Cafe : Opinion

It was one thing to know data, but it’s quite another thing to know how to interpret it. That requires critical thinking or experts to explain statistics, two elements lacking on social media. 

It’s no coincidence that the vast preponderance of those who incited the insurrection by objecting to the counting of electoral votes were politicians who owed their perpetual re-election to gerrymandering. 

While the election of Joe Biden as President was confirmed, the country will need to brace for conflict left in Trump’s wake.

It is not enough for political elites to tell us the vaccine is safe.

The Trump administration pulled the consumer financial watchdog’s teeth. It’ll be up to Biden to give its bite back.

Elected officials' attacks on election workers are a dangerous new form of radicalism.

The math is clear: Democrats must excite and animate a coalition base of Democratic voters, and lure over a portion of the middle.

It’s time to do away with the bad faith arguments against student debt forgiveness — and the time for forgiveness is now, while the nation attempts to economically recover from a pandemic.

The resurgence of democratic socialism has occurred during a period of growing activism against widening inequality, persistent racism and looming environmental disaster.

In America, how is it that the very poorest counties, the cities with minimal health care, voted for Trump, a supposed billionaire who wanted to take what little revenue flows their way and give it to his 1 percent friends, via a tax cut?

No matter the final U.S. decision on licensing and waivers related to the impending Houthi designation, only one thing is clear: the job of staving off the world’s worst humanitarian disaster will be unnecessarily complicated by a terrorist designation that lacks efficacy.

Focusing solely on the ousting of this particular president and his friends — and on their considerable failures as leaders — risks missing a deeper, more fundamental point: that though Donald Trump lost reelection, the ideology and belief system underpinning so many of the debacles of his presidency prevails, and was always doomed to fail the country in the face of a disaster like this one.

The GOP caucus became less white and male in 2020, adding conservative pro-life women to Congress and state legislatures.

And if GOP Obamacare repeal was any indication, they’re not ready for bipartisanship.

There are profound ripple effects from having a federal government made up of people who don’t look like or live like America — and it’s not just a matter of symbolism.

I cannot think of another election where the mettle of the legions of Americans who make our Democracy function were challenged and their integrity so maligned as it was this year.

There’s a bigger issue in how election cases are litigated — namely, no one knows at the outset what standard a court is likely to apply, and that’s a real problem.

Trump’s victories in many states, as well as the success of Republican candidates in areas that Democrats were expected to win, may have had less to do with fear mongering about socialism and more to do with another factor: Republican-sponsored voter suppression.

Black Americans did not grieve Trump's 2016 win in the same way as white liberals.

On several fronts, 2020 voters embraced changes that will reign in the police, restore voting rights to people on parole, relax drug laws and challenge long-standing racist practices.

Collins benefited from a tendency among Mainers to split tickets in 2008, when 58 percent backed Barack Obama, and 61 backed her. The same tendency helped her in 2020.

For days, Americans fretted over just a few thousand votes in swing states.

The most important thing journalists can do as they think about covering and investigating government and politics in election years is to not assume any outcome.

Congress enacted the Electoral Count Act to deal with precisely this sort of hypothetical, and the law working just as designed would prevent the sort of gamesmanship that’s being floated.

Exit polls report that more than 90 percent of Black women cast their ballots for Biden and Harris, voting as a bloc.

The GOP leadership in Pennsylvania has decisively disavowed moving to seize the power to appoint electors directly under any circumstances. 

There are critical differences between the legal and political landscapes in the 2000 election and today that make it exceptionally unlikely that any of this legal wrangling will matter.