More Republicans have died of COVID-19. Does that mean the polls are off?

Doctors and demographers recently noticed another tragic example of how polarization shapes America: The pandemic has killed more people in the nation’s Republican enclaves than its Democratic strongholds. They explain the gap by pointing to Republican resistance to vaccines and the GOP’s more cavalier approach to combating the virus in […] Read more »

America’s Suburbs: Ground Zero in 21st Century Politics

People often talk about politics as though the business of electing candidates is shrouded in nearly infinite complexity. The reality is that for most of the 40 years I have been in and around campaigns, winning has often come down to just three factors — the racial composition of a […] Read more »

Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?

Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — the fastest-growing group in the country according to Pew — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues. The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand […] Read more »

Ranking the States Demographically, from Most Republican-Friendly to Most Democratic-Friendly

Key Points• For all 50 states, we looked at 3 variables that are increasingly linked with partisan voting patterns: education level, race, and urbanization.• When the states are rank-ordered by their composite scores on these 3 measures, the Republican-voting states for the 2020 presidential election cluster on one end of […] Read more »

Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes

The accelerating red-state offensive to censor what public-school students are taught about racism is emerging as a critical companion measure to proliferating race-based voter restrictions in many of the same states. The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as […] Read more »