John Sides

Several of the questions from the last debate led commentators to joke about whether the participants were truly “undecided voters,” as they were billed.  Jonathan Chait, for one, says that “Obama enjoyed friendly questions from an audience that obviously leaned left.” It’s important to remember that undecided voters—at least as best we can identify them—are […]

Last week at the outset of the vice-presidential debate, I offered a few thoughts at the New York Times Campaign Stops blog on how to use political science to inform your debate-watching.  Each of them could also prove useful tonight. Popular people are more persuasive — an idea that social scientists refer to as “source […]

This is a guest post from political scientist John Geer, who runs the Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project.  More on the ad is at that link. ***** The Obama campaign released an ad this week that used Big Bird to attack Mitt Romney.   It was a limited “ad buy.”  It was a spot more aimed at […]

All throughout last night’s debate, I read a zillion tweets wondering how the exchange between Biden and Ryan, deemed “aggressive quarreling” on the front page of my New York Times this morning, would “play” with undecided voters or “Middle America” or whatever.  One notion was that ordinary voters would get turned off by the combat […]

Perhaps you’ve heard about Romney’s pivot to the center in last week’s debate—what it means, whether it will work, how Obama is responding, etc.  Yesterday, Bill Clinton described his reaction to Romney’s performance thusly: “Wow, here’s old moderate Mitt. Where ya been, boy?” New survey data suggests that voters’ reaction was far less dramatic.  In […]

A new UMass poll finds Elizabeth Warren leading Scott Brown by 3 points among likely voters.  You can see that poll here and other polls from that race here.  (The average of polls suggests Warren has a slight lead.) In the UMass poll, respondents were asked to locate Warren and Brown on a standard liberal-conservative […]

The political scientists Jane Green and Will Jennings have an interesting project tracking evaluations of political party competence in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.  Here’s a description: This project gathers over time data from opinion pollsters in four countries; the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Australia, about voters’ ratings of parties on policy competence […]

I got into this with Noam Scheiber on the night of last week’s debate, and now I see David Frum making the same point: Political science proclaims, “debates don’t matter.” After this election, we may need to retire a lot of political science. So that’s just wrong.  In my piece about debates, I was careful […]

It is commonly argued in the media that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. We show that a presidential candidate is not helped, but in fact hurt, by having a governor from the […]

Yesterday Nate Silver tweeted: Retweeting individual poll results is probably disinformative on balance. Which I gladly retweeted.  And then came the new Pew survey.  I’m sorry, I mean THE NEW PEW SURVEY.  The collective reaction of political commentators can be summarized with the frontpage of the Huffington Post: (And HuffPo is not alone.)  For my […]