Metapolitics | Praxis

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…

Presidents Who Get What They Want Use the Other Party’s Base to Do So

Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins November’s election, the next president faces what looks to be a nearly impossible task when it comes to governing: Persuading the other side to compromise. With the House likely to remain in Republican hands and neither party likely to hold a filibuster-proof Senate majority, successful dealmaking with Congress by the next president would have to overcome massive partisan divisions. Holding your breath doesn’t seem advisable. But one route to legislative success may lie with the public….

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…

The Israeli Left Has Essentially Collapsed

Some research reveals an interesting pattern in Israeli history compared to other industrialized Western nations: the complete and utter collapse of the Israeli Left since the founding of Israel, and the steady ascendancy of the Israeli Right – and not an Anglophone-style milquetoast Right, but a nationalistic and religiously-inclined Right descended from militiamen and terrorists. Here’s my attempt to numerically chart the collapse of the Israeli Left: Israel’s proportional representation system has wrought a litany of factional, religious, regional, and ethnic parties since the country’s founding,…

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 Left Machine: Foundations and Elizabeth Warren

Part 1: Massive Foundations put billions into left wing activist campaigns, but nobody seems to notice. In part 1, I explained that left wing Foundations fund an enormous amount of research, activism and media — creating, promoting and covering their own political campaigns. In part 2, I will give you an example of how this works. Specifically, how Elizabeth Warren built her career on the kind of “sponsored” research that she criticizes today. Last September, Elizabeth Warren attacked Brooking’s scholar, Robert Litan over alleged “financial conflicts of interest” related to…

The Left Machine: Foundations and Government

Part 1: Left wing Foundations put billions into left wing activist campaigns, but nobody seems to notice. Part 2: How Foundations buy manufactured “research” from activist-academics like Elizabeth Warren. In part 1 of this series on the Foundations behind the Left, I mentioned that left wing Foundations sometimes collaborate with government agencies. Let’s look at one particular collaboration. The Open Technology Fund (OTF), was started under Secretary of State Clinton, and is funded by “yearly U.S. Congressional appropriations for State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs”, which are routed to…

The Left Machine: Foundations and Media

I’ve already described how deep-pocketed, left-wing foundations funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal groups and news outlets, largely without much media scrutiny, which is at least partly “due to the fact that the left wing Foundations fund many media organizations…” and the media seems to be hesitant to bite one of the increasingly few hands that feed it. The result is a perfect circle jerk of Foundation-funded research pushed by Foundation-funded activists covered by Foundation-funded media. One recent example illustrates how this model works. Last year, InsideClimate News and…

The Rise of Irreligion is the GOP’s Real Demographic Crisis

In the past several years, many trees have been felled and pixels electrocuted in the service of discussion about the impact of Hispanics on the American electorate. No one knows for sure which way they’ll vote in the future but everyone is interested in discussing it. Curiously, though, an even larger political shift is taking place yet receiving almost no attention whatsoever from political reporters—the emergence of post-Christian America. Judging solely from the rhetoric and actions of the Republican presidential candidates this cycle, you would be…

Understanding the present is the key to the future