2012 President

According to the Gallup Poll, many Americans today view both major political parties as too extreme ideologically. In a survey conducted from June 14-17 of this year, 46 percent of Americans said that the Democratic Party was “too liberal” while 42 percent described its political views as “about right” and 8 percent said it was “too conservative.” In the same survey, 43 percent of Americans saw the Republican Party as “too conservative” while 34 percent who described its political views as “about right” and 17 percent said it was “too liberal.” The 46 percent of respondents who described the Democratic Party as too liberal was the highest since the Gallup Poll began asking this question in 1992, and the 43 percent who described the Republican Party as too conservative tied the previous high mark set last year. It is clear that many Americans today view the Democratic Party as “too liberal” and the Republican Party as “too conservative,” but do these results mean that Americans are dissatisfied with the extreme views of both parties? Not necessarily. To answer this question, we need to examine how Democrats and Republicans view both their own party’s ideology and the opposing party’s ideology. It

The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly. The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992. The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since 1964 that has left the Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress. And in the past, Republicans benefited from a confluence of favorable factors to rebound with alacrity. They had pragmatic leadership that muted ideological differences within the party. Democratic presidents had troubles governing, even with strong congressional majorities. And by the time of the midterm election, the sitting presidents had acquired a beleaguered look, with presidential approval ratings that had fallen below 50 percent. The result in each case was an environment conducive to a quick GOP rebound. Just four years after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Republicans won the White House. The Vietnam War, urban race riots and a bout of inflation all served to damage the

Barack Obama has been pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people. At least that’s what some conservative pundits are claiming. Despite his current popularity, commentators such as Michael Barone, Dick Morris, and Karl Rove are predicting that Mr. Obama’s approval ratings will come crashing down to earth once the public understands what he’s really up to: dramatically expanding the role of government in American society. Notwithstanding the dire condition of the U.S. economy, the failures of some of the nation’s largest banks and investment houses, revelations of enormous salaries and bonuses paid to corporate CEOs who ran their companies into the ground and, of course, the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections, these pundits claim that Americans retain a fundamental faith in the virtues of the free market and a deep skepticism about the ability of government to solve the country’s problems. Therefore, they argue, President Obama’s attempts to use the power of the federal government to stimulate the economy, expand access to health care, improve the quality of education, reduce dependence on imported oil, and address the causes of climate change will eventually be his political undoing. But if Americans are deeply suspicious of activist

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election represented one of the most dramatic shifts in political power in American history. In terms of both style and substance, the contrast between Obama and George W. Bush is perhaps as great as that between any incoming and outgoing presidents in the modern era. Yet the historic nature of this election should not blind us to the high degree of consistency between the results of the 2008 election and previous elections. New evidence on the results of the 2008 presidential election at the congressional district level reinforces this point. The following figure displays a scatterplot of the relationship between Barack Obama’s share of the vote in 2008 and John Kerry’s share of the vote in 2004 in all 435 U.S. House districts. Each point represents a single House district and the diagonal line is the line of equality which is where each district would be located if Obama had received exactly the same vote share as Kerry. Two things stand out in this figure. First, there was an extraordinarily high degree of continuity between these two elections. The correlation (Pearson’s r) between Obama’s vote and Kerry’s vote is .97, which means that

Of all the jaw-dropping comments made by politicians this year, the one that takes top prize was not uttered in the nation’s capital but deep in the heart of Texas. There, in conjunction with a tax day “tea party,” Republican Gov. Rick Perry floated the idea of his huge state along the Mexican border seceding from the Union. As explanation, Perry declared that “we’ve got a great Union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that?” Wacky and silly has been a common reaction to the idea of Texas’ secession. Yet to those who take the idea at all seriously, responses range from potentially treasonous to “close the door behind you on the way out.” As a political matter, it would be about the worst thing that could possibly happen to Perry’s Republican Party at a time that it holds neither end of Pennsylvania Avenue and is a receding force in many states. Without a doubt, Texas is the cornerstone of the modern Republican Party. In 2008, it gave the GOP more electoral votes and elected more Republican House members than any

We at the Crystal Ball must beg your forgiveness. With fewer than 1,300 days left until the next general election for President, we have failed to offer a single analysis of this historic upcoming battle. With humility, and hoping for mercy, we submit this first update on 2012. The start of the nomination battle is even closer, of course. The two major parties are fiddling with their primary and caucus calendars again, probably in order to delay the start of the process from early January until February 2012. That will be welcome, after the ridiculously early January 3rd Iowa kick-off in 2008. Even political types ought to get an end-of-year holiday. Yet no one should plan on the upending of the Iowa-New Hampshire duopoly. As often as we and others have argued that these two small, unrepresentative states should be replaced by other states at the start of the nominating season, you can be certain they will lead the parade once again. Hawkeyes and Granite State citizens simply want to be first more than anybody, and they’ll do almost anything to keep their head-of-the-pack positions. Candidates are not openly campaigning in Iowa or New Hampshire, and no one has declared

Americans under the age of 30 played a major role in the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. According to the 2008 national exit poll, 18-29 year-olds made up 18 percent of the electorate and they cast 66 percent of their votes for Obama vs. 32 percent for his Republican rival, John McCain. Based on the exit poll results, we can estimate that of the 132 million Americans who voted in 2008, almost 24 million were under the age of 30 and they provided Barack Obama with a plurality of more than 8 million votes out of his overall plurality of 9.5 million votes. Obama’s margin of victory among 18-29 year-old voters was the largest for any presidential candidate since at least 1964. Moreover, the 13 point difference between Obama’s 66 percent vote share among 18-29 year-olds and his 53 percent overall vote share was the largest for any presidential candidate since the advent of national exit polls in 1972. The question raised by these results, of course, is why Barack Obama did so well among young Americans and what his huge margin among this group of voters might mean for the future of

California may be the Golden State, but it has been a while since people have called it that without a trace of sarcasm. With its double digit unemployment rate, difficult to balance budget, and crumbling infrastructure, California these days is anything but golden. That is, with the exception of its mother lode of electoral votes. Since 1972, California has possessed more than any other state, and is certain to maintain the number one spot throughout the next decade. Yet candidates of late have battled more fiercely for the electoral votes of much smaller states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico. From 1968 through 1988, California was reliably found in the Republican column in every presidential contest. Since then, the state’s huge bloc of electoral votes (55 in 2008) has gone virtually by default to the Democrats. For Republicans to have any real hope of a comeback in the next presidential election, that will have to change. Over the last few decades, whichever party won California was highly competitive nationally, and the vast majority of the time also won the White House. Meanwhile, whichever party lost California had to struggle hard to cobble together an Electoral College majority that