The Forces at Work in the 2012 Elections
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, answers questions about the 2012 presidential campaign so far and some of the trends that will shape this year’s congressional elections.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, answers questions about the 2012 presidential campaign so far and some of the trends that will shape this year’s congressional elections.
While the focus this year has been on the GOP’s race, Democrats express about as much interest in 2012 candidates as do Republicans.
The Iowa caucuses produced six small but significant indicators of the dynamics that drove the race.
Hispanic voters are nearly three times more prevalent in states that gained congressional seats and Electoral College votes in the 2010 reapportionment than they are in states that lost seats.
An older and much more conservative electorate than in 2006 and 2008 propelled the Republican Party to a broad victory in the 2010 midterm elections. But the vote was more repudiation than endorsement. Views of the Republican Party are no more positive than those of the Democratic Party.
Millennials continue to be among the strongest backers of Democratic candidates this fall, though their support for the Democratic Party has slipped since 2008. But young voters have given far less thought to the coming elections than have older voters, and this gap is larger than in previous midterms.
At a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, Pew Research Center analysts and outside experts discussed research findings about the Millennial generation, the American teens and twenty-somethings now making the passage into adulthood. The last of three sessions addressed the question of whether Millennials, who rocked the vote in 2008, will show up at the polls this November and how they may shape the political landscape beyond?
Despite such challenges as a growing wireless-only population, possible racially-related response bias and greater-than-usual difficulties in forecasting turnout, polllsters’ methods were evidently adequate to the task.
When the campaign was finally over, the media almost immediately viewed Barack Obama’s victory as a transformational event, and a subject that had been in some ways taboo moved front and center – race.
The latest study of Pew Research Center election surveys analyzes the effects of conducting both landline and cell phone interviews. While the addition of cell phones had at most a modest effect on estimates of candidate support in individual surveys, when looked at in the aggregate clear patterns emerge.
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