Boosting STEM education opportunities for young women globally is one critical way that the U.S. can promote women's equality, as well as economic development, around the world.Collection: Equality
One thing that is fairly undeniable about Trump - love him or loathe him - is his understanding of how to manipulate the media and to perpetuate a symbiotic relationship with the press.Collection: Relationship
Thoughtful education programs and access to effective forms of contraception are key to preventing unplanned pregnancy.Collection: Education
The robots are coming, whether we like it or not, and will change our economy in dramatic ways.Collection: Change
I think 'Candy Crush' may be fading in popularity, but there's always something new that's popping up.
Lots of folks still do watch TV, but I think understanding the future of politics means understanding where folks' attention is being paid and delivering your message and your ideas in that space.
It was weird that I was a young person who was Republican. And I wanted to get at the heart of why it was that so many people of my generation thought that being Republican just wasn't for them. They thought that conservative ideas just weren't for them.
My dad is an electrical engineer. So he was always very focused on, you know, teaching his daughters about, you know, science, math, technology. None of us actually became engineers for our careers, but I always had that exposure when I was young, and I just loved playing computer games.
I grew up in Orlando, Florida, and I joined the debate team right around the time of the 2000 election.
I had a history teacher who taught us a lot about the Cold War. You had these examples of countries where the government had tried to manage the economy really intensely, and it ended up being bad for the citizens there. I found myself beginning to lean more right on economic issues.
I dreamed of being like Sam Seaborn on 'The West Wing'.
I went to Washington, D.C, for the first time my senior year as part of Girls Nation, put on by the American Legion Auxiliary, which sends high school students to D.C. to form a pretend federal government. There was an energy about the city that made me feel like I just had to come back there.
For federal races, being able to carefully navigate the Trump Era is a significant challenge.
President Trump is right about at least one thing: No matter what he does, America cannot stop talking about him.
In 2014, topics like Black Lives Matter, the Middle East, and Ebola were prominent in the national discussion, with mentions of then-President Barack Obama making up a relatively small slice of the discussion on news twitter.
Even when we're not talking about Trump, we're talking about Trump.
It is fair to debate how much either bill - Obamacare in 2010, tax reform in 2018 - had or will have an impact on the midterms.
Obamacare itself did not become popular until the middle of 2017, when the risk of repeal was the greatest; for the bulk of 2010 after passage, it was unpopular by double-digit margins.
Federalists, Whigs, Democratic-Republicans; parties are born, parties die, and parties realign themselves to adapt to shifting demographics and attitudes.
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.
I have written time and again about the damage the Republican Party has done to itself with the millennial generation.
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.
If a woman rising in power is too tough or aggressive, she's attacked for it. If she's attractive, she's accused of having used that to her advantage. And even if a woman is beyond qualified for a role, there will always be those who raise doubts about if she's really qualified.
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.
Election losses are always an inkblot test for partisans. If a candidate's defeat has no clear and obvious cause, if the data points are all over the map, it is easy for those on the sidelines to claim, 'Candidate X would have won if only he or she had been more like... me.'
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.
Without a clear diagnosis of why the candidate or party failed, there can be no clear consensus about how to move forward.
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.
In the United States, it is unmistakable that young people have broken away from the political right and have gravitated to more leftist-populist figures like Bernie Sanders.
With an economy that is going strong and a belief that tomorrow will be better than today, it may be easier to just shrug it off if, say, an internet service you use like WhatsApp gets turned off by the government as the Communist Party's national congress approaches.
Those who are able to afford to live in a neighborhood with 'good schools' will do so, knowing that a good education is the key to good opportunity for their children.
Millennials easily connect the dots between good education and good opportunities, and they also understand that it isn't just hard work that determines how well a child will be educated - it also depends on where they live and the resources their parents commit to their education.
Often times, when we talk about improving our public schools, it is easy to come back to the question of money. Are schools basically fine, just underfunded? Millennials say no - more funding isn't the cure-all for what ails our schools.
Millennials are not deeply familiar with school choice, and have some reservations, especially about the types of institutions that a student might choose to attend with taxpayer dollars.
Republicans can't always agree on where to cut spending. They certainly can't agree on what to do about entitlements. There isn't a unified foreign policy vision, and there's no consensus on immigration reform.
If there is one issue where one could justifiably assume that Republicans are all in agreement, it is on lowering taxes.
Congress has been productive when focusing on bites of policy that don't inflame the divisions within the party and quietly do the work of governing.
The reality is that the Republican Party may have unified government but is not unified enough on many major signature policy areas.
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.
The data - on issues and on Trump himself - keep pointing back to 'one-in-four' as the true size of Trump's base. It is around one in four who like the tweeting, like the insults, the things other people say are mean or unproductive behavior.
Washington in the summer is a never-ending stream of tour groups and packs of students, here to swarm the monuments, stroll the National Mall, and learn about our nation's history and government.
Not long ago, women in Afghanistan were required by Taliban leadership to be covered nearly head-to-toe and were barely allowed to leave the home; that young Afghan women today are not only accessing an education but are able to meet young people from around the world and cheer on a robot of their own making is something beautiful.
Overall, America's math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have risen since the 1990s though remain disappointing when compared to the rest of the globe.
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.
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.
Electing Democrats means nothing happens. Elect Republicans, and at least there's a chance.
There are certainly more Republicans who like President Trump than like 'Republicans in Congress,' and certainly many Republicans who already feel like their own Congress is a brake pedal of its own.
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?'
Obama's numbers fell by a slightly larger amount over his first few months because he enjoyed much more support right at the start from Republicans, support that eroded quickly.
'Staunch conservatives' and 'free marketeers' are fairly typical Republicans, while the 'American preservationists' are far less reliably a part of a GOP coalition.