With the year almost over, we’re pleased to present our top 10 posts of 2024!
#10. Danielle Lupton’s playlist of presidential campaign songs was a fascinating compilation of campaign songs and other music that presidential candidates have used. Al Gore and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, anyone?
#9. “Why replacing Biden with Harris may not mobilize Black voters,” by Samantha Canty and Michael Tesler. This piece, published before Biden dropped out of the race, appears pretty prescient.
#8. “Maybe young men and young women aren’t so ideologically different.” Faced with a viral graph showing an increasing difference between young men and women in how they identify themselves ideologically, I looked at a larger range of data and concluded: “more comprehensive data show that the gap isn’t that large and any gap isn’t confined to young people.”
#7. “Iran is playing a high-stakes game by attacking Israel.” Jacquelyn Schneider describes why Iran would risk its April 13 attack – and how the use of unmanned weapons systems played an important role.
#6. “Why global commerce is now in the crossfire.” After repeated Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, Bruce Jones explains how aggression-at-sea is an increasingly common tactic – and why the U.S. and other Western powers lack the power to stop it.
#5. “The real reasons Latinos are moving to the Republican party.” After the November election, I interviewed political scientist Yamil Velez about his research on GOP gains among Latinos in 2020, what happened in 2024, and what it means for the future. A key quote from Velez: “Democrats will likely need to grapple with the significant ideological complexity among Latinos if they hope to win them back. While there were some positive efforts this cycle, I worry they may have been too little, too late.”
#4. “How much trouble is Joe Biden really in?” Writing in March 2024, Michael Tesler and I showed that Joe Biden’s approval rating at that point predicted a 3-point loss for the Democratic Party in the presidential election. Of course, Biden would later drop out – but this forecast based simply on dissatisfaction with the incumbent party proved pretty accurate.
#3. “Why Elon Musk’s politics are so problematic for Tesla, in one graph.” It’s a pretty simple story, says Michael Tesler: Democrats like electric cars, but Democrats dislike Musk.
#2. “Where to start to explain Trump’s win.” I wrote this about 7 a.m. the morning after the election. The central point – Trump’s broad win demands a broad explanation rooted in voter dissatisfaction with the incumbent party – is still fundamental to understanding the 2024 election.
And now for the most-read article ….
#1. “Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions.” In this piece, Vanderbilt political scientist Joshua Clinton showed that reasonable choices about how to weight respondents in a single poll could change the margin between Trump and Harris from a dead heat to an 9-point lead for Harris. It was a powerful lesson in why we have to assume much more uncertainty in preelection polling than most people typically think. Clinton’s concluding remark should be shouted from the mountaintops in every election cycle: “We would all do better to temper our expectations about preelection polls.”
Onwards to 2025! Bookmark our landing page to keep up with Good Authority analysis in January and beyond.
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