The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump
by Alan I. Abramowitz
“I expect a Democratic landslide in 2018,” George Soros told an audience at Davos in January. His listeners were eager to agree. There are some grounds for this forecast. Since the president’s early weeks in office, his Gallup disapproval ratings have been consistently higher than the approval figures. The fact …
Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent
by Michael S. Teitelbaum
Occupational Outlook Handbook: 2014–2015
by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
The fervor over STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) goes beyond promoting a quartet of academic subjects. Rather, it’s about the kind of nation and people we are to be.
The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown
by Paul Taylor
Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972
edited by Peter V. Marsden
Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center argues that surveys of public opinion are both necessary for democracy and based on equality. His The Next America opens: Opinion surveys allow the public to speak for itself. Each person has an equal chance to be heard. Each opinion is given an …
The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election
by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck
Here’s our current political situation: • A Democratic president has twice won the popular vote, both times by comfortable margins. • In the Senate, Democrats (with two independents) hold 55 percent of the seats, receiving nearly that share of the votes in their most recent races. • Republican now have …
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t
by Nate Silver
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable
by James Owen Weatherall
Nate Silver called every state correctly in the last presidential race, and was wrong about only one in 2008. In 2012 he predicted Obama’s total of the popular vote within one tenth of a percent of the actual figure. His powers of prediction seemed uncanny. In his early and sustained prediction of an Obama victory, he was ahead of most polling organizations and my fellow political scientists. But buyers of his book, The Signal and the Noise, now a deserved best seller, may be in for something of a surprise.