The rumors were true: House Speaker Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress. One of the most powerful political jobs in the United States will change hands next year, which will surely have a major effect on how the country is governed, but we’re here to discuss something slightly less weighty: the effect Ryan’s departure will […]
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Poll of the week We in the press often write and talk about African-Americans and their political perspectives through a single, simple frame: Blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates. As a result, the only real question about them politically tends to be how enthusiastic they are about whichever […]
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Today’s debate will center around this tweet from a political analyst: Everybody always writes columns about why Democrats or Republicans should pay more attention to issue X. It would be actually way more useful if people wrote […]
It’s old news by now that Democratic candidates have done unusually well in Trump-era elections so far, suggesting that the 2018 midterms will be a good cycle for the party. So why keep writing about them? Well, for one thing, we’re inveterate psephology addicts — but also, the more special elections that occur, the more […]
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Poll of the week 2018 seems like a bad time to be a Republican just about anywhere. So you would think it would be even worse to be a Republican in deep-blue Massachusetts, where Hillary Clinton won by 27 percentage points in 2016. But the state’s GOP governor, […]