As a graduate student in economics, I have used Google search data to quantify the cost of racism on President Barack Obama’s vote total. I compared the rate at which areas made racist searches on Google to Obama’s vote share, controlling for the vote share of the previous Democratic candidate, […] Read more »
The Education Split on Obama
This week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll puts both his total job approval and economic job approval numbers at 47%. The usual divides are also there, of course – 81% of Democrats approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing on the economy, while only 6% of Republicans do. But not […] Read more »
A New Budget for a New Party
The keening on the left about President Obama’s budget proposal this week suggests that large portions of the Democratic base still don’t understand the political and economic dynamics of the party’s changing electoral coalition. Much of this year’s Washington story is about Obama aligning the Democratic agenda with the priorities […] Read more »
How Many Votes Did Racism Cost Obama? I’ll take the under
After two clear victories and “Bradley Effect” no-shows, it would seem that the fear that racism could cost Barack Obama the presidency was overstated. But Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Harvard, begs to differ; he thinks that racism significantly hindered Obama. With a novel approach that uses […] Read more »
Strong majority backs citizenship for undocumented immigrants
With a bipartisan group of senators expected to unveil immigration-reform legislation in the next few days, a brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans – including eight-in-10 Latinos – support giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. A slight majority of Republican respondents oppose this […] Read more »
In Political Campaigns, Do You Get What You Pay For?
Mark Hanna, the Republican Party political boss, famously declared at the outset of the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” In the wake of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act and the […] Read more »