In 2019, on average, 47% of U.S. adults identified politically as Democrats or said they were independents who leaned toward the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, 42% identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents. Americans’ political leanings have been quite stable since 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president. The Democratic […] Read more »
Understanding the precarious, uncertain position of the Democratic primaries right now
One’s confidence in predicting what’s likely to happen in the contest for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination correlates neatly with how closely one is looking at it. In the abstract, it seems like a mess, with a field of more than two dozen trimmed down only partially and a leading […] Read more »
What Decades Of Primary Polls Tell Us About The 2020 Democratic Presidential Race
… Early national polls conducted in the year before the first nominating contests do have predictive value, but remember there isn’t one national primary. Instead, parties choose presidential nominees via state-by-state elections over the course of a few months. And that sequential nature of the primary makes it hard for […] Read more »
How Democrats Can Win Back Obama-Trump Defectors
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, analysts fiercely debated the role of the approximately six million voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but shifted their support to Mr. Trump in 2016. Democratic strategists also had to worry about their future behavior: Was 2016 a temporary […] Read more »
Why Republicans will stick with Trump in 2020 — even if they don’t love his behavior
… The Republicans who make a living hating Trump today hated him before he was elected. The rest of the party remains solidly behind him. The reason for that, as we enter this election year, is less granular than feeling happy or sad about a specific presidential behavior. Rather, it […] Read more »
It’s not just the polls that show Biden and Sanders leading the primary
We have less than a month until the primary season, and it’s becoming more apparent that former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are the candidates to beat. It’s not just that they are Nos. 1 and 2 in the national polling. It’s that each holds […] Read more »