President Obama’s Approval Rating Is the Highest in Years

President Obama is leaving office on a high point, though that may be cold comfort as his successor Donald Trump prepares to dismantle major components of his agenda at home and abroad. In the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll, 56 percent of adults said they approved of Obama’s job […] Read more »

To move forward, Democrats must address class and race

How can the Democratic Party best respond to Donald Trump’s election? The current debate rages around whether to unify around class or instead to build a coalition of identity groups, key among them racial minorities. We reject as fundamentally flawed the implicit assumption that class and race are incompatible bases […] Read more »

Democrats search for a path back into rural America’s good graces

… As much as anything, the 2016 election highlighted the degree to which Democrats have lost favor among voters in rural and small-town America. Heading toward Election Day, Democrats dismissed the possibility that there were enough white, working-class voters in these nonurban areas to overcome their advantages with African Americans, […] Read more »

Forget the ’60s—The Real Generation Gap Is Happening Right Now

Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters along the dividing lines of race, education, and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat less attention. … Hillary Clinton may […] Read more »

Clinton won as many votes as Obama in 2012 — just not in the states where she needed them most

The final results of the 2016 presidential election look like this: Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Obama received four years ago en route to his reelection, but she nonetheless lost the presidency to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.8 million votes behind […] Read more »