PapaBigears

Here is something you don’t hear too much: voters view Mitt Romney about as favorably as Barack Obama.  At least if voters are asked about whether the candidates are knowledgeable or decent or intelligent or moral or a strong leader.  Those are important qualities, and perceptions of Romney and Obama don’t differ much. One of […]

My new post at 538 addresses this question.  See also this piece by Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, and this post by Thomas Holbrook.  My posts summarizes some of their research. Here is the bottom line, from me: I would expect only small bumps for either party.  Neither candidate is really polling above or below […]

This is a guest post by University of Virginia political scientist Eric Patashnik.  Earlier posts by him are here and here. ***** The big Medicare fight between Obama and Romney/ Ryan is over whether to retain or alter the program’s traditional defined-benefit structure.  That’s where political attention properly belongs.  But there is also an interesting […]

Me, yesterday: …without any dramatic trend the resulting balance of economic indicators is favorable for Obama, though not strongly so.  This is, in part, why the forecasting model that Lynn Vavreck, Seth Hill, and I helped develop for Wonkblog, suggested Obama would win.  Lynn and I reach the same conclusion with a elaborated forecasting exercise […]

The Restaurant Ste. Marie’s Champagne Tower For the second year, The Monkey Cage will be hosting a shindig at the American Political Science Association conference in New Orleans.   It’s schedule for around 9:30 pm on the Friday, August 31. We’ll be congregating at the bar of the Restaurant Ste. Marie, which is but a short […]

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy I was on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” yesterday, trying not to look as much like a zombie as I do above and also talking a bit about some of the data from the first chapter of The Gamble, which is called “The Hand You’re […]

Lynn Vavreck and I are pleased to announce that the first two e-chapters of our book on the 2012 presidential election are now available.  You can find those chapters here and here.  They are available for free.  The book’s website is here. The book is called The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential […]

I am part of a proposed panel for the 2013 South by Southwest entitled “How Partisan Media Contributes to Healthy Politics.”  Here’s the description: The rise of new media, from Facebook and Twitter to The Huffington Post and The Daily Caller, has allowed consumers of news to ignore anything that challenges their prior beliefs. Purveyors […]

From Jeff Smith.  More here.

This is a guest post by Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler.  For more on his work, see this Slate piece. ***** Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.  From Joe Biden’s suggestion that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators’ contentions that the Romney campaign is using racial […]