Brendan Nyhan

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  • New NYT: Not time for change to Trump?

    From my new Upshot column: With Donald Trump’s unfavorable ratings at record levels, the Republican Party’s prospects for taking back the White House already seem bleak. But its chances may be even worse yet. The doubts Mr. Trump has raised during his primary campaign also undermine the strongest rationale for any Republican candidate in this

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  • New NYT: The triggers for Trumpism

    From my new Upshot column: There is no one quite like Donald Trump — as either a human being or a presidential candidate. While he has been compared to populist insurgents like George Wallace and Ross Perot, neither came as close to the presidency as Mr. Trump will be if he secures the G.O.P. nomination.

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  • How we got here on Trump: A tweetstorm

    [View the story “Brendan Nyhan on the mutifactorial institutional failures that lead to Donald Trump” on Storify]

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  • New NYT: Hillary Clinton’s flawed message

    From my new Upshot column: Political campaigns are supposed to promise hope and change, but Hillary Clinton is not offering enough of either — one of the most important reasons that she barely won Iowa and lost by a wide margin to Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire.

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  • New NYT: The downside of dynastic politics

    From my new Upshot column: Why have Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton struggled so much during this campaign? It might seem as if the public is weary of Bushes and Clintons and has turned against dynastic politics, but voters don’t usually punish politicians for being members of political families. Becoming a long-term member of the

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  • New NYT: The obstacles to a Bloomberg win

    From my new Upshot column: The dream of a centrist third-party presidential candidate will never die. Michael Bloomberg, the media billionaire and former New York City mayor, is once again considering running for president, but how broad is his appeal? Although he may wish to portray himself as a centrist alternative to more extreme presidential

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  • New NYT: The downside of Trump touting his polls

    From my new Upshot column: Donald Trump misses no opportunity to remind us that he’s ahead in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. During a rally in Claremont, N.H., last week, he said, “When people say, ‘Why do you always talk about the polls?’ I say, ‘Because I’m winning!’ Believe me, if I’m not

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  • New research on journalistic fact-checking

    I have a new article out in the Journal of Communication with Lucas Graves and Jason Reifler on the reasons journalists engage in fact-checking (ungated preprint): Understanding Innovations in Journalistic Practice: A Field Experiment Examining Motivations for Fact-Checking Lucas Graves, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler Why has fact-checking spread so quickly within U.S. political journalism?

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  • New NYT: Trump’s misdiagnosis of extremist opinion

    From my new Upshot column: On Monday, Donald Trump singled out American Muslims as supporting repression and violence, citing a discredited poll from an anti-Muslim group as evidence for imposing border restrictions. But if he is worried about extremist public opinion in the United States, he should take a broader look around. Research shows that

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