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.

The things that frustrate one piece of Trump's coalition often endear him to or embolden another wing of the coalition.

A compelling story requires conflict, friction, an obstacle to be overcome.

As a member of the oldest slice of the Millennial generation, my teenage years spanned the late 1990s through the start of the new millennium. I spent that time watching a lot of MTV's 'Total Request Live', 'Dawson's Creek', and wearing out a dual VHS tape of 'Titanic'.

For some in my generation, Sept. 11th was a moment of political awakening. For others, the Iraq War or the financial crisis or the rise of Obama were the major events of their teenage years that began to lay the foundation for their views.

Feeling unsafe in your own home? Look no further than those terrorists and criminals and illegal immigrants who have been given free reign and on whom Trump says we need to 'get tough.'

President Trump rightly points out that law enforcement is mostly made up of good people putting themselves in harm's way to protect us. He lauds the men and women in blue and often talks about the need to make it easier for the cops to do their jobs.

Donald Trump has had political success positioning himself as a 'law-and-order' candidate.

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.

President Trump is right about at least one thing: No matter what he does, America cannot stop talking about him.

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.

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.

Hillary Clinton famously embraced the Trump-originated label 'nasty woman' as yet another way to show just how bad Donald Trump was to women.

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.

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.

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.

In the relatively short time frame of December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of all young Republicans left their party at some point, with roughly a quarter bidding the GOP adieu for good.

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.

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.

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.

I think 'Candy Crush' may be fading in popularity, but there's always something new that's popping up.

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.

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.

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.

Even when we're not talking about Trump, we're talking about Trump.

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.

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.

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.

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.