Won’t be a popular tweet, but I think political scientists mostly disagree that closed partisan primaries are the root cause of ideological polarization.
TED Talks are great. But I think I’m gonna stick with people who actually study politics, not a cheese factory owner, on this one
As a general rule, I tend to tune out people who say “x is the ONE single REAL reason that things are bad, and all your other nuanced explanations are wrong”
Another general rule (maybe with a larger error term): If politicians across the aisle today will tell you on the record they’re in favor of a reform, the reform probably does not go far enough
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One explanation is that the share of people actually getting_vaccinated decreased (perhaps for additional reasons than the J&J pause!) but those people are telling pollsters they'll get it later
The central conflict between "radical" and "moderate" Republican candidates/elected officials today is not over politics or policy, but evidently whether the party should have any commitment to free and fair elections at all gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/the-big-lie-…
What Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Adam Kinzinger all have in common is not that they favor the same policies or cultural war items, but that they believe in democracy and validated election results. Yet they are a fringe in a growing anti-democracy party.
"Can the center hold?" is a tired question in American politics — but it has evolved a much more serious framing over the past six months.
1) A "durable majority" might not translate into electoral victory due to minoritarian institutions. Some might say that's the whole point of the critique! 2) Don't throw out the turnout -> D gains hypothesis yet. There is a clear county-lvl correlation in 2020 pres results
In general, the 'demographics is destiny' thing has always been dumb and short-sighted, but the fact that Trump made gains with Hispanics doesn't invalidate the magnitude of their vote for Biden or lower turnout rate. The lowest propensity voters are still probably D voters
This tweet really does miss the point, though -- Republican electoral laws right now are clearly *designed* to make voting harder for minorities and city-dwellers, probably to the gain of the R party. Looking at aggregate demo patterns isn't helpful here.
‼️‼️ We have a shiny new polling project up today that uses all of our @TheEconomist/@YouGov polls conducted since 2009 (!). It will update every week w/ new polls on Biden's approval and which issues Americans rank as the most important for gov to tackle. economist.com/WhatAmericaThi…
These charts are particularly insightful, I think, for two reasons: (1) No other media org has so frequent a reading of what problems Americans want to be solved, and (2) it presents a bigger picture on politics which often gets overlooked in coverage of the polls.
The lead chart shows Biden's approval in the most recent poll, and offers a demographic and political profile of approvers and disapprovers. We hope this will help readers understand polls at the people-level, and maybe highlight the diversity of America's political coalitions.
Great 538 package on the historically large (and growing) pro-Republican bias of America’s electoral institutions. The data show we are truly falling short of majoritarian democracy, in ways that make me question whether policy outcomes are really all that “representative” at all
Charts like these make me shudder at what our conceptualization of public opinion would be without robust national polling data
The issue w/ this argument is the anti-majoritarian design of our electoral system works very differently under modern factionalism, when the majority and minority have vastly different policy prefs & thwarting the majority has persistent incongruent fx
The share of adults identifying as Republican was also 25% in July 2020 and March 2019 -- and the leaned share was 38% — worse than the 40% the article claims was "worst" since 2012 — as recently as 2018.
not clear to me the quoted tweet is a robust finding, as the share of GOP identifiers has rebounded (not completely) in our YouGov data — favs are down, but that doesn't matter much at the ballot box