Politics of Aging

Doug Jones is the snow leopard of American party politics: He exists, but his extinction seems inevitable. With his 2017 special election victory, Jones became Alabama’s first Democratic U.S. senator since Howell Heflin retired 20 years earlier. The former prosecutor is the only Democrat among the ten who currently represent the five Deep South states, […]

The Democrats’ ability to wrest back Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa faces a steep hurdle. The population of the Rust Belt is aging at a much faster pace than the rest of the country. Exit polls show that people over the age of 50 put Donald Trump in the White House, and the Midwest has […]

In a representative democracy, a key goal is to ensure that government is “for the people” — that it does what citizens want. What are Americans’ policy preferences? What groups and political parties do they identify with? Who do they vote for and why? Lane Kenworthy