PapaBigears

In our earlier post, Lynn Vavreck and I analyzed a January 7-10 YouGov poll and found: So here is the problem that Romney confronts.  Americans perceive him as personally wealthy more than they do Obama.  They perceive him as caring more about the wealthy, but less about “people like me” and the middle class, than […]

Matt Bai’s piece on Sunday nicely illustrated how divided Tea Party activists are about the Republican presidential contenders.  Are the findings from his interviews with activists mirrored in polling data?  Yes.  And this tells us something about whether and how the Tea Party will matter in 2012. In a January 7-10 YouGov poll, respondents were […]

Moreover, an analysis relating 2012 congressional vote intentions to partisan predispositions and tax policy preferences suggests that supporting increased taxes on the wealthy pushed prospective voters toward favoring Democratic congressional candidates much more strongly than opposing increased taxes on the wealthy pushed them toward favoring Republican congressional candidates. That asymmetry in potential electoral impact will […]

There’s this meme that if there were only one conservative candidate, it would work to Romney’s disadvantage.  So if there was only, say, Gingrich or Santorum opposing Romney, he’d be in more trouble. The opposite seems to be true.  In head-to-head match-ups with Gingrich or Santorum, Romney cleans up.  This is because the second-choice candidate […]

Graph from Gallup.  My earlier post.

This is a year old, but still interesting: I’ll add another tidbit.  About 45 years ago, a December 1966 Harris Poll asked whether Martin Luther King was “helping or hurting the Negro cause of civil rights.”  Exactly half (50%) of white respondents said “hurting,” while 36% said “helping” and 14% said “not sure.”

At the Gingrich town hall in Hudson this afternoon, a questioner told him that Romney supported indexing the minimum wage to inflation and then asked if Gingrich supported this. Gingrich: Are you sure that’s his position? Woman: Yes, I asked him on Sunday.  I can show you the video later. Gingrich: I would like that […]

Following on our trip to Iowa last week, Lynn Vavreck and I are going to New Hampshire tomorrow.  I’ll do some more casual blogging and tweeting over the next few days, to be followed by some more substantive posts here and on Model Politics.   Speaking of which, see Lynn’s recent post on voters for […]

We are very pleased to have Nolan McCarty as a new occasional contributor to The Monkey Cage.  Nolan is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.  His work has focused on American political institutions and especially the study of partisan polarization.  See, for example, his recent book with Keith […]

Andrew Therriault: In terms of race and ethnicity, NH is much more representative of the broader electorate than one might think. It is indeed much more likely to be white, non-hispanic, and native-born than the rest of the country, but in the context of analyzing the GOP primary, that hardly makes a difference—all three groups […]