Donald Trump’s election as president startled many Americans. A number of observers commented that Trump’s campaign represented a set of illiberal values and policy positions far outside of the United States’ political traditions of individual rights, equality and democracy. But in many ways, Trump represents a return to the historical […] Read more »
Did Moderates Help Elect Trump?
During elections, most public opinion surveys try to identify likely voters and use them to predict the winner. Working with our students at Cornell University, we took a different approach by focusing on respondents who said they did not intend to vote for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. In our […] Read more »
Donald Trump and the Politics of Disjunction
… One of the strongest pieces of evidence we have that Trump is facing a politics of disjunction is that the Republican Party was already in the midst of a civil war when he emerged on the scene. The fight between Tea Party and establishment Republicans eventually led to a […] Read more »
The Hillary Clinton of 2000 would have beaten Donald Trump
It was a sunny day on Daniel Moynihan’s farm in July 1999 when Hillary Clinton first launched her own political career and months later she would officially announce her candidacy for the U.S. Senate as a New Democrat. She extolled the values of “opportunity, community, responsibility and enterprise.” … She […] Read more »
The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise — a systemic shock, really — to both journalists and so many who read […] Read more »
How the 2016 Election Exposed America’s Racial and Cultural Divides
The 2016 election exposed an America of deep divides over race, ethnicity and culture — a nation carved into two large coalitions, roughly equal in size but radically different in demographics and desires. … The electorate coalitions in 2016 were similar to the 2012 election, with one major exception: white […] Read more »