Seth Masket

Frances Lee, writing as part of the Monkey Cage’s wonderful series on polarization, notes that we are living in an era of incredible competition between the two major parties nationally: [T]he period since 1980 stands out as the longest sustained period of competitive balance between the parties since the Civil War. Our politics is distinctive […]

Darren Samuelsohn has a fascinating piece of alt-history up at Politico, arguing that congressional Republicans would have backed a broad range of big government initiatives if not for the challenged rollout of the Affordable Care Act: Lawmakers are reluctant to rely on the federal government to get anything done — a guilt-by-association consequence of Obamacare’s […]

I’ve got to disagree with Emily Bazelon’s take on Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bazelon is defending Ginsburg’s right to stay on the Supreme Court from a number of legal and political critics who are urging her to resign while Obama is president and Democrats still control the Senate. Some, she notes, seem fixated on Ginsburg, although […]

Peter Aldhous has a nice article up at Medium about the persistence of polarization in American politics. I particularly recommend it because he begins with journalistic/reformist claim that gridlock has gotten out of control but ultimately draws on political science research to note that not only do most party reform efforts fail, but that: a) […]

Jamelle Bouie has a very nice response to William Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s recent essay “The New Politics of Evasion.” Galston and Kamarck describe the Republicans as being on the “wrong side of a demographic tidal wave.” That is, the non-white share of the American population is growing rapidly, and it’s increasingly voting Democratic. This […]

I recently re-watched “Contact” (1997) and was surprised how relevant it was to current issues, including religious terrorism and the conflict between faith and empiricism. But what really jumped out at me was the discussion over public funding of the sciences. Early in the film, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is seen working at the Arecibo […]

The Boston Globe recently ran a profile of the bipartisan advocacy group No Labels, which purports to help Washington overcome gridlock and get members of Congress working together across party lines. The article does a fairly thorough job of excoriating the group, falling just short of labeling them a bunch of cotton-headed ninnymuggins: No Labels […]

Just how costly is it for a party to nominate an ideological extremist? Or have our elections grown so polarized that every election is a base election and no one even bothers nominating moderates anymore? Harvard graduate student Andrew Hall investigates this question in a new paper (PDF) that makes use of an innovative regression […]

By the end of 2011, Mitt Romney had the overwhelming share of campaign money and endorsements on his side in his bid to become the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. To a large extent, the party had decided on that nomination long before anyone set foot in a polling station. Contrast that, however, with the Democrats’ […]

All the returns aren’t in yet, but the ones we have suggest that the vote on Amendment 66, a statewide education tax initiative, was a straight-up ideological one. Here’s the county-level correlation of the vote on 66 and the 2012 presidential vote: The correlation is above 0.85. So, not too surprisingly, the more Democratic a […]