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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 […]

Bill Moyers returned to television last weekend with a new series, Moyers & Company. (Check your local listings.) The first few installments focus on the politics of economic inequality, drawing heavily on a multi-hour interview with political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson about their much-praised 2010 book, Winner-Take-All Politics. Someone must be watching, since Winner-Take-All […]

We are delighted to welcome a guest post by Ryan Powers and Michael Tierney, who provide further analysis from a survey among scholars of international relations (see here for an earlier post). This post looks at whether the topics political scientists study and the approaches we take influence our policy preferences. Most notably, and contrary to some […]

Who knew the State Department was so hip?

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 […]

Rethinking Monopoly for the millennial and international set.

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.