August | 2016 | Praxis

Whatever Happened to Donald Trump and the Black Vote?

This was supposed to be the post-Barack Obama presidential election when Republicans regained a modest share of the black vote, but Donald Trump has watched support among these voters fade nationwide and in battleground states where minorities could play a decisive role. The Republican presidential nominee is missing a golden opportunity to make inroads to black communities. Worse yet for the New York real estate mogul, he is driving black voters to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — in one survey he attracted just 1 percent…

Arab Rulers Have No Use for Their Young Adults

Arab countries are full of young people frustrated by a lack of jobs; questioning traditional authority; bittersweet about the West, its liberties and its power; and plugged-in enough to know that their lot is worse than that of many of their peers around the world. “Young people just want to live and not make trouble, but they are unable to break into the political, social, economic systems of their countries,” says Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. “They have to create parallel universes…

Are Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hackers?

The revelation this month that a cyberattack on the DNC is the handiwork of Russian state security personnel has set off alarm bells across the country: Some officials have suggested that 2016 could see more serious efforts to interfere directly with the American election. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like…

After Condemning Them, Trump Is Courting Big GOP Donors

In hotel suites and skyboxes, from K Street to the Texas suburbs, in conversations that are both urgent and strained, allies of Mr. Trump are imploring senior Republicans and senior party donors to come to Mr. Trump’s aid, despite a damaging series of post-convention controversies that have left some in the party ready to abandon him. The goal is to persuade thousands of the party’s most reliable patrons to overcome their lingering objections to the candidate most of them never wanted, and to help defeat…

Gallup: The Supreme Court’s Favorability Is at a Record Low

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 42% job approval rating is down slightly from September and matches the low point in Gallup’s 16-year trend, recorded in June 2005. The Supreme Court’s approval ratings have not been above 50% since September 2010. The latest results are from a July 13-17 Gallup poll. Although the current approval rating ties the historical low, it is not a major departure from updates over the last five years, when approval has ranged between 43% and 49% — including 45% when Gallup last…

After Trump: GOP Elites Haven’t Realized They Can’t Return to the Status Quo

Editor’s note: This is the first of several “After Trump” pieces we will be running about how the candidacy of Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and American conservatism. Three pieces this week intertwine to present a picture of the broader challenges facing the political right at the moment: Matthew Sheffield’s important study of the conservative media, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column about the Trump campaign, and this New York Times story on the future of reform conservatism. All three touch on the crisis of paralysis facing…

Hosting the Olympics Is Actually Economically Harmful for Cities

The Olympic Games as currently conducted are not economically viable for most cities. The most important reasons include infrastructure costs relating to the venues hosting the events; the monopoly rents that flow to the International Olympic Committee; poor management; corruption; and the specter of unreasonable and unrealizable economic expectations for the host city and nation. Concerns about costs are nothing new. Even Salt Lake City’s $1.9 billion in expenditures in 2002 ($2.5 billion in 2015 dollars), which seem almost quaint by today’s standards, raised concerns among…

Trump Voters Like Crime and Remodeling, Clinton Fans Prefer Strong Women

Earlier this week, I wrote about how conservative political junkies have become trapped in a political echo chamber that marginalizes them. A left-wing echo chamber exists as well (another day and another article). Regular Americans are also split in terms of their political preferences, of course, and it reflects sometimes in weird ways. According to an analysis from the DVR company TiVo, supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have different preferences for entertainment shows as well. Might it be a televised version of the…

Globalism vs. Nationalism May Be the Future of American Politics

First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them…

Gary Johnson on Race and Poverty: ‘My Head’s Been in the Sand’

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has been making a heavy play for left-leaning voters in his second run for the White House. On Wednesday, he turned that effort up a notch when asked about racial issues, a subject that has long been a difficult one for libertarians given their tendency to support almost no role for the federal government in ending private racial discrimination. Asked by a questioner during a televised town hall discussion about his thoughts concerning the “Black Lives Matter movement,” the former…

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