Jonathan Bernstein

Will polling prove accurate in 2014? None of the high-tech, number-crunching forecast models seeking to determine which party will win a Senate majority will be useful if the raw material — individual polls — are wrong. But that could be the case this year, as Carl Bialik reported in an important piece today. Many people […]

Quick thoughts on some midterm developments: 1. Former Republican Senator Larry Pressler, running for Senate as an independent in South Dakota, seems to be a live candidate (albeit a Bateson class candidate). That has sparked discussion of what would happen if the Democratic candidate dropped out, as the Democrat did in Kansas. Pressler, however, would […]

Wait — Lindsey Graham? Really? Thus far, the story of the 2016 Republican presidential field is that everyone who seems interested in running already is — yielding a dozen or so active candidates even without counting marginal attention-seekers such as Dr. Ben Carson or Representative Michele Bachmann. Today, however, for the first time in a […]

It’s terrific that we have six polling aggregators and forecasting models, each giving us rapidly updated odds for every Senate seat. It’s nice to have the chances of a Republican majority in the next Senate (continued aggregation-of-aggregation odds: toss-up, very slight edge to Republicans). But as many have noted, things aren’t going to change much […]

A Catch to Aaron Blake at the Fix for his quick write-up of the four House incumbents who managed to lose primaries this year. As Blake points out, yesterday’s defeat of scandal-plagued Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney belongs with the thoroughly predictable and understandable losses of an accidental Michigan Republican, Kerry Bentivolio, and an aged Texas […]

The Upshot’s Nate Cohn has a nice item explaining why gerrymandering isn’t responsible for Republican majorities in the House (for more on this argument, see an old John Sides post). Dave Weigel has a good response, arguing that yes, gerrymandering is the culprit. Who is correct? They both are! But Cohn is, on the whole, […]

Is political science needed now more than ever? Ezra Klein noted earlier this week that my discipline, at least in the subfields that study U.S. politics, has moved into the mainstream of political journalism, and perhaps the mainstream of U.S. politics. That’s certainly true. At the American Political Science Association meeting in Washington last week, […]

I largely agree with T. Becket Adams, who argues today that if Republicans were planning to shut down the government, we would know about it. As I’ve said, government shutdowns that last longer than a day or two don’t happen by accident. In 1995-1996, Newt Gingrich deliberately engineered a train wreck, as they called it […]

How good a speaker has John Boehner been? I’ve been hanging out at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Washington this week. I was a bit surprised when two people who study American politics volunteered that they believed Boehner had done an excellent job, given the constraints he has faced. The reason I […]

A well-deserved Catch to Ezra Klein for the final item in his post “The 9 most important facts about the 2014 election” — that local elections are hugely underappreciated. The biggest bias in election coverage isn’t towards Republicans or Democrats or even towards conflict and sensationalism. It’s towards national elections rather than local elections. This […]