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New NYT: Net neutrality and the bully pulpit
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
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New NYT: 2014 doesn’t tell us much about 2016
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
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New NYT: How exit polls can mislead
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.
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New NYT: Don’t get fooled on Election Night
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
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New NYT: The information cocoons myth
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
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New NYT: The partisan divide on Ebola
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
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New NYT: The unhealthy politics of Ebola
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.
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New NYT: Raising money by saying you’re losing
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
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New NYT: More fun to spread rumors than truth
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
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New NYT: The coming boom in 3rd party speculation
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.