California Gov. Gavin Newsom amassed a huge vote count, 63.4 percent, to defeat the attempt by Trump Republicans to recall him. (The exact number could change a bit as the state continues to count ballots for some weeks, but it will likely be pretty close.) Pundits and strategists alike are already deriving lessons from this great victory…
This questionable imitation of a column notwithstanding, I’m not a journalist and therefore play no role in determining what the story is. In my humble opinion, however, by focusing on one or two Democrats who may fail to support legislation deemed critical by the overwhelming majority of their co-partisan colleagues, actual journalists are missing the…
Cold War babies like me were taught to abhor communism as children. My earliest memory of such instruction came from a teacher who raged against what she claimed was communism’s demand that people inform on family, friends and neighbors, turning them over to the secret police for actions or views critical of the regime. I…
My father, of blessed memory, a stalwart civil libertarian who cut his teeth as a lawyer defending people accused of being communists by McCarthyite goons, used to say, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” The aphorism seems particularly apt at a time when one of the greatest collective threats we face is a pathogen…
Any careful reckoning would conclude that polling on massive, multipart legislative packages is beset by problems. Our typical notion of public opinion assumes people hold views in their heads which polls simply measure. Often though, we aren’t measuring public attitudes but creating them, by asking votes to develop opinions on the spot, in response to…
Everybody “knows” two things about the economy: it’s (at least somewhat) important politically and it’s getting better. Take the first as a given, but the second needs greater exploration. First, what do we mean by this abstraction we call the economy? For economists it is “the large set of inter-related production, consumption, and exchange activities…
I’ve long said there is a minor Ph.D. dissertation in it. Spoofing a late 1960s self-help guide, it’s a phenomenon I labeled, “I’m OK, you’re not.” It’s the tendency to think things are alright in our own spaces but pretty awful elsewhere. I first noticed it during the health care reform debate of the 1990s.…
In his long, largely unprincipled pursuit of power at any price, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has proved particularly adept at inventing constitutional principles and American history from whole cloth. So it was when McConnell fabricated the claim that the Senate didn’t confirm Supreme Court nominees in presidential election years; and so it is today, when…
While most Americans rightly see Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, time, facts and evidence have done little to shift the attitudes of Trump voters who stubbornly cling to the fantasy that their candidate actually won. In Arizona, for example, a poll my firm completed at the end of May found just…
In our hyperpolarized society, the left can’t talk to the right and the right can’t talk to the left. Liberals and conservatives hold different values, worship different heroes, abhor different villains, respond to different vocabulary, trust different sources of information and tell different stories about the world, and their experience in it. The gulf is…
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