Tag Archives: Monkey Cage

Eight White Majority Districts Elected Black Members of Congress. That’s a Breakthrough

Read my piece in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog:

This year, Americans appear to have elected a record 53 African Americans to the House.

Forty-four were reelected. Of those, four-fifths won reelection from majority-minority districts — defined here as districts where non-Hispanic whites form a minority of the voting-age population according to the 2010 Census. That’s what we’ve seen in the past: Historically, black representatives have been elected from majority-minority districts.

But here’s the big news: Eight of the nine newly elected African Americans won in districts dominated by non-Hispanic whites.

Read the full piece online over at the Post.

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Stacked for Separatists? Catalonia’s Version of the Electoral College

Believe it or not, I don’t study Maryland much for my day job as a political scientist. Read my analysis on Catalonia in the Monkey Cage blog in the Washington Post.

Notwithstanding separatist leader Carles Puigdemont’s dramatic flight to Brussels, Catalonia’s fade from American headlines gives the impression that normalcy is gradually returning to the region in the wake of the ousting of the region’s separatist government by the Spanish central government.

Appearances are deceiving. New regional elections are scheduled for December 21 and the electoral system may yet again manufacture a separatist majority in a manner eerily parallel to the electoral college. In other words, what Catalonia has just gone through might well be the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

 

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