Campaign 2016 | Praxis

Hispanics Least Worried About Presidential Election, Black Women Most Worried

Despite Donald Trump’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric throughout this year’s presidential campaign, Hispanics are less likely than either whites or blacks to “strongly agree” that they are afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses. Hispanics also are less likely to agree that the stakes in this year’s presidential election are higher than usual. Large majorities of all three major U.S. racial and ethnic groups agree the election stakes are higher this year than in prior years, with 66% of blacks, 63% of whites and…

The Republican Industrial Complex Has Turned Missteps Into Millions

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famously criticized for his ability to convince others to believe anything he said through a combination of hyperbole and bravado. One Apple employee called the effect a “reality distortion field” in 1981 and the term persisted ever since. It’s quite clear by now that conservative philanthropists and grassroots donors have been living in a reality distortion field as well, the creation of a cadre of political consultants who have failed repeatedly at their jobs and yet manage…

The Decline of the Common Good Produced the Rise of Trump

If one wants to understand the rise of Donald Trump, it’s useful to consider two narratives. The first narrative goes like this: The fortunes of the white working class have been waning for decades. Real median wages for people without a college degree are lower today than they were forty years ago. Income inequality is now back to where it was during the Gilded Age. Meanwhile, trust and social cohesion have plummeted. As each new technological advance leaves low-skilled workers out in the cold and…

Veep Nominees Can Actually Help With Voters, Contrary to Myth

Since 2000, only one vice-presidential candidate (John Edwards in 2004) was from a state that could have been competitive in November. Pence, the incumbent governor of Indiana, doesn’t break that pattern: Recent polls have Trump comfortably ahead in his state. […] However, in a new study published in American Politics Research, we come to a different conclusion. We find that the average vice-presidential home-state advantage is considerably higher: nearly 3 percentage points, on average. We also find that this advantage exists in battleground states with…

Why Ohio Picks America’s Presidents

Every four years, Ohio voters end up speaking for more than just themselves, whether they realize it or not. While Ohio is not always or even often the single state that decides who becomes president of the United States, its consistent presence near the average national voting has cemented its reputation as one of the key states in presidential politics. Ohio almost always votes fairly close to the national average, and the winning candidate almost always carries the state by a margin that mirrors the…

Donald Trump Is the Candidate Conservative Intellectuals Conditioned Their Base to Want

It’s been said that societies elect the governments they deserve. That’s certainly the case with the American Right and Donald Trump. In spite of this, many Republicans have been beside themselves about the man for the past 12 months. According to his critics, the former reality-TV star is a gross departure from the conservative tradition. They couldn’t be more wrong. One group of Trump disparagers were so discontented with their future nominee that they vowed to found their own rump organization, the Renegade Party, in…

Negative Partisanship: Dislike of the Opposing Party Is a Big Factor in Voting

The 2012 election saw the highest levels of party loyalty and straight-ticket voting since the American National Election Studies began tracking American voting patterns in 1952. Over 90% of Democrats and Republicans, including voters who claimed to be independents but indicated that they leaned toward one party or the other, supported their party’s presidential candidate. Close to 90% supported their party’s House and Senate candidates as well, and 83% cast a straight-party ballot for president, House, and Senate. There is no reason to expect voting…

The Trump Victory Proves the GOP Is Fundamentally Broken

If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in which the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered. Besides driving Republican officials to distraction, Donald Trump has been the bane of journalists from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom…

Rand Paul Lost Because He Wouldn’t Appeal to White Identity Politics

Kentucky senator Rand Paul announced today that he is ending his run for the Republican presidential nomination. “It’s been an incredible honor to run a principled campaign for the White House,” he said in a statement released to the media. “Today, I will end where I began, ready and willing to fight for the cause of Liberty.” Paul’s withdrawal came after he finished fifth-place in the Republican presidential caucuses held in Iowa Monday. In 2014 and very early in 2015, Rand Paul was thought by many…

Donald Trump and the Anti-Libertarian Moment

It hasn’t even been a year and a half since journalist Robert Draper wondered at length in the New York Times Magazine whether America was about to begin a “libertarian moment.” The question seems downright quaint just days before the first actual votes are cast in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Rand Paul, the man whom Draper and many others anointed as the leader of the revolution, has been languishing in also-ran territory for a solid year in local and national surveys….

Understanding the present is the key to the future