John Sides

New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni writes several hundred words on the competing biographies of Romney and Obama—arguing that Obama’s is the more compelling—and then says this: In the end, that may not make a whit of difference. If swing voters were driven chiefly by candidates’ biographies, political analysts trying to predict election outcomes […]

A new Public Policy Poll finds a substantial increase in support for gay marriage among African-Americans in Maryland.  How should we interpret this?  Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer think it’s evidence that presidential leadership can move public opinion.  Brendan Nyhan notes that public opinion nationally hasn’t really moved—citing Lynn Vavreck and Ryan Enos’s analysis as […]

A new Gallup poll shows that the percent of Americans calling themselves pro-choice has fallen to 41%.  In 2008, when that number hit 42%, there was a predictable flurry of news attention.  So I want to call attention to what I wrote then. In short, this “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” question obscures the true nature of […]

So concludes a new paper by Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do: We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of […]

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words. Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing […]

It is described here: The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign. Will this matter?  My guess is that it won’t be effective, […]

David Brooks’s recent column argued this: Why is Obama even close? If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now. And thus this flight of fancy: He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence. This is “ESPN masculinity,” apparently.  Ezra […]

This new poll—discussed here by Peter Baker and Dahlia Sussmann—is already getting attention for what the article doesn’t say: this survey is a “panel-back.”  That is, respondents who were previously interviewed in an April 13-17 poll have been interviewed again.  You will learn this if you choose to click through to the toplines of the […]

This project evaluates the impacts of war on presidential power and public policymaking. It takes as its starting point Clinton Rossiter’s “axiom of political science,” to which scholars ranging from Edward Corwin to John Yoo have assented, that “great emergencies in the life of a constitutional state bring an increase in executive power and prestige, […]

Earlier I suggested that anyone writing about the electoral implications of Obama’s support of gay marriage needed to think rigorously about some key questions.  This is in lieu of flabby statements about how Obama’s endorsement “could” lead “some voters” in “key battleground states” to “reconsider” their support for him.  Etc.  The upshot of that post […]