Declining response rates for polls mean we must rely on the shrinking minority of Americans that agree to be interviewed to represent the broader public. Josh Clinton finds that Democrats were more likely to agree to be interviewed than Republicans or Independents in 2020. Common corrections could not compensate, as […] Read more »
The Outlook for the 2022 Senate Elections: A State-by-State Analysis
Key Points• Senate elections have become firmly yoked to their state’s presidential leanings.• Democrats now hold a tiny Senate majority in large part because of their superior performance in otherwise Republican-leaning states, a performance they may find difficult to sustain because of deepening partisan polarization.• Based on the fundamentals of […] Read more »
We Can’t Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart
Today, even scholars of polarization are polarized. This was not always the case. In 1964, Philip Converse of the University of Michigan wrote a groundbreaking paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” that attempted to determine the size of the share of the electorate that could reasonably be […] Read more »
The role party affiliation played in getting US to grim new milestone of 1 million COVID deaths
The American flag flies at half-staff at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on May 14, 2022, after President Biden ordered flags lowered to commemorate 1 million American dead due to COVID-19. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais Monika L. McDermott, Fordham University and David R. Jones, Baruch College, CUNY COVID-19 has now […] Read more »
The MAGA Formula Is Getting Darker and Darker
The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping […] Read more »
How white racism and anti-democracy elite rhetoric create the conditions for right-wing violence
… When a man walked into a grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, yesterday and shot 13 people, killing 10, he illustrated the extreme consequences of the same minoritarian, anti-democracy thinking that is used to justify things like ending Roe and the existence of the […] Read more »