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James is away this week and has handed me the keys to the newsletter. There are lots of interesting things in this week’s Economist, including some actual good news. One of those stories is about Andy Kim, the Democratic politician from New Jersey who has managed to overturn the state’s
county-line system.
This is an ingenious mechanism for protecting political insiders by giving them prominence on ballot papers. In elections that voters aren’t paying much attention to, it is an especially effective way of vote-rigging. According to Abolish the Line, a local campaign group, thanks to the county-line system no state legislator has lost a party primary since 2009. Thanks to Mr Kim, its days seem numbered.
The other cheering story to highlight is from Florida, where Ben Sasse and his colleagues at the University of Florida are engaged in a good-faith effort to make one of the country’s most important public universities more
friendly to conservatives.
Rather than setting ideological tests for faculty, or banning books—the approach the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, seems to favour—Mr Sasse and co are making what our correspondent describes as “a $30m wager on the appeal of Western civilisation”.
The last piece I’d like to draw your attention to uses a huge dataset—49,000 respondents to our weekly YouGov poll—to
hunt for swing voters.
American politics is so calcified that there aren’t many of them. Among the 49,000 are 465 people who said they voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and plan to vote for Joe Biden in November, and 632 who have gone in the other direction.
One surprising (to me, at least) finding from this work is that the likeliest vote-switchers are non-white parents of school-age children. We have a few theories as to why that might be. If you are an election nerd then you might like our
Build a Voter tool,
which will allow you to explore the data. If you’re reading this in America then plug in your age, race, sex, religion, place of residence and so on and our model will try to predict how you’ll vote in November. We reckon it gets the right answer 75% of the time.
Elsewhere in The Economist: |
