Commentary by Michael Barone

Most Recent Releases

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
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                            March 7, 2025A Formidable President Storms Ahead By Michael Barone
Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.

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                            February 28, 2025Getting to Denmark By Michael Barone
Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.

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                            February 21, 2025The Policies of European Elites End in Tears By Michael Barone
If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.

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                            February 14, 2025Why Were Hopes of the 1990s Dashed? By Michael Barone
As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.

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                            February 7, 2025Trump Rides the Vibes, for Better or Worse By Michael Barone
        After a flurry of activity -- the president's tariff threats and showdowns

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                            January 31, 2025Trump Is Moving Fast and Breaking Things By Michael Barone
Move fast and break things. That's the original operating philosophy of Facebook founder and Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and it seems to be the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term.

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                            January 24, 2025Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Andrew Jackson? By Michael Barone
The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.

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                            January 17, 2025For Now, Trump Is Succeeding While His Opponents Fail By Michael Barone
"It is not enough in life that one succeed," the droll economist John Kenneth Galbraith is supposed to have said. "Others must fail."

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                            January 10, 2025Facebook Embraces Free Speech: The Masses Win, the Experts Lose By Michael Barone
        The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps

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                            January 3, 2025Toward a Political History of the Last 75 Years By Michael Barone
New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.

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                            December 26, 2024Time for Trump to Drop Lawsuits and for the Press to Apologize By Michael Barone
Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough.

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                            December 13, 2024Free Speech: Why a Tech Titan Backed Trump By Michael Barone
Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?

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                            December 6, 2024Politics of Economic Redistribution, RIP By Michael Barone
Whatever happened to the Democrats' reputation as the party favoring the working man? Put another way, what happened to the Democrats as the party promising economic redistribution from the rich to the average man?

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                            November 29, 2024The Groups and Barista Proletariat of the Democratic Party By Michael Barone
Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.

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                            November 22, 2024Trump Gains Among Nonwhite People: Historical Precedent and Possible Harbinger By Michael Barone
Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?

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                            November 15, 2024The Democratic Gerontocracy Forgets the Lessons of Its Youth and Maturity By Michael Barone
Here's another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It's the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it's hard to find a time when a party's leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.
November 8, 2024What You Didn't Hear About on Election Night: The Other 43 States By Michael Barone
Here are some observations on what you didn't hear on election night. Most networks' focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- to win the needed 270 electoral votes. Public polling, as reported and analyzed by websites such as RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, had Trump ahead in most of the target states, but by microscopic percentages, and polling in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles had understated the percentages Trump ended up winning.

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                            November 1, 2024Who Will Make the Last Mistake in This Flawed Campaign? By Michael Barone
"The only garbage I see out there is his supporters," said President Joe Biden on Tuesday evening, referencing a comedian's comment at former President Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, as Vice President Kamala Harris delivered on the Ellipse, visible from the White House windows, what her campaign has described as her "closing argument" speech of her campaign.

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                            October 25, 2024The Democratic Party's Bad October By Michael Barone
Was it just a coincidence that Vice President Kamala Harris showed up, 15 minutes late, to be interviewed by Fox News' Bret Baier a day before Nate Silver's poll aggregation website showed her chances of winning the election slipping below 50%? Probably not.

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                            October 18, 2024Are Minorities Voting Increasingly Like Normies? By Michael Barone
Not everything significant politically is happening just in the target states.