If the supposedly unlikable Hillary Clinton didn’t break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in 2016, she made enough cracks in it to encourage others to try again: Six women are competing for the Democratic nomination today. But guess what? We don’t seem to like them either. … Likability: It is […] Read more »
Bernie Sanders will be tested in 2020 as he never was in 2016
Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg signaled the start of a new political era for Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the front-runners for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, with five crisp words. With those five words during last week’s CNN town hall marathon — “No, I don’t think so” — the South […] Read more »
Why Identity Politics Could Be Good Politics For Democrats In 2020
… The case for Democrats both running on populism and centering their electoral strategy around appealing to Midwestern white voters without college degrees is fairly strong. After all, polls show that voters are more aligned with the Democrats on some high-profile economic issues than on some hot-button cultural ones. … […] Read more »
Black Voters Like Bernie Sanders Just Fine — They Just Might Like Other Candidates More
The narrative after the 2016 Democratic primary was that black voters overwhelmingly chose Hillary Clinton in part because they didn’t like or connect with Sen. Bernie Sanders. That dislike for Sanders was often attributed to his focus on inequality based on class rather than race and to his sometimes clumsy […] Read more »
How the Trump Era Is Molding the Next Generation of Voters
… Political science research shows that a generation of voters is shaped for life by what happens during the teenage years and early 20s: whether the country is at war, how the economy is doing, whether the president is popular. Evidence in the Trump era so far shows young people […] Read more »
Battleground States Then (2012/2016) vs. Now (2018/2019)
Was the 2016 election a one-off — a once-in-a-lifetime contest between two fundamentally flawed contestants? Or, was it a realignment election; the end of Democratic dominance in the industrial Midwest as well as the loosening of the Republican grip on southwestern states like Arizona and Texas? Was Clinton the outlier […] Read more »