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All politics is (still) local
As the late Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, all politics is local. The idea that Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia amount to some sort of repudiation of President Obama is just as silly...
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Not fat, not a lady, but Nate Silver is singing
This may be the last polling analysis of the Massachusetts Senate race worth paying attention to before the voting starts tomorrow. According to Nate Silver, Republican candidate Scott Brown now has a...
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Tierney, Tisei and a defense of party-line voting
John Tierney We all live in Nate Silver’s world, so there were no real surprises on Election Day. Except one: Republican congressional candidate Richard Tisei’s failure to topple U.S. Rep. John...
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Ezra Klein and the problem with top-down control
Ezra Klein This commentary was published earlier at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What should a 21st-century news organization look like? A single entity, run from the top, with a common set of values? Or...
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No surprises, really. So why do the early election returns feel like a punch...
Photo (cc) 2008 by H2Woah! Previously published at GBH News. Four years ago I was watching CNN as John King poked and prodded an interactive map of Florida while Wolf Blitzer looked on. King was...
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Say it again: Bad data, not bad reporting, is what led to media failures in 2016
Photo (cc) 2005 by stu_spivack This drives me crazy. In a New York Times review of Katy Tur’s new memoir, “Rough Draft,” Joanna Coles writes about Tur’s coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign: Tur,...
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Why asking voters who they think will win might be the smarter question
Nate Silver’s current project, the Silver Bulletin, is online at natesilver.net I freely confess to paying more attention to polls than I should. Multiple times a day I check in with FiveThirtyEight,...
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It was a dark and metaphorically stormy night; plus, Northeastern students...
I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving...
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