Washington Monthly

On a simmering June afternoon in Richmond, Virginia, well after school has let out for the summer, four teenage boys in frumpy suits stand at the front of a poorly air-conditioned classroom, sweating and talking over one another.

Spotify Apple YouTube iHeart RSS About the guest Seth Masket is a professor of political science at the University of Denver and the author of the @smotus report on Substack.

Both parties know that Democrats are heading into the final weeks of the midterm election campaign with momentum, as Republican political action committees have all but given up defending their Senate seat in North Carolina, and their House seats in Iowa’s

Center-left leaders in Britain and the United States are asking the same question: What should we do about young people falling into the gap between school and work?

In this issue Trump as the apotheosis of GOP xenophobia Don’t miss at the Monthly Bought by billionaires After Richard Nixon’s narrow loss to John F.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing” is an old political adage sometimes attributed to Ronald Reagan, but it probably predates him.

Four years ago, the Washington Monthly dove into the ample dumpster of dubious candidates seeking public office and selected the worst ten.

Spotify Apple YouTube iHeart RSS About the guest Jim Kessler is Executive Vice President for Policy at Third Way.

“If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Sena…

In September, after months of negotiations and to much fanfare, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a major package of energy reforms.

October 7 is a day that will surely live in infamy, both at home and in the Middle East.

Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko was in Brussels on September 28, when a Russian drone flew into the National Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s leading research institutes and a symbol of Ukrainian identity.

This fall, millions of students are returning to public schools, where they will be regularly tested on how well they are mastering math and reading but not on how well they understand the American political tradition.

This summer, I was a poll skeptic.

It is hard to read Donald Trump’s mind—what with his chronic lies, delusions, and fake promises.

At more than 100 sites around the world today, sincere but poorly-informed people are holding vigils—not for the innocent Israeli civilians (and foreign nationals) slaughtered in southern Israel three years ago, but for the Palestinian war dead, at least…

Political polling has suffered some embarrassing failures this year.

As is well known by now, this summer, AI agents created by OpenAI broke out of their testing environments and coordinated an autonomous cyberattack on HuggingFace, a popular platform for sharing AI models.

It’s well established that the last decade has been unfriendly to friendship.

“Republicans Enter Final Midterm Stretch With a Significant Financial Edge.”

In signing AB 2222, the Community NEWS Act, Gov.

Political polling has had a black eye since at least the 2016 presidential election.

In Bladen County, North Carolina, an agricultural community in the state’s southeast known for its blueberry, tobacco, and hog farms, more than 6,000 people—one in five of the county’s 30,000 residents—rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance…

One of many current controversies over artificial intelligence centers on “alignment”: A euphemism for “trying to build AI that won’t intentionally kill us all.”

As much as the political world has been turned upside down by the Donald Trump administration’s callous cruelty, rampant corruption, and woeful incompetence, it is hard to shake the feeling that in a decade it will be a footnote compared to humanity’s col…

Artificial intelligence has a gender bias—not because AI intentionally discriminates against women but because it reflects the biases inherent in the data on which it’s trained.

In the past half century, thousands of books and articles have been written about mass incarceration.

Earlier this month, the U.S.

If the final election outcome reflected the average of polls sampled in the third and fourth weeks of September (not including any internal polls from campaigns or affiliated political action committees), Democrats would cede none of their own U.S.

Last March, West Suburban Medical Center, a 230-bed safety-net hospital serving one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, abruptly closed its doors.

For more than 40 years, Charlie Cook has been the gold standard for election forecasting and political trend analysis.

Since sweeping to power in 2025, Republicans have waged an all-out war on clean energy.

Artificial intelligence has been justifiably under fire in recent weeks for the myriad dangers it represents.

With her senior year of college now underway, Mitzie Westgate has begun planning what she’ll do after graduation next spring.

There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections.

Among the many theories of constitutional interpretation that swirl through American politics, the Unitary Executive Theory (UET) is the most important one circulating today.

A two-decade fight with monopoly power in the payment system has arrived at a moment of truth, boiling down to one simple question: Will the courts bless price-fixing?

The country finds itself debating what happens to young people after 12th grade.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans votes by mail.

The written word is having a rough time in American public life.

Gloria Steinem’s tenth book and third memoir, An Unexpected Life, will be her last.

Debate is roiling among political operatives and observers over whether the midterm elections will result in a Blue Wave or a Blue Trickle.

When the Census Bureau reported last week that the uninsured population remained steady at its all-time low of 8 percent of the adult population in 2025, I immediately thought of this visual metaphor to describe the news: The picture is of one Wile E.

Defenders of democracy breathed a sigh of relief this week after the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s effort to restrict vote by mail this fall.

The John Roberts Court, in my opinion, is the worst Supreme Court since the Roger Taney Court, which gave us the Dred Scott decision.

One dismal morning in January 2001, I strode into a University of Oregon classroom to face 90 fresh-faced first-year law students.

A new survey finds that 18 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election now say they regret their vote.

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks has passed, marked by solemn remembrances and harrowing footage.

“The country has never faced anything like this in its 250-year history,” former Judge J.

It’s become settled wisdom that Donald Trump’s first term as president might have been much more disastrous for democracy had patriotic Americans, many of them either Republicans or non-partisan figures in government, the courts, or the military, restrain…