As the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol approaches, it’s clear that the ever-increasing gap between the Republican and Democratic parties includes different views about the nature of U.S. democracy and core American values. Our recent research finds that this divergence grows in no small part […] Read more »
An Early Midterm Forecast
Political observers seem to be treating a Republican takeover of the US House next year as an inevitability. And maybe that’s true, but I wanted to apply a bit of simple modeling to it to see if we can get some handle on how likely that is to happen. The […] Read more »
‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe’
If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. […] Read more »
A new survey provides little comfort about democracy’s future
A new survey from Bright Line Watch, an organization that monitors democratic practices, provides some interesting insights but little solace about Republicans’ commitment to democracy. They might say they support democratic principles (e.g., “All adult citizens enjoy the same legal and political rights”), but they fail to embrace the most […] Read more »
How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return
Political analysts, scholars and close observers of government are explicitly raising the possibility that the polarized American electoral system has come to the point at which a return to traditional democratic norms will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. … The activist anti-democratic Trump wing of the Republican Party, committed […] Read more »
Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away?
… Do Democrats’ difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of […] Read more »