Washington Monthly – General Political | Politics & Government

For more than 40 years, Charlie Cook has been the gold standard for election forecasting and political trend analysis. In 2021, he stepped back, and Amy Walter, a top political analyst in her own right, took over the newsletter, which was renamed The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. But Charlie, now 72 and living in Maine, still writes a must-read column in National Journal. Earlier this year, Charlie was much more cautious about the midterms. Now he thinks President Trump’s unpopularity will decide the outcome. For the last few years, I’ve been part of a regular Zoom call with a couple dozen former Carter administration officials, plus a few journalists and others. Started by Les Francis, a former senior White House aide to Carter, it’s called Carter Old Farts Amiable Discussions, or COFAD. Last Sunday, Cook was COFAD’s guest. The following is excerpted from his remarks. Why Midterms Punish the President’s Party Donald Trump’s job approval ratings are usually in the mid-to-high 30s. The history is clear. Unless a party has a president with an approval rating in the 60s, as Bill Clinton did in 1998 and George W. Bush did in 2002, it will suffer losses. That party might lose just five or six seats, or it may lose 50 or 60, as Democrats did under Clinton in 1994 [when they lost 54 seats] and Obama in 2010 [when they lost 64 seats]. The post-World War II average is around 26 seats lost by the party in the White House. This is just as natural as it could be. People in a president’s party might be satisfied, complacent, a little disappointed, or deeply disillusioned, but they are rarely pumped up and energized, thinking, “I can’t wait to go vote.” Conversely, people in the opposition party, particularly in this era of hyperpartisanship, hate anything the president is doing. They hate everything he might even think about doing. Everything. They want to relitigate the last election. They can’t wait to vote. And then you’ve got this little slice of pure independents, and I’m not talking about the 45 percent of all adults or the third of all registered voters who claim to be independents but consistently lean toward and vote for one party. I’m talking about the three to six percent who don’t lean toward either party and are legitimate independents. They tend to be very fickle. They read,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Since sweeping to power in 2025, Republicans have waged an all-out war on clean energy. Congress gutted major clean energy and electric vehicle subsidies enacted under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, killed state-level rules to spur electric vehicle adoption, and blocked legislation to ease permitting for wind power projects. The Trump administration has gone further, paying developers billions to abandon offshore wind projects and invest in oil and gas instead, freezing wind and solar development on federal lands, and terminating $20 billion in clean energy grants (all three moves have been challenged in court). The Republican trifecta could deliver one clean energy priority in the form of a bipartisan permitting reform bill currently taking shape in the Senate, but otherwise stands firmly athwart the decarbonization agenda the White House has termed the “Green New Scam.”  In recent months, however, the clean energy industry has started to fight back. A new super PAC organized by solar investors and executives, Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC, has made waves in the press by targeting some of the industry’s biggest antagonists in Congress. The PAC reported about $5 million in total spending through August, most of it against three far-right Republicans who led the charge to undo Biden’s clean energy subsidies: Representative Chip Roy in his bid for Texas attorney general; Representative Andy Ogles in his Tennessee reelection campaign; and Representative Ralph Norman in the South Carolina Senate primary. All three lost. After Ogles’s defeat, Politico suggested the PAC “may be showing conservatives the power of clean energy money.”  “We needed to instill fear,” Peter Davidson, CEO of the investment firm Aligned Climate Capital and a founding organizer of Invest in Tomorrow, told me of the group’s philosophy. The industry has historically focused on winning hearts and minds rather than playing political hardball. Now, Davidson wants politicians to understand that “if they cross the industry—just like crypto, just like the NRA—there would be consequences.”  Invest in Tomorrow plans to spend $20 to $30 million by the end of the midterms to send that message. But in our brave new world of unlimited election spending, is that enough to instill fear in Washington? James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, ridiculed me for even asking the question. “Twenty million—what the fuck do you think the carbon industry spends in a year?” In the 2024 elections, that number was $219 million. The cryptocurrency industry, which Davidson… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Artificial intelligence has been justifiably under fire in recent weeks for the myriad dangers it represents. At around the same time that a researcher for Anthropic predicted the odds of human extinction from AI were “greater than 10 percent,” the company admitted it had blocked research that could lead to AI-engineered bioweapons. China’s top spy chief has warned his country’s leaders of AI-powered security threats, like cyberattacks, misinformation, and widescale espionage. Even Elon Musk, an otherwise reckless techno-maximalist, has backed the calls of top AI CEOs to slow down AI development due to its risks. But as policymakers get serious about AI safety, they shouldn’t neglect another fundamental problem with AI: bias—and in particular its bias against women.  Perhaps this problem sounds trivial compared to the existential threats posed by AI that are dominating news coverage of late. But it’s exactly its low-key pervasiveness that makes bias so insidious and so damaging.  Don’t take my word this problem exists. Just ask AI. When I asked ChatGPT if it’s biased against women, its answer was an unequivocal “Yes.” “Not because AI inherently ‘hates’ women,” ChatGPT said, but because “AI systems can reproduce, or amplify gender biases that exist in their training data, design choices, and societies that produce that data.” Claude as the ultimate tech bro? This isn’t a harmless quirk. Bias shapes societal attitudes by perpetuating stereotypes that limit women’s freedom. Here’s what Gemini had to say about that: “Text-generation models frequently associate men with career success, business, and leadership, while linking women to domestic roles, family, or supportive positions.” Here’s an obvious example (from ChatGPT): Bias can also sabotage women’s future opportunities, as more employers and institutions adopt AI. For instance, according to Gemini, automated hiring systems tend to favor male candidates: “Studies have shown that when Al evaluates identical qualifications, it often rates female candidates—particularly older women—as less experienced or qualified than male peers.” Algorithms also tend to assign women lower credit scores and higher interest rates, which means women will pay more to their mortgage lender chatbots if they ever want to own a house. AI chatbots may even treat users differently, depending on their gender. A new study from Johns Hopkins University finds that when women ask AI to draft emails and job applications, its responses are less sophisticated than what it generates for men. “You’ll get back a response that’s less complex, at a lower grade level, and less formal,” said senior author Anjalie… [TheTopNews] Read More.

There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.  There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.   But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.   Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.   Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.  Per capita real disposable income took a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

With her senior year of college now underway, Mitzie Westgate has begun planning what she’ll do after graduation next spring. An exercise science major, she hopes to go straight to graduate school and pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy so she can open a nonprofit to help children with disabilities like her cousin, who has cerebral palsy. But thanks to unprecedented confusion around federal student loans, she can’t firm up plans or even decide where to apply until she sees how the chaos shakes out.  “It’s kind of up in the air whether I’ll be able to pay for college” after this year, said Westgate, a 21-year-old senior at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Tuition and other costs at her top choices—Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, the University of New Hampshire, and the Medical University of South Carolina—could far outpace federal loan limits, she said. That could leave her able to afford only a single smaller school, Johnson & Wales University in her home state of Rhode Island, where she could save money by living with her parents but would graduate with fewer professional connections. She still plans to apply to more expensive schools and hopes that scholarships will cover some of the cost. “I’m kind of playing it by ear,” she said.  Congress last year removed dozens of graduate-level programs from the U.S. Department of Education’s list of “professional” degrees, a reclassification that set tight limits on federal loans students can borrow to pay for graduate school. Westgate’s dream program—occupational therapy—is among those that could cost students far more than they can now borrow from the federal government, leaving many wondering whether to rely on more expensive private loans to cover the remainder. Under the Grad PLUS program, students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance. The new law, which took effect July 1, eliminated Grad PLUS and limits federal loans to $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total for most graduate programs, with higher limits of $50,000 annually and $200,000 in total for just 11 professional programs. A lawsuit by nursing groups and other health care and educational associations led a judge to suspend the rule restricting higher limits until at least December, making it difficult for students to plan for the 2027-28 school year even as they apply for graduate school this fall. Depending on how the lawsuit goes, some degrees with higher… [TheTopNews] Read More.