After a sluggish debate that forced him compliment job destroyer/new GOP favorite Carly Fiorina’s looks and deliver a scorchingly white low-five to Jeb Bush, Donald Trump got back into the groove on Thursday by suggesting that he may be willing to build a wall around American Muslims in case they try to make a clock or something. “That’s my question. […]

This guest post comes from Sean McElwee — a research associate at Demos and an excellent follow on Twitter. If you haven’t already, check out Sean’s work on Salon, Rolling Stone, his own blog and various other publications. You’ll see that he has a gift for lucidity and a healthy obsession with improving our democracy by increasing voting, dispelling economic […]

And it could be Democrats greatest nightmare, too How did Mitt Romney end up losing more of the Latino vote than John McCain who lost more than George W. Bush? It mainly comes down to one utterance of “self-deportation” in one primary debate. Sure, there were other utterances that involved him saying he’d have vetoed the DREAM Act and planned […]

When it comes to our economy, we have one massive problem that’s like a black hole sucking in all hope of rebuilding the middle class: Only the richest are getting richer. From the year before Ronald Reagan was elected to the year before George W. Bush left the White House, the only income gains for most Americans came from working […]

A “low-information voter” has come to mean “anyone not smart enough to vote the way I do.” The discernment is not usually made on facts, since we all choose which facts to focus upon. Voters are not generally rational actors making perfect decisions, no matter how much we like to pretend we are. For instance, I know studies have shown […]

On Thursday, the chairman of the Republican Party — a man who presented a report that called on the GOP to take a new, less-Republican tone toward immigrants — stood on stage with Donald Trump and got him to pledge to support the Republican nominee in 2016. Meanwhile the other Republican candidates did the same thing, knowing that Trump is […]

The nuclear deal that United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China made with Iran is the epitome of giving peace a chance. Rejecting it would set us on a likely path to war. Accepting it gives us the hope of preventing Iran from ever gaining a nuclear weapon without a tragic, wasteful military conflict. Of course, the […]

Call Ari Berman the Paul Revere of voting rights. “In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with twenty-seven new laws taking effect in nineteen states, nearly all of them controlled by Republicans,” Berman writes in his new book Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. This wasn’t some freak […]

Matt Taibbi is probably right. Donald Trump’s campaign has stopped being funny. Now it’s beyond a living satire. Even Paddy Chayefsky wouldn’t let things get this vile. We’re now under the rock seething in the squishy, stomach-turning underbelly of conservative politics that has festered in the resentment of a politics that has capitalized on the anxieties created by the growing […]

When a Michigan story goes national — like the bizarre sexcapades of moralizing Tea Partiers Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat — you can bet Eclectablog has been on the case for a while. When a corporate front group launches a sneak attack to cut wages, we’re there. When Donald Trump takes on auto workers with perfect distillation of how billionaires like […]

Why did Wisconsin’s Republican Party decide it immediately needed a voter ID law before the 2014 election? The law’s proponents claimed it was necessary but offered no evidence — less than zero — to support that claim. “As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it’s a problem turn […]