President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn’t matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcement communities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the “fake news” it promoted would undermine […] Read more »
Parkland highlights political potential of millennials. The question now is if they’ll vote
… It’s been more than six weeks since the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., launched a generation often maligned as self-absorbed and politically apathetic on a fierce campaign for gun control and school safety. Young activists have staged walkouts, led massive rallies […] Read more »
Be Skeptical Of Anyone Who Tells You They Know How Democrats Can Win In November
… Which is a better representation of the true base partisanship of the United States, 2012 or 2016? By winning white, working-class areas (especially in the Midwest) but losing traditional GOP strongholds in suburbia and the Sun Belt, President Trump charted an electoral map that looked slightly but notably different […] Read more »
50 years after Martin Luther King’s Assassination: Assessing Progress of the Civil Rights Movement
On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. Most Americans today say at least some of the goals of the 1960’s civil rights movement that he spearheaded have been attained. But black and white Americans differ widely in how they perceive the treatment of […] Read more »
The 2016 Exit Polls Led Us to Misinterpret the 2016 Election
Crucial disputes over Democratic strategy concerning economic distribution, race and immigration have in large part been based on Election Day exit polls that now appear to have been inaccurate in key ways. According to subsequent studies, those polls substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters — many of […] Read more »
The Seats/Votes Relationship and the Efficiency Gap: House Elections 1972-2016
Redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives is not a unified process, as is the case for most national legislatures, but rather the result of the cumulative actions in the states that have more than one representative. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the entire House to see how […] Read more »