John Sides

This is a guest post from Tobin Grant: Most early analysis noted that Romney received around the same percentage of the caucus vote and number of votes as he did four years ago. During the punditry last night, some even suggested that Romney attracted the same voters except those that died in the interim. Polling […]

The Pizza Ranch in Altoona, Iowa sits amidst a long series of strip malls. At 5 pm on Caucus Eve, and hour before Santorum appears, Carl Cameron is the first person you encounter inside-deeply tanned with pancake make-up, talking seriously into his microphone. The second is a man selling Santorum buttons. 3 for $10. It’s […]

I am here in Iowa with Lynn Vavreck. I’ll have more to report on our minor adventures later. But before the caucus takes place, it’s important to address a perennial concern: the unrepresentativeness of people who attend the caucus. This is a familiar refrain that typically involves claims about the high costs the caucus imposes […]

Soon after Pearl Harbor, acting under political pressure and without time to design and pre-test a survey, interviewers from the Agriculture Department’s Program Surveys spoke to people in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and California’s Imperial Valley. These “preliminary impressions” found a range of views toward Japanese-Americans, with more negative opinions in rural areas, among […]

From James Choi.

A few weeks ago, I was dubious about 2012 as an “anti-incumbent” election.  Alan Abramowitz brings some better data to bear: The graph shows that when congressional incumbents lose, they tend to be mostly from one party.  There are really no elections in which large numbers of incumbents from both parties are defeated.

Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008–2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author…measure(s) changes in Israel’s and Hamas’s military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of […]

This is a guest post from Lawrence Jacobs, who is the Mondale Chair at the University of Minnesota and the author with Robert Shapiro of Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, among other books. One of the odd paradoxes of American politics is that political polling is soaring as responsiveness […]

Roger Simon, the Chief Political Columnist for Politico: I have never been called by a political pollster and don’t know anybody who has, but I know some pollsters, who assure me they don’t make the numbers up, and I believe them. From George Gallup’s mock Q-and-A in A Guide to Public Opinion Polls, which he […]