Brendan Nyhan

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  • What’s going on with the gender gap?

    In the Wall Street Journal today, Fred Barnes claims the following: More important is its appeal to women [Bush’s opposition to gay marriage]. This year the gender gap is all but gone. Women, once decidedly Democratic, are now almost evenly divided between Bush and Kerry. And while men tend to be terrorism-centered voters, women disproportionately

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  • Two pieces to check out

    If you haven’t seen them yet, make sure to check out my Spinsanity column on the ways the Center for American Progress twists quotations and my media fact-checking scorecard tracking how well the media debunked three well-known distortions over a ten-day period earlier this month.

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  • Fixing the system

    On Wednesday, the election will (hopefully) be over and the fight over the rules of the game will resume. Here is what I think should be done: 1) Abolish 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

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  • Sign controversy unmasked

    The Durham Herald-Sun finally ran its report on the Communist-hating sign maker and his opponents. It’s a doozy. Once again, sign-stealing and hateful invective are wrong no matter what. This whole controversy is equal parts amusing and sad — it almost seems like an article in The Onion parodying how extreme both sides of our

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  • Details – who needs them?

    Today’s New York Times has an article on Kerry and Bush’s efforts to appeal to Jewish voters by touting their support for Israel. In it, Stephen R. Weisman alludes to criticisms made of Kerry without actually presenting the details of what has been alleged, which means that readers don’t get the context they need to

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  • Small jobs error on “Meet the Press”

    The vaunted “Meet the Press” staff appears to have messed up the latest jobs figures slightly. On today’s broadcast, they claimed the country had 132.4 million jobs when President Bush took office, but that it now has 131.5 million, for a total loss of 900,000 jobs. In fact, however, the correct numbers from the Bureau

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  • The fog of elections

    For the next 72 hours, tens of thousands of people are going to spend a lot of time and energy worrying about what will mostly turn out to be statistical noise. Don’t be one of them. Most national and state polls will be moving around inside their margin of error. As such, in the absence

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  • Our political debate in a nutshell

    The latest from the Durham sign wars – here’s a shot of three competing signs at the corner of University and 15/501 Business: Apparently, our good friend the Communist-hating sign maker is getting some competition… Update: News on the sign beat from the Durham Herald-Sun…

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