PapaBigears

Alas, this topic is becoming a series. Jonathan Martin: Unemployment is over 8 percent. Nearly 60 percent of Americans, according to a new poll, believe the country is on the wrong track. The number of people on food stamps is at a historic high and the median net worth of American families is at a […]

Josh Barro: You can mark my prediction now: A secret recording from a closed-door Mitt Romney fundraiser, released today by David Corn at Mother Jones, has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president. Josh Marshall: It’s rare when the impact of some gaffe or embarrassment or revelation isn’t overstated on first blush. But this may just […]

I will be writing occasional posts for Wonkblog about the presidential advertising.  My first post is up now, featuring the graph above, this new analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project, and so newly published research by Travis Ridout, Michael Franz, Ken Goldstein, and William Feltus. The main story the past several weeks, as the graph […]

With all the forecasts of the presidential election—e.g., here, here, here, and here—we wanted to add a little value here at The Monkey Cage by focusing on congressional elections.  We’ll begin with a forecast of the seat breakdown in the House and then explore such corollaries as the effect of low congressional approval and the […]

While media reports on the Arab uprisings discussed the difficulty of estimating crowd size and pondered what percentage of the population they represented, much of the current media coverage of the recent riots that erupted throughout the Muslim world on September 11, 2012 in response to the anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslim,” has described the events […]

We welcome as a new occasional contributor Eric Patashnik, Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia.  Eric’s research focuses on public policy, especially health care and social welfare.  His books include Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted. With Alan Gerber, he is currently finishing a book […]

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president […]

Although it is true that whites without college degrees are more likely to view African Americans as “lazy” or to express racial resentment, analyses of data from nationally-representative surveys indicate that whites who hold negative racial beliefs are twice as likely to oppose welfare if they have college degrees than if they do not. Put […]

This is a guest post from University of Virginia political scientist Eric Patashnik. ***** The United States Preventative Services Task Force on Monday issued a report advising healthy women who do not have symptoms against receiving routine screening tests for ovarian cancer. According to the expert panel, the screenings are not effective in lowering the […]

Friday’s disappointing jobs report has already generated a lot of speculation about how it might impact the election in November.  See, for example, this piece by Helene Cooper and Annie Lowrey, which quotes both Andy and me. My basic take is that the jobs report won’t shift the dynamics of this election very much.  Here […]