When Mike Espy, the Democrat challenging Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, faced his opponent at a debate ahead of this Tuesday’s runoff election, he had to make a choice: confront Ms. Hyde-Smith over her comments about attending “a public hanging,” which evoked the state’s racist history, or take a milder […] Read more »
California Has Become a Crisis for the Republicans
For all the focus since Election Day on the Republican Party’s precipitous decline in California, the true depth of the collapse is still only coming into focus. And so are the implications of that fall for the GOP’s prospects in other western states following the same trajectory of geographic and […] Read more »
The 2018 House elections may be historic enough to end the redistricting wars
The US midterm elections were historic in part because of the success of reforms to state redistricting processes. Citizens in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, and Utah passed initiatives that take control of redistricting US House districts out of the hands of state legislatures. Reformers went undefeated, and this is a major […] Read more »
Polling Error in the 2018 Midterm Election
Here are some graphs summarizing analysis I’ve been doing on polling error in the 2018 midterm elections. CONT. Alexander Agadjanian Read more »
Why Nancy Pelosi makes a lot of sense as speaker
A group of House Democrats are trying to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker next Congress. It’s not clear at this point whether they’ll be successful. They claim that it’s time for new leadership, after Democrats won a majority on a message of change. Fair enough. Pelosi has been in […] Read more »
What the Polls Got Right This Year, and Where They Went Wrong
It was a good year for polls. This time, they got the basic story of the election right: a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. And on average, the final polls were closer to the results than any election in a decade. Best of all, the polls were relatively unbiased, […] Read more »