Musa al-Gharbi, Columbia University In 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama outperformed his predecessors John Kerry and Al Gore with virtually every single demographic group, handily defeating his Republican rival John McCain. This success spread to down-ballot races as well. Democrats expanded control over the House and the Senate, and […] Read more »
Obama pollster Cornell Belcher on the failures that led to President Trump
The Democratic Party is continuing its postmortem after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat. Many challenges and puzzles will need to be resolved. … Some have suggested that Democrats should abandon “identity politics” and focus exclusively on winning back white working-class voters. While Barack Obama won two terms — and left office […] Read more »
Why is immigration such a problem for the Democratic Party?
… For the past fifty years, the Democratic Party has been the moving force behind rights movements generally, including, prominently, immigrant rights. Over that same time period, the Republican Party has been, and still is, the political arm of those opposed to the expansion of civil rights. This division has […] Read more »
Election autopsy: Latinos favored Clinton more than exit polls showed
Among the many surprises in the 2016 presidential election was the claim by the national exit poll that Donald Trump captured a larger share of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney did four years earlier. … As social science researchers, we decided to take a look at the official election […] Read more »
Learning from voter survey experiments
Leading up to the November election, AP worked with GfK Custom Research and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to examine new ways to survey voters. One study, designed by NORC and funded by the Knight Foundation, explored the opportunities and challenges of using smartphones to […] Read more »
History repeats itself
A number of people have remarked on parallel between Donald Trump and Senator Joe McCarthy (e. g. this post from Andrew Gelman in June). In light of the election results, there’s another one: they both got more support among less educated people. In November, 1954, a NORC survey asked “all […] Read more »