of why the national media clobbered Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who is challenging Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, for ducking a question about whether she voted for President Barack Obama. Why is the “neutral” news media going easier on some Republican Senate candidates who have ducked questions […]

No, Democrats aren’t venturing into the kind of polling denialism that turned “unskewed” Republicans into a joke two years ago. That, you remember, led Karl Rove and other party strategists to dismiss unfavorable opinion surveys as politically biased against them. The Hill’s Niall Stanage tried to make the case this morning that 2014 Democrats are […]

Ed Kilgore has a nice item about the Georgia Senate race: In the endless argument between political scientists and “traditional” political people about how elections are decided, I’m with the Poli Sci crowd more often than not, and don’t much believe individual “moments” in campaigns usually matter all that much. But there are obviously exceptions; […]

A Gallup poll released today confirms what anyone paying attention knows: The Affordable Care Act’s successes aren’t changing negative views on “Obamacare,” including what people report about their personal experiences with health care. Yet the very characteristics that make Obamacare unpopular make the ACA safe from repeal. The design of the law almost ensured a […]

Republicans are worried that their enormous field of 2016 presidential nomination candidates will be a problem, according to a good article from Maggie Haberman and Jake Sherman in Politico: The message from Republican officials has been crystal clear for two years: The 2016 Republican primary cannot be another prolonged pummeling of the eventual nominee. Only […]

At The Upshot, Lynn Vavreck reviews new evidence supporting the old but important finding that a dollar given to challengers is worth more than a dollar for incumbents. It’s a story of diminishing returns. Even partisans hesitate to back a candidate they’ve never heard of, so candidate spending to establish name recognition is effective. Moreover, […]