John Sides

Ezra Klein’s new piece on presidential persuasion is stimulating a lot of debate.  I’ll have more to say.  But let me make one small point in response to Kevin Drum’s critique.  Drum writes: I also think that Ezra doesn’t really grapple with the strongest arguments on the other side. For one thing, although there are […]

From Tobin Grant here.  He writes: Beneath the Republicans’ regional split is Romney’s failure in states where the Republican base is made up of socially conservative evangelical voters. In New England and other states where evangelicals are in the minority, Romney has been able to win over the lion share of the evangelical vote. The […]

I have a piece up at Al Jazeera on how health care is likely to affect the 2012 election. I focus in particular on the Affordable Care Act and its implications.  Here I’ll note a few points by way of summary.  Interested readers can click through to see the whole discussion. An emerging finding in […]

Andy Borowitz wrote a piece called “In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say Obama Wasn’t Born in US,” and Barry Ritholz writes: The NYT’s Floyd Norris, on a hunch, decided to crunch them to see if there is any math underlying the funny business. As it turns out, there is: Anyone can check the numbers […]

Since I recently posted a skeptical take on whether negative ads “work,” I’ll continue to highlight relevant research in the months ahead.  To wit: Using a large-N, geographically representative sample of U.S. adults, we conduct an experiment to assess how sponsorship influences ad effectiveness. We find that attack ads sponsored by unknown independent groups are […]

Last month, I learned about a publication that has been quickly gaining popularity, the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine (JNRBM). Published, presumably, by a gang of dour curmudgeons who hate everything, JNRBM openly welcomes the data that other journals won’t touch because it doesn’t fit the unspoken rule that all articles must end on […]

…should there be a two-way race for the Senate seat (and that’s by no means a sure thing), Republicans will need a candidate who can run as a Snowe Republican. The currents of 2010 affect their ability to field such a candidate. That’s U. of Maine political scientist Amy Fried in this post.  See also […]

That’s the title of Lynn Vavreck’s and my latest post at Model Politics.  We compare Obama, Romney and Santorum in terms of how voters perceive their personal wealth and their concern for the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy.  Here is one key graph: And here’s the takeaway: …compared to Romney, Santorum appears to […]

In James Fallows’s interesting take on the Obama presidency, he discusses the notion that Obama is “cold.”  He refers to this as one of “Barack Obama’s particular versions of the weaknesses every president brings to office” and one of “the diagnoses that I heard, and have myself observed.”  Two illustrative quotes from this discussion: “President […]

Continuing the series, here’s another zombie idea: negative advertising “works.”  Either by hurting the candidate who is attacked or by turning off voters from the campaign altogether.  The sheer volume of negative ads certainly keeps this zombie living. As does the terrific string of cliches attached to so much writing about negative ads.  Consider this […]