Kyle Wingfield

Republicans are doing some soul-searching after losing the presidential election and some winnable U.S. Senate contests. The Georgia GOP should be similarly self-reflective after delivering the second-smallest margin among states won by Mitt Romney.

The same demographic trends Romney failed to overcome are increasingly apparent in Georgia. Republicans here must learn to win over voters they typically haven’t attracted. Fortunately for them, Tuesday also offered a template for doing so: the successful charter schools amendment.

The referendum to affirm a state role in creating these public schools was passed in a Republican-dominated Legislature with crucial, but limited, Democratic support; was endorsed by our Republican governor; was opposed by the state Democratic Party; drew much-scrutinized financial support from wealthy Republicans outside Georgia; and was slammed in a radio ad by a civil-rights icon, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, as a precursor to resegregation.

Yet in …

Continue reading Charter schools amendment points the way for Georgia GOP »

The election is over, but there is real work to be done in Washington before President Obama even begins his second term. On Jan. 1, about seven and a half weeks from now, we take a flying leap over the fiscal cliff unless Obama and Congress can strike a deal to avoid it. Oh, and the debt ceiling will probably have to be raised again before the end of 2012, too.

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This time, Obama is inheriting a mess from himself. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that going over the fiscal cliff would …

Continue reading Poll Position: How to avoid the fiscal cliff? »

Tuesday was a brutal night for Republicans.

Incumbent presidents are tough to beat, but Barack Obama was about as vulnerable as they come. The economy is stagnant; his signature legislative achievement is unpopular; his party weathered sharp losses in the midterm elections – by now, you know the litany by heart. Yet Mitt Romney appears to have flipped only two states Obama won in 2008 (pending the final result in Florida).

When political parties lose brutally, a lot of new conventional wisdom crops up. Some of it’s right, some of it’s wrong. Here’s an early take on which is which:

1. Republicans have to move toward the left.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. There are two major political parties in this country in large part because they represent two sets of durable, mainstream beliefs. Sometimes one or the other does a better job of representing its beliefs, but neither ideology will be permanently defeated. Which leads me to …

2. The GOP has to ditch the tea party.

Wrong. Just two …

Continue reading How the GOP needs to change, and how it doesn’t »

Here’s the third installment of the Google+ Hangouts that Jay Bookman, Aaron Gould Sheinin and I have been doing. Spoiler alert: You’ll see more disagreement between Jay and me than in the first two…

Please feel free to keep talking on the thread downstairs as well.

– By Kyle Wingfield

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Continue reading Post-election video chat: Where does GOP go from here, and does Obama have a mandate? »

A few quick thoughts before I go record another Google+ Hangout with Aaron and Jay:

• The Dow dropped about 200 points at today’s opening after a decent rally yesterday. Looks like I wasn’t the only one with a gut feeling about Mitt Romney winning the election.
• Can we all just agree on no more nominees from Massachusetts? Romney, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis … the last person to reside in Massachusetts at the time he won the presidency was John F. Kennedy. (On second thought, maybe I should be encouraging the Democrats to nominate Elizabeth Warren in 2016 …)
• With almost all the votes counted, Romney is a little less than 3 million votes off John McCain’s 2008 total — while President Obama is nearly 10 million votes off his own total from four years ago. Those numbers will shrink somewhat, but it’s safe to say that turnout was down and most of those who stayed home were previously Obama voters. These most likely were the folks who still told pollsters they were undecided right up …

Continue reading Initial post-election thoughts »

UPDATE at 11:25 p.m.: And that’s it. Ohio has been called for Obama, and it looks likely that Florida will follow suit. A couple of near-billion-dollar campaigns, and it looks like two states (Indiana and North Carolina) will have flipped, maybe three if Romney ekes out a win in Virginia.

We’ll have plenty of time in the weeks to come to talk about what comes next for the GOP nationally. Tonight is for Obama and his supporters.

The silver lining here in Georgia, for me: The charter schools amendment passed, giving students and parents more choices in the near future.

—

UPDATE at 9:56 p.m.: With Michigan and Pennsylvania being called for Obama, Romney is right where most people thought he would be: needing to sweep Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio, plus one more smaller state, to win. None of those four has been called yet, and all are within reach. But the hour is getting late, and his margin for error is gone.

Incidentally, and just for the record: Some news outlets …

Continue reading Decision Time! Live blog of results for president, Senate, Georgia races »

With the election results almost upon us, Jay Bookman, Aaron Gould Sheinin and I decided it was time for another chat using Google+ Hangout. Check it out:

Depending on how quickly the results come in tonight, we’ll do another of these either tonight or tomorrow morning.

– By Kyle Wingfield

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Continue reading Election Day Video: Jay Bookman and I discuss who wins and what’s next »

History and the numbers say Barack Obama will be re-elected tomorrow. History and the intangibles suggest Mitt Romney will unseat him. Which will prevail?

Let’s look at each.

The numbers have moved solidly in Obama’s favor. He caught Romney in the Real Clear Politics average of national opinion polls on Halloween after trailing for the better part of the previous three weeks. More importantly, he holds leads — usually narrow leads, but leads nonetheless — in enough swing states to push him past the threshold of 270 electoral votes (EVs).

There’s been much parsing of the polls this year, much of it focused on the partisan-ID breakdowns that various pollsters were using. A poll of “likely voters” inherently tells us something about who the pollster believes will actually bother to vote, and that’s as much art as it is science. Many pollsters have been forecasting an electorate similar to that of 2008, a wave election that saw Obama rack up 365 EVs and the Democrats claim a huge …

Continue reading Presidential prediction: The candidate who defies history and wins will be . . . »

No one among us, if faced with a persistent disease and a physician who’d failed to cure it, would be content to continue consulting only that doctor — and, especially, to be told we could not seek a second opinion.

None of us believe we could live in a place with only one grocery store, selling only junk food, and be expected to maintain good health.

Nobody I know would want to learn a trade but have the opportunity to work for only one employer.

And I’m certain no American would stand for living in a country where just one name, the same name, appeared on the ballot year after year.

Yet that’s exactly the situation we expect thousands of students, parents and even teachers in Georgia to accept. We can take one small but important step toward changing that by approving Amendment One and increasing their educational choices.

This amendment, which would affirm the state’s role in creating public charter schools, is neither a magic potion nor an indictment of all …

Continue reading Amendment One: A chance at a choice for students who today have neither »

I may as well bow to the reality that y’all will spend the entire weekend talking about the election regardless of what topic I write about, so here it is: Your weekend-before-the-election open thread.

The rules still apply — it’s an open thread, not a no-holds-barred thread — but otherwise, have at it.

– By Kyle Wingfield

Continue reading The weekend before Nov. 6, what else would we talk about? »