How a bad response to a weather disaster can ruin a political career

The tragic situation in Texas following this week’s historic cold snap and power outages has people pointing fingers. Perhaps the ire has been pointed toward no one more than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who left the state for Cancun, Mexico. It’s obviously too early to know what if any political […] Read more »

How United Are Democrats? A 96-0 Data Point Offers a Hint

Joe Biden has emerged from a contested Democratic primary with surprising party unity and without any serious threat on his left flank, according to New York Times/Siena College polls of the six battleground states likeliest to decide the presidency. Over all, voters in the battleground states who said Bernie Sanders […] Read more »

Democrats named Biden, Sanders and Warren as their top picks 18 months ago. What did the primaries change?

Former vice president Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president — after a primary involving months of campaigning, 28 Democratic candidates and over $1 billion in ads. Did any of that affect the result? Not much, our research suggests — but they weren’t meaningless. We’ll explain below. […] Read more »

Inside the 3 days that remade the Democratic primary

At Mike Bloomberg’s midtown Manhattan campaign headquarters, a team of pollsters and analysts churned out multiple tranches of data each day on the state of the Democratic race. The sophisticated data operation was supposed to be the candidate’s not-so-secret weapon, giving Bloomberg an almost real-time look at voters’ preferences in […] Read more »