ArcaMax

No two states voted more alike and closer to the national average in last year's presidential election than the two states that have gubernatorial elections in this odd-numbered year: New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey voted 51.8% for Kamala Harris and 45.9% for Donald Trump. Virginia voted 51.8% for Harris and 46.1% for Trump. Aside from the...Read more

"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." That was the mordant comment of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister, on the failure of a liberal reform to achieve the results promised with great assurance by the articulate liberal eminences of the day.

With ...Read more

Why are so many Democrats fond of wishing death on their opponents? That's a question raised by two astonishing developments early this month. On Oct. 3, National Review's Audrey Fahlberg revealed texts Jay Jones had sent, perhaps mistakenly, to Virginia state Del. Carrie Coyner, bemoaning the cordial remarks then-Virginia House Speaker Todd ...Read more

Whatever else you want to say about him, President Donald Trump has what Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70 called "energy in the executive." Announcing a peace plan for Israel and Hamas, ordering the dispatch of federal troops to protect immigration enforcement personnel in "sanctuary" states, authorizing his budget director to use ...Read more

We Americans, it seems, continue to live in two separate countries. Consider two items in the news this week and the inconsistent responses they evoked.

One was the conviction in Florida of Ryan Routh, the second man who attempted to assassinate then-candidate Donald Trump in mid-September 2024. The news appeared on page A24 of the print ...Read more

What a difference half a decade makes. This summer's prevailing ethos, zeitgeist, vibe -- call it any fancy name you want -- was sharply different from the summer, just five years ago, of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.

Such sudden changes in the moral atmosphere seem to occur every so often. The year 1776, the 250th anniversary of which we ...Read more

When the Irish comedian Graham Linehan arrived at London Heathrow Airport this past weekend, he was greeted by five armed British police officers who arrested him for -- get this -- three rude tweets.

Or, as Linehan wrote on his Substack, "I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because...Read more

The Constitution of the United States lays out a complex scheme of governance that has mostly worked for the 237 years since it became effective with the ratification of the ninth state, New Hampshire, in 1788.

There have been exceptions, of course. Abraham Lincoln took extraordinary steps to quell the rebellion of 11 Southern states. Franklin ...Read more

The extraordinary pair of meetings in the past week -- the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday and Donald Trump's hosting of the leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Finland, as well as the NATO alliance and the European Commission -- were prompted by the latest iteration of a continuing source of instability over ...Read more

In assessing the current controversy over Texas Republicans' proposed redistricting of the state's U.S. House seats, two historic facts should be considered.

One is that the principle of equal representation by population is well established in American history. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention required the members of the House of ...Read more

When debating current issues, it's helpful to avoid inaccurate depictions of past policy, especially on immigration, in which both opponents and advocates of President Donald Trump's policies have views based on not altogether accurate renditions of the past.

Many opponents of Trump's policies seem to believe the president wants to cut off ...Read more

Here's a clue that the off-year elections in November 2026 may not go the way conventional wisdom suggests. That conventional wisdom is that the president's party almost always loses the House and, slightly less often, Senate seats.

There are two structural reasons for this. One is that parties in power tend to do things or produce results that...Read more