Frozen

Sean is Irish and Catholic and decades ago his great-grandfather was an immigrant; after he (Sean) graduated from Fordham and married and worked a stint in White Plains, New York, he moved to Raleigh where he now lives and earns $175,000 a year. Sean doesn’t have one ideological bone in his body and partisan politics…

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(Mis)reading polls

A reporter recently sent me a long list of detailed questions about how to tell if a political poll is reliable. Things like margin of error, sample size, live vs. robocalls, question wording, question order, the pollsters’ track record, partisan affiliation, past performance, etc. All good stuff. But face it, you’re not going to that…

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Look What It’s Led To

The Washington Post was roaring Trump’s ‘Mean, Scary and Hurtful’ and Fox News was crowing on its website the ‘Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan’ has endorsed Hillary. Another website was claiming ‘Hillary is Saul Alinsky’s Daughter’ (Conservative Review) and another was saying ‘Hillary’s mentor was a former Klan leader’ (they were talking about…

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Frozen

Ten weeks out, the presidential election appears frozen in place. Absent an act of God or an incredibly boneheaded play by the Hillary Clinton campaign, she is going to win and Donald Trump is going to lose. Big. Then things will really get interesting. More in a bit. Trump is losing because of how he…

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The wave

Democrats who are nervously hoping for a good 2016 but afraid to believe it need to read “The Wave” from Stanley Greenberg at Democracy Corps. His analysis: “America is about to experience a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake of an election, but progressives do not seem to trust the new American majority and its ascendant values and thus,…

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Crooked but Predictable

Last summer the Insiders looking on figured Donald Trump was going to crash and burn – but after Trump started winning primaries they moved in and after the first round of knife fighting Corey Lewbanowski was out and Paul Manafort was in charge. Which should have been the end of the story; once an Insider…

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Roy is ready

As I listened to Roy Cooper set a crowd of OBX Democrats to clapping and hollering Monday evening, a wise old political vet whispered what I was thinking: “He’s come a long way.” A year or so ago, Democrats had doubts about Cooper. “He should have run before now.” “Does he really have the fire…

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The rise of Deborah Ross

Richard Burr has his hands full. For the first time since he went to Washington 22 years ago, he faces a double whammy: a strong opponent and a bad year for Republicans. You can see his problem in the first ad for Deborah Ross. It tags Burr, sans socks, as the worst kind of Washington…

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After November

Saying he was going ‘To Make America Great Again’ and waving the banner of ‘Americanism’ Donald Trump set out to whip the Washington Politicians and he did whip every Republican in sight from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz – but then came eyeball to eyeball with Hillary. Ship sinking, unable to save himself, Trump needs…

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Trump TV

If Donald Trump loses, he and Roger Ailes may well start Trump TV. They’ll outFox Fox. As James Carville said on Morning Joe, you can’t win an election with 40 percent, but you can make a bazillion dollars on TV with 40 percent. Can you imagine how much Trump and Ailes will debase a political…

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