… While data geeks and traditional journalists each made their share of mistakes when assessing Trump’s chances during the campaign, their behavior since the election has been different. After Trump’s victory, the various academics and journalists who’d built models to estimate the election odds engaged in detailed self-assessments of how […] Read more »
Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News
In the coming days, Americans will follow a single event across a variety of media channels: the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. If the public’s media habits during the campaign are any indicator, it is likely that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters will […] Read more »
Explaining Trump
… Although a substantial answer will not emerge for years, this post is my own morning-after answer to the “WTHH?” question. I make three arguments: First, Trump’s electoral college victory was a fluke, a small accident with vast implications, but from a social science perspective not very interesting. Second, the […] Read more »
Trump’s Pre-Inauguration Favorables Remain Historically Low
President-elect Donald Trump approaches Inauguration Day with a significantly lower favorable rating than his three immediate predecessors received when they were presidents-elect. Trump’s 40% favorable rating is roughly half of what Barack Obama enjoyed before his inauguration in 2009 (78%) and is much lower than the pre-inaugural ratings for George […] Read more »
Donald Trump has brought us the American style in paranoid politics
Political scientists long assumed that U.S. institutions were more open and sturdier than those in other countries. One manifestation of that robustness, the theory went, was that U.S. politics appeared largely free from troubling symptoms like conspiracy thinking. Foreigners — particularly in less-developed countries — might attribute the actions of […] Read more »
A Pollster’s New Year’s Resolutions and What We Learned from Mark Twain
Well, it’s a new year and two months have elapsed since the November elections, two months in which we have had time to assess what happened and take in much of the post-election analysis as well. Frankly, the miscues and misguided analysis that plagued the pre-election coverage of the Presidential […] Read more »