Curtis Gans, a liberal activist, journalist and recognized expert on voter turnout in the United States, has died. … Gans went on to found the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, which provided data and analysis of voter turnout. Born in New York City, Gans became active in […] Read more »
America’s Still-Healing Racial Wounds
Fifty years ago, on March 15, 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson gave one of the most memorable speeches by a U.S. president, calling on Congress to enact a voting rights bill by borrowing the cry of the civil rights movement: “We shall overcome.” The Voting Rights Act passed a little more […] Read more »
Coattails and Correlation
Few political observers will be surprised that the correlation between presidential and Senate results has been increasing over the last few presidential election cycles. That is, during a presidential election year, the Senate race in state A has increasingly tended to have a similar outcome to the presidential result in […] Read more »
Have the goals of the civil rights movement been achieved?
Fifty years after the Selma to Montgomery marches, Americans see progress, but 54 percent (including 72 percent of blacks) think only some or none of the goals of Martin Luther King and the 1960s civil rights movement have been achieved. Forty-three percent think most or all of the goals have […] Read more »
Top-two primary system hasn’t worked as proponents promised
… After years of partisan squabbling, massive budget deficits and general haplessness in Sacramento, voters grew fed up and decided it was time for a government makeover. One result was Proposition 14, passed in June 2010 and intended to help bring a new breed of more accommodating, less ideological lawmaker […] Read more »
Changing The Way We Vote Isn’t Getting More People To Vote
California is the closest thing we have to a political lab for engineering a solution for the country’s voter apathy problem. From permanent absentee voting to term limits and redistricting reform and now a top-two primary system, California has tried just about every remedy imagined to help boost voter participation […] Read more »