Donald Trump’s election as president startled many Americans. A number of observers commented that Trump’s campaign represented a set of illiberal values and policy positions far outside of the United States’ political traditions of individual rights, equality and democracy. But in many ways, Trump represents a return to the historical […] Read more »
How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country
The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920. Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country’s direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and […] Read more »
The Not-So-Silent White Majority
Between Richard Nixon’s election by the silent majority in 1968 and Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, there have been six conservative waves that swept Republicans into office. Disaffected white voters without college degrees have been the driving force in all of them. … Despite their declining share of the […] Read more »
How Accurate Were the Political Science Forecasts of the 2016 Presidential Election?
With the dust settling from one of the most brutal and nasty presidential campaigns in modern American history and with the late vote returns creeping up to a final count, it is time to take stock of the presidential election forecasts offered initially to readers of the Crystal Ball website […] Read more »
16 For ’16: Bite-sized observations on a wild election
Now that we’ve had a week to digest the results of the 2016 election, here are some observations about what happened and what the results might tell us about the future: 1. Electoral map tilts to the GOP In close elections, the Electoral College will probably continue to tilt to […] Read more »
The forecasts were wrong. Trump won. What happened?
… Trump’s Election Day victory, with 306 electoral votes, took us by surprise. My forecast was wrong. It’s time to understand why. The forecast was based on a statistical model that analyzed nearly 1,400 state-level pre-election public opinion polls, in combination with a set of political and economic “fundamentals” that […] Read more »