In 2016, white evangelical Protestants strongly supported Donald Trump, a septuagenarian candidate who promised to make America great again, to bring back “Merry Christmas” and to protect, cherish and defend America’s Christian heritage. White evangelicals have consistently told pollsters that life in the U.S. has gotten worse since the 1950s. […] Read more »
Empathize With Your Political Foe
Sept. 16, 2017, had the potential to be an awful day on the National Mall in Washington. It started with a rally, organized by a group of Trump supporters, called the Mother of All Rallies Patriot Unification Gathering. Counterprotesters from a group called Black Lives Matter of Greater New York […] Read more »
Powerful or warm? Liberal and conservative voters favor different traits in a politician
Several decades of research in political and electoral behaviour have concluded that a candidate’s personality matters when voters cast their ballots. Unsurprisingly, the main take-away from most of these studies is that voters tend to vote for candidates that they find appealing. However, existing research is still unclear about the […] Read more »
The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War
The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done. In this current period […] Read more »
What the Shutdown Says About the Future of the Democrats
Surprised that the Democrats stuck to their guns on the shutdown, even opening themselves up to the charge that they are “far more concerned with illegal immigrants” than with the military and border security, as President Trump put it in a Saturday morning tweet? Don’t be. It’s been coming for […] Read more »
Shutdown dynamics highlight the state of politics on Trump’s anniversary
The elements that produced this weekend’s government shutdown sum up the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency: a dealmaking chief executive who can’t make a deal; a divided Republican Party struggling to govern and in an uneasy relationship with the president; and a Democratic Party tethered to its anti-Trump progressive […] Read more »