Charlie Cook: “It’s surprising how many people who avidly follow American politics don’t seem to appreciate that elections are both seasonal and cyclical in nature.”

“The seasonal aspect is the more obvious one. Clearly in some years, or seasons, the wind is blowing in favor of one party. In other years, it appears to blow in the opposite direction. In others still, as during the time between seasons, the partisan winds do not seem to blow in any direction at all.”

“Unfortunately, the cyclical nature is lost on more people. In any given even-numbered year, the House is on a cycle of its own, the Senate another, and the governorships yet another. The easiest to identify is the House cycle; with its two-year terms, all you have to do is look at the previous election. If Democrats had a great year and picked up a large number of Republican seats, you know that Democrats are likely to be overexposed and to suffer losses in the coming election cycle. If Republicans had a banner year in the previous election, they are more likely to lose than to gain seats. It’s all pretty straightforward.”

Pew Research: “The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 33, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry– and optimistic about the future.”

Most interesting: 50% of Millennials now describe themselves as political independents and 29% say they are not affiliated with any religion.

Monkey Cage: “In Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson describe a striking disjuncture. When identifying themselves in a word, Americans choose ‘conservative’ far more than ‘liberal.’ In fact they have done so for 70 years, and increasingly so since the early 1960s.”

“But when it comes to saying what the government should actually do, the public appears more liberal than conservative. Ellis and Stimson gathered 7,000 survey questions dating back to 1956 that asked some variant of whether the government should do more, less, or the same in lots of different policy areas. On average, liberal responses were more common than conservative responses. This has been true in nearly every year since 1956, even as the relative liberalism of the public has trended up and down.”

“About one in four Americans say that abortion should be legal in all circumstances, one in five say abortion should always be illegal, and slightly over half the public thinks abortion should be legal in some, but not all, circumstances,” according to a new CNN/ORC poll.

Compare your name to voter registration records to predict your party affiliation.

A TIME survey found that preferences for pets or particular kinds of food can accurately predict partisanship.

“Loving cats may not make a person a liberal, but it does increase the odds that a person already is one. To see how accurate our survey was, we analyzed the data from 220,192 TIME readers who took the quiz and then volunteered their actual political preferences, and found that all 12 items did in fact predict partisanship correctly.”

Wonk Wire looks at the fascinating trend in the states over the last two decades.

In one chart, over at Wonk Wire.

Gallup: “Overall, Americans are as likely to be positive (39%) about the current state of the country as they are to be negative (40%). However, the gap between whites’ and nonwhites’ views of where the country stands is wider than at any point in recent history, with nonwhites now almost twice as likely as whites to view the nation’s situation positively.”

“Public opinion on same-sex marriage has shifted so dramatically in recent years that Democratic groups now see the issue as a critical way to mobilize voters in a slew of races up and down the ballot,” the Washington Post reports.

“Just a decade ago, widespread opposition to gay marriage did just the opposite, allowing Karl Rove to mobilize conservatives in 13 states and help reelect George W. Bush as president.”

A new Gallup poll finds 65% of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s system of government and how well it works, the highest percentage in Gallup’s trend since 2001.

A new Gallup poll finds just 23% of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. at this time, unchanged from December and within one percentage point of the 24% average for 2013.

Wonk Wire notes the dramatic fall off in cigarette consumption over the past 50 years.

Gallup: “Americans continue to be more likely to identify as conservatives (38%) than as liberals (23%). But the conservative advantage is down to 15 percentage points as liberal identification edged up to its highest level since Gallup began regularly measuring ideology in the current format in 1992.”

A new Gallup poll finds 42% of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest measured in 25 years. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.

The Week: 4 reasons our political dysfunction isn’t going to end soon.

A new Pew Research survey finds that 60% of Americans say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” while 33% reject the idea of evolution, saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Most interesting: “In 2009, 54% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats said humans have evolved over time, a difference of 10 percentage points. Today, 43% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats say humans have evolved, a 24-point gap.”

A new Gallup poll finds President Obama and Hillary Clinton are the most admired man and woman in America by large margins for the sixth consecutive year.