Russia is again peddling misinformation in an attempt to upend our election. It’s an important news story, but there’s a larger threat that’s getting less coverage. In a New York University Stern School study, Paul Barrett shows that Russia’s contribution to our misinformation problem is nearly a distraction compared with what Americans themselves are providing. […]

“Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among white working-class voters.” So read the first line of a New York Times story the day after the votes were counted in 2016. It was the prevailing narrative after the election and the cause of much soul searching among reporters. Why […]

Every 10 years, a U.S. election bestows a predictable long-term advantage to one of the two major parties. The 2010 election handed that edge to the Republicans, and they didn’t waste the opportunity for gerrymandering — manipulating the boundaries of an electoral district in a way that gives one party an unfair advantage. Even though […]

At this point in the 1976 U.S. presidential race, Jimmy Carter had an 11-point lead on Gerald Ford, down from his 33-point lead in July. His lead would further narrow such that the election was a cliffhanger. Carter won by the narrow margin of 2 percentage points. Although the vote swing in the Carter-Ford race […]

A shell of a shell is how a cynic might describe the 2020 U.S. presidential election’s national party conventions. Devoid of huge crowds and conducted mostly online over the next couple of weeks, they likely will be the most subdued conventions in history. The national party conventions were once rollicking affairs, none more so than […]