Republicans Should Go Easy on Obama, At Least in Public

• By Charlie Cook
• May 20, 2013
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With the newest controversy over Justice Department subpoenas of Associated Press reporters’ and editors’ telephone records, President Obama and his administration find themselves drawing fire from three different directions. Last week’s stories indicating that the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea-party groups and other conservative organizations for investigation sent a shiver down the spines of those of us who lived in Washington 40 years ago during the Watergate scandal. Meanwhile, allegations about the lapses in security that led to the fatal attacks on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year—as well as about the administration’s candor in the days after the attack—are getting new scrutiny. In the wake of these three developing stories, journalists typically quite sympathetic to the administration are raising questions about its performance. In fact, even reliably sycophantic reporters and commentators have joined the attack, and that’s a bad sign for any president.

Unfortunately, the overly broad subpoenas in the AP case distract from what could have been a legitimate and constructive debate over whether overly zealous journalists and news organizations hotly in pursuit of a “good story” can jeopardize vital intelligence activities aimed at preventing terrorist acts and uncovering terrorist ...

Virginia Means More Than South Carolina

• By Charlie Cook
• May 13, 2013
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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
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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
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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
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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 ...