David Turnbull

Political Scientists Reassure Americans That Stripping Minorities Of Citizenship Usually Where Descent Into Fascism Peters Out

Amy Burgans, the clerk-treasurer in Douglas County, Nevada, herself had doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election when she started in her role that December. (The previous clerk-treasurer had resigned—the pandemic and contentious election cycle, Burgans told me, had been “a lot.”) Burgans said that she had heard in the news, on social media, an... See more

As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

They argue that dynamic exists because these racialized accusations of fraud serve a function for these Americans: They allow them to preserve their sense of superiority over nonwhite Americans and continue to support democracy in theory, while still rejecting electoral outcomes that they don’t agree with. In this way, racialized talk of voter frau... See more

We talk a lot about a crisis of public trust in America today. But when we do we’re usually talking about Red America or what we might call Disaffected America — people lack trust in the press, in elections, in scientific or expert authority and big institutions. But there’s this other crisis of trust in institutions and people, rapidly catching up... See more

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you'd have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That's because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.

The Democratic coalition really is tetchy and hard to manage. I’ve watched a number of Arab-American writers who disapprove of Biden’s approach to Israel but agree that Trump’s would be worse spend the final month of the campaign driving up the salience of an issue that they know is bad for Harris and being relentlessly negative about her approach ... See more