Brendan Nyhan

The economic damage of recession news

From my new Upshot column:

Real gross domestic product (G.D.P.) in the United States shrank by 1 percent in the first quarter of the year. What made this announcement seem so significant?

We already knew that the economy did not perform well in the first part of the year — the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis initially estimated G.D.P. growth at 0.1 percent — and that early economic estimates are often revised substantially as more data become available.

The key difference is the direction of change. A shrinking economy is far more scary — and newsworthy — than a slow-growing one.

Cantor's loss and the value of connections

From my new Upshot column:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss Tuesday night will reshape the landscape not only within the Republican caucus but on K Street as well. As Dave Brat, his primary challenger, highlighted in his campaign, Mr. Cantor had a close relationship with business lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

What’s less widely appreciated is how the defeat of Mr. Cantor — once seen as the next speaker of the House — will ripple through the ranks of Washington lobbyists, who often trade on their connections to the powerful politicians for whom they once worked. Former Cantor staff members are likely to find that they are less attractive to outside interests seeking influence on Capitol Hill.

Voter fraud is rare, but myth is widespread

From my new Upshot column:

Is vote fraud common in American politics? Not according to United States District Judge Lynn Adelman, who examined the evidence from Wisconsin and ruled in late April that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs” in the state and that “no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future.”

Strikingly, however, a Marquette Law School poll conducted in Wisconsin just a few weeks later showed that many voters there believed voter impersonation and other kinds of vote fraud were widespread — the likely result of a yearslong campaign by conservative groups to raise concerns about the practice.