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Brendan Nyhan writes: “people are missing the forest for the trees in focusing on swing states, swing demos, etc. Large deviations from expected outcomes are likely to get pushed back toward fundamentals by the campaign – in this case, GOP and GOP-leaning independent women returning to Romney who are currently saying they don’t support him…” […]

Filip Spagnoli writes: Low tax rates can be seen as a desirable policy goal for a variety of reasons. Your views on justice and desert may require a system of taxation that allows people to keep as much as possible of what they earn. Or you may have strong opinions on property rights, self-property, self-reliance […]

From 1931: Dear Sir: My husband is in the habit of buying a quart of wiskey every other day from a Chinese bootlegger named Chin Waugh living at 317-16th near Alder street. We need this money for household expenses. Will you please have his place raided? He keeps a supply planted in the garden and […]

I just saw this news item about a man who conspired on a (successful) assassination and was just let out of prison: “He told reporters that he had no regrets, adding, ‘I am proud of what I did.’” All the parts of this story make sense: the penalty for helping to plan an assassination (but […]

A colleague pointed me to this feature article about political scientist James Fowler. According to reporter Delle Willett, “He’s been invited to the Microsoft CEO Summit, having dinner at Bill Gates’ house with him, Warren Buffet and 100 other CEOs around the country. . . . President Obama’s campaign recently invited Fowler to help with […]

Just to add to John’s criticism of silly publicity involving changes in the polls: John mentions a report of “a March poll of young people that finds a 7-point difference between Obama and a generic Republican, a much smaller margin than between Obama and McCain in 2008” and points out that, before jumping to conclusions, […]

Bo and Ben Winegard have some thoughtful reactions to the controversial new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” The Winegards agree with me that Murray makes a mistake on focusing on upper-class liberals and not considering upper-class conservatives as well. (They include one of our Red State Blue State graphs to make […]

I see in the paper that Sen. Lugar of Indiana is facing the possibility of involuntary retirement. As a political scientist, I’m in favor of more primary challenges—-I don’t see why anybody should be getting a free ride. The real question, though, is why would Lugar want another six years in congress, given that he’s […]

In class we were talking about the Bafumi and Herron work on simultaneously estimating ideal points of voters and congressmembers. One of the challenges in interpreting this sort of work is that survey responses are different from vote choices. Anyway, we were discussing all this, and Lucas mentioned this paper where they addressed some of […]

As the saying goes, everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. Or, to put in political terms, people want lower taxes and more government services—with the gap filled, presumably, with a mixture of borrowed funds and savings realized by cutting government waste. In their new book “Class War? What Americans Really […]