When biographers are interviewed about George H.W. Bush, they often emphasize that he was more interested in governing than in campaigning. In the 1992 debates, he famously looked at his watch as if he would rather be somewhere else. In First to the Party, I show that he made a […] Read more »
How President Trump helped the media lose the 2018 midterm elections
The tone of media coverage often reflects the outcome of election campaigns. This is not necessarily because opinion follows media content — it seems just as likely that media reflects the state of public affairs. Either way, there is a considerable body of work that finds a correlation between media […] Read more »
Democrats in 2020 don’t have the Republican safety margin
One of the central questions in understanding the Democratic presidential nomination race for 2020 is simply: Are Democrats now where Republicans were four years ago? Will the party be confronted next year with one or two dozen viable candidates on the debate stage, each with their own financial base of […] Read more »
In the midterms, much of the Democrats’ Blue Wave hit a Republican Red Wall
Two of the main casualties for pollsters in most elections are often their reputation and their credibility. In the US, their perceived failure to predict the election victory of Donald Trump left many to question if they could ever be trusted again. Going into the midterms, the leading pollsters had […] Read more »
Citizens feel disconnected from government. If they knew what government did for them, they wouldn’t.
Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the department of government at Cornell University. She is also the author of a new book, “The Government-Citizen Disconnect,” which argues that citizens are often unaware of the benefits they receive from the government. I spoke to her […] Read more »
The midterms have shown that President Trump’s campaign rhetoric on the economy has come back to haunt him
… The Democrats’ relative success in the mid-terms appears hard to explain in terms of the economy. Growth in the United States for the last two quarters is estimated at 4.2 and 3.5 per cent, respectively. The Democrats’ primary campaign message was about health care, an issue that has played […] Read more »