As I have before, I want to flag YouGov’s Model Politics blog for readers. There is and will be a lot of fresh content there, written by political scientists with fresh survey data from YouGov. Here are two recent posts of note
The first is from Gabriel Lenz. He ran an experiment in which participants to choose between pairs of Republican presidential candidates. Half the participants were randomly assigned to see pictures of the two candidates when choosing; the other half were not. For the Romney-Gingrich pair, he found that showing the pictures strongly helped Romney among voters who were otherwise less familiar with Gingrich. In fact, it gave Romney at 14-point boost.
The second is from Michael Tesler. He shows that racial attitudes are still very strong predictors of how people feel about Barack Obama. And he’s got some lovely graphs. You might think this conclusion is obvious. It’s not. Other research, which I described here, shows that white voters can actually become more supportive of black incumbents because their behavior in office disproves some white voters’ fears.
Stay tuned for more at Model Politics.