Happy Birthday to Evanna Lynch, 22.
What about some good stuff?
1. Seth Masket on political science and geography.
2. Paul Krugman on good reporting and the blogs. One point I'll make again: from 2009 through 2010, and then on through the courts and through implementation today, the coverage of health care reform has been outstanding. Outstanding. I'd love to see a study comparing it with coverage of Medicare in the 1960s or Social Security in the 1930s; my guess is that it's night and day.
3. The second and third parts of Sean Trende's look at party makeovers. I agree with a lot of this, and it's all worth reading. Again, my big disagreement is that I do think that healthy parties (1) will take better advantage of their time in office, and (2) that will strongly tend to help them stay in office. But I agree with his basic conclusion that out-party dysfunction doesn't have significant electoral effects.
4. Abby Rapoport on pre-K in Houston.
5. And Dan Drezner on networking at the political science meetings.
Trende writes: "More recently, here is a complete list of states that had Democratic PVIs in 1988, listed from most Democratic to least: Rhode Island, Iowa, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, West Virginia, New York, Wisconsin, Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Vermont, California, Missouri, New Mexico, Connecticut, Montana, South Dakota. Five of those 20 states are red today, and states like Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are on the purple end of the spectrum, rather than the deep blue end."
ReplyDeleteFive of those states are red? West Virginia, Missouri, Montana, and South Dakota add up to four, not five--or am I missing something? And note that two of those four states were at the very bottom of the top twenty. (And Obama's victory by more than twelve points in Oregon in 2012 doesn't seem that "purplish" to me.)
In fact, I would say that the figures actually prove continuity rather than change or "randomness"--not only did Obama in 2012 win sixteen of the twenty states with the top Democratic PVI's in 1988, but these states furnished him with 213 of the 272 electoral votes he got in those states where he did better than his national average.