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Donald Trump is in big trouble. Polls released last week from Monmouth University, CNBC, the Economist, ABC News/Washington Post, and CBS News have Trump trailing Biden by 4 to 11 points nationally. On average, Trump is down by 7.8 points. State-level polling is equally grim. Biden is consistently polling ahead of Trump in the swing states. Perhaps even more concerning for Trump, Biden is statistically tied with Trump in a number of traditionally red states, including electoral vote rich Arizona and Texas. Trump’s Base is not Big Enough Trump’s struggles are unsurprising. To be sure, his largely white, Christian, and Continue reading Trump’s Base Strategy is Unlikely to Work in 2020. He was Warned→

Some variant of this is line comes up from time to time, and it’s always irritating, but I think it’s something that strikes me as dumber the more time goes by. Whether it’s stated implicitly or explicitly, this remark is almost always uttered in the context of dismissing academic expertise or research. The logic here is never clearly stated, but presumably it has something to do with academics not being able to understand the things they study because they haven’t “lived it”. Insert appropriate hand-waving here. First, it’s just descriptively wrong. There are a lot of academics who get into Continue reading The “academics don’t have real world experience!” argument is really, really, dumb→

Since the beginning of the Trump Administration US allies have been walking something of a tightrope. Given the President’s Trumps strange relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, South Korea in particular has been in an especially strange place over the past three years. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump threatened to pull US forces out of South Korea if that country did not increase its funding for the US presence. More recently, the Trump Administration announced the cancellation of a series of large-scale military exercises with South Korea. The most recent dust-up involves demands by president Trump that Continue reading US-ROK Burden Sharing: You Want Us to Pay What Now?→

This is a quick post that was inspired by some thinking I was doing yesterday while finishing up a project and a resulting tweet that seemed to garner a bit of attention (relative standards here, people). You can find it below. The punch line is this: You should probably nominate your own work for awards, whether they be papers, conference presentations, or (eventually) book awards. Even as a graduate student. This is something I really only realized you could do a couple of years ago. I came into graduate school knowing next to nothing about how the academic profession actually Continue reading Graduate student, nominate thyself→

A copy of the whistleblower’s report to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community was released this morning. I don’t have a lot to add beyond the analyses that are circulating around various media outlets, but there is one point that I think is worth highlighting that maybe isn’t yet getting the attention it deserves. The bulk of the story focuses on President Trump’s apparent efforts to leverage access and US military aid to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The report itself is impressive insofar as it details a more protracted, and broader, effort Continue reading The whistleblower story is going to get a lot worse→