Donald Trump is making noise about an independent bid for president. If the Republican National Committee doesn’t treat him fairly, Trump says, he’ll be more likely to launch a third-party run. I don’t know if he is at all serious, but I do know two things: History suggests that an […] Read more »
The Trump and the Restless
I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about Donald Trump. But Ron Fournier’s piece about Trump’s candidacy calls for a facts-infused response. Fournier claims that Trump’s candidacy signals “restlessness” in the electorate, specifically among protest voters. There are three main problems with this analysis: lack of specific data about citizens’ actual […] Read more »
Rise of the Independents
Independence Day comes once a year in the United States, but in politics we are witnessing the rise of an “independents’ era.” And that unaligned group is reshaping the way we understand the two-party system. CONT. Dante Chinni, NBC News Read more »
There Are More Liberals, But Not Fewer Conservatives
A few days ago, a potentially troubling report for Republicans came out: Fewer Americans were identifying as “conservative” than at any point in the past five years. According to polling conducted this year by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, just 33 percent of voters called themselves conservative. That’s […] Read more »
The GOP’s Voter-ID Problem
One of the more interesting changes in U.S. politics in recent years has been the increasingly parliamentary nature of voting behavior. Fewer people are straying beyond their party affiliations, we are seeing more straight-ticket voting, and the characteristics of individual candidates mean less than ever. Entering this 2016 presidential cycle, […] Read more »
Democrats Keep Lead in Party Identification
The party identification of American voters was one of the most hotly debated topics among analysts before the 2012 presidential election. Many Republicans thought there were roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, and so doubted polls showing President Obama with the lead. In the end, the polls were right. […] Read more »