5 results for author: Nancy Kaplan


WHO ELECTED THIS WHITE MAN?

Who elected this white man to the office of the POTUS? In her much discussed book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, political scientist Katherine Cramer locates voters' discontent in the disconnect between rural and urban worlds. She says very little about racial resentment, focusing instead on rural citizens' perceived lack of power and resources (those goodies flow to the larger cities of Madison and Milwaukee) and their perceived lack of respect from the elites in power. No doubt her research has some explanatory power but the data from the last election shows that the majority of ...

ACTIVISM WORKS

Senate Health Care Bill did not pass. It's not clear what Republicans will try next but it is clear that engaged citizens can and do make a difference. We can't promise it will always work. But we can see that voter resistance can force a change of course. So when Trump and McConnell and Ryan cook up their next nasty "tax cut masquerading as healthcare" stew, you'll know just what to do. Josh Marshall has what I think is the best explanation of why the Republican plan to repeal the ACA has come such a cropper. First he acknowledges the vital role played by how unpopular the various versions of the legislation were and the equally vital played by ...

WINNING IS THE ONLY THING

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote an important post last week arguing that Voting Rights Defeatism is Toxic. It's his response to some of the ways people and pundits reacted to John Ossoff's loss in the Georgia special election. Complaining about voter suppression may provide some emotional balm. But "the simple fact is that Democrats or anyone who believes in voting rights will need to win elections under the current restrictive system to be able to change laws to change that system. The fact that that is challenging and unfair doesn’t change the reality of it. There’s no getting around this basic fact." And that's the bottom line, ...

ANOTHER LOOK AT 2016 ELECTION

While we await developments on a number of critical fronts — Will the Republicans running our state ever agree on transportation funding? Will the US Senate stumble as it tries to formulate a healthcare bill that can pass both the Senate and the House? Will the Supreme Court issue a stay in Gill v Whitford? Will James Comey's testimony on Thursday offer the bombshell the national press is hoping for? You might want to have a look at an analysis of How And Where Trump Won Wisconsin in 2016. Malia Jones at the UW Applied Population Laboratory has run the numbers and concludes that "lower voter turnout and community size defined the presidential ...

WHAT MOTIVATED 2016 VOTERS?

Professor Katherine Cramer Walsh, author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (March, 2016), finds the split between rural and urban voters' choices to be rooted in what she calls "group consciousness." In an article published years before her book, she concludes that rural voters, at least in Wisconsin, perceive themselves to be deprived and attribute "rural deprivation to the decision making of (urban) political elites, who disregard and disrespect rural residents and rural lifestyles." But there appear to be some other attitudes about urban areas and people that fit tightly with Wood's ...