Seth Masket

Earlier this week, I attended the Politics to the Extreme conference at Cal State Channel Islands. I got to see an interesting presentation by Doug Harris of Loyola University Maryland. In his paper, “Let’s Play Hardball: Congressional Politics in the Television Era,” Harris examines the parties’ approaches to television appearance opportunities. At one point, he […]

I was a bit annoyed with Robert Draper’s Atlantic article about redistricting. I mean, it does a decent job explaining redistricting’s history, some modern innovations in redistricting technology, and Texas’ recent drama with redistricting. And it nicely describes the confluence of events — a Republican takeover of several statehouses right after a census — that made this […]

Some interesting findings from the new post-debate poll of Colorado voters conducted by the University of Denver with Selzer and Associates: 58% of Democrats say the economy has improved over the past year, while 14% say it’s gotten worse. A mere three percent of Republicans say the economy has improved, while 86% say it’s gotten […]

I watched the debate from inside the media filing room in the Ritchie Center. You can see my perspective at left, which pretty much encapsulates my thoughts on the debate — it was all about Romney. It was hard not to see this as a very one-sided debate, with Romney proving very assertive, confident, and in-command, […]

The University of Denver is hosting the first of this year’s presidential debates this coming Wednesday. It’s a thrilling, if rather disorienting, time on campus right now, but I thought I’d take a few moments to sum up what we might expect to see. First of all, some quick obligatory notes. Debates rarely make much […]

In the past week, Mitt Romney has committed two fairly substantial gaffes with strikingly different responses by his campaign. (Yes, I recognize the word “gaffe” means different things to different people. For these purposes, let’s just say that a gaffe is an unnecessary utterance that forced the campaign off message for some considerable time period.) […]

There’s some sort of emerging consensus that Romney got either a very small bounce out of the Republican convention or no bounce at all, underperforming his predicted 3.6% bounce. People seem to be explaining this result by saying that the Republican convention just wasn’t that good — the speeches were lackluster, the policy claims were vague, […]

I tweeted the other day that the GOP convention had thus far offered an excellent critique of things Obama hasn’t actually said or done. Paul Ryan seemed to double down on that strategy last night, saying numerous things that were, at best, highly misleading. Poor Jonathan Bernstein blew a fuse when Ryan criticized Obama for opposing […]

A few years ago I did a study looking at the use of field offices by the Obama and McCain campaigns in 2008. One of the findings was that Obama was absolutely overwhelming McCain in the establishment of field offices. (The Obama folks established over 700 offices nationwide, compared to fewer than 400 for the […]

Parties spend a great deal of time vetting their presidential candidates. Mitt Romney went through dozens of debates, hundreds of media interviews, and countless meetings with voters, donors, and activists — in two election cycles — before Republicans settled on him for their presidential nominee. It’s a very public and expensive process. Conversely, just a […]