Politics

Excerpt: Three times in the past century, a sitting president’s party has lost its majority in at least one house of Congress. And all three times, the president went on to win re-election — Harry Truman in 1948, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Bill Clinton in 1996. So if, as expected, the GOP takes the…

No matter their political affiliation, the experts on the panel at D.C.-based emerging-leaders organization IMPACT‘s Election Night Party, which The Root co-sponsored with the CBC Institute, BET and Politic365, agreed that increased political engagement is paramount in the black community. The panel, moderated by BET White House correspondent Andre Showell, opened the evening at Washington,…

Despite efforts by President Barack Obama and the Democrats to rally their base at the eleventh hour, voter anger about the shabby state of the economy swept through Congress on Tuesday, leaving in its wake a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. As of 11 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, CNN was predicting that the GOP…

On their way to wresting control of the House of Representatives and consolidating their ranks in the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, conservative Republicans managed to turn a self-described former witch into a “constitutional conservative” while calling Barack Obama — a former constitutional lawyer — an enemy of the Constitution. They got indignant when…

Barack Obama and black America wake up today to a new political reality: a House of Representatives under control of the Republican Party and a U.S. Senate with a slim Democratic majority. The White House started putting its spin on the shift of power in the week before the election. There were hints that Obama…

If the United States is a car broken down on the edge of a highway somewhere, the Senate is its dry, ill-maintained, crapped-out engine. Since the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, our nation’s 100-member upper house has been, thanks to a monolithic block of obstructionist Republicans, a largely useless body of angry white men, many…

According to an exit poll conducted by the Associated Press, four out of 10 voters support the Tea Party movement. Voters across the nation Tuesday said they were intensely worried about the future of the economy and unhappy with the way President Barack Obama and Congress are running things. Voters in overwhelming numbers were dissatisfied…

A billboard sponsored by the Raging Elephants and stating, “G.O.P. Is the New Black,” is posted in Houston. If the GOP is the “new black,” then the Raging Elephants must be the “new wack,” since blacks have been Republicans since the founding of the party. Perhaps they should change their name to Raging Bull, because…

Two years after America elected its first black president and gave Democrats control of Congress, the country is in a very different mood. “Yes We Can” optimism has given way to Tea Party anger in some parts of the land, and too many members of key voting blocs backing Barack Obama and the Democrats the last…

By Michelle Ebanks As we head into the homestretch of the midterm election on Nov. 2, examination of the crucial role of black voters to the fate of many leaders was unavoidable. After all, as The New York Times recently indicated, “The black turnout percentage in the [2008 general election] exceeded white turnout by a…