Blog: The Monkey Cage

As a recent Time magazine cover and a host of other articles remind us, Hispanics/Latinos are a sizable voting block in several states that will be fiercely contested come November, including Arizona, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.  What’s more, shifts among this group were a critical factor in President Obama’s 2008 victory.  As Governor […]

This is a guest post from Michael LaCour, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at UCLA.  The paper on which this post is based is here. ***** The reemergence of a prominent partisan press has led many scholars to investigate partisan self-selection of news outlets. Political scientists and journalists have concluded that individuals are motivated […]

A la the Murray Hill campaign in 2010, another business is running for office: Farmscape.  Their site is here.  “Bio” is above.  Here is video from when they registered the company to vote.

This is a final guest-post from Jonathan Ladd.  We appreciate his contributions.  His other posts are here and here. ***** In my final post on media distrust, I would like to explore the connection between attitudes toward the media and partisan self-selection of news outlets.  In the past 20 years, the number of news sources […]

I sure hope not. I thought we had all learned a few things over the past 5 decades but I guess not. Here is Foreign Policy’s motivation (emphasis added) for the special issue: Women’s bodies are the world’s battleground, the contested terrain on which politics is played out. We can keep ignoring it. For this one […]

This is a second guest post from Jonathan Ladd.  His first post is here. ***** Yesterday, I discussed causes if media distrust. Now, I would like to focus on the consequences.  A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead […]

The big news out of today’s Bernanke presser will undoubtedly be the Krugman-Bernanke-Krugman not-so-close encounter over the Fed’s stand pat stance in face of a still sluggish economy and high unemployment.  Krugman assailed Bernanke for forgetting the lessons he taught as a professor about aggressive central banking, Bernanke maintained that he’s been entirely consistent, and […]

Jay Cost responds to the Washington Post’s forecasting model that I helped put together: I find Klein’s model to be particularly unpersuasive, but all these models seem to share a similar problem: they take the blowout elections of 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, and 1984 not as historical peculiarities with little relevance to today, but […]

This is a guest post by Georgetown political scientist Jonathan Ladd. ***** Recently Jay Rosen and Ezra Klein discussed the causes of declining trust in the media. In my recent book, Why Americans Hate the Media and Why It Matters, I explore the causes and consequences of declining media trust. I agree with much of […]

Gallup Editor Frank Newport interviews political scientist Chris Wlezien on this subject here.  Obama’s has an edge on 5 of the 6.