Larry Bartels

Ezra Klein wants you to know that the “conventional wisdom on Washington,” that “corporations win every fight and everyone else—particularly the poor—gets shafted,” is “wrong, or at least incomplete.” The “comforting” fact, according to Klein, is that the ”altruists” who champion the poor have “quite a lot” of political power, “at least in recent years.” Not the […]

Jeremy Johnson asks: “Do we have information yet about voting among whites based on income from the 2012 election?  Did lower-income whites in every state again vote more Democratic than upper-income whites?” I don’t know about every state; but here is the picture for the Non-South and South, based on survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Campaign […]

Wealthy Americans, by a sizeable margin, consider the federal debt to be the nation’s most important problem. Unlike the public as a whole, they support cutting spending on a wide variety of government programs, including health care and social security. They are much less supportive of corporate taxation, and they strongly oppose redistributing wealth by heavy taxes on […]

Income growth was slow through most of 2012, and prospective voters were correspondingly pessimistic about the state of the economy. So how was Barack Obama reelected? An important part of the answer is that perceptions of the economy became significantly less pessimistic in the fall than they had been in the summer—a shift coinciding with the beginning of […]

The regression line, that is. John’s post on “the ‘formidable campaign’ narrative” offers some apt words of caution regarding one popular explanation for the president’s reelection. Alas, that’s a bit like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. There’s always more ocean; and there are always more plausible-sounding special explanations for Obama’s victory—including demographic […]

A group called EGAP (Experiments in Governance and Politics) is considering a proposal to establish a “Pilot Registry for Research Designs” where scholars could register new research projects, specifying in advance the topic, data to be collected, hypotheses to be tested, data analysis to be conducted, and conditions under which the hypotheses would be accepted […]

Under the budget proposed by Paul Ryan, federal spending on everything other than Medicare and Social Security would decline over the next 20 years … (a) from 22% of GDP to 18.5% of GDP (b) from 22% of GDP to 14.5% of GDP (c) from 14.5% of GDP to 11.5% of GDP (d) from 14.5% […]

Lynn Vavreck has an informative piece on the New York Times Campaign Stops blog today tracing shifts in presidential voting intentions from late 2011 through early September. The data are from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, which interviewed nearly 44,000 people last December and has subsequently been reinterviewing 1,000 per week. Through most of the spring […]

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate puts fiscal policy—government spending, taxes, and debt—squarely in the center of this year’s presidential campaign. The latest YouGov survey suggests that expectations about future budget deficits under President Obama or President Romney were having a major impact on prospective voters’ choices even before Ryan joined […]