What, exactly, explains why a billionaire former CEO of a coffee chain thinks he can launch an independent run for president in 2020? … Schultz does not need to be nearly as popular as Perot to prove a disaster for Democrats. Even with a tiny share of a state’s vote, […] Read more »
U.S. Still Leans Conservative, but Liberals Keep Recent Gains
Americans’ assessment of their political ideology was unchanged in 2018 compared with the year prior when 35% on average described themselves as conservative, 35% as moderate and 26% as liberal. CONT. Lydia Saad, Gallup Read more »
Americans Continue to Embrace Political Independence
Significantly more U.S. adults continued to identify as political independents (42%) in 2018 than as either Democrats (30%) or Republicans (26%). … Most independents do express a party leaning when probed, and when those leanings are taken into account, 47% of Americans on average in 2018 were Democratic identifiers or […] Read more »
Target 2020: the Independent Male Voter
Conventional wisdom holds that Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives because they got clobbered among college-educated women. They did take a beating in that demographic, but opposition from college-educated women doesn’t account for why the GOP lost. The real reason Republicans lost 40 House seats? They lost Independent […] Read more »
The Extraordinary 2018 Election in Colorado
This post-election survey of unaffiliated voters, along with observations of voter turnout in Colorado, can only be described as extraordinary. It was extraordinary because in the past 20 years never has one political party been so overwhelmingly rejected at every level of representative government by the electorate. It was extraordinary […] Read more »
GOP Didn’t Have a Turnout Problem, It Had a Focus Problem
Did the 2018 midterm electorate break new political ground as the media had predicted for months or was it déjà vu all over again? The answer is both. In my last column before the election, I suggested that four key measurements would tell the story of this year’s midterms: party […] Read more »