Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
If polling is to be believed (and we should generally believe polling), Donald Trump’s support from Hispanic voters is higher today than it was four years ago, even as his overall numbers are significantly worse. This feels counterintuitive to many people, for obvious reasons. But it certainly seems to be a real effect, so it’s
My first semester at UTRGV, I was teaching Intro to US government. This was in the fall of 2016, a pretty eventful time in US politics. I was incredibly nervous to be at a new university, in a part of the country I had no familiarity with, trying to figure out how to teach students
In the past several years, we have seen several models designed to explain different routes to success in the presidential primary process. In 2015 and 2016, there was much talk of ‘lanes,’ which was generally defined in terms of ideological coordinates. This combined with the popular ‘party decides’ model, which emphasizes acceptability to party elites
The Democratic Party is at a crossroads . The first two weeks of the Trump administration have catalyzed a powerful wave of protest and political action—the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades. There was a lot of talk over the past couple years about the possibility of a ‘Tea Party of the left,’
Michael: Gee, it is my business model. I mean, if you had a business model, then by all means, you go in there and do… For the last few weeks, frantic liberals have been checking the 538 election forecasts, and discovering a lot of reasons to worry. Their model – which famously predicted a relatively
I’m currently reading The Three-Body Problem, and it got me thinking about third parties. Here’s the analogy: the problem with third parties in US politics is that the law of physics under which they operate create impenetrable barriers for a three-party equilibrium. To be specific: first-past-the-post victory conditions, for single-member districts, layered on top of the Electoral