Donald Trump is, in a word, performative. His entire political career has been one long installation of performance art. He lives to see good television ratings. It is his own personal measure of his self-worth. And tomorrow night, he'll be unveiling his next act.

It's far from being a secret what this act will consist of. Tomorrow night, Donald Trump will announce his third bid for the United States presidency. He has wanted to make this announcement for months now, but has so far been talked into delaying it by his advisors. Tomorrow, the delay will be over and Trump will throw his hat back into the ring.

Read Complete Article »

Well, that was a better week than we expected, we have to say.

The 2022 midterm elections are now over (although the counting still isn't) and the one big takeaway is that either Republicans dropped the ball or Democrats ran excellent campaigns all over the country. Or maybe some combination of the two. The red wave simply did not appear as predicted. A "blue breakwater" turned it back.

Read Complete Article »

Reasonable Republicans now have the best chance they have had in almost two years to reclaim their party and realign it so that it is not in perpetual orbit around the whims of one unhinged man -- a man whose track record of losing elections grew much larger this Tuesday. Donald Trump is now being called the thing he fears most -- a loser -- by members of his own party. The right-wing media is even jumping on the "Dump Trump" bandwagon. The next few weeks could be pivotal for the ultimate direction of the Republican Party, in fact. It could either recede into the swamp of fawning obsequiousness towards Trump (that it has been stuck in since 2016), or it could decide that a brand new direction is what is needed right now.

Read Complete Article »

That headline could be applicable to today's post-election situation in a number of ways, I suppose. As a movie director's cry (i.e. "We're starting take number two!"), since we are going to have a Senate race runoff election on December 6th in Georgia. It could be read literally, since at this point both parties need to take two of the three uncalled races in order to achieve a Senate majority. Or just as: "Take two and call me in the morning," the classic punchline to a doctor joke -- because it will probably take quite a while to get all the results in even before the December runoff. Or maybe even as: "I did a double-take when I heard the first results," that could work too. The funniest thing I heard during the extended post-election period in 2020 came out of the mouth of a babe -- some parent's toddler (this was passed along to me as an anecdote) said they were tired of watching television with Mommy and Daddy because "all they wanted to watch was The Map Show." And it looks like we'll all have at least a few more mornings of checking in with The Map Show before we know what Congress is really going to look like in January.

Read Complete Article »

At this point, there's only one thing left to say:

-- Chris Weigant
 
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
 

Read Complete Article »

The American system of holding elections is about to go through a stress test. I saw this term in the headline of a Washington Post piece today and had to agree it was the correct term to use. A stress test, whether for a piece of software or a new gizmo, is essentially the quality assurance/quality control people beating the living daylights out of it until it crumbles. For online software, this might mean simulating millions of people trying to access it simultaneously (see: Obamacare marketplace website rollout). For a new doodad, it might mean dropping it from increasing heights until it shatters when it hits. The whole idea is to push beyond the limits to find out the breaking point, one way or another.

Read Complete Article »

Some weeks, we pre-empt our own talking points here and just deliver a rant (because sometimes the circumstances seem to almost require it). This week, however, we're going to pre-empt the entire Friday Talking Points column. For some reason, we just don't think handing out awards to Democrats (good and bad) or providing talking points is the important thing, this week. At this point, the Democratic talking points are kind of set in stone; new ones wouldn't do much good with such little time between now and Election Day.

Read Complete Article »

Two years ago today, we were all glued to our television sets to find out who had won the 2020 presidential election. We didn't find out that night, of course, we had to wait days and days before the final results were in: Joe Biden had decisively beaten Donald Trump, with the exact same Electoral College split as happened in 2016 -- an election Trump had always liked to refer to as "a landslide."

Read Complete Article »

In the past week or so, the Democratic Party has been doing an excellent job of getting out on the campaign trail and making a closing political argument. Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have made or will make appearances. President Joe Biden's speech today is a part of this full-court press, but one has to wonder why it took the Democrats so long to get so engaged with the process.

Read Complete Article »

Perhaps things aren't quite as bad for Democrats as the storyline the entire political media universe has been echoing for the past week or so. That's the message today, and it is an interesting one indeed for Democrats to see. For a while now, the political press has had a rather gloomy outlook: "Democrats peaked too early on the abortion issue and the momentum has now officially shifted to the Republicans in the midterm election races." Now, I'll admit I haven't been following the polls as closely as I do during presidential election years, so I didn't notice something that has apparently been happening (but, to be fair, few others had commented on it either) -- virtually all of the polling done in the past couple of weeks has been from Republican pollsters, not independent, nationally-known polling organizations. Which could explain the whole "momentum shift" as nothing more than bias induced into the polls themselves.

Read Complete Article »