Brendan Nyhan

From my new Upshot column:

Imagine you are President Obama. You have about two more years in office, but your agenda is dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress that takes over in January. What do you do?

One obvious strategy is to search for areas of common ground. However, the prospects for resolving existing stalemates in Washington on issues like immigration reform are unclear…

Instead, Mr. Obama may seek to bring new issues into the conversation. That’s what he did Monday when he called on the Federal Communications Commission to promote “net neutrality”…

[T]he President’s increasingly public embrace of net neutrality (which he has supported since his 2008 campaign) could come at a significant cost. Though Congress is already divided along party lines on the issue, Mr. Obama’s advocacy could strengthen Republican opposition to the issue.

From my new Upshot column:

America has again embraced our long history of electoral overreaction. While it’s true that Republicans won a major victory at the polls, the results tell us far less about future elections than some commentary has suggested.

In particular, the widespread Democratic losses weren’t a “repudiation” of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who played a minor role). But despite claims that they actually offer her a useful opportunity to contrast herself with a Republican Congress, she doesn’t face a “great situation” for her prospective 2016 presidential candidacy either.

From my new Upshot column:

When the returns from tonight’s election start to become clear, the debate is likely to turn, as it so often does, to why the American people voted the way they did.

That turns out to be a very difficult question to answer, however.

From my new Upshot column:

Election Day creates a vast information vacuum — millions of Americans (and hundreds of reporters) are trying to figure out the outcome of an event before it has been decided. With few useful indicators of what is actually happening at the polls, rumors and misinformation can run rampant. Here’s how to avoid getting fooled.

From my new Upshot column:

In this polarized age, have citizens retreated into information cocoons of like-minded media sources?

A new Pew Research Center report found that the outlets people name as their main sources of information about news and politics are strongly correlated with their political views….

The Pew study has been widely interpreted to mean that people are living in partisan and ideological echo chambers — a fear that has been frequently expressed as new communication technologies have expanded the media choices of consumers…

But have the predictions of widespread media echo chambers really come true?

From my new Upshot column:

After a second case of Ebola was discovered among the staff of a Dallas hospital that treated an infected patient, public concerns are likely to increase about whether the United States health care system can properly respond to an outbreak.

Data from surveys suggest, however, that those views — like so many others — are being shaped by people’s partisan affilations as much as by news about the outbreak itself.

From my new Upshot column:

What’s more dangerous — flying on an airplane or driving to the airport? In general, auto accidents are a far greater threat than plane crashes, but we tend to devote more attention to dramatic or novel risks like threats to aviation safety.

The same principle applies to the Ebola virus. Although the outbreak is a substantial threat in West Africa, a region plagued by weak government and failing public health systems, the risk to Americans is currently minimal. By contrast, the seasonal flu kills thousands of people every year but receives relatively little attention.

From my new Upshot column:

Who has the edge in November’s congressional elections? According to the fund-raising emails being sent out, no one does.

Instead, both parties claim to be on the brink of defeat. Fund-raising pleas from political figures ranging from the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, to Senator Rand Paul tell voters that the campaign is close but their side is losing…

Why do campaigns keep saying they’re losing? These doom-and-gloom messages seem to be effective at motivating donors. The best evidence to support this claim comes from a new study by the social scientists Todd Rogers of Harvard and Don A. Moore of the University of California, Berkeley.

From my new Upshot column:

It’s no surprise that interesting and unusual claims are often the most widely circulated articles on social media. Who wants to share boring stuff?

The problem, however, is that the spread of rumors, misinformation and unverified claims can overwhelm any effort to set the record straight, as we’ve seen during controversies over events like the Boston Marathon bombings and the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration manipulated unemployment statistics.

Everyone knows there is dubious information online, of course, but estimating the magnitude of the problem has been difficult until now.

From my new Upshot column:

Remember Unity ’08, Draft Bloomberg or Americans Elect? Most Americans don’t either. The hype built up around these efforts to launch centrist third-party presidential campaigns came to naught.

It’s a result that seems likely to repeat itself during the 2016 election cycle.