… The fierce tribalism that has characterized debates over immigration, taxes and health care is now coloring policy-making during a coronavirus outbreak that threatens countless lives and local economies across the nation. There are exceptions, but Republican leaders have been far more likely to resist the most aggressive social distancing […] Read more »
Uneven coronavirus spread leads to uneven partisan response
The spread of the coronavirus has not occurred evenly around the country. Urban areas, such as New York City, have been harder hit than rural locales and that difference in impacts follows some of the deep partisan political splits in the country. Democrats and Republicans seem to be experiencing the […] Read more »
Republicans were more concerned about Ebola than they’ve been about coronavirus
President Trump has spent much of the past two months downplaying the novel coronavirus threat. Those statements, others have noted, are dramatically different from his comments about the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Back then, Trump repeatedly played up fears of Ebola to attack President Barack Obama. His many tweets included […] Read more »
2020 Election at a Turning Point: Presidential and Senate Battleground Poll
This is a turning point in the 2020 campaign. Vice President Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in the battleground by a healthy margin of 4 points, and 5 in a two-way contest. This is a battleground that Donald Trump painfully won by 1.3 points in 2016, but Senator Bernie Sanders […] Read more »
The Cleaner ‘Smoke-Filled Room’
Key Points • In the last 50 years, American political party leaders lost their historical control of the nominations of presidential candidates. • The reduced power held by these expert politicians contributed to Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016, and Democrats in 2020 came close to making a similar choice. • […] Read more »
In God We Divide
A steady religious realignment has reshaped the white American electorate, turning religious conviction — or its absence — into a clear signal of where voters stand in the culture wars. As mainstream Protestant denominations have declined over the past half century, there has been a hollowing out of the center […] Read more »