Sean Trende

The California primary was held on March 5, 2024. A flood of analyses followed, all of them premature. California is a state that votes heavily by absentee...

The 2024 presidential election has grabbed most of the headlines recently, but the Senate races are taking shape under the radar. Here is a preview of the 10...

A few weeks ago, a “Morning Joe” panel concluded that if Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose...

We’ve paid much attention to President Biden’s flagging job approval here, in part because it tends to be a strong predictor of how an election will turn...

Before we start evaluating what Nikki Haley’s plans are for the Republican primaries, let’s get one thing out of the way: Barring catastrophe, Donald Trump...

There’s a strange disjunction in the discourse about the 2024 elections. On the one hand, when presented with the proposition “Trump can win,” people...

Analysts are carefully parsing the results from Tuesday’s off-year elections. The truth is that these are an odd collection of races: Elections in two...

I’m serious – don’t pay attention to early voting. About this time in every election cycle analysts become starved for data to analyze. Of course, actual...

The 2022 United States Senate elections can best be thought of as the classic battle between the irresistible force and the immovable object. The irresistible...

Every now and again, an otherwise arcane legal topic suddenly becomes relevant to contemporary political debate. At that point, general commentary suddenly...

Last month, I posed this question: “If President Trump wins, what should we have paid attention to that would have allowed us to see it coming?” The...

When President Trump’s job approval numbers began their nose dive in earnest in mid-May, a friend asked me what I thought was going on. After all, at that...

As a few observant readers have noted, one thing that has been missing entirely from this series is race. This is a bit odd, given that virtually all election analysis this cycle has focused on that...

Part 4 in a series We now turn our attention to the biggest prize of the 2016 election: the Midwest. This region has largely been where our national...

The third part in a series Over the course of this five-part series, we’ve developed a few themes. One has been that the problems that beset the Democratic...

The first in a four-part series In 2009, the lead author of this piece co-wrote a series of articles with Jay Cost, who was then with RealClearPolitics. That series (the lead author’s first...

There is a fast-building meme that Donald Trump’s surprising win on Tuesday reflected a failure of the polls. This is wrong. The story of 2016 is not one of...

Note: An updated version of the RCP Republican Delegate Calculator can be found here. As is always the case, national polling is drawing the lion’s share of the attention in discussions about...

Republicans were disappointed when the Supreme Court ruled that the Arizona redistricting panel was constitutional. They shouldn’t have been. Losing that...

With the defeat of Mary Landrieu this past weekend, the Southern Democrat has become, for all intents and purposes, an extinct species on the national scene. Outside of Virginia and North Carolina,...