Jonathan Bernstein

I see that the periodic flap about the possibility of a president winning with a small percentage of the vote got a little play yesterday. Sorry, but I think this is a lot of fuss over nothing. I mean, first of all, there’s no point designing a system to prevent absolutely implausible outcomes; I mean, […]

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight finally got around to part three of his interesting series on at early-season polling in presidential nomination contests, but unfortunately I’m on the road and can’t give it all the attention right now that it deserves. I’m highly suspicious, however, that his conclusion won’t hold up. Silver says: [I]t’s […]

Presidential nominations serve multiple purposes. The party selects a candidate, to be sure. But it also chooses a platform. I’m not talking about the formal document that will be debated by earnest activists, ratified by the convention when only C-SPAN is watching, and then filed in a drawer and mostly ignored for the rest of […]

The phone rang just after dinner the other night, and it turned out to be my very own local Member of Congress on the phone — it was a Conference Call Town Hall meeting. I stuck around and listened; what interested me wasn’t so much what he had to say (boilerplate, obviously), but what my […]

Nick Beaudrot at Donkeylicious still wants a much larger House of Representatives; I’m still strongly against it. Last time around, I wrote this longish post explaining why, despite being an understandably intriguing idea, a Big House would actually create more problems than it would solve. Short version: it wouldn’t actually be good for representation, and […]

I’ve said this before, but while I have no problem at all with recognizing the heroism and bravery of those who risk their lives for the United States of America, the people who get underappreciated at times like these are the politicians, other political leaders and actors, and other government workers. If you want a […]

The House Republican Budget is a fraud, pure and simple. Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic has run a great series this week on what the House Republican Budget (also known as the Ryan Budget) would actually do, outside of ending Medicare-as-we-know-it. The final segment is about the deficit, and Cohn is right that the […]

I’m not going to pass on a good Star Wars thread — this one begun by the good folks at Overthinking It, who explore a good question: What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying […]