Answering constituents in congressional offices often involves tabulating comments in a database. Office of Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont. via AP Samantha McDonald, University of California, Irvine Big technology companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google aren’t the only ones facing huge political concerns about using citizen data: So is Congress. Reports […] Read more »
Don’t vote? The Trump campaign would like a word with you
… Less than 14 months before Election Day, the president’s team is banking his reelection hopes on identifying and bringing to the polls hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters … people in closely contested states who didn’t vote in 2016. The campaign is betting that it may be easier to […] Read more »
Democrats are missing an opportunity to brand Trump as too conservative, poll suggests
In his 2016 campaign, President Trump ran as a relative moderate among Republicans — opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, talking up federal efforts to rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges, staying away from culture war issues such as same-sex marriage. But in office, Trump has aligned himself firmly […] Read more »
Grassroots Blossom Across America, Reshaping Country’s Political Geography
As the 2018 midterm campaigns hit their stride last summer, there was finally some mainstream recognition that post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes discussed as “Resistance” groups — had become an electoral force to be reckoned with. Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts: • The new groups are disproportionately composed […] Read more »
Americans’ Civics Knowledge Increases But Still Has a Long Way to Go
The past few years have seen contention between Congress and the president over budgets and immigration, disputes over the limits of executive power, contested confirmation hearings for two Supreme Court justices, and lawsuits involving members of Congress and the president. The good news is that amid all this, the American […] Read more »
The Suburban Vote Isn’t as Blue as It Looks
My colleague, David Wasserman wrote a (typically) insightful analysis on GOP state Sen. Dan Bishop’s narrow win in Thursday’s special election in North Carolina’s 9th district. His main conclusion was that the special election continued a trend we’ve seen since 2016 of suburbs voting more Democratic, while small town and […] Read more »