As the presidential debate approaches, Democrats are once again wringing their hands over a new poll showing the race is a dead heat. Even the polls that continue to have Kamala Harris up by two or three points are cold comfort: That’s still within the margin of error. And in 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump did better than the polls showed.

A grand dame in the Hamptons told me over her glass of Vin Rosé in August: “Kamala Harris is a lightweight,” she said. “Everyone I talk to says so. Biden had six picks, and he picked the worst.”. “Maybe so,” I answered, “but she packs a...

Last month, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced that, if elected, she would advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries. Her opponent, Donald Trump, immediately attacked the idea as “SOVIET Style Price Controls.” He was not alone in that hot take. Several mainstream media outlets accused Harris of much the same. “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” harrumphed Washington Post economics columnist Catherine Rampell. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”

In the spring and summer of 1798, the young United States engaged in a quasi-war with post-Revolutionary France. Although both nations had thrown off monarchies, their friendship, born in liberty, frayed as France’s revolution grew more radical. The U.S. signed a peace agreement with France’s enemy, Great Britain, and a diplomatic entanglement involving American diplomats in Paris grew into what became known as the X, Y, Z affair. John Adams, the second American president and former vice president of George Washington, presided over a nation divided, as many Americans, especially Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans, remained sympathetic to France. At the same time, Adams’s Federalists viewed Republicans as seditious. In May 1798, rival mobs gathered outside the president’s home in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. The fraught, violent atmosphere would find echoes in later civil conflicts through the 18th and 19th centuries to the January 6 insurrection in the 21st. We’re delighted to publish this excerpt from Making the President: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Copyright © 2024 by Lindsay M. Chervinsky and published by Oxford University Press. All Rights Reserved.

Are women voters poised to promote Vice President Kamala Harris to the Oval Office, or are they showing hesitancy? Are male voters clamoring for a second Donald Trump presidency, or are they rejecting the Republican nominee’s misogynistic appeals?. Of course, we won’t be able to answer these questions until...

Andrii Ryzhov, an assistant chaplain in the Ukrainian army, peers into the back of his battered Volkswagen van on a leafy side street in Kramatorsk, just 15 miles from the front line. These are the tools of his trade: dog-eared cardboard boxes containing packaged food, canned goods, and pocket prayer books, nestled among rolls of camouflage netting and combat gear, including bullet-proof vests.

When Steve Benen’s new book on Republican disinformation was published in August, it quickly shot to the number 10 spot on The New York Times Best Sellers list. It remains on the list for a second week, although the Gray Lady has yet to review it, nor has The Washington Post, which denies it some of the elite conversational buzz it richly deserves despite its brisk sales.

To justify his endorsement of Donald Trump and abandonment of the Democratic Party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said last week Trump told him “that he wanted to end the grip of the neocons on U.S. foreign policy. He said he didn’t want any more $200 billion wars.”. The...

In typical campaigns, presidential hopefuls and their staffs spend a year or so researching, debating, testing, and messaging new policy ideas. I know because I’ve helped develop economic policy for five Democratic presidential candidates. It can make a real difference if the campaign correctly identifies an issue that moves voters who otherwise might stay home or even support the other side.

Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, partly because of his potential to connect with Midwestern and the Rust Belt voters. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are arguably the three most important states in the 2024 presidential election. Harris undoubtedly thought Walz’s straight-talking demeanor and “normal guy” resume—former National Guardsman, high school teacher, and football coach—would help her sway voters in those key states. He joins other recent vice-presidential nominees, including Joe Biden, Paul Ryan, and J.D. Vance, whose perceived ability to reach swing state voters bolstered their cause.

For my Washington Monthly column today, I argued Kamala Harris should make a campaign promise to include a Republican in her Cabinet. My reasoning? It’s the best way to amp up her outreach to on-the-fence Republicans and right-leaning independents (i.e. Nikki Haley voters) and offer an example of how she would differ from Joe Biden, without making any policy concession that could rattle the Democratic base.

When Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Walz’s potential to connect with Midwest and the Rust Belt voters was part of his appeal. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are arguably the three most important states in the 2024 presidential election. Harris undoubtedly thought Walz’s straight-talking demeanor and “normal guy” resume—former National Guardsman, high school teacher, and football coach—would help her sway voters in those key states. He joins other recent vice-presidential nominees, including Joe Biden, Paul Ryan, and J.D. Vance, whose perceived ability to reach swing state voters bolstered their cause.

The Kamala Harris campaign is transparently eager to win over “normie” Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley over Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries—the kind that hates authoritarianism abroad and election-stealing at home. We know this because of the emphasis put on Republican supporters of Harris...

While much of the media convulses over politics on our nation’s most elite campuses, the Washington Monthly today releases innovative new rankings that shine a spotlight on a different class of schools, ones that produce the greatest share of four-year degrees and actually serve everyday Americans: regional public universities.

The past year has been one of unceasing turmoil in higher education, with assaults on the fundamental social and economic value of college. Student protesters at Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and other universities received fervent denouncements and praise. The presidents of several of those institutions were called before Congress and two were forced by their boards to resign. Federal courts blocked another Biden administration loan forgiveness plan. Red states defunded diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and put restrictions on the teaching of America’s racial history. Capping all of that were revelations about Project 2025, the conservative road map for a second Trump term, which contains such radical policy prescriptions as closing down the federal Department of Education and privatizing all student loans. A heightened and troubling level of rancor pervades these plans and the wider political conversation about higher education. But the focus of both sides’ attention remains the same.

In high school, Jenna Duursma sometimes dreamed of leaving home. Growing up in rural Allegan, Michigan, a town she half-jokingly described as “just a bunch of cornfields,” she felt antsy. “To put it bluntly, I wanted to get the hell out of Michigan,” Jenna explained. But...

Coconino Community College was founded in 1991 to serve the county around Flagstaff, Arizona, amid fears that, as a local paper editorialized back then, many people there “cannot afford to or are not allowed to enroll at Northern Arizona University,” the local state school. For 30 years since, the community college has embraced its obligation to those underserved people, many of them low-income minorities, in keeping with its motto: “Start Small, Go Big.” Each spring CCC has held commencement on its small campus in Flagstaff, where it celebrates the modest number of graduates who move on to four-year schools. That is, until this May, when Coconino students received their first-ever invite to hold graduation at the big university down the road.

In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel. Instead, a banner headline blared “AMERICAN COLLEGE TEACHING REACHES A NEW HIGH,” with all-caps subheads that read “IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE TEACHING NOW RECOGNIZED BY ALL” and “SKILL OF NEWLY TRAINED COLLEGE TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM AMAZES COMMUNITY.”

When Jabrielle Jones enrolled at rural Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon, in 2019, a placement test deemed her unready for college-level math. Jones, who has a learning disability, said she never really learned math at the small-town school in Florida where she grew up. Her special education teacher was so disengaged, Jones said, that class time was mostly study hall. “We were encouraged to sort of self-teach through workbooks,” she told me.

In the 52 years since the enactment of Title IX—the federal law prohibiting discrimination in education on the basis of sex—women have made tremendous strides in closing educational gaps that once seemed insurmountable. Women now make up about 60 percent of college students in the United States and earn 56 percent of law school degrees. They also outnumber men in undergraduate communications programs by nearly two to one. In the humanities, graduate-level enrollments flew past parity decades ago. Today, about 60 percent of master’s and more than half of doctoral degrees awarded in the field go to women.