The Border Between Red and Blue America

The suburbs are up for grabs. Anybody who’s paying attention to the 2020 election knows that. But there’s a more fundamental question: Just what are the suburbs anyway? In a statistical sense, they are surprisingly hard to define. The United States Census Bureau, the primary source of demographic data, doesn’t […] Read more »

The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting

As a candidate for President, Donald Trump defied recent norms for presidential candidates with several racially charged statements. Did that rhetoric—and the 2016 campaign more generally—affect voters’ support for Trump in his general-election contest with Hillary Clinton? Given prior research on prejudice and priming, a few research questions loom especially […] Read more »

As Elizabeth Warren Rises, the G.O.P. Deploys an Old Tactic

President Trump and his allies have struggled for months to come up with effective ways to confront Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose steady rise in the polls put the lie to Mr. Trump’s boasts last spring that she was “finished” and “gone,” undone by her past claims of Native American ancestry. […] Read more »

Why Trump’s Favorite 2016 Map Should Scare Him

This week, as President Donald Trump went on the offensive to bolster his case against impeachment, he tweeted a county-by-county map of the 2016 presidential race that showed a vast sea of red interrupted only by a few blue inlets, mostly along the coasts. The map, captioned with the headline […] Read more »

Why it’s back to the future in the Democratic presidential race

The wine track and the beer track are back. The leading candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential race are assembling coalitions of support through the early primary polling that are reminiscent of the patterns that repeatedly shaped the struggles for the party’s nomination in the last decades of the 20th […] Read more »