Free Republic

Ah, the good old days, when Democrats voted in Democrat primaries and Republicans voted in Republican primaries. Those registered to other parties voted for candidates who held conventions in IHOP restaurants. Not content with one-person, one-vote elections (even including the dead), Democrats used the pandemic to promote mail-in voting to ballot-harvest their way to suspiciously fraudulent victories. Now some Democrats want more dubious election results with open primaries. Currently, 22 states have open primaries that allow crossover voting. Some Democrats plan to take full advantage of the opportunity. Writing in "When Your Vote Doesn't Matter, Try Switching Ballots," Jonathan Robinson...

The consensus (more or less) among political analysts was that the GOP was likely to lose in the shutdown showdown, but was unlikely to suffer serious electoral consequences. The first prediction appears to be the case (but see Peter Beinart's smart contrarian take). How about the second one? It is early, but what evidence we have seems consistent with the idea that the GOP didn’t take on much electoral water from this loss. This isn’t to say that there isn’t any evidence that the shutdown hurt Republicans, but the idea that their prospects were seriously jeopardized is thin. Start with...

RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende has come under coordinated red-hot rhetorical fire from the Left for his thesis that one of the major causes of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 was that a disproportionate number of white voters – mostly downscale whites outside the South – stayed home. Much of the criticism of Trende’s thesis is based on deliberately misreading his policy prescriptions – but it’s also based on a simpler failure to grasp the basic math behind his calculations. Like any exercise in reading exit polls and census data, Trende’s assumptions (which he lays out explicitly) can be critiqued...

A tradition after each national election, presidential or midterm, is for the pundit class to pontificate on whether and how the results point to a realignment. This exercise dates back at least to the publication of The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips in 1969, and it continues to this day. Now, of course, the hot topic is the so-called emerging Democratic majority, dominated by young people, nonwhites, and upscale social liberals. Pundits across the political spectrum are offering free advice to the Republican party on how to change its ways lest it face extinction at the hands of this...