Arkansas representative switches parties, giving GOP supermajority in House

Numerous demands they make upon Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be uncompromisingly extreme and mutually exclusive. Yet if Republicans can bring these voters “into the GOP fold” while veering toward traditional party priorities, it “will make the Midwest a new red firewall”. Self identified Republicans are pretty much always going to vote with the Republican candidate and self-identified Democrats are always going to vote for the Democratic candidate. There are 24 US counties in which Latinos made up at least three-quarters of the voting-age population in 2015; Clinton’s margin of victory was smaller than Obama’s in 18 of them, by an average of almost 10 percentage points. For evidence, we need look no further than the picks Trump has made for attorney general and chief of the Central Intelligence Agency. This election gave Republicans control in both state legislative chambers in 32 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“The American public has clearly said that they want to go a different direction”, said Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado. “There are more Republicans at the state legislative level than there have ever been”, said Tim Storey, an analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. Just three Senate Republicans backed the stimulus package, which had been shaped to attract bipartisan support; no House Republicans supported it.

To unify the party, the Democrats will need to find a persuasive economic message that appeals to all of their interest groups. There are troublesome clues to what we can expect during the next four years. Obama’s two terms masked a crumbling party infrastructure. It said this happened at a time when many experts thought that Democrats would increase the number of seats they controlled in state legislatures.

As Rare Politics editor Jack Hunter has explained, Trump’s AG choice, Sen.

Republicans were never able to unleash a full-scale attack on the Vermont Senator, and moderate Democrats, probably concerned about the state of their party, might have run a moderate third party candidate.

Sanders didn’t get many cheers when he said that. Hillary Clinton acknowledged this in a 2015 interview: “You see the problems, when we don’t have a pipeline from county commissions and school boards and state legislatures all the way up to governors”. It has created quite a bit of soul searching among Democrats.

Democrats not accepting the result of this election is an indication of their inability to understand the very fabric of this nation, and was a major reason for their loss. But maybe even in the first 100 days.

As they prepare to take control of the White House and both chambers of Congress next year, Republicans are celebrating the opportunity to enact a new agenda for the country, including lowering taxes, securing the border and repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law. Mark Schauer, a former MI congressman who is a senior adviser to the effort, said the goal is to have a central organization direct resources into critical local races. Additionally, numerous party’s core constituents (minorities, young people, diehard liberals) habitually skip the midterm elections where down-ballot candidates take prominence; by contrast, the GOP’s diehards turn out for the midterms, and the party has long prioritized state legislative elections, routinely far outspending their Democratic counterparts. But confirmation bias is a heck of a thing, and the more I became convinced of my theory of the race, the more I shut out contrary information and glommed on to that evidence which confirmed what I already believed. “We have felt under-resourced”.

Several contestants have emerged, including Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who ran the national party in the run-up to Obama’s 2008 election, and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a favorite of Sanders and the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Charles E. Schumer of NY. Three years later, the strategy is working against the very ones who enacted it.

Before the election, we talked to Harry Enten, a senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight, about what the polls were projecting.

Pompeo was also one of the more outspoken opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, leading a campaign to publicize the “secret side deals” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.