… A decade ago, Obama memorably rebutted the trope that the United States could be neatly cleaved into a red and a blue America that pits coastal liberals against inland traditionalists. But in one very measurable and consequential sense, there are two Americas. There is the America that votes in […] Read more »
Why the Democrats’ Turnout Problem Is Worst in North Carolina
… North Carolina might be the state where Democrats suffer the most from low midterm turnout. The state is divided between older, culturally Southern and conservative voters, and younger, more diverse and more liberal voters, especially around the Research Triangle and Charlotte. In presidential elections, those two groups fight nearly […] Read more »
The GOP has a demographic problem, and it looks like it could get even worse
… The math isn’t complicated. Winning 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and six percent of the African American vote — as Romney did in 2012 — makes it hard to win a majority of the overall vote when those groups represent 10 percent and 13 percent of the electorate, […] Read more »
The GOP’s Political Reconstruction Project
… It’s an undeniable empirical truth that the GOP coalition is shrinking, and it’s shrinking in the aftermath of two fairly decisive defeats, with the latter coming against a president whose policies were judged by many Americans to have been failures. Which means the Republican task isn’t simply to nominate […] Read more »
The close results of recent presidential elections reflect the emergence of a highly divided and partisan electorate
Election forecasters generally have a short-term time perspective and that is perfectly understandable. We are concerned with predicting the outcome of one election at a time. In making our forecasts, we therefore focus on factors that can contribute to an accurate prediction of each party’s share of the vote in […] Read more »
The Self-Sort
This week, four presidents journeyed to Austin, Tex., to address the Civil Rights Summit and remark on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark act brought an end to legal racial segregation in public places. But now we are […] Read more »