Portside

Still think the Democrats have this election locked up - and that between their 242-vote head start in the Electoral College, and Donald Trump's ongoing identity crisis, the only cloud on the horizon is whether or not the inevitable Republican meltdown is big enough to cost the GOP control of the House as well as the Senate? Well, think again. Just because the presidency looks like Hillary Clinton's to lose doesn't mean it can't be lost.

Republican elected officials and party leaders do not have time for retrospective contemplation. They have a decision to make. The party belongs to Trump now, just as Rome belonged to the barbarians, and GOP politicians have to decide whether to fall in line or take up arms against the new order.

A strategic look at the U.S. political landscape shows how Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would be able to pull together a majority electoral coalition. It also reveals why either might still be thwarted in pulling together an effective governing coalition in 2017, (assuming they are able to defeat Trump or Cruz). The far right has grown in strength and virulence, while the `regular' conservative right has grown in intransigence.

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American democracy has been failing for decades, so a disturbing number of us are turning to authoritarianism. Is Trump our Juan Perón? Trump's Atlantic City empire has crumbled. But Trump himself has somehow emerged stronger than ever. The man who sought to lure all aspiring monarchs to A.C. ('welcome to a kingdom where everybody's treated like a king') has whipped up a heady mix of xenophobia, political bromides, and so-light-it-floats policy proposals into a movement

Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation's statehouses - and could well win the presidency - but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning. The need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how whoever wins in the general election, and governs once in office.

Neither the videos nor the many investigations that followed have found any evidence that Planned Parenthood employees offered to sell fetal tissue for a profit. Texas is the 12th state in which investigations stemming from the videos have found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood. A grand jury in Harris County, Tex., went a step further. Though it was convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, it indicted two members of the group that made the videos instead.