Mark Schmitt

s even the most committed conservatives have begun to recognize the scale of the debacle, foreign and domestic, of the seven years during which they have held unchecked power, they have begun to plot a slick escape from the consequences. “Oh, that?” they will say. “That wasn’t conservatism. That was something completely different.” It started […]

here’s no doubt that America’s political parties have undergone a major transformation in the last two decades, and that we now have, for better or for worse, a center-left party and a center-right party (although at the moment, more right than center), pitted against one another, rather than the jumble of the past. The question […]

There are, we are told, two kinds of congressional elections. In most even-numbered years, the issues are local and only a few incumbents are vulnerable, usually for reasons unique to them or their districts. Occasionally, as in 1994, an election is decided on national issues and a strong partisan or ideological wave loosens the bonds […]

The greatest challenge in politics is to understand when a political era is closing and the door to a new one is ready to be opened. Thirty years ago, a small band of conservatives understood that what they called the era of tax and spendin which government grew inexorably on a tide of invisible tax […]

Back in 1994, legend has it, a Republican Revolution captured Washington. Revolution was surely the right word, featuring as it did a leader who would have ordered his portrait painted onto the faade of public buildings, except for the fact that he wanted public buildings torn down. Like any good revolution, it came with a […]

The modern Republican Party has shown itself to be, once again, the master of the close call. Reversing a double-digit deficit in the generic congressional polls three weeks before the election, facing near certain loss of both the House and Senate, the party strategically abandoned its most vulnerable candidates in order to target a massive […]