John Sides

Number of stories in Lexis-Nexis with words “Barney Frank and “prostitute” that were published between August 25 and October 4, 1989: 302. The percentage of people who answered “no” or “I don’t know” or gave an incorrect answer when asked “Do you happen to know who Barney Frank is?” in an Oct. 5-8, 1989 Times […]

Jeremy Peters discusses the GOP’s ad campaign against Obama, which is well underway.  I find this reporting necessary and valuable, but Peters misses an opportunity here: But going negative so early also carries substantial risks. One is that many voters are not yet paying much attention to the campaign and will not do so until […]

As Gingrich soars in the polls, the libertarian stalwart plummets.

The ten Fortune 100 companies that lobbied on 50 or more bills since 2008 paid an average effective tax rate of 17.1 percent in 2010; the ten companies that lobbied on between 25 and 49 bills paid an average effective tax rate of 18.0 percent; the remaining publicly-traded companies paid an average effective tax rate […]

“What we’re doing is, by hand, going through the political science journals and reaching out to people and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think we should include?’ And then try to boil it down to some core studies on topics of interest,” Wihbey said. “Maybe it’s the case that some of the more sophisticated reporters […]

A new book by Tanni Haas interviews 20 political bloggers and gets their thoughts.  Here is one from Tyler Cowen on how to have a successful blog: It needs to be updated regularly and to some extent be self-critical or self-reflective. And the person should read widely on the Web. That’s a requirement. There are […]

Daron Shaw, Matt Grossmann, and Keena Lipsitz, and I have a newly published text on campaign and elections that might be of interest to some readers.  It’s intended for classroom use and would, I think, be appropriate for advanced high school students or undergraduates.  We tried in the book to do three things.  First, we […]

Elmo Roper, 1962: It may be human to err, but to err time and time again, in precisely the same way, is folly of divine dimensions. I am talking about journalists—when they tackle the job of predicting elections. Though their impressionistic predictions often land them in electoral soup, journalists keep on preferring the intuition of […]

Shrinking the president.  Amen. Critiquing the media critics. Most honest political ad ever. Liberals aren’t so bad at economics after all. How men can dance all sexy.