Here’s a question very few people expected to be asking this year: Does the Democratic Party have a future? The defeat of Hillary Clinton has revived with new intensity the conflict between proponents of identity politics — focusing electoral attention on African-Americans, Hispanics, women and the L.G.B.T. community — and […] Read more »
Democrats angry that Clinton had no economic message
… Celinda Lake, the renowned Democratic pollster, is very angry that her party failed to lay out an economic vision to contrast with Trump’s. During an afternoon symposium at Gallup’s headquarters in downtown Washington yesterday, where dozens of experts on public opinion gathered to discuss the lessons of the election, […] Read more »
Why Do Debate ‘Expectations’ Matter?
… The role of expectations in framing press evaluations of presidential debates is sufficiently familiar that we are now regularly subjected to meta-analyses of the “expectations game” in which members of the media evaluate how well the campaigns are manipulating the media. Less commonly discussed, however, is why this practice […] Read more »
What People Don’t Know About the Clinton Foundation Is Revealing in Itself
A story line has developed around the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton that seems to affect how each new event is interpreted by journalists and the public. It’s variously described as a lack of transparency or even obfuscation. … A few of my colleagues at the University of California, Los […] Read more »
Pessimism Might Not Be a Winning Bet for Republicans
A political lifetime ago, Ronald Reagan’s pollster seized on this question to frame the campaign’s argument during his 1980 presidential campaign: “Is the country headed in the right direction, or is it on the wrong track?” … In the New York Times-CBS News poll for July, 26 percent of respondents […] Read more »
Understanding the allure of Trump
There is a lot being written spoken about Trump by intelligent and articulate commentators whose insights I respect. But as a longtime researcher in cognitive science and linguistics, I bring a perspective from these sciences to an understanding of the Trump phenomenon. … I will begin with an updated version […] Read more »