Facing a bleak electoral landscape after 2016, the brightest spot for Democrats may be President Trump’s continued weakness with members of the Millennial generation—who are poised to surpass the more Republican-leaning baby boomers in 2020 as the largest generation of eligible voters. Polls early in his presidency consistently show Trump […] Read more »
How Midterms Do (and Do Not) Differ From Presidential Elections
With politicos everywhere turning their eyes to the still-distant 2018 midterm election, we thought it would be useful to review some of the basic differences and similarities between the electorates in presidential and midterm cycles. Basically, midterm electorates are smaller, older, and less diverse than presidential ones, but the demographic […] Read more »
The Democratic Party is facing a demographic crisis
Musa al-Gharbi, Columbia University In 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama outperformed his predecessors John Kerry and Al Gore with virtually every single demographic group, handily defeating his Republican rival John McCain. This success spread to down-ballot races as well. Democrats expanded control over the House and the Senate, and […] Read more »
Results from the Bright Line Watch U.S. Democracy Survey
BLW conducted its first U.S. Democracy Survey from February 13-19, 2017. We invited 9,820 political science faculty at 511 U.S. institutions to participate and received 1,571 responses (a response rate of 16 percent). … The survey had two broad goals. The first was to learn what qualities our respondents regard […] Read more »
Making Voter Pie
There has been a compelling pie chart circulating on Facebook and Twitter, showing the percentage who voted for Trump or Clinton, or who didn’t vote, or weren’t eligible. … The problem is … well, there are a couple problems. CONT. Daniel Laurison (Swarthmore) & Dan Hirschman (Brown), Scatterplot Read more »
Obama pollster Cornell Belcher on the failures that led to President Trump
The Democratic Party is continuing its postmortem after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat. Many challenges and puzzles will need to be resolved. … Some have suggested that Democrats should abandon “identity politics” and focus exclusively on winning back white working-class voters. While Barack Obama won two terms — and left office […] Read more »