In explaining the rise of populism, it’s not economic anxiety vs. identity politics – it’s both

Deindustrialization has decimated the blue-collar workforce in the US. … Our research examines the effects of deindustrialization on electoral politics. Specifically, we explore how deindustrialization affected voting in three US presidential elections (2008-2016), using county-level data which captures localized manufacturing job losses. Our argument is that responses to what we […] Read more »

Bidenomics Really Is Something New

Some of the changes are obvious: Compared with the economic strategies of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden is proposing more new spending and more new taxes than either of his Democratic predecessors, and he’s abandoned their support for negotiating new free-trade agreements. But Biden is also […] Read more »

Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope

The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans. The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters […] Read more »

Do You Live in a Political Bubble?

More than half of Republicans believe that last year’s election was stolen from Donald Trump. Rather than reject claims of election fraud, Republican lawmakers have used the premise that the election was stolen to justify restrictions on voting. Mr. Trump most likely deserves much of the blame for the widespread […] Read more »

American Politics Now Has Two Big Racial Divides

There’s been a recent flurry of studies and analyses that take a deeper look at the results of the 2020 election. These examinations don’t contradict our early interpretation of the results from the days and weeks immediately following Election Day: The overwhelming majority of voters backed the candidate from the […] Read more »

The GOP scared Latinos from the census. Now that may cost the party red seats.

Everyone knew Hispanics were at risk of being undercounted in the 2020 Census, because the Trump administration gave every indication of wanting them undercounted. The administration’s hard-line anti-immigrant policies, after all, extended to the census. As commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross attempted to get a citizenship question added to the survey, […] Read more »