There are two separate issues covered in Thomas Edsall’s Thursday, March 30, 2018 article in the New York Times. First, exit polls have problems with race and education. Certainty true, but not exactly as the author describes. Second, Democrats have problems messaging race and education. Certainty true, but not exactly […] Read more »
Is the Trump Bump Real?
Even as Stormy swirls, the president seems to have found his footing. Reporting from the White House press corps is that after a year of on-the-job training, the president is feeling much more confident and eager to follow-through on his 2016 campaign promises. Since the beginning of the year, he’s […] Read more »
The 2016 Exit Polls Led Us to Misinterpret the 2016 Election
Crucial disputes over Democratic strategy concerning economic distribution, race and immigration have in large part been based on Election Day exit polls that now appear to have been inaccurate in key ways. According to subsequent studies, those polls substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters — many of […] Read more »
How election forecasts confuse Americans — and may lead them not to vote at all
Where were you on the night of Nov. 8, 2016? If you’re like many political junkies, you were watching election night coverage and wondering not whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would win but might Clinton do so well that she’d win in places like Texas and Arizona. When she […] Read more »
Support for Gun Control Seems Strong. But It May Be Softer Than It Looks.
When you ask Americans in a poll whether they support universal background checks for gun purchases, huge majorities say yes. Ask them for a specific vote for such a legal change, and that support drops off. In recent years, there have been three true tests of this question. In Washington […] Read more »
Trump does what he wants because partisanship means that nothing ever changes
… If presidential approval ratings are mired in partisanship over the long term, it means, in essence, that they’re broken as a tool for evaluation. The more significant problem, of course, is that political actors would never be rewarded or punished for any actions they might take, so there’s not […] Read more »