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Harry C. McPherson, Jr., counsel to the president (back when that job title meant policymaking, not criminal defense), died last week. An obituary is here. McPherson worked for then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson and became a political appointee in the Defense and State Departments in the Kennedy Administration before rejoining Johnson in the White House in […]

Political Scientist Josh Putnam, who blogs at Frontloading Headquarters and who may know more about delegate selection than anyone, was interviewed on Fresh Air.  Here’s one quote from him: The assumption going into this is that the number of delegates moving forward is going to be close to proportional to the number of votes in […]

In a sign that someone other than Jeremy Lin can still attract online attention, two Vladimir Putin visual “photo shops” are making the rounds. The first is punny: The second a bit more serious: Even if you don’t speak Russian, you should be able to get the gist of this video – it is a […]

When it comes to explaining whether poor whites vote Republican, trust the statistics. 

Did the the contraception contretemps hurt Obama’s standing among Catholic voters?  Despite endless speculation about this, evidence has been in short supply. With some newly released data from YouGov, I can shed some light on this question. Here is the percent who approve of Obama among both Catholics and non-Catholics in the last 7 weeks […]

We are pleased to welcome the following guest post from Brad Parks. Brad also blogs at aiddata, which is a terrific resource for data on the effectiveness of aid projects. Brad discusses how the detailed data gathered by the aiddata project has helped researchers uncover how project aid targeted at certain sectors can reduce terrorism. […]

Matthew Yglesias proposes that employers should tackle problems of skill shortages themselves. On a firm level obviously one solution here is to just pay higher wages and hire away someone else’s machinist. But there are still only so many machinists to go around. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to find a […]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about the question of why some blog posts are more likely to be tweeted and why others are more likely to be “liked”. I threw out some hypotheses, and got a lot of interesting suggestions in the comments. Anton Strezhnev, a Georgetown University undergraduate and soon-to-be Ph.D. […]