Tag: Daily Beast

December 26, 2014

Whether it is entertainment, consumer goods, or almost anything else that can be purchased, viewed, or clicked on, millennials are the most coveted demographic. There are about 80 million Americans between the ages of 18-34 and next year they are expected to spend $2.45 trillion. But when it comes to politics and national policy, they have relatively little clout because most of them don’t reliably vote and aren’t major political contributors. These young adults have voluntarily checked out of a political system they consider corrupt and dysfunctional.
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November 3, 2014

This midterm election has been pretty terrible measured by the metrics that independent/swing voters care about. Instead, there’s been a record $4 billion spent mostly on vacuous television attack ads, little substantive discussion about important issues or a clear argument for how Republicans or Democrats would lead the nation, and the feeling that nothing will really change in Washington no matter which party wins control of the Senate. That’s why a lot of voters could stay home November 4th. But in the closest races around the country—the 10 Senate races that are within five percentage points, including those in Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Iowa, at least half a dozen gubernatorial contests, and a handful of House races—the swing voters who do show up could determine the outcomes.
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October 13, 2014

Anyone who has been talking to voters around the country and watching public opinion polls knows that American voters are angry, tired of both political parties, and ready for a change. Until very recently, though, that frustration has had almost no outlet, as independent candidates for office in the past were rarely competitive and almost always dismissed by the national media as a sideshow. Not this year.
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October 13, 2014

Anyone who has been talking to voters around the country and watching public opinion polls knows that American voters are angry, tired of both political parties, and ready for a change. Until very recently, though, that frustration has had almost no outlet, as independent candidates for office in the past were rarely competitive and almost always dismissed by the national media as a sideshow. Not this year.
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July 5, 2014

Meet the non-partisan candidates changing American politics. Innovate. Disrupt. Solve problems. This mantra of the hi-tech revolution has brought fundamental change to virtually every area of American life except one—politics. America’s polarized politics are mired in a dysfunctional and increasingly unpopular two-party system that has failed to address this nation’s major challenges and threatens its future. The approval rating for Congress—which just had its least productive year since at least the early 1990s—is at a historical low of roughly 13 percent. Less than a third of Americans have confidence in President Barack Obama’s leadership and voters have an even dimmer view of his Republican opponents. More than 40 percent of Americans now identify as political independents, a larger number than either Republicans or Democrats. And this anti-partisan trend has not gone unnoticed by aspiring office holders.
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April 3, 2014

District of Columbia voters went to the polls Tuesday, a few of them anyway, to vote in mayoral and city council primary elections. Unfortunately, although I am a Washington resident, I was not one of them. My non-participation wasn’t due to a lack of interest but because I am an Independent voter.
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February 18, 2014

Ron Wyden gets along with some Republicans better than Harry Reid or the White House. If Democrats let him work across the aisle, we may get the first tax reform in 30 years.
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March 13, 2012

When one gets a laughably bad review of a book that one has spent two years working on, the immediate reaction is—he’s a jerk, he didn’t like my book; so what—a lot of other people did. But in the case of Ruy Teixeira’s New Republic review of my book, The Swing Vote, a closer examination makes clear he has an agenda, and it has nothing to do with reviewing a book. In the purported review he lists a string of falsehoods, and claims swing voters are a myth on par with the unicorn, which begged for a rebuttal.
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January 18, 2012

For most of the last two decades, Haley Barbour was a model Republican able to appeal to social and fiscal conservatives alike. He led the GOP’s charge against Bill Clinton’s scandals, raised buckets of money for countless conservative causes, and rallied Mississippi back from Hurricane Katrina with little of the drama of neighboring New Orleans. But in his final hours in office as Mississippi governor this month, Barbour tarnished his own legacy as well as the GOP’s law-and-order image with more than 200 pardons, including a dozen convicted murderers, more than a dozen people convicted of manslaughter and homicide, several rapists, and a slew of robbers and drug dealers.
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January 6, 2012

A growing controversy in Democratic and pro-Israel circles over U.S. policy toward Israel, the security threat posed by Iran and what some journalists and bloggers are writing about these issues has unleashed a bitter feud involving the Center for American Progress (CAP) and charges and counter-charges about who actually has Israel’s best interests at heart.
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