The year 2023 opens with slightly better — though not good — assessments of the nation than we saw last year, tempered by pessimism about plenty of issues. More say things in the country are going well than said so at the start of 2022. Ratings on today’s economy aren’t […] Read more »
CBS News poll: Inflation, cooperation and…investigation? Americans on what the new Congress should — and shouldn’t — deliver
Inflation remains a concern, and Americans across the political spectrum want Congress to focus on it, amid the usual calls for bipartisanship from most of the nation. We also see splits within the Republicans’ rank and file over how to best use their newly minted House majority, through cooperation or […] Read more »
How ‘representative’ is the 118th Congress?
After days of false starts, the House voted Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the new speaker, and the 118th Congress was sworn in. But the demographic makeup of the new House and Senate may raise some questions about how truly “representative” of the nation those bodies are. The figures around […] Read more »
Gold-standard polls got it right in 2022. Others did not
Over the New Year’s holiday weekend, the New York Times published a 4,000-word article noting how some political polls, as well as the polling aggregators, overstated Republicans’ strength in key midterm races, feeding the narrative of a coming “Red Wave” that never came to be. But there’s a far simpler […] Read more »
Polls show Americans are divided on the significance of January 6
Today marks two years since Americans turned on their televisions to watch something that many thought was impossible—a violent mob attacking the Capitol of the United States with the intention of disrupting the Electoral College vote count. … Some days of violence, such as the December 7 attack on Pearl […] Read more »
Kevin McCarthy’s flailing bid for Speaker of the House is not (only) about ideological differences
… Students of history and political science alike may note that extra-ideological factors are common in determining who wins leadership elections. Speakers have included both members near the middle and extremes of the distribution of ideological scores for their party, for example. Yet what is different this time is that […] Read more »