The evocative sound of barriers falling was the signal note during the Democratic National Convention’s first two nights. … But there is also an undercurrent of concern that something old is being lost in this celebration of the new. The fear among some is that this polychromatic Democratic Party, open […] Read more »
The Class Inversion of American Politics Accelerates
The reshaping of the two parties’ coalitions under the blast-force pressure of Donald Trump’s iconoclastic candidacy may reach unprecedented heights in 2016, the first polls released after the GOP convention suggest. National surveys released on Monday by CBS and CNN/ORC show the gap between the preferences of whites with and […] Read more »
The One Demographic That Is Hurting Hillary Clinton
The list of voting groups generally alienated by Donald J. Trump is long: Hispanics, women, the young, the college educated and more. How is it that he’s in such a close race with Hillary Clinton? The answer lies with a group that still represented nearly half of all voters in […] Read more »
Economic Hardship and Favorable Views of Trump
Donald Trump, the Republican Party presidential nominee, has aggressively attacked trade and immigration in his campaign speeches, claiming globalization “has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” This rhetoric, and the weakness of the U.S. economy in recent years, has led many to conclude that his […] Read more »
Trump’s Battle for College-Educated White Voters
The most striking argument from the podium during the Republican convention’s first nights was Donald Trump Jr.’s claim that his father had more respect for blue-collar “street smarts” than white-collar book smarts earned at “fancy colleges.” It was yet another instance of cultural signaling from the Trump campaign toward the […] Read more »
Trump, Clinton, and the Realignment of Battleground States
The tumultuous 2016 presidential race appears poised to realign the states at the tipping point of American politics. Since Bill Clinton’s first victory in 1992, Democratic presidential candidates have consistently run better in the aging, predominantly white and heavily blue-collar swing states clustered in the Rustbelt than in the younger, […] Read more »