The 2016 US election forecasting field was mostly divided up between the political science modelers, pollsters and poll aggregators. Pollsters and poll aggregators use national and state-level vote intention polls to make their forecasts, and are continually updating their forecasts until Election Day. The political science modelers apply theory and […] Read more »
The candidate or the circumstances
… Trump’s failure to capture a plurality of the popular vote suggests he failed to live up to the potential created for him by situational factors over which neither he, nor Clinton, had any control. As I noted throughout the campaign, Clinton was running an uphill race based on the […] Read more »
Donald Trump’s Alt-Reality
… Trump proved throughout his campaign and in the month since he won that he would not only lie repeatedly, but that he could get away with it. As Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post, pointed out on Nov. 4: Donald Trump has amassed […] Read more »
Stop blaming ‘populism’ for everything
The word “populism” is being used to explain almost every trend or event of 2016, including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as America’s next President, and shifts in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Austrian politics. … Reducing everything to “populism” is ignoring the real issues that motivate people. To […] Read more »
How Vladimir Putin Became the Oracle of the East
Immediately following the annexation of Crimea and the tragedy of flight MH17, the West largely regarded Vladimir Putin as a dangerous international pariah. But two years later, following the sweeping success of demagogues world-wide, Putin has emerged as a new oracle of the East, leading the charge for the new […] Read more »
19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election
OK, we can all agree that the November election result was a shocker. According to news reports, even the Trump campaign team was stunned to come up a winner. So now seemed like a good time to go over various theories floating around in political science and political reporting and […] Read more »