Virginia Means More Than South Carolina

• By Charlie Cook
• May 13, 2013
• comments

Republican Mark Sanford’s victory Tuesday in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District tells us only one thing about the 2014 midterm elections—that Democrats still need to capture 17 seats to win back the House majority they lost in 2010. Nothing more, nothing less.

Had Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch won the special election, all it would have demonstrated was that even in such an overwhelmingly Republican district (Mitt Romney carried it by 18 points last year, John McCain by 13 points in 2008), a scandal-ridden, politically disfigured Republican could still lose. Because Sanford ended up winning, all it showed was that district voters prefer to hold their noses and vote for a deeply flawed Republican than to vote for a Democrat. It should be noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi figured prominently in Sanford’s last round of advertising; the former governor warned that a vote for Colbert Busch was a vote to make Pelosi House speaker again.

There have been times when a special congressional election told us something about the national political environment, but those instances are few and far between. More often, the districts bear little resemblance to the country as a whole, or the ...

The Fight for Millennials

• By Charlie Cook
• May 7, 2013
• comments

President Obama carried the 18-to-29-year-old voting bloc by 34 points in 2008 and by 23 points last year. But a new national survey of millennial voters conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics suggests this emerging generation might not be as locked into the Democratic camp as conventional wisdom suggests, and that young voters exhibit some of the same stark partisan divides as older Americans.

In the study of 3,013 millennials, conducted online by GfK, Obama’s job approval was at 52 percent, with a disapproval rate of 46 percent (the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points). That is only slightly better than the Huffington Post/Pollster.com averages and theRealClearPolitics.com averages of all national polls among Americans over 18 years of age, both of which show 48 percent approval and 47 percent disapproval.

At the same time, the gap between those young voters who consider themselves Democrats and those who identify more with the Republican Party is the size of the Grand Canyon, just as it is with older generations. Among Democrats ages 18-29, Obama enjoys an 85 percent approval rating, but among Republicans in that same age ...

Can Boston Be the Unifying Event That Our Nation Needs?

• By Charlie Cook
• April 23, 2013
• comments

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, virtually every national-security and terrorism expert predicted it was only a matter of weeks or months before another major attack came. They said a terrorist event within six months was a virtual certainty; and that certainly seemed plausible to many of us at the time. As each week, month, and season passed with no attack, most people still instinctively assumed one would come and seemed surprised that year after year went by without some comparable horror. It turned out to be 11 and a half years before another major attack. The bombings on the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday were obviously not on the same scale as the 9/11 tragedy—but were horrific nevertheless.

I’ve been spending this semester on a college campus in Boston, and it was interesting to observe the faces of dozens of undergraduates and graduate students in a common room, watching in horror and disbelief as the events unfolded on a giant television screen. It made me realize that this was a new and terrible experience for the freshmen and sophomores, many of whom were only in second or third grade ...

The Republican Advantage

• By Charlie Cook
• April 16, 2013
• comments

The “Incredible Shrinking Swing Seat” really does keep shrinking. In August 1997, The Cook Political Reportintroduced the Partisan Voter Index, an attempt to uniformly measure the competitiveness of all 435 congressional districts by comparing each district’s performance in the two most recent presidential elections with that of the nation as a whole. With the tireless help of Clark Bensen at Polidata, we have updated the PVI six times: after redistricting in 2002 and 2012, and after the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.

By now, the trend lines are clear. In 1998, we found 164 swing seats—districts within 5 points of the national partisan average, with scores between R+5 and D+5 (a score of R+5 means the district’s vote for the Republican presidential nominees was 5 percentage points above the national average). The data 15 years ago showed just 148 solidly Republican districts and 123 solidly Democratic seats. Today, only 90 swing seats remain—a 45 percent decline—while the number of solidly Republican districts has risen to 186 and the count of solidly Democratic districts is up to 159.

In 1998, the median Democratic-held district had a PVI score of ...

The Second-Term Jinx

• By Charlie Cook
• April 8, 2013
• comments

Pretend for a moment that you are President Obama, his chief of staff, his counselor, or another top adviser. The question before you is how to avoid the fate of so many other second-term presidencies. Dwight Eisenhower’s final four years were marred by a recession, Richard Nixon’s by Watergate. Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment saga that followed. For George W. Bush, it was the unraveling of the war in Iraq. Bad things seem to happen during second terms in the White House. Beyond the obvious—don’t do stupid, illegal, or ill-advised things—how do you make the most of your final four years?

Obama realizes he is unlikely to have the political and legislative advantages he enjoyed during his first two years in office, when he had large majorities in the House and Senate—at different points, the Democrats held 59 and 60 seats in the upper chamber. That was not enough to do whatever he wanted but enough to get a lot done; Obama was in about as strong a position as any recent president has been. He and congressional Democrats were able to pass an economic-stimulus ...