Labor Day is almost here and Democrats are still waiting for the cavalry to arrive. An exhaustive scan of the horizon reveals no rescuers and none of the things Democrats badly need to save them from tough midterm election losses on Nov. 2.
Just over a year ago, a Democratic congressional leadership staffer who had sat in on a number of closed-door meetings between President Obama and Democratic members of Congress told me something to the effect of, "I know this isn't true and sounds naïve, but listening to the president in these meetings, you'd think he really doesn't care if he gets re-elected or not."
One of the fascinating things about wave elections is that the party in power often has raised significantly more money nationally, district by district and state by state; it may have invested in strong field organization efforts; it may have done everything in its power to insulate itself from a hostile political environment; and in many cases, it's to little or no avail.
It appears that the signs of a possible Democratic rebound were just a false alarm. After almost a year of unrelentingly bad poll numbers, back-to-back weeks of Gallup Polls showing Democrats with eyebrow-raising leads might have just been statistical flukes.
With the conventional wisdom saying that Democrats' House majority is in grave danger -- in my mind, more likely than not to fall -- many have started suggesting that Republicans may capture control of the Senate.
Ten years ago, there was a dumb romantic comedy starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt called "What Women Want." Not that the question isn't an age-old concern for men, but it was a silly movie.
With the Supreme Court's decision Monday to restrict state and local government from tougher gun control laws, some observers assumed that it would become a major issue and have a meaningful impact come November.
For months, I had been suggesting to my Republican friends that their party was facing good news and bad news. The bad news was that voters don't like Republicans these days and feel as though they have learned few, if any, lessons from 2006, when the GOP's majorities in Congress were abruptly terminated, or from 2008 when the party was unambiguously evicted from the White House.
Most of the attention today will, understandably, be focused on the primary elections that are being held in a dozen states. With several marquee races, notably the Democratic Senate primary runoff in Arkansas and the gubernatorial and senatorial primaries in California, there are obviously many races that are interesting and important.
