Mark Mellman

No one — not the press, not the White House, nor anyone else — should have been truly surprised by the outcome of the House trade vote last week. Republicans…

Strange behavior has engulfed the Capitol over the last few weeks. Intense conflict remains over trade and NSA surveillance, but the alliances were not dictated exclusively by partisanship. The failure…

American politics has long navigated uneasily between two forms of democracy: Republicanism and mass, or direct, democracy. Journalist and labor leader J.W. Sullivan, whose 1893 book Direct Legislation by the…

Having not done British politics since the Concorde was flying, and being fully cognizant of the fact that others have spent those decades immersed in the subject, I had resolved…

As riots engulfed parts of Baltimore, and Americans everywhere were forced to confront police killings and other brutalities in minority communities, TV viewers and newspaper readers were exposed to a…

Years ago, I argued that opinions on gay rights generally, and same-sex marriage in particular, were changing faster than those on almost any subject in the history of polling. That…

Last week, House Republicans voted once again to repeal the estate tax. This newspaper reported that both parties were excited about the politics, which should mean one of them is…

For Democrats, election night 2014 offered a surfeit of unpleasant surprises. Perhaps most surprising of all was the outcome of Maryland’s gubernatorial race (disclosure: our firm was not involved). After…

A seemingly interminable flight, blessed with a well-stocked video-on-demand system, afforded me the opportunity to watch Woody Allen’s classic “Annie Hall” again after a hiatus of many years. At one…

When regular folks don’t understand statistics, they can be misled. When pollsters don’t understand statistics, they can lose races that should have been won. When doctors don’t understand statistics, people…