… While Trump is outperforming your run-of-the-mill Republican among whites without a college degree, he’s underperforming among white voters with a college degree. In fact, he is on a track to lose white college graduates. That’s really unusual for a Republican, and it means that among white voters overall, he’s […] Read more »
The Biggest Danger for Donald Trump: Florida
If demographics are destiny, Donald Trump’s political fate could very well be sealed in Florida. The big demographic threat to the Republican Party isn’t a “blue” Texas or Arizona or Georgia, but the possibility that Florida will follow Nevada and New Mexico to the left. It’s extremely hard for a […] Read more »
Beware of Analyzing Demographic Groups in Isolation (Even the All-Important White Working Class!)
… Close study of the changing preferences of a single demographic group or stratum of the electorate can yield insights and illuminate developments that otherwise go unappreciated—such as the dramatic pro-Democratic trend among Asian-American voters since the 1990s. The evolution of the parties’ popular coalitions over time holds significant implications […] Read more »
How Polling Can Go Wrong
When people complain to me about a poll, it’s usually because they think the demographics are wrong. The pollsters polled too many white people, commenters might say, or too many old people. Or perhaps the sample of Hispanic voters doesn’t seem quite Democratic enough. Most of the time, these comments […] Read more »
The 270 Project: Try To Predict Who Will Win The Election
… We at NPR Politics wanted a data-driven, quantitative way to answer the fundamental question of whether Trump can win, or if this is Hillary Clinton’s race to lose — and give readers the power to test it out themselves. There’s perhaps no better way to do that than through […] Read more »
On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart
Almost eight years after Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president – an event that engendered a sense of optimism among many Americans about the future of race relations – a series of flashpoints around the U.S. has exposed deep racial divides and reignited a national conversation about […] Read more »