Seth Masket

From the President’s remarks yesterday regarding the 150th Anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences: One of the things that I’ve tried to do over these last four years and will continue to do over the next four years is to make sure that we are promoting the integrity of our scientific process; that not […]

Molly Ball has a nice piece up in the current Atlantic noting that female candidates are all the rage right now in both major parties. She cites campaign practitioners who note that women tend to be harder to attack politically and political scientists who find that female candidates seem to do just about as well […]

Maureen Dowd: Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls. Point one: Yeah, isn’t it weird how the Democrats control 55 seats but couldn’t get 60 votes on a controversial measure? Point two: […]

When political scientists make claims that party insiders are influential in primary or general elections (and we do that from time to time), there’s an assumption built in there that endorsements matter. Endorsements are the primary means by which an influential person or group can actually be influential. But we don’t have very many great […]

I wanted to comment a bit on the U.S. Senate’s passage of Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) amendment barring the National Science Foundation from funding most political science research. This is pretty shocking on many levels, but one of the more disturbing questions is, out of all the social sciences — indeed, all the federal expenditures — why was […]

From a scathing new self-examination by the Republican National Committee: We need to look at our methods of contact and test each — mail, phones, door-to-door, and digital efforts, and fundraising appeals — to determine what provides the best quality of contact and most likely conversion to actual votes. Gee, if only there were an […]

Will Marshall is arguing that the Republican Party needs a version of the Democratic Leadership Council to encourage the nomination of more moderate candidates and basically make the party more competitive again. I addressed some of this in a Pacific Standard piece a while back, but some quick points on this: First, the DLC narrative […]

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the recent Thunderdome-esque smackdown between two colleagues over just what a party is. Rather than jump in the middle of these two seasoned gladiators, I thought I’d weigh in to say what a party is not. This one’s easy: a party is not what Jennifer Rubin thinks it is. In Sunday’s Washington Post, […]

There’s been a lot of chatter about President Obama’s comments at last week’s press conference that he can’t use a “Jedi mind-meld” to convince Republican leaders to agree with him on the budget. Most of the commentary has concerned a) Obama’s inappropriate conflation of Star Wars and Star Trek terminology (although see here) and b) […]