Was the Midwestern ‘Red Shift’ More Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary? The Answer Matters a Lot for 2018

… In general, one of the most challenging aspects of analyzing events in real time is distinguishing temporary blips from long-term trends. Popular pundits and other media figures often tend to overstate the degree to which immediate events portend long-term patterns; as I noted once in another context, “There’s a […] Read more »

Precinct Data Shows Rich, White Neighborhoods Flipping Democratic in 2016. Will It Last?

Republicans have been the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor for about as long as political scientists have collected data on American elections. That might not be quite so true anymore, at least among white voters. Hillary Clinton won the nation’s richest and most exclusive […] Read more »

The Least Analytical 2016 Voters: Democrats Who Supported Trump

… A study that examined voters’ styles of thinking finds that, as expected, Democrats are somewhat more analytically oriented than Republicans. This supports the idea that conservatism is something of a default setting, and rejecting it requires intellectual reasoning. However, the biggest difference in cognitive approaches was between two subsets […] Read more »

About that claim in the NYT that the immigration issue helped Hillary Clinton? The numbers don’t seem to add up.

Today I noticed an op-ed by two political scientists, Howard Lavine and Wendy Rahm, entitled, “What if Trump’s Nativism Actually Hurts Him?” … Now I was curious, so I thought I’d check the numbers. CONT. Andrew Gelman (Columbia U.), Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Read more »