The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Pre-election polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency […] Read more »
Taking Trump’s Temperature Amongst His Supporters (and Opponents), Part 2
Last week, we released the results of a national poll of voters who said they supported President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, as well as focus groups of mostly Trump voters (but also some voters who either supported Hillary Clinton or voted third party last year). We found that […] Read more »
The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used […] Read more »
How conspiracy theories helped power Trump’s disruptive politics
We watched over the past year as a wave of conspiracy theories infected our national discourse. … Trump’s use of conspiracy theory politics proved to be a particularly ingenious form of populism. By focusing his populist appeals on conspiracy rhetoric — rather than substantive policy — Trump galvanized the broad […] Read more »
French voters are just as divided as American ones
Marine Le Pen. AP Photo/Michel Euler Michele Gelfand, University of Maryland and Joshua Conrad Jackson, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill On May 7, France will choose its next president. In the first round of voting on April 23, voters rejected candidates from the country’s established parties, lifting […] Read more »
Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer.
As the Democratic Party rebuilds itself for the 2018 and 2020 elections, Democratic strategists have been preoccupied with a pressing question: Why did so many voters who backed Barack Obama in 2012 switch to Donald Trump four years later, and what can be done to win them back? Top Democratic […] Read more »