Would any Republican besides Donald Trump have beaten Hillary Clinton and been elected the 45th president? It's an interesting question, not susceptible to a definitive answer but with consequences for politics going forward.
In May 1986, a 39-year-old Manhattan real estate developer named Donald Trump promised to get Wollman Rink in Central Park up and running -- something the city government, despite spending $13 million, had failed to do for six years. Trump delivered, ahead of time and under a $3 million budget.
History is on our side. That's a claim Barack Obama has made frequently, in his two successful campaigns for president and during his nearly eight years in office. It's a claim that looks a little shakier this Thanksgiving holiday than it did during the Halloween holiday three weeks ago.
What is to become of the Democratic Party? The world's oldest political party, which traces its roots to 1792, is in as dire straits as it has ever been.
Hillary Clinton lost the election in the Midwest. Donald Trump won 50 Midwestern electoral votes that went to Barack Obama in 2012 -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio -- plus 20 more in Pennsylvania, where the two-thirds of voters beyond metro Philadelphia are Midwestern in culture and concerns. Trump could have lost Florida and still won.
One of the issues President-elect Donald Trump says he wants Congress to act on is immigration. That's not entirely surprising, given that he spotlighted just that issue, in incendiary terms, after gliding down that escalator in the Trump Tower and announcing he was running 17 months ago.
Astounding. That's the best word to describe the tumultuous election night and the (to most people) surprise victory of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton hoped to win with votes of Northeasterners, including those who have moved south along Interstate 95 to North Carolina and Florida (44 electoral votes). Instead, Trump won with votes along the I-94 and I-80 corridors, from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (70 electoral votes).
Among the many complaints I have seen about this squalid presidential election -- the most dismal choice of major-party nominees since 1856 -- there's one that I find missing: that it shows how our politics have become less republican.
In my Nov. 1 column, I looked at the presidential election through the lens of the old children's radio show "Let's Pretend" -- examining how things would look if it turned out that Donald Trump ends up winning.
When I was a child, there was a Saturday morning radio program called "Let's Pretend." It used words and sounds to encourage young children to paint pictures in their heads of make-believe worlds.
Could a flailing Donald Trump campaign hurt down-ballot Republicans and cost the party majorities in the Senate and House? That seems possible, if he loses to Hillary Clinton by a margin similar to those in most current polls and if Americans keep on straight-ticket voting as they have increasingly in recent years.
In last week's third and (thank goodness) final presidential debate, each candidate did an excellent job of presenting convincing arguments for why people shouldn't vote for the other.
2016 has been a big year for protest politics -- not just in the United States, what with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting over 40 percent of primary votes, but also all over Europe and Latin America, where voters have been rejecting the advice of their nations' political, financial and media establishments.
Which party is going to control the House and hold a majority in the Senate in January 2017? Even if you regard the presidential contest as over -- a proposition for which there is powerful evidence, including Donald Trump's current campaign message choices -- the answers to those questions are, respectively, mildly and very unclear.
"It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to," Donald Trump tweeted at the reasonable hour of 10 a.m. on Tuesday.
Robin Hood is dead. Or at least seriously ailing. The politics of taking from the rich and giving to the poor -- the politics that philosophers from Aristotle to James Madison dreaded -- just doesn't seem to be working as it used to.
"The president believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated -- from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of economic development and in welcoming people from other cultures and countries."
You've heard and read by now lots of spin and speculation about who won and where the polls are going to move after Monday's presidential debate. We'll know the answers to these questions soon. The more important question for the long run is how each of these candidates would govern. The debate provides no certain answers to that question, but it does offer some useful clues.
There's been lots of speculation about the fate of the Republican Party if (as most of the prognosticators expect and hope) Donald Trump loses. There's been less speculation, though recent polling suggests it may be in order, about the fate of the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton loses.
Success breeds failure. That's one of the melancholy lessons you learn in life. The success of policymakers in stamping out inflation in the 1980s and minimizing recessions for two decades also produced policies that contributed to the collapse of the housing and financial markets in 2007-08
