Kerwin Swint's Blog

Well, if the Republican establishment had its hopes riding on the candidacy of Marco Rubio to stop Donald Trump and bring order back to the GOP universe, then the establishment is reaching for some Alka-Seltzer right about now. Rubio had a lot of 3rd place finishes on Super Tuesday. Realistically, he would have to finish a strong second in a majority of the states holding primaries or caucuses March 1, then use that momentum as a spring-board to win his home state of Florida on March 15, whic...

1/24/2016

The conservative Republicans who make up what is now considered the “establishment” are not a happy lot at present. The Party that nominated George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney wants nothing to do with either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. The fact that Trump and Cruz lead in all of the polls demonstrates how much of a disconnect exists between the GOP and its voting public.

The voters, in both parties really, are frustrated, worried about the future, and therefore angry. Trump...

By most accounts, Senator Saxby Chambliss is being driven from office by the tea party, a dysfunctional congress and a hyper-partisan President Obama. This triangle of frustration leads the senator to prefer sipping whiskey on the back porch to six to eight more years of Washington politics. One can sympathize.

It also clears the decks for a host of ambitious Georgians to seek higher office. An open U.S. Senate seat is like an unexpected gift dropped in one’s lap. It wasn’t expected. It also g...

Well, the electoral vote wasn’t as close as some of the final polls indicated. The President won over 300 electoral votes and Mitt Romney’s narrow path to 270 never materialized. Evidently, most Americans were not ready to give up on the Barack Obama they elected in 2008.

By most objective standards, his performance in office has not been great, but it has been “good enough.” His approval rating of 49 percent is about where George W. Bush’s was in 2004 and is about 10 points higher than the ra...

We have very foggy election forecasts heading into next Tuesday’s voting, and unless something changes in the next several days, one or more of the nation’s top polling organizations is going to be flat wrong. According to Rasmussen and Gallup, Mitt Romney is winning. According to Quinnipiac/CBS/NY Times, President Obama is winning. They can’t both be right.

Those findings are based on national tracking polls. But even at the state level the polls differ sharply. Rasmussen finds that Romney ha...

The big issue with regard to the presidential debates in 2012, and one that will engender a fair amount of discussion from the two political parties and from the Commission on Presidential Debates, is the role of the “moderators.”

Debates are always contentious of course, with very high stakes. That’s why the parties agreed to form a Commission in the first place. The bipartisan Commission has strived to create a system of organized debates that will allow the candidates to have maximum flexib...

The debate over the Charter School Amendment on the GA election ballot next month is heating up, as supporters and opponents of the measure are on the march. GA schools superintendent John Barge, who announced his opposition to the amendment, has been warned by the Attorney General not to use public resources to campaign against it, and has been now threatened with legal action by the attorney representing the GA Charter Schools association.

Republican legislators are almost uniformly in suppo...

This presidential election was destined to be close. It will be. We have an incumbent with shaky approval ratings, though not terrible as in 1980 or 1992, and a nervous electorate. The economy is not currently in recession, but is experiencing one of the weakest post-recession recoveries since WWII. And President Obama’s foreign policy is showing signs of completely unraveling.

But practically everyone in the political world – especially political journalists, even many of those on the right...

This is one of those presidential election years in which the incumbent, by most objective standards, should not win reelection. The sluggish growth in the economy is disappointing to virtually everyone, unemployment is unacceptably high, the U.S. credit rating is headed in the wrong direction, and gas prices are significantly higher than four years ago. When the economy looks and feels like this, the incumbent generally loses (Carter 1980, Bush 1992). In fact, I’m surprised there hasn’t been...

Depending on which presidential campaign poll you look at, President Obama either has a 9 point lead nationally over Mitt Romney, a 7 point lead, a 4 point lead, a 1 point lead, or its tied, or Romney has a 1 point lead over the President, or a 2 point lead. Huh?

Welcome to campaign polls. It’s not quite an exact science. In fact, some would argue it is as much an art as it is a science. Consider the national polls represented in the Real Clear Politics average, which is updated daily. In the...