The potency of right-wing populism was visible again last week in the success of right-wing parties in the Austrian election. Conventional wisdom has a ready explanation for populism’s success: the declining economic fortunes of the working class. As the story goes, people who are frustrated with modern economies that require […] Read more »
Democrats Are Playing Checkers While Trump Is Playing Chess
For Democrats, the warning shots are coming thick and fast. “More than half of Americans don’t think Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, yet he has a clear path to winning reelection,” Doug Sosnik, who served as President Bill Clinton’s political director, wrote in the Washington Post last […] Read more »
Nothing Divides Voters Like Owning a Gun
Americans are deeply split along demographic lines, but there aren’t many demographic characteristics that embody America’s cultural divide better than gun ownership. In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday, the polling firm SurveyMonkey published a pair of maps from its 2016 presidential election exit polls. […] Read more »
Can the Republican Party Keep Its Coalition Together?
Donald Trump and the Republican Congress this week are straining every fraying seam in their party’s coalition. In just days, Trump’s White House has advanced aggressively nationalistic initiatives on trade and immigration, while also starting an incendiary fight with protesting NFL players. Each of these confrontations has energized elements of […] Read more »
Base to Trump: Start listening to experienced Republicans
When President Trump bashes the Senate Majority Leader, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Speaker of the House, he may be pleasing himself and Breitbart News, but there is no evidence that he is pleasing the majority of his base. As numerous studies have shown, working-class […] Read more »
Americans’ views of trade aren’t just about economics. They’re also about race.
As U.S. trade officials gear up this week to begin renegotiating NAFTA, the trade pact with Canada and Mexico, what do voters really think about trade agreements? … In my new book, “American Opinion on Trade,” I found that one influence on support for protectionism is a factor that others […] Read more »