Quotes from Kristen Soltis Anderson

Federalists, Whigs, Democratic-Republicans; parties are born, parties die, and parties realign themselves to adapt to shifting demographics and attitudes.

Major realigning events can reshape coalitions and change how large groups of people view politics, policy, and the parties.

Polling is an art as well as a science, and the art of crafting good questions is still vital.

In the 2012 election, the polls that had made Mitt Romney so confident that he was going to win were his own internal polls, based on models that failed to accurately estimate voter turnout. But the public polls, especially statewide polls, painted a fairly accurate picture of how the electoral college might go.

After Mitt Romney's defeat, the RNC released its official assessment of what happened - a failure to reach younger voters, nonwhite voters, women - but was met with a counter-narrative that, in fact, it was Romney's failure to be conservative enough that led to a depressed Republican base.

There's no question that a Democratic Congress plus a Trump presidency would equal gridlock. Nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing gets accomplished, nothing gets reformed. Voters know this.

Young voters may be growing up in an era of increased global connection, cooperation and commerce. But they're very open to politicians who tell them it is these very things that are keeping elites in power and keeping their generation down.

It's not hard to assume that voters do not have deeply considered views on each and every policy issue before them but instead, perhaps, have one or two strongly held views and then allow their favored political leaders to fill in the gaps on the rest of the issues.

With Trump assuming the role of America's CEO, it may be chaos rather than callousness that threatens to harm his standing with the American voters who are giving him a chance.

After the 2012 election, 'independent' becomes the popular choice among new young voters and stays that way with the exception of a brief spike around the 2016 Democratic primary fight.

In 2010, voters certainly hit the brakes on the Obama presidency. Fast forward to the 2016 election, where voters yanked up on the emergency brake and did a donut in the parking lot. Now, the car has stopped. We sit here dizzy for a moment, looking to get on the road again.

I do not think it is a coincidence that young people gravitated toward populist voices in the French election and that the two issue positions where Donald Trump and young voters seem to agree most - global engagement and trade - are rooted in populism.

Political science has long tried to tackle a fundamental question of voter behavior: Do voters choose politicians because those politicians hold views that they like, or do voters choose policy positions because the politicians they like say those positions are correct?

My slice of the millennial generation, as we grew up, became - to the dismay of the GOP - a bloc of fairly consistently Democratic voters.

When people note that more and more voters are cutting their landline phones and that more and more people are refusing to pick up phone calls from numbers they don't know, they are identifying problems that the polling industry has long struggled with and continue to try to adapt to.

Trump won 44.4 percent of votes in Virginia in 2016. At press time, Ed Gillespie had won 45 percent of the vote in 2017.

The American system is set up to have two parties competing for votes. But Americans have not had the same two parties to choose from since the beginning.

When the oldest batch of millennials really first began voting around the mid-2000s, they leaned a little toward the Democrats, looking a lot like the Gen Xers also did at that time.

Not all change and disruption succeeds, to be sure.

Either people are changing their minds about Trump, or increasing numbers of his supporters are deciding it is too embarrassing to admit they support him. Neither is a particularly good position to be in.

There's no counting the number of times the media have asked, 'Will this be the thing that drives Donald Trump's supporters away from him? Is this finally the time?'

There's a lot of work to be done in the polling world, and a need to continue to rethink how we do what we do. We also need to be more open to the idea that any one input - in this case, polls - may not be the only way to hear what people are saying.

I have written time and again about the damage the Republican Party has done to itself with the millennial generation.

When talented, qualified women take on greater responsibility, the simple fact of being talented and qualified is hardly enough to shield them from the gender-specific animosity that will come their way.