This is a good piece from @Edsall & scholars that overlaps with a lot of what I've been thinking about re: US institutions over the last yr. Should remind us of how much democracy has progressed internationally since 1787, and how little we've done at home
nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opi…
As far as contemporary debates go, I think scholars are right to point out that anti-democratic institutions do much more harm to Liberal progress, the will of the majority, and the Dem Party than messaging squabbles do — even tho activists can only really influence the latter.
I do think, by the way, that the question of whether "LatinX" and "Defund" hurt Democratic candidates (by association) would be a much lesser, though not non-existent, issue in the party if the Ds didn't have to win 53%+ of voters to have a governing majority, like they do now.
Another way of saying this is that the overall median voter's policy preferences and ideological/cultural attitudes look a lot more like your average Democratic House member's than the average Republican's, but the functional median is skewed right by at least 3 or 4 points

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More from @gelliottmorris

8 Dec
I have been running some models on our YouGov/Economist data today looking into whether voters' attitudes on inflation are being driven by partisanship and, esp, Fox News, as many in the media (and especially on Twitter) are theorizing.

Some findings in this thread ⬇️
The groups most likely to say gas has gotten 'much more' expensive (v 'a little more' or not at all) are:

a) Republicans
b) Ppl 45-64
c) Ppl who watch a lot of news, but not necessarily Fox (Fox had a lower impact on attitudes than eg CNN, actually)
d) Ppl who make <50K
Groups that are LEAST likely to say gas has gotten much more expensive:

a) Democrats
b) Ppl under 30
c) Ppl who don't watch a lot of news
d) Ppl who watch MSNBC
Read 6 tweets
30 Nov
Ranked-choice voting: good
Abolishing primaries: bad
Re: party primaries

This is one of those things that makes sense at first but falls apart after the slightest of scrutiny. We had primaries before we had polarization, and polarization has worsened as the modern primary system has mostly stayed constant. 1/2
2/2 I do think primaries *sustain* some amount of polarization, but they didn’t cause it. We have polarization bc leaders & voters moved to the poles (esp on the right). We need 2 give pols incentives to move to the center, and complete democratization probably isn’t the solution
Read 5 tweets
29 Nov
One thing I think most politics reporters and commentators have yet to internalize is that polarization inherently means the days of presidents hitting 55% approval months into office are probably long gone, and 60% might never happen again (under normal political conditions)
Biden is unpopular (compared to past presidents) in part because of his own personal failings, in part because of his party’s political failings, but also (and this is a big one that gets left out!) because the structures of our politics have changed massively since even the 90s
I guess the final point here is that bc elections are closer now than they used to be, and bc there are more safe seats, a 50% approval still buys parties a lot — maybe as much as a 55% approval used to. But a 40% approval can also be as bad as a 30-35% one from the ~70s.
Read 4 tweets
16 Nov
(Not making any statements about the politics of this article)
It's amazing how much attention this "focus group" is getting when the firm hasn't so much as published a methodology or report on findings. IMO there is a reason nobody who knows about research is writing about this
I will say that it's pretty stunning how new people think the finding that the Democrats are alienating working-class whites is, when education polarization has been increasing steadily since the 50s. Is this really about CRT and campus "wokeness" or something deeper and broader?
I do think @ryangrim does a better job than other commentators at trying to sort that out -- but also think the academic literature has many answers that have been left out of The Discourse. Like this paper for US dropbox.com/s/3nsueuaoquxz… or this globally: academic.oup.com/qje/advance-ar…
Read 4 tweets
7 Nov
I think it is very odd that we’re getting these stories about Democratic collapse in very rural areas when the swing against them in VA was much larger in 50-50 and 60-40D precincts, which tend to be suburban, and when the turnout decrease was much larger in very urban counties.
This is partially explained by the logit curve (50-50 areas have more personable voters in them than 75-25 jurisdictions!) but, really once you look at the turnout data there is no world in which McAuliffe’s loss was made in rural VA
I do think there is also a base rate fallacy going on in the underlying articles. Eg, the NYT piece compares Youngkin’s +2 win to McCain’s -6 in 2008 but doesn’t look at relative shares. And most of the change for Ds happened before 2020! So it’s not rly a 2021 story... at all
Read 6 tweets
3 Nov
Somebody asked me where the Dems are headed and I thought I might as well share my response here
(sorry, my text switched off its autocorrect)
Read 5 tweets

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