Extended analysis of political cause and effect: how coalitions form and break, why a governing party loses support, where institutional design blunts a mandate. Arguments are built from results, roll calls and comparative cases. Intended for analysts, academics and readers who want reasoning instead of reaction.
Longer arguments about why a political outcome occurred, from coalition arithmetic to incumbency effects, grounded in results data rather than commentary.
Since 1934 the president's party has lost House seats in almost every midterm — the exceptions are few and instructive, and the modern re-sorting of seats has flattened the old wave sizes.
Christopher Lee
Unitemized receipts are the most quoted and least understood line in campaign finance — the data can show breadth of support, but only the itemized detail shows who supplies it.
Christopher Lee
From 5 percent of the last gubernatorial vote to distributed county requirements, the qualification rules filter which questions citizens ever get to vote on — and the filters are tightening.
Christopher Lee
A four-point lead with a three-point margin of error is a coin toss — and weighting choices, likely-voter screens and subgroups mislead far more often than sampling noise does.
Asha Venkataswamy
Daily returns show who has returned ballots, not who is winning; the numbers are administration data, and reading them as a scoreboard produces the same error every cycle.
Christopher Lee