Blog: The Monkey Cage

Nope, not another sex scandal post (although I do want to congratulate Mark Sanford and Maria Belen Chapur on their engagement). Instead, this is a story about using sex – or, more accurately, the lack thereof – as a political tactic. As the AP reports: The female wing of a civil rights group is urging […]

Sam Wang (who’s a biologist in his day job and analyzes surveys for fun) pointed me to his poll aggregates and predictions for the presidential race. Wang writes: My current view is that modelers who put in econometric assumptions face the challenge of ascertaining how much new information their additional variables (GDP, unemployment) add which […]

Ha. Don’t make us laugh.

Following the lead of the Republican party, the American Political Science Association is also delaying the start of its national convention by a day. From the APSA website: Weather Alert: Hurricane Isaac Updated: August 26, 2012 (5:20pm) All Wednesday events CANCELLED (including Short Courses) In light of the projected conditions in New Orleans by hurricane […]

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 […]

The new issue of Perspectives on Politics is now available. It’s intended to tie in with the APSA meeting next week, and has a particular focus on New Orleans, with articles by former Perspectives editors Jennifer Hochschild and Jim Johnson, as well as pieces by Kevin Fox Gotham, Michael Dawson, William Paul Simmons and Monica […]

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 […]

Here is an interesting Politico article about Paul Ryan’s rise to prominence in the GOP. The article is much stronger on reporting than analysis, unfortunately. The journalists who wrote it declare that “the establishment has withered and power has flowed away from party bosses to new media forces.” These “new media forces” turn out to […]

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 […]