Midterms

Black Mirror politics is coming to America, courtesy of a new Democratic initiative called Citizen Strong. Announcing their existence in Bloomberg this week, Citizen Strong claims to have assembled an army of 17,000 amateur secret police who have spent months looking for damaging material on dozens of vulnerable Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. The information - presumably embarrassing at least, career ending at worst - will be unleashed on them just in time for the midterms. Though this kind of dirt-digging is as old as politics itself, the direction the Democrats are taking opposition research through Citizen Strong reveals how it has been re-energised and refashioned by the communications technology of the early 21st century.

It’s Donald Trump’s party now, but Republicans are still struggling with what that means. The primaries weren’t especially kind to insurgent candidates who imitated the president’s brash style — albeit almost uniformly without his humor or marketing flare — or wrapped themselves in the MAGA flag. That’s not to say Trump didn’t have an outsized influence in the party’s nominating contests this year. He most certainly did, as Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp and Kris Kobach — the Republican gubernatorial nominees in Florida, Georgia and Kansas, respectively — can all attest. So can soon-to-be former Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. When Alabama’s Rep.

The 2018 midterm elections, like the 2016 presidential contest, are proving to be far more interesting than conventional wisdom ever suspected. Two years ago, pundits were sure that Trump would lose, right up to the early evening of election day. This year, the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats will take back control of at least the House of Representatives, probably by a landslide, if not the Senate as well. But two critical polling indicators suggest the GOP’s hand is getting stronger. President Trump’s approval ratings are solidly into the 40s in recent polls, and even hit 50 percent in the most in the Rasmussen survey last week (which, to be sure, has consistently shown better numbers for Trump).