Donald Trump did not win in 2016 because the establishment “split the field”

… Conventional wisdom about the 2016 primary has analysts stipulating that dividing the anti-Trump vote will allow him to win the primary again with plurality support, as he did last time around. After all, he only won 45% of the popular vote in the primary; surely if Ted Cruz, Marco […] Read more »

Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

… If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more […] Read more »

In explaining the rise of populism, it’s not economic anxiety vs. identity politics – it’s both

Deindustrialization has decimated the blue-collar workforce in the US. … Our research examines the effects of deindustrialization on electoral politics. Specifically, we explore how deindustrialization affected voting in three US presidential elections (2008-2016), using county-level data which captures localized manufacturing job losses. Our argument is that responses to what we […] Read more »

Trump didn’t bring White working-class voters to the Republican Party. The data suggest he kept them away.

Republican leaders have been hailing a class realignment of the parties. “We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley on election night 2020. In February, Sen. Rick Scott told audiences at CPAC, “We will not win the future by trying to go back to […] Read more »

Partisan voters claim, ‘We wuz robbed.’ No, they weren’t

… Ironically, neither Republicans nor Democrats understand that they have become little more than mirror opposites of each other, with one party still blaming Russian collusion for their loss and the other crying fraud as the only possible explanation for their defeat. That continuing problem led us, in our most […] Read more »

White working-class politics

Analysts have been debating the politics of America’s white working-class for years with little net increase in knowledge. The whole discussion assumes a fact not fully in evidence — that membership in the “white working-class” is a politically relevant identity; that it is causally related to voting behavior. Maybe, but […] Read more »