Brendan Nyhan

From my new Atlantic article:

This week is coming to a close with truly miraculous news: In the coming days, Americans across the country are expected to begin getting vaccinated against COVID-19, a virus that emerged just a year ago. But even miraculous vaccines do little good for public health if people refuse to take them. What will persuade millions of Americans to take these new vaccines, which were developed and tested in record time?

To succeed in vaccinating the population against COVID-19, the United States must draw on the resources we already have: a population that generally supports vaccination and networks of trust that connect health-care professionals with their patients and people with their communities.

From my new piece in The Washington Post:

Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for instance, hundreds of thousands of people in key states received mysterious text messages with falsehoods about Democratic nominee Joe Biden (including that he wants to give “sex changes to second graders”). But how much of the news that average Americans consume is misinformation, and what impact does it have? Many news sources ironically misinform readers about its prevalence and influence. These five myths are particularly persistent.

From my new piece in The Washington Post:

Tuesday night’s presidential debate perfectly illustrates how President Trump abuses our democratic institutions — and how feckless the media can be in the face of those violations.

Since he first entered the presidential race, Trump has violated countless norms of public life, including making tens of thousands of false claims. Such an approach to governing should inspire the media to modify the way it treats the president, including during the debates in which he takes part.

Yet Fox News host Chris Wallace attempted to moderate the debate as if Trump were like any other candidate.

From our new UCI Law report by the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy (of which I am a member):

Fair Elections During a Crisis:
Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics, and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of, and the Public’s Confidence in, the November 2020 U.S. Elections

Even before the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, close observers of American democracy worried about the public’s faith and confidence in the results of the upcoming November 2020 U.S. elections. Although a decade ago concerns about peaceful transitions of power were less common, Americans can no longer take for granted that election losers will concede a closely- fought election after election authorities (or courts) have declared a winner.

Current American politics feature severe hyperpolarization and an increasingly partisan media and social media environment. Mistrust is high. It is harder for voters to get reliable political information. Incendiary rhetoric about rigged or stolen elections is on the rise, and unsubstantiated claims of rigged elections find a receptive audience especially among those who are on the losing end of the election. American elections are highly decentralized, leaving pockets of weak election administration which can further undermine voter confidence in the process. The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States hard beginning in March 2020, has only exacerbated concerns about the fairness and integrity of the 2020 elections.

The reasons for growing voter concern about the fairness and legitimacy of the U.S. election process are multifaceted, raising issues in law, media, politics and norms, and tech. This means that solutions to bolster American confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the elections must be multifaceted as well.

Recognizing the need for multifaceted solutions to the issue of the legitimacy and acceptance of fair election results in the United States, Richard L. Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine, convened both a conference and an ad hoc committee made up of a diverse group of leading scholars and leaders to tackle this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective. After public meetings and further online deliberations, this Committee makes the following fourteen recommendations for immediate change that should be implemented to increase voter confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the 2020 elections. These recommendations listed below call for specific action from: journalists and editors deciding on headlines, what, and how to cover the election up to and including the election night itself; tech companies in the fray; legislators from federal to state to local levels; and nonprofits, citizens, and social media influencers…

From my new Foreign Affairs article with Sarah Kreps:

In the desperate fight against the novel coronavirus, social media platforms have achieved an important victory: they have helped limit the dissemination of life-threatening misinformation that could worsen the pandemic. But this success should not cause us to adopt a similar approach to political speech, where greater caution is required.

From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section:

How do you warn your party that its potential nominee is vulnerable in a general election without sinking your own campaign? That question now confronts Democratic rivals of Bernie Sanders, who are realizing that the iconoclastic Vermont socialist might really win the presidential nomination.

In recent days, Sanders has taken a narrow lead in early-state polls and betting markets. Though he attracts support from only a minority of Democratic voters, he could plausibly follow a Trump-like path to the nomination in which multiple other candidates doubt his viability and stay in the race to await his collapse, dividing the vote against him until it is too late.

One factor in Sanders’s success is how little scrutiny he has faced from rivals on the campaign trail and the debate stage. Media accounts that catalogue Sanders’s atypical history and decades-old comments are easy to find for anyone who cares to look. But no one knows how Sanders will fare when Democratic or Republican rivals attack him in a high-profile fashion, which to this point no one has seriously done.

From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section:

With so many entrants in the Democratic primary field, many observers have wondered what billionaire Tom Steyer’s candidacy adds to the race.

Here’s one answer: Steyer is a gift to political scientists. His campaign offers us an unusual opportunity to explain why the “reforms” he champions as magical solutions to our political problems are likely to be anything but. Unlike other candidates in the race, who focus on substantive policies — like health care — Steyer is passionate about changing the procedures of democratic decisionmaking. Unfortunately, the ideas he champions are generally bad ones. My field has spent decades amassing evidence that his proposals, and overall approach to governing, would likely make our political system worse, not better.

From our new report:

• Perceptions of the overall performance of American democracy remain stable among both experts and the public since we began surveying each group, but assessments on certain specific democratic principles have declined substantially, erasing perceived gains observed in the period after the 2018 midterm elections. Especially sharp declines were observed for beliefs that government agencies are not used to punish political opponents, the presence of effective limits on the authority of the executive, the independence of investigations into wrongdoing by public officials, and keeping U.S. elections free from foreign influence — all topics that closely relate to the current impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives.
• Experts again rate numerous recent events that have taken place during the Trump presidency as both important and abnormal. President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election opponent, scores especially high on this dual metric (comparable to Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki).
• The public and expert consensus on actions that uphold democratic principles is strong — both groups (and especially experts) overwhelmingly rate actions like allowing peaceful protest as “democratic” rather than “undemocratic.” Moreover, most of the public rates actions that experts regard as transgressions against democracy, such as blocking peaceful protest, as “undemocratic”. The extent to which transgressions are viewed as undemocratic, however, is asymmetrical between supporters and opponents of President Trump. Both groups tend to rate such actions as undemocratic, but Trump supporters are less likely to do so than opponents, particularly for actions that President Trump has taken or ones that favor GOP interests.
• Both experts and the public view some “constitutional hardball” tactics as appropriate but see others as inappropriate. For example, impeachment, admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, DC as states, and determining the presidency by national popular vote are typically viewed appropriate. Conversely, gerrymandering, disenfranchising partisan opponents, and presidential self-pardons are all widely regarded as inappropriate.

From my new Upshot column:

The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These sites exploit the relatively high trust Americans express in local news outlets — a potential vulnerability in Americans’ defenses against untrustworthy information.

From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium:

The weekend’s deadly massacres in El Paso and Dayton served as a grim reminder of past inaction on gun policy. Even posting the famous Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” on social media has become a kind of ritualistic cliché.

In the past, such atrocities have quickly faded from the public consciousness because gun-rights groups are better organized than their gun-control rivals, as well as able to more effectively inspire their members to vote their beliefs at the ballot box. Due to fears of the outsize political influence of pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), few Republicans are willing to break ranks with the NRA, while Democrats who represent rural and swing districts often seek to avoid taking positions on guns that could endanger their seats.

However, the growing salience of high-profile shootings by white nationalists could change these dynamics…