Brendan Nyhan

Month: November 2008

  • My post-election reform agenda

    Since it’s Election Day, I want to reiterate my quadrennial objections to the Electoral College: It’s an undemocratic constitutional legacy that causes voters in 30-40 states to be ignored in favor of a handful of battleground states. People claim small states would be neglected without the Electoral College, but most of them are not getting

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  • Early voting by county: NC and OH

    My friend and co-author Jacob Montgomery ran some numbers over the weekend on early voting by county in all 100 NC counties and the 11 Ohio counties that have public data. He plotted the percentage of the 2004 major-party vote that has already been cast against the proportion of African Americans in the county and

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  • Jerrold Nadler on Obama’s congruity problem

    As I’ve pointed out before (here and here), Barack Obama has been plagued by a series of controversies with a common cause — the lack of congruity between his state senate district and the presidential election landscape. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) committed a Kinsley-esque gaffe by suggesting as much during a visit to a synagogue

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  • Obama’s lead — still solid

    How solid is Barack Obama’s lead? NBC’s First Read notes that he’s led in 111 consecutive national polls whose methodology they trust: Obama has now led in 111 straight national polls with methodologies we trust (looking back through the Pollster.com national trend), including the trackers back to Sept. 22-24 when a Gallup Tracking poll showed

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  • Obama’s lead is stable

    It looks like I didn’t miss much during my work-related blogging hiatus over the last few days — here’s UNC’s Jim Stimson yesterday: Friday 10/31: Steady As She Goes: With four days remaining the apparent tightening of recent days has relapsed to pretty much the state of affairs of a week ago. Notwithstanding claims from

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