Congressional elections often are considered a referendum on presidents. Popular presidential candidates produce coattails in presidential election years and can limit voters’ typical desires for partisan balancing in midterms. But the president’s party tends to lose congressional seats and vote share in midterms even with high popularity. We argue that […] Read more »
Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism
Although the hardest dividing line between those who accept the election of Joe Biden as legitimate is partisan, there is still variation within the Republican Party between those who accept the 2020 election and those who do not. Among those who do not accept the outcome, they differ as to […] Read more »
Yes, it’s too early to focus on 2024 polling
Once upon a time, in this very same land we still inhabit, midterm election cycles ended and odd-numbered years were free from national campaigns and horse-race speculation. We could spend these off-cycle years discussing issues and policies and the handful of off-year state gubernatorial contests, free from all but the […] Read more »
Why the right has already won the House speakership election
No matter how they resolve Tuesday’s vote choosing the next speaker of the House, Republicans appear poised to double down on the hard-edged politics that most swing state voters rejected in last November’s midterm election. Stubborn conservative resistance to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has put the party at risk […] Read more »
The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
… Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past. That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that […] Read more »
Since 2018, Republicans have lost confidence in U.S. institutions
In June and July 2018, we launched a U.S. survey that asked 5,400 Americans how much confidence they had in a series of national institutions, called the American Institutional Confidence (AIC) Poll. These included political, social and business institutions. … With these questions, we collected detailed demographic and background data […] Read more »