The worrisome Omicron variant lends fresh urgency to President Joe Biden’s months-long grind to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus. He needs it. That 78 million Americans still resist protective shots confounds anyone examining the medical evidence of the vaccines’ effectiveness. But the evidence of history, turbocharged by the modern Republican […] Read more »
Saving Democracy Will Require Institutional and Civil Resistance at All Levels
A sense of alarmed fatalism is starting to take hold among pundits and political scientists. It’s not hard to see why: The future of American democracy looks exceedingly grim under threat from a far-right authoritarian movement—and it’s not clear that any particular electoral or legislative response by Democrats can fix […] Read more »
The vast majority of Republicans don’t want a booster
The effort to provide a Covid-19 vaccine booster to every American adult is underway. While millions of Americans have received their booster, 84% of adults have not. The initial polling indicates that convincing a good portion of this 84% to get a booster could prove difficult. This divide may end […] Read more »
A Tale of Two Midwestern Gerrymanders: Illinois and Ohio
Key Points• Gerrymanders by Democrats in Illinois and Republicans in Ohio seek to build upon their dominance of their respective states.• The Ohio Supreme Court could intervene against the GOP gerrymander there, which perhaps helps explain why Republicans were not as aggressive as they could have been, even though Republicans […] Read more »
Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA
Why have white, less educated voters left the Democratic Party over the past few decades? Scholars have proposed ethnocentrism, social issues and deindustrialization as potential answers. We highlight the role played by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment […] Read more »
How anti-Trump conservatives have fled Fox News
Former Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes decided to leave the network last week. The two have long been concerned over former President Donald Trump falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen. The publication of Tucker Carlson’s falsehood-filled “Patriot Purge” on Fox Nation, about January 6, was the […] Read more »