Outside the Beltway

Republican Troy Balderson holds a narrow lead in a Special Election in Ohio. Even if he wins, though, the way this election played out does not bode well for the GOP in November.

Facebook, Google, and several other companies have closed down accounts associated with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Corey Stewart rose to become the Republican Party’s Senate nominee in Virginia with blatant appeals to racial division. Now his party fears they’ll be the ones who end up paying the price.

A Special Election tomorrow in suburban Columbus, Ohio could tell us a lot about where the midterm elections might be headed.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro survived an apparent, albeit amateurish, assassination attempt yesterday in what could be a sign of underlying instability in Venezuela.

The Texas Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke is looking close, but Democrats should not hold out much hope of flipping this seat.

Jobs growth fell short of expectations in July but was still relatively decent. Wage growth, however, remains stubbornly stagnant.

You might say he body slammed the opposition.

President Trump says he wants to talk to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but his own lawyers clearly don’t trust him enough to allow that to go forward.

A powerful political network is distancing itself from the Trump-dominated Republican Party.

President Trump is suggesting he may force a government shutdown over his immigration policies just a month before the midterm elections.

Senate Democrats appear to be recognizing that there’s basically nothing they can do to stop the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The Secretary of State of West Virginia has barred Don Blankenship, who came in third place in the GOP Primary, from mounting a third-party bid on the November ballot.

Senator Corker provided a pretty damning run-down last week.

Mid-terms are coming.

A new poll suggests that Governor Scott Walker could be in trouble as he seeks a third term as Governor of Wisconsin, but he’s been counted out before only bounce back and confound the doubters.

One of the biggest names in Hollywood stands accused of sexual misconduct by a number of women in yet another ground-breaking report by Ronan Farrow.

New polling shows that the ground looks fertile for Democrats in the fall.

Contrary to last week’s reports, we won’t be seeing a second summit with Vladimir Putin in the near future.

Don Blankenship, who came in third in the Republican Primary in West Virginia earlier this year, is moving forward with plans to run as a third-party candidate in the General Election.

A fourth poll in less than a month shows that most Americans support keeping the rights protected in Roe v. Wade alive.

If President Trump’s trade war continues, it could have a serious impact on the political fortunes of President Trump and his party.

Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who challenged Nancy Pelosi for a leadership spot in 2016, is telling supporters he’s running for President in 2020.

Most Americans disapprove of the President’s handling of our relationship with Russia, and foreign policy more generally, in the wake of the Helsinki Summit. That’s not having much of an impact on his overall job approval, though.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is running for a third term under a dark ethical cloud. That probably won’t matter.

Republicans will hold their 2020 National Convention in the same city that hosted the Democrats back in 2012.

In the wake of a grievance filed by the union representing players, the N.F.L. has suspended the new National Anthem policy it announced earlier this year. This guarantees even more cynical political exploitation by the President.

The Trump Administration is inviting Vladimir Putin to Washington, D.C. for a second summit in the fall. What could possibly go wrong?

We still don’t know what President Trump and Vladimir Putin talked about or agreed to during their two-hour meeting on Monday.

Three new polls show that Republicans basically agree with the leader of their party when it comes to the issue of Russian interference in American elections.

It took less than twenty-four hours for President Trump to essentially repudiate his purported attempt to walk back the appalling comments he made in Helsinki.

Initial polling on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court find the public more divided than they have been for other recent SCOTUS picks, but that’s unlikely to impact the fate of his nomination.

One day after an embarrassing performance at the Helsinki Summit, President Trump an absurd, completely unbelieve walk back of things the entire world heard him say loud and clear.

Rick Scott is pulling in impressive fundraising numbers, giving Democrats reason to worry that they’ll have another Senate seat to worry about in November.

Mariia Butina, a Russian “gun rights activist, is accused of being an unregistered agent of the Russian government and attempting to influence Republican Party policies regarding Russia in an operation that pre-dates the Trump Presidential campaign.

The midterm elections are still four months away, but Democrats are already making moves to prepare for the race for their party’s Presidential nomination in 2020.

Forget the “republic v. a democracy” abstraction. The numbers show some serious flaws in translating popular will into government.

Even if all he gets out of the Helsinki Summit is a handshake and a photograph, Vladimir Putin has already won.

California’s Democratic Party endorsed “progressive” upstart Kevin de León over Senator Dianne Feinstein, but this is unlikely to stop Feinstein from winning election to a sixth term in office.

The Strzok hearing provides a return to this timeworn favorite.

The Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued indictments against twelve Russian intelligence officials for election-related hacking, and in the process has shown most of the arguments made by the President and his surrogates regarding the Russia investigation are nonsense.

The Democratic National Committee is one step closer to adopting a rule change that would make superdelegates largely irrelevant to the party’s nomination process.

At least in these early days, Democrats appear to lack a coherent message, or a coherent strategy, to propel any effort to block Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

A new poll lends credence to the suggestion that Democrats should be careful about rallying behind the call to “Abolish ICE.”

A selection that is likely to keep the Senate GOP united and red-state Democrats up for re-election under pressure to vote to confirm.

A new poll finds that most Americans oppose key elements of the immigration policies that the President and Republicans in Congress support.

Some considerations on the politics of Roe v. Wade.

Democrats are rallying around the “Abolish ICE” slogan in response to the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, but it could end up backfiring on them.

Democrats are making largely meaningless appeals to the so-called ‘Merrick Garland Precedent” to argue for a delay in confirming the President’s next Supreme Court nominee. The American people feel differently.

The National Debt has passed $21,000,000,000,000 for the first time in history just as the nation begins its return to the era of trillion dollar budget deficits.