The Political Conversation

We all know where we were the day Trump was elected. To many Democrats – myself included – it was a shock but also a moment of great insight. In her book, "White Working Class", released just four months after the election, Joan Williams describes a Trump voter in the South Carolina election as saying: "We are voting with our middle finger". After all, incomes of the white working class had double...

From 2019 to 2020, Dr. Lynn Vavreck –professor of political science at UCLA and contributing columnist to The New York Times– and her colleagues interviewed over 500,000 voters, leading them to conclude that our politics aren’t just polarized, but calcified. According to the authors, “polarization — a blanket term that gets thrown around a lot in the media — doesn’t really do much to explain the s...

To understand the significance of the 2022 elections, we have to understand just who the Independents are. If you doubt this, Google “2022 election independents”: CNN: “How Trump’s legacy became ‘pure poison’ for independents." Bloomberg: “Independent voters are more important than ever." Vox: “How independents saved Democrats." To dig into the significance of the 2022 election I had conversations...

While the nation was engrossed in the slow-motion car crash that was the election of a Republican House Speaker, the unanimously-elected new House Minority Leader was paid little attention. Yet, there is much about Jeffries to note–not least of which is the fact that he has already reinstated some key powers of the Democratic Leader that Nancy Pelosi previously had lost, and has int...

In the 2022 midterms post-mortem, some Republicans went for the Democratic candidate over their Trump-endorsed alternative, much more impactful was the a majority of Independents voted for the Democratic candidate. The power of the Independents has risen alongside their numbers–at 42% of the electorate, they far outnumber Dems (25%) and Republicans (32%). Samara Klar has studied Independents as pa...

At this moment, only two members of Congress can challenge any state's electoral college votes and throw the election into chaos in 2024. That's why passing the Electoral Count Act is paramount–to prevent a Jan 6 repeat, and to protect election integrity. But it's never that simple, of course–it has to make it through Congress first. Listen to this week's ten-minute episode, to...

Several camps have strong views on what the Federal Reserve should do next to control inflation.  And on the federal budget, there always are arguments about whether the deficits are too large or needed to keep America working. Who do we believe?   Wally asked that of Brad DeLong, a heavy-duty macroeconomist at Berkeley and former Assistant Director of the Treasury who has just published...

Will the 2022 Midterm election show that we have polarized into hostile camps? That the center in our politics called the shots in the key races?  In race after race, were the results determined by which way the Independents went? Or were races dominated by Democratic or Republican loyalists?  An interesting context for thinking about the Midterms and their role over time is provided by...

Globalization made many promises, but left one detail out: it would pit American workers against workers elsewhere around the globe working for a fraction of their pay. The result was a multi-decade decline of our middle class. In the 1990s, Dani Rodrik of Harvard predicted that people would rebel and elect a spokesperson to voice their rage. Anyone come to mind? Decades ago Rodrik’s was a lonely...

For Daron Acemoglu, the prominent MIT economist relied on from  The Times  to  Politico , what is missing from our current debate on business taxation is an awareness of the difference between taxes on labor and taxes on capital.  In our conversation on  The Political Conversation , Acemoglu lays out how the huge rate difference between taxes on work (25 percent) and...

America's middle class has not had a decent raise since the 1970s.  At the same time, our national productivity has soared and almost all the benefits have flowed to our upper echelon.  MIT's David Autor explains what is needed to restore wide shared prosperity.

We've all wondered, at one time or another: Are these really our only two choices? But turning that thought to action is not the popular thing to do. This didn't phase Darry Sragow in 2011, when the opportunity to join a serious effort to create a third American party came about.  Sragow's views on America's need for a third party come out of decades spent as a senior official at th...

Some say Washington just hasn't gotten much done; for others, our democracy seems to be on the brink of collapse. Take a break from the despair with Frances Lee of Princeton and Congressman Henry Waxman. Lee discusses her new book The Limits of Party,  which aptly challenges the idea of total partisan gridlock. Henry Waxman adds the inside perspective as one of the foremost legislators o...

In 2012 and in 2016, Steve Bullock was elected to be a Democratic Governor in Montana. In 2016, 25% of his vote  also  voted for Donald Trump. It is safe to say Bullock understands rural voters, swing voters, and persuadable Trump voters. In his interview on The Political Conversation, he argues: Democrats might be able to win the presidency with a coastal majority. But with&nb...

Is a (bipartisan) deal on reforming the Electoral College Act possible? Donald Trump is attempting to restore his domination of the Republican Party; is there reason to think that his domination is not complete? We sat down with Congressman Adam Schiff to get his perspective. 

Michael Hiltzik, a Pullitzer-Prize winning colunist with the LA Times, opens up our view of polarization to be more specific: Polarized voices are everywhere, yes. But does that mean most of us are polarized? He argues that the media are not reporting a genuine schism in American politics; they’re reporting on a divide pitting a majority in broad agreement against a boisterous minority.

We all know someone who follows political news obsessively, who gets anxious if they can’t follow the news, and who goes on social media to tell lots of people that they are wrong. That describes less than 20% of us, but, as Yanna puts it, "It, it feels like 80%!” Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University, talks about what it means to be deeply involved in politic...

Between tweets, op-eds, newsletters and, well, podcasts–what does it mean to be politically engaged today? We explore this question with Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, Dr. Eitan Hersh. He is the author of  Politics Is for Power .

With slim majorities on either side of the aisle depending on the election cycle, we wonder: Who are the 'swing voters'? What motivates them to be Independents? We explore this with Associate Professor at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy, Samara Klar. She has extensively studied how individuals’ personal identities and social surroundings influence their political a...

Morris Fiorina looks ahead to the midterm elections and back into the history of the political majority to address a paradox: The country is increasingly polarized, and yet voter's willingness to subscribe to either party is sharply declining. Morris Fiorina–who will insist you call him Mo–holds an endowed chair of political science at Stanford University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institu...

Introducing The Political Conversation, a podcast going beyond the two-party binary to have a different kind of conversation.