John Sides

Now that Rick Perry has dropped out of the presidential race, where are his Perry supporters likely to go?  Nate Silver has one take on this here.  Here is another snapshot from Lynn Vavreck and me, using a Jan. 14-17 YouGov poll. For the plurality of Perry voters (43%), their second choice  is Mitt Romney.  […]

Matt Bai’s piece on Sunday nicely illustrated how divided Tea Party activists are about the Republican presidential contenders.  Are the findings from his interviews with activists mirrored in polling data?  Yes.  And this tells us something about whether and how the Tea Party will matter in 2012. In a January 7-10 YouGov poll, respondents were […]

Recently, Lynn Vavreck and I analyzed a January 7-10 YouGov poll and found: So here is the problem that Romney confronts.  Americans perceive him as personally wealthy more than they do Obama.  They perceive him as caring more about the wealthy, but less about “people like me” and the middle class, than does Obama.  Moreover, […]

So apparently Santorum did win the Iowa caucus.  Maybe.  Eight precincts’ numbers can’t be certified.  Justin Wolfers tweets: Iowa, you are a joke: GOP finds errors in caucus results from 131 precincts, has no count for 8. I attended only one caucus meeting out of the hundreds across Iowa.  But let me use that to […]

The debate among the Republican candidates over Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital has raised again questions about whether Romney’s tenure in the “1%” will damage his campaign.  The Obama team certainly welcomes this debate.  After all, they have been attacking Romney along precisely these lines: The day after Mr. Romney squeezed out a razor-thin […]

Alex Lundry and I have a new post at Model Politics that repeats a version of our earlier experiment.  We again randomly assigned survey respondents to see information about how likely each Republican candidate is to win the nomination, win the general election, or both.  Just as in our earlier study, this information makes a […]

In the Wall Street Journal, Carl Bialik mentions some of my research with Jack Citrin in a piece called “Americans Stumble on Math of Big Issues”: Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California, Berkeley, hypothesized in a working paper that supplying Americans, who typically overestimate the […]

The Pizza Ranch in Altoona, Iowa sits amidst a long series of strip malls.  At 5 pm on Caucus Eve, an hour before Santorum appears, Carl Cameron is the first person you encounter inside—deeply tanned with pancake make-up, talking seriously into his microphone.  The second is a man selling Santorum buttons.  3 for $10. It’s […]

I am here in Iowa with Lynn Vavreck. I’ll have more to report on our minor adventures later. But before the caucus takes place, it’s important to address a perennial concern: the unrepresentativeness of people who attend the caucus. This is a familiar refrain that typically involves claims about the high costs the caucus imposes […]

A few weeks ago, I was dubious about 2012 as an “anti-incumbent” election.  Alan Abramowitz brings some better data to bear: The graph shows that when congressional incumbents lose, they tend to be mostly from one party.  There are really no elections in which large numbers of incumbents from both parties are defeated. [Cross-posted at […]