The media often attributes a portion of Donald Trump’s election to fake news — as in the vintage, original meaning of that term: Macedonian teens making bank on preposterous headlines; the Islamization of Texas, Pizza-shop child-sex conspiracies, etc. Such fabrication, commentators worried, reverberated around online echo chambers so resoundingly that […] Read more »
For Donald Trump, campaigning by Twitter limited the public’s access to his policy positions and strategies
Donald Trump has ensured that Twitter is now inextricably tied to the Presidency of the United States. Over the past 18 months, the social network has become central to political communication, alongside official campaign press releases. Trump, both as presidential candidate, and now as Commander in Chief, has used Twitter […] Read more »
Hope from the Heartland: How Democrats Can Better Serve the Midwest by Bringing Rural, Working Class Wisdom to Washington
Democrats’ national level of support has seen better days. Much better. By the numbers, Democrats are at their lowest in nearly 100 years. While the party had a successful night in off-year elections on Nov. 7, 2017, and in the Dec. 12, 2017, special election in Alabama for U.S. Senate, […] Read more »
Robots Can’t Vote, but They Helped Elect Trump
When you look across America to see where jobs and wages have been lost to robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation, it is the middle of the country that stands apart from the rest. The accompanying map, which was produced by Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of […] Read more »
It’s Actually Pretty Normal to Think You’re a Genius After Winning an Election
When analyzing Donald Trump, it’s helpful to distinguish which of his words or actions represent violations of established norms, and which are, in fact, consistent with his presidential predecessors’. Trump’s tweet-storm over the weekend, in which he claimed his victory in the 2016 election was evidence that he is a […] Read more »
How trustworthy are the polls, more than a year after the 2016 election?
Over the past year, political professionals have been picking over the pre-election polling data to figure out whether the polls failed to predict Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton. In many people’s minds, the polls were flat wrong in 2016. Actually, it’s more complicated than that. … After interviewing […] Read more »