Outside the Beltway

It would be nice if the legislature represented the voters and whatnot.

31 of the 35 Senate races next month are noncompetititve.

And a reminder of the role of political parties.

Autocrats facing defeat have all kinds of counterproductive, dangerous ideas.

Putin provides an example for a Politics 101 class.

How well has the famous thesis fared?

More details from the Alaska special election.

No one should draw conclusions about RCV from the AK special election.

American parties are coordination problems with shared branding.

This is as close as we get to Garland saying “Eff around, find out!”

“America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.”

Hardball politics or dirty pool?

Capitol Hill Republicans are turning the concept on its head.

The Forward Party will almost certainly go nowhere.

Can American democracy survive its information bubbles?

A proposal by Jamell Bouie

Are plurality winners less legitimate than popular vote losers?

What should conservatives who can’t support the party of Trump do?

Assuming they had the votes, should Democrats carve out yet another exception?

The implications of modes of interpretation.

Yet another reminder of the pathologies of American institutions.

How long can the unsustainable be sustained?

This will just reinforce minority rule in the US.

Could Alaska point the way to a solution?

Tweaking the message and getting out the vote don’t matter as much as strategists think.

Are you going to believe this index or your own lyin’ eyes?

The laying out of the case begins.

They’re taking their eye off the ball.

The NYT and CA41 and yet another example of telling the wrong story.

The first round produced two very different candidates.

Donald Trump and friends speak to the NRA.

The obstacles to fixing the problem are many.

Alas, it’s unlikely to change the policies that enable them.

The President continues his recent penchant for saying the quiet part out loud.

The combination of a horrendous rollout and a social media onslaught was disastrous.

An ongoing series of observations.

Quite often, political fights are about attitudes rather than issues and polices.

Ezra Klein discusses the dynamics of American conservatism in historical perspective. Plus, he helps illustrate a key problem that we have in thinking about American politics (IMHO).

Is harassing judges, mayors, Senators, and the like in their private lives just free speech?

Hopefully answering a reader question (but probably just making it all worse).

More on primaries with a foray into Madison and the general politics of power-seekers and incentives.

The Ohio GOP Senate contest.

Nobody is keeping the gate.

The role of American political institutions.

When doing the right thing is the wrong thing.

A illustration from the Senate race in Georgia.

How rules shape the game.