Polls show President Trump’s approval numbers languishing around 40 percent, while the anger and intensity of the Democratic base is rising and the Republican base remains pretty complacent, not full of fight as it was during the Obama years. … That’s a lot for Democrats and liberals to be excited […] Read more »
What can (or should) activists learn from the tea party?
The next four years are likely to see a lot of activism on both left and right. … We studied the tea party movement as it happened, documenting the movement at its grass roots, in the conservative media, and at the elite levels, and demonstrating how these forces combined to […] Read more »
As Georgia Vote Nears, G.O.P. Asks if Ideological Purity Matters Anymore
… Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has blurred the bright-line ideological distinctions that defined the right for the past eight years. Driven more by personal loyalty and a ravenous appetite to win than by any fixed political philosophy, the deal-cutting president has been received warmly by some mainstream […] Read more »
The New Party of No: How a president and a protest movement transformed the Democrats
… The Democrats have never been a natural opposition party, or a particularly effective one. Republicans from Reagan to the Tea Party broadly believed in reducing government, as the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it […] Read more »
Perilous Times for Both Parties
… Republicans are experiencing a mirror image of the outrage that Democratic members of Congress faced back in 2009 and 2010. The people and nature of their complaints are different, but what we are seeing looks like what we saw from the Tea Party folks from the other end of […] Read more »
Progressive protesters face longer odds than the Tea Party did
… In February 2016, using a representative sample of 725 California residents, we conducted a survey experiment to see if liberals and conservatives view protests differently, and how those attitudes might be conditioned by the ideological goals of particular social movements. A few studies have shown that conservatives hold protesters […] Read more »