I got the following email today from Jordan Gehrke, Campaign Director, AmericansforHermanCain.com

Patriot—
They’re at it again.

Herman Cain is winning the Republican race for President. So the left-wing media has swung into action.

Clarence Thomas called it a “high tech lynching” 20 years ago. That’s exactly what they’re doing to Herman Cain today. This is nothing but an attempt to smear Cain’s reputation and character. . . .

The Left spews such hatred at black conservatives because they know that if the GOP ever breaks the Democrat stranglehold on the black vote, they are DONE as a party. . . .

As part of our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome Matteo Fumagalli of Central European University with the following post-election report on Sunday’s Kyrgyz presidential elections.

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Kyrgyzstan’s presidential elections, held on Sunday 30 October, resulted in an overwhelming victory for the front-runner, Almazbek Atambayev, the small Central Asian republic’s prime minister since December 2010.

Incumbent Party’s Expected Vote Margin = 1.14 −.83 × (Years in Office) +4.51 × (4th-Year Income Growth) +1.66 × (3rd-Year Income Growth) −1.04 × (2nd-Year Income Growth) −2.34 × (1st-Year Income Growth)

Most of the ingredients in this recipe for success at the polls are very familiar to students of American presidential elections. The incumbent party tends to do less well the longer it has held the White House. Robust income growth in the year of the election provides a huge boost to the incumbent’s electoral prospects. Income growth in the preceding year matters much less.

Steve Smith sends this graph:

In the political science literature, DW-NOMINATE scores a the most prominent measure of the ideology of members of Congress.  This graph plots the standard deviation in those scores from the 84th through 111th Congresses (basically 1955-2010).  The larger the standard deviation, the more ideological heterogeneity there is in the party.

In the earlier part of this period, the Democrats were clearly more heterogeneous, as one might expect in a party with defined liberal Northern and conservative Southern wings.  But over this period, ideological heterogeneity in the Democratic Party decreases substantially.  By about the 104th Congress (after the “Republican Revolution” of 1994), the parties are equally heterogeneous.   And that has continued to be true.  Via email, Smith says:

There is hardly any difference since start of the Gingrich era (he became Republican whip in 1989).  ”Gingrichism” encouraged a disciplined party to sharpen differences (he thought the public was on his side) and force Democrats to cast more difficult votes (he thought this would put Democrats from conservative districts in danger).  Republicans gave this strategy credit for the 1994 victory.  For detail, see Barbara Sinclair’s Party Wars.

Democrats’ reputation for less discipline, or at least less cohesiveness, was certainly deserved in the period between the late 1930s and 1980s.

According to Chris Wilson, there are two versions of the report of the Occupy Wall Street poll from so-called hack pollster Doug Schoen.

Here’s the report that Azi Paybarah says that Schoen sent to him, and here’s the final question from the poll:

My new post at 538 discusses a forthcoming paper by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Arthur Simon.  They argue that certain kinds of previous experience, including military service and tenure as the governor of a large state, are associated with “presidential greatness,” as gauged by surveys of historians.  “Washington outsiders,” by contrast, fare poorly.

The post is here.

John gives some reasons why viewers of the political scene might think that congressional Republicans are more disciplined than their Democratic counterparts, even if this isn’t really so.

I’d like to give one more big reason based on recent history. When Barack Obama became president, congressional Republicans implemented a solid No strategy and were successful at stopping much of the Democrats’ agenda. With only 40% of each of the houses of Congress, the Republicans had few tools except party discipline. To me, it is this impressive achievement that earns congressional Republicans their reputation.