… The reason the most confrontational congressional Republicans have seized the party’s controls is that they are most directly channeling the bottomless alienation coursing through much of the GOP’s base. That doesn’t mean Republican voters have broadly endorsed the party’s specific tactics: In this week’s United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection […] Read more »
‘If You Live Near Other People, You’re Probably a Democrat. If Your Neighbors Are Distant, Republican’
The below graph from Conor Sen, an armchair demographer in Atlanta, has been making the rounds this morning in my Twitter feed. It neatly reflects a political phenomenon we’ve written about before: Yes, cities generally tend to lean more Democratic, and rural states more Republican, but the fine-grained relationship between […] Read more »
How Did Conservatives Get This Radical?
… Mainstream conservatives trying to figure out how to extract their party from the hole their more extreme colleagues are digging for them face a major hurdle: the dependence of the national Republican Party on the votes of besieged whites, especially white southerners. … There may be no way to […] Read more »
Bad Bet: Why Republicans Can’t Win With Whites Alone
This much is undisputed: In 2012, President Obama lost white voters by a larger margin than any winning presidential candidate in U.S. history. In his reelection, Obama lost ground from 2008 with almost every conceivable segment of the white electorate. With several key groups of whites, he recorded the weakest […] Read more »
Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories
Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has sorted the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. [cont.] Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia U.), New York Times Read more »
AP-NORC Center Poll: Demographics divide views of schools
… Overall impressions of the nation’s schools and teachers are similarly positive among all groups of parents, but deep demographic differences emerge in the details of how parents see teachers, schools and even their own roles in their children’s education. The divisions fall along the familiar fault lines of income, […] Read more »