… A new study hints at where candidates and legislators can find their strongest supporters: Women tend to think more highly of female legislators on a variety of measures. With men, though, it depends on party; Republican men have reservations about the women representing them, whereas Democratic men in some […] Read more »
Voters value competence. That could be bad news for Trump.
… Falling assessments of a party or president’s competence have important electoral consequences. For one thing, it limits the range of issues that a party can campaign on, since voters are unlikely to find persuasive promises from a party that has proven it can’t deliver. Voters punish governments for poor […] Read more »
Trump has already crossed the red line. What now?
Political observers during the Trump era have spilled a lot of ink asking where the red line is. I’d like to spill a bit on what happens if we’ve already crossed it. … As a species, politicians almost invariably want to be liked. Presidents, in particular, know that the success […] Read more »
Trump isn’t changing the Republican Party. The Republican Party is changing Trump.
During the 2016 election, many observers from across the political spectrum saw Donald Trump’s candidacy as a direct challenge to the Republican Party’s ideological orthodoxy. Reporters described Trump as an “insurgent populist” running on a policy platform that “cuts across party lines . . . [and is] anathema to movement […] Read more »
Should democracy depend on ‘we, the people’? Here’s what the framers wanted.
… Over the next five episodes we’ll look at the role of public opinion and the media, see how elections work, and examine ways other than voting by which people can participate in politics. Public opinion is a fundamental place to start. After all, as William McKinley put it, “Here […] Read more »
Trump Came In As A Weak President, And He’s Made Himself Weaker
… The classic insight about presidential power came from the late Richard Neustadt in a book first published in 1960, in which he argued that “presidential power is the power to persuade” (an idea he attributed to Harry Truman) and identified the president’s professional reputation among Washington elites and, to […] Read more »