Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.  From Joe Biden’s suggestion that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators’ contentions that the Romney campaign is using racial code words like “welfare” and “anger” to mobilize anti-black sentiments against President Obama, charges and counter-charges of ...

John Sides has done an excellent job throughout this campaign season documenting how Americans are often unaware of the ostensibly game-changing moments that the media deem so important.  For his latest installment, Sides reveals that less than half of the respondents in a recent YouGov poll knew President ...

As discussed in a previous post, several recent studies show that political evaluations are increasingly polarized by racial attitudes after becoming associated with Barack Obama.  Indeed, health care opinions, tax policy preferences, approval of Supreme Court nominees, midterm vote choices, party identification, and even impressions of Portuguese Water Dogs, ...

A long line of social science research suggests that the more attention campaigns and the media pay to a particular aspect of political life the more citizens will rely on that consideration in their political evaluations (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; though also see: ...

John Sides recently highlighted polling conducted by Gallup and PPP, which shows a growing polarization of Romney evaluations by party identification since he became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.  These results would seem to confirm a very long line of political science research suggesting that campaigns activate ...

As mentioned in a previous Model Politics post, racial attitudes remain a much stronger predictor of attitudes towards Barack Obama than previous presidential candidates.  Perhaps even more interesting, a series of findings by social scientists indicate that presidential vote choice isn’t the only thing that has become increasingly polarized ...

As discussed earlier on this site, a nationally representative survey of Americans conducted last week by YouGov (n=1,000) uncovered significant racial differences in respondents’ opinions about Trayvon Martin—the 17 year old African-American who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in February.  Not surprisingly, black respondents were considerably more ...

I’ve always thought that you can learn a lot about people by how they treat their pets.  Well, it turns out that you can gain substantial insights into their political beliefs.  I’m not talking about the infamous tale of Mitt Romney putting Seamus the Dog on the roof ...

Media speculation abounds that Mitt Romney’s poor performance among Evangelical voters in the 2012 Primaries is rooted in anti-Mormonism—a sentiment that will surely intensify if the former governor loses this week in Alabama and Mississippi.  My analysis of seven surveys conducted by YouGov from late January to ...

Rick Santorum’s meteoric rise in the national polls following his surprise February 7th wins in Minnesota, Missouri and Missouri naturally begs the question, “Where did the Santorum surge come from?”         My analysis of a nationally representative re-interview survey conducted by YouGov last week (respondents were first interviewed in January ...