Andrew Gelman

Thomas Ferguson writes about the campaign: There’s something chilling that haunts these final days: the Ghost of the 2000 Election. . . . for 2012, the scariest thing about 2000 is the evidence that a flood of highly concentrated Republican money in the very last week of that campaign gave G.W. Bush a decisive edge […]

Reading this excellent post by Lynn Vavreck reminded me of a question that sometimes comes up (for example, in our recent q-and-a at the Larchmont public library): Who are those undecided voters? Are they thoughtful or clueless? John Dickerson characterizes them as thoughtful moderates, while liberal blogger Atrios characterizes them as “about politics at least, […]

Jonathan Rodden sends along this interactive webmap of 2008 precinct election results: Rodden writes: It is a pretty big improvement over the old county-level maps, and you can zoom in on metro areas and neighborhoods. We have also made an atlas that makes it possible to superimpose the precinct election results on block-group-level race and […]

The death of George McGovern has got people thinking again about the 1972 presidential election. In Salon, Joan Walsh gives what might be called the extreme “journalistic” view of that contest: In 1972 the populist war hero was destroyed by Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and Democrats’ self-destructive fear . . . Protracted floor-fighting over the […]

Michele Margolis and Michael Sances write: Conservatives and liberals are equally generous in their donation habits. This pattern holds at both the individual and state level, and contradicts the conventional wisdom that partisans differ in their generosity. What about the claim by Arthur Brooks that conservatives give more? Margolis and Sances write: We are not […]

Mark Lilla writes: Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. . . . Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows. Except conservatives. The most important thing I [Lilla] learned from Kesler’s book is […]

I opened the paper today and saw this from Paul Krugman, on Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the [recent unemployment data] had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities. It was nonsense, […]

In an article entitled “Your Vote Doesn’t Count: Why (almost) everyone should stay home on Election Day,” Katherine Mangu-Ward writes: Your vote will almost certainly not determine the outcome of any public election. . . . I’m talking about pure, raw math. She correctly points out that that congressional elections are tied at a rate […]

Chris Wilson parsed the Federal Election Commission database by first name: (Click to get to the interactive version, also don’t forget to click on the dot in the lower-right to arrange by money.) It’s no surprise that men give more to Republicans and women to Democrats, or that the average contribution to a Republican has […]

In an otherwise reasonable article, Felix Salmon writes: In America’s two-party system, you’re given a simple choice: this guy, or the other guy. If you find yourself in wholehearted agreement with one of the two, then the other one becomes the enemy, the obstacle standing in the path leading your guy to the White House. […]