… After presidential elections, commentators—especially those on the winning side—often seem to believe that Something Big Is Happening. It’s not just that the winner won and the loser lost. It’s that the winner won in a transformational way, in a way that will fundamentally reshape politics, in a way that […] Read more »
Polling and the 2012 Election
There are a number of challenges facing the survey research industry, and every election offers the opportunity to continue to learn, change, and adapt. As a leader in the industry, we take every election, whether there are good election outcomes like 2010 or bad election outcomes like 2012, as a […] Read more »
The Auto Bailout Didn’t Decide Ohio
… While many believed that the auto bailout and attacks on Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat would allow the president to win the state with the support of white working class voters, the exit polls show that Obama did worse among Ohio’s white voters than John Kerry. … Moreover, if […] Read more »
The Republican Party’s electoral map problem
… The numbers paint a very clear picture: Republicans now face the same low electoral-college ceiling that Democrats confronted for much of the 1970s and 1980s — needing everything to go right to win the presidency, much less break the 300-electoral-vote barrier. Why the switcheroo? A few reasons. [cont.] Chris […] Read more »
The GOP polling debacle
For Republicans, one of the worst parts of the GOP’s 2012 trouncing was that they didn’t see it coming. Top party strategists and officials always knew there was a chance that President Barack Obama would get reelected, or that Republicans wouldn’t gain control of the Senate. But down to the […] Read more »
The Culture War and the Jobs Crisis
… Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 — and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 — the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than […] Read more »