RealClearPolitics Articles

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s radicalism on illegal immigration is almost touching. The Great Left Hope for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat has sounded less like a hardened, Bidenesque partisan – hellbent on demolishing the border and luring millions of Future Democrats of America. Instead, while contesting the Wolverine State’s 2018 Democrat gubernatorial nomination, he seemed more like Abdul El-Bambi. He sweetly welcomed foreign citizens and, their illegality notwithstanding, waved them toward the leafy trees and berry-filled bushes, there for the nibbling. They just...

As we watch public buildings, stores, and places of worship go up in smoke in France, we wonder if it could happen here. The reality is that while youth in France suffer far higher unemployment, approaching 20%, our youth here have never had more education, better technology, greater opportunity, or higher living standards. And yet many are souring on America.  The number of young college graduates skyrocketed 75% between 1993 and 2023. Total nonfarm employees in the U.S. increased 12% over the past decade. And they are living through what promises to be the greatest...

With five days until Election Day, Democrats are poised for their largest national generic ballot win since Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide. Since Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution in 1994, there have been 15 national elections for the House of Representatives. In five of them, the party out of power in the White House won the generic vote for Congress by more than 5 percentage points: twice while George W. Bush was president, twice while Barack Obama was president, and once in Donald Trump’s first term. This year will almost certainly be the sixth, as the latest RCP Poll...

There’s so much talk about Democratic dirty tricks and decoy candidates in Alaska, along with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s husband problem in Minnesota. Along with socialists running away from socialism in Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, and elsewhere.  Perhaps the most important issue for voters, though, is almost getting blocked out. The economy is booming. More numbers today. Real GDP, the best overall measure of the economy, rose 3.4 percent in the third quarter that just ended September 30. I know some wise guys say you can’t eat GDP, but it’s a very important...

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History frames Christianity as a force for conquest and oppression – not freedom, according to an alarming report released by the White House Domestic Policy Council following a review ordered by President Trump. The Museum’s “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit opens with a panel titled “Unsettling the Continent, 1492–1776,” which asserts that the European settlement of the New World was a “profound unsettling” and that “Service to those monarchs, Christian religious...

Flanked by Detroit’s top city officials and labor leaders, Abdul El-Sayed on Monday sought to shore up his support in Michigan’s largest city in a hard-fought contest that may determine control of the U.S. Senate As a former city public health official, El-Sayed said he, not his GOP opponent Mike Rogers, a former congressman representing Lansing, has shown the most commitment to Detroit voters and their needs. “See, I didn’t just get here to start asking for votes, didn’t just open an office, you know, 16 days ago thinking maybe I could go sling some shots of...

Like countless people around the country and even the world, I am a regular reader of RealClearPolitics. Occasionally, I am fortunate enough to have the site run one of my pieces. This past weekend, the political junkie in me was scanning its headlines with my eyes unexpectedly settling on one which literally caused me to say “Oh, no” out loud. The headline was titled “Winding Down.” The author was John Kass. I just shook my head as I stared at it. The message was obvious, but I had no desire to process it. I did not want to know or accept this truth. Like passing a...

Latin American democracy is being put to the test in Brazil and Venezuela. At stake is whether the left-wing government in either country can countenance the idea of legitimate opposition. The day after losing Brazil's presidential election, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro had his personal and diplomatic passports confiscated and was ordered not to leave Brazil. Earlier, as Brazilians went to the polls Sunday to choose between Bolsonaro and leftist incumbent leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was back in her home country for the first time...

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race was already one of the closest in the country. Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is fighting for a third term against former Rep. Mary Peltola, and the RCP poll average shows Peltola narrowly ahead. Control of the Senate could depend on the result. The race also has an unusual complication. A second candidate, a former teacher and Forest Service employee from the remote southern Alaska town of Petersburg, is also named Dan Sullivan. Republicans called him a sham candidate, and state election officials tried to remove him from the ballot. The Alaska Supreme Court put...

On Oct. 7, against the stunning backdrop of the Acropolis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a rousing speech that illuminated Western civilization’s and America’s roots in classical Greece. Rubio’s unusual effort as secretary of state to educate European friends and fellow Americans about their shared ancient heritage elicited widespread praise from American conservatives. And rightly so: Citizens’ ignorance of, and frequently scorn for, their civilization weakens the West and America from within. Yet Rubio’s account of the West oddly demoted virtue and...

As the days grow shorter and temperatures turn chilly, especially in the northern U.S., minds start to turn toward the upcoming holiday season. For too many Americans, though, paying for heat will present a hardship this winter, as heating oil and other fuel prices have soared, in large part because of the ongoing Black Sea war. While the situation may be frustrating for Americans, it looms as a downright miserable and dangerous one for Ukrainians. Those war-weary citizens face the likely turmoil of consumer product shortages and regular power outages due to ongoing Russian strikes against...

Defeatism is the disease eating at American politics. A physician’s diagnosis – and prescription – with two weeks to go. Nearly every day in my practice, a patient sits across from me and hears words no one wants to hear. Cancer. Heart failure. A diagnosis with a long name and a short prognosis. The first thing I tell them matters most: You are not your diagnosis. You are a person who happens to have an illness. Then we go to work – every option weighed, every rock turned over. Some of my bravest patients fought all the way into hospice, still smiling, still...

Reason’s new film follows a Venezuelan textile manufacturer from the Colombian border to his refugee life as a Miami handyman, even as the left-leaning documentary world spent two decades looking the other way.   Carlos Mora ran a textile factory with 150 employees in a Venezuelan border town. Today he works as a handyman on the outskirts of Miami, sharing a small apartment with the family he extracted from that failed state one person at a time. His story anchors “Escaping Venezuela,” a 74-minute documentary from Reason that premiered at the IFC...

With less than two weeks until the 2026 midterm elections, all eyes are on the polls. Promoting accuracy in polling is part and parcel of strengthening the integrity of American elections. For nearly a quarter century, the RCP Poll Average has been the Gold Standard – a signal amid the partisan noise. But not everyone shares RCP’s commitment to accuracy. Wedgewood Polling is a case in point. An unproven outfit with no track record or reputation emerged from the woodwork, releasing polls showing big leads in races previously viewed as toss-ups. The New York Times, MS NOW, and Nate...

In the past four months, Vice President JD Vance has traveled to at least 12 states for 17 campaign visits. In the past month alone, he sat for a town hall in Michigan, stumped for candidates in Alaska, and sprinkled in official events connected to the White House anti-fraud task force throughout. He’s repeating a near-daily schedule of stumping for Republican candidates as the White House attempts to put the administration on the ballot as a proxy for the GOP. President Trump believes that if he can motivate the same turnout that elected him in 2024, he can at least retain party...

Democratic candidates are raking in donations this election season for all kinds of reasons, but one source of funding is deeply concerning. The people who staff America’s leading medical societies are overwhelmingly backing Democratic politicians, party committees, and political action committees. Regardless of which party prevails on Election Day, Americans should be very worried about the politicization of health care in this country. We have reviewed federal election records to document political donations from staff at 10 of the nation’s leading medical societies. The list...

On a hill beneath the Parthenon, I watched Marco Rubio’s much-discussed Oct. 7 speech in the heart of Athens. Although I had lived there before, I had never seen its archaic center so quiet as the night I watched our secretary of state give a speech about the heart of American and Western civilization. The stone streets circling the Pnyx hill, near Socrates’ prison and Pericles’ Acropolis, were empty of the dangerous Athenian flow of taxis, motorcycles, and pedestrians. As I stood between the secretary’s podium and the Acropolis, I was surrounded instead by Greek...

"This is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few," says prospective 2028 presidential candidate and socialist Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) about the mass rioting and social unrest unfolding in France. As with most issues, Khanna has it backward. It's Democratic economic and social ideas that have destabilized France. France, after all, is home to socialized medicine, high minimum wages, powerful unions, some of the most generous worker protections in the world, big government spending and a massive welfare state. France's Gini index, the standard measure...

Democrats, suffering from denial and delusion, tend to think of themselves as the guardians of the rule of law. Back in reality, nothing could be further from the case. Consider Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who fancies herself a rule of law-championing model immigrant despite the fact she literally conceded to her fellow Somalis that she is "Somali first" and "Muslim second." Earlier this month, Omar's Washington, D.C., home was raided by the feds. Over a dozen Homeland Security Investigations agents, executing a duly issued search warrant, seized 17 items, including cellphones and...