… A cocktail of problems led to the polling misses of 2016. … But while pollsters received the majority of the blame, perhaps more condemnation ought to have fallen on the forecasters, who turn pollsters’ data into predictions. CONT. Rob Arthur, MIT Technology Review Read more »
Trump Is Waiting and He Is Ready
There are three crucial developments working in Donald Trump’s favor in the 2020 presidential campaign. These include what a group of Harvard economists — Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva and Armando Miano — describe in a recent paper as “The Polarization of Reality.” They write: Evidence is growing that Americans are […] Read more »
Candidates say they want to build momentum with voters – but what is that actually worth?
Before the primary, Buttigieg said his campaign had the ‘strongest momentum.’ AP Photo/Mary Altaffer Daniel Palazzolo, University of Richmond and Ernest B. McGowen III, University of Richmond “I’ve got the ‘Big Mo,’” said George H. Bush after winning the Iowa caucuses in 1980. “We are the campaign with the strongest […] Read more »
Putin would recognize Trump’s ‘reality TV’ techniques in the State of the Union address
On Feb, 4, President Trump gave his third State of the Union address. This year’s address included more political theater than we’ve seen in the annual event before. … Trump’s showmanship was more strategic and consequential than it might appear at first. In researching nondemocratic regimes, I’ve found that when […] Read more »
It was a bad week for unwritten rules. What does this mean?
The decline of norms has become a common criticism of Trump era politics. The violation of unwritten rules ties together some of the developments in what was an eventful week in American politics. The Iowa caucuses failed to produce a clear result. The president gave a Medal of Freedom to […] Read more »
The Republican Party is white and Southern. How did that happen?
… With the exception of the short period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the GOP was notoriously ineffective in the ex-Confederacy. The region was dominated by the Democratic Party from the late 1870s through the second half of the 20th century. Why the shift? Historians and political scientists traditionally […] Read more »