Trump is a symptom of the decline of American institutions

… How are Trump and Sanders doing so well? Part of the answer is that there has been a long-term crisis of confidence in America’s leaders. Trump and Sanders’s success is a symptom of that crisis. … The General Social Survey (GSS) has asked Americans about their confidence in Congress, […] Read more »

Are Sanders And Cruz Really Less ‘Electable’?

With a varied cast of characters pursuing each party’s nomination for president, the subject of electability — the idea that some candidates are inherently better or worse general election candidates than others — keeps coming up. … But what does “electability” mean? Is it real? CONT. Julia Azari (Marquette), FiveThirtyEight Read more »

Debunking Donald Trump won’t work if you repeat what he got wrong

The same infographic kept appearing in my Twitter feed again and again around Thanksgiving. The graphic, originally shared by Donald Trump, showed a series of statistics about race and gun deaths in 2015, alongside an image of a dark-skinned man with a handgun. Every single one of the statistics in […] Read more »

Why Fact-Checking Donald Trump Backfires

… A few weeks ago, Republican pollster Frank Luntz spent hours showing a focus group of Donald Trump supporters television ads that criticized their candidate. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel described one ad as “not so subtly comparing the Republican front-runner to Adolf Hitler.” Those attacks on Trump made him […] Read more »