… Although a substantial answer will not emerge for years, this post is my own morning-after answer to the “WTHH?” question. I make three arguments: First, Trump’s electoral college victory was a fluke, a small accident with vast implications, but from a social science perspective not very interesting. Second, the […] Read more »
For these Trump voters, no amount of change is too much
It’s literally impossible for Donald Trump to shake things up too much in Washington, in the eyes of those who backed him for president. That’s my big takeaway from a post-election focus group of a dozen Trump backers convened in Cleveland by longtime Democratic pollster Peter Hart. CONT. Chris Cillizza, […] Read more »
Donald Trump has brought us the American style in paranoid politics
Political scientists long assumed that U.S. institutions were more open and sturdier than those in other countries. One manifestation of that robustness, the theory went, was that U.S. politics appeared largely free from troubling symptoms like conspiracy thinking. Foreigners — particularly in less-developed countries — might attribute the actions of […] Read more »
A Pollster’s New Year’s Resolutions and What We Learned from Mark Twain
Well, it’s a new year and two months have elapsed since the November elections, two months in which we have had time to assess what happened and take in much of the post-election analysis as well. Frankly, the miscues and misguided analysis that plagued the pre-election coverage of the Presidential […] Read more »
The vast majority of these counties voted for Donald Trump — even if they had backed Democrats for years
A new analysis of labor data offers insight into why Donald Trump delivered surprise wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Yes, he swept the Rust Belt. But more specifically, he won over voters in counties that were most dependent on blue-collar work — including hordes of longtime Democratic voters. The […] Read more »
The ‘Divided States of America’?
In its end-of-year issue, Time magazine rather unsurprisingly named Donald Trump its “Person of the Year.” More surprisingly, there was a subtitle under Trump’s cover photo that stated, “President of the Divided States of America.” CONT. V. Lance Tarrance, Gallup Read more »