John Sides

What the data reveal is striking: nearly all Americans — 96 percent — have relied on the federal government to assist them. That is from a piece by Suzanne Mettler and I have at the New York Times. Drawing on some data that Suzanne collected, it examines the “47%” notion and in particular how people […]

A new survey and report from the Public Religion and Research Institute—entitled “Beyond God and Guns”—is a valuable corrective to so many stereotypes of the white working class.  Particularly noteworthy in this report are the large and important differences within the white working class—by age, region, gender, and party, to name a few. For example, […]

The only way to answer the question in the title of this post is to ask a second question: “Compared to what?”  I see a lot of people piling on Romney, but fewer people thinking this through. First, you can ask about Romney compared to some other specific Republican.  If that’s the question, it’s hard […]

Here’s a graph from political scientist Tobin Grant about acts passed by all U.S. Congresses (click on image for clearer view): The current Congress and the next least productive Congresses are highlighted. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Josh Barro: You can mark my prediction now: A secret recording from a closed-door Mitt Romney fundraiser, released today by David Corn at Mother Jones, has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president. Josh Marshall: It’s rare when the impact of some gaffe or embarrassment or revelation isn’t overstated on first blush. But this may just […]

I will be writing occasional posts for Wonkblog about the presidential advertising.  My first post is up now, featuring the graph above, this new analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project, and so newly published research by Travis Ridout, Michael Franz, Ken Goldstein, and William Feltus. The main story the past several weeks, as the graph […]

While media reports on the Arab uprisings discussed the difficulty of estimating crowd size and pondered what percentage of the population they represented, much of the current media coverage of the recent riots that erupted throughout the Muslim world on September 11, 2012 in response to the anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslim,” has described the events […]

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president […]

Although it is true that whites without college degrees are more likely to view African Americans as “lazy” or to express racial resentment, analyses of data from nationally-representative surveys indicate that whites who hold negative racial beliefs are twice as likely to oppose welfare if they have college degrees than if they do not. Put […]

Friday’s disappointing jobs report has already generated a lot of speculation about how it might impact the election in November.  See, for example, this piece by Helene Cooper and Annie Lowrey, which quotes both Andy and me. My basic take is that the jobs report won’t shift the dynamics of this election very much.  Here […]