President Obama, on a recent campaign trip through the crucial swing state of Virginia, recited an assertion he made again during Wednesday’s debate: that he has cut taxes for the typical American family by $3,600. That is news to many voters — among them Don Woodson, a landscaper loading cases […] Read more »
Toe to Toe
… Romney’s rising poll numbers in the aftermath of the debate on Oct. 3 actually reveal the relative failure of Romney’s general election advertising. Millions of dollars in ads couldn’t do what one effective debate performance — and a dismal showing by the president — did. … No one knows […] Read more »
Romney’s Debate Win Doesn’t Make It 1980 Again
Mitt Romney’s winning performance in last week’s presidential debate has reinforced his campaign’s belief that this election parallels the one in 1980: In troubled times, Republicans inevitably defeat an unpopular Democratic president. While Romney gets to hit the reset button after President Barack Obama’s desultory display, he’d better not count […] Read more »
Before Debate, Poll Showed Obama Hitting Demographic Targets
If President Obama matches the 80 percent he won in 2008 among nonwhite voters, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and others, he can reassemble a national majority by attracting only about 40 percent of whites. As Democrats have become fond of saying, that is a matter of arithmetic, so long […] Read more »
The Unskewed Election
… There is a vast and longstanding political science literature devoted to explaining the human propensity to fit opinion and even fact to partisan convenience — support for a war, for instance, tends to flip when a new party takes the White Houes — but many of the political scientists […] Read more »
Market Clarity When Campaign Feathers Fly
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine,” Benjamin Graham, the guru of value investing, once wrote about the stock market. His words seem to apply as well to prediction markets like Intrade, which set probabilities on the […] Read more »