This guest post comes from Sean McElwee — a research associate at Demos and an excellent follow on Twitter. Find out more about Sean, his work and what his research into voting uncovered about Michigan by checking out his first guest post for Eclectablog. In my latest report, Why Voting Matters, I argue that nonvoters are more progressive than voters, […]

Take action: Tell Michigan lawmakers to stop the attacks on women’s health and trust women to make their own choices. UPDATE: Committee vote on coercive abortion bills scheduled for the morning of Tuesday, September 29. Contact the committee immediately and request a NO vote on House Bills 4787 and 4830. Details in the original post below. They still haven’t figured […]

The positive stories about the ACA are starting to outnumber the negative ones. It’s about time. Two years ago, it wasn’t easy to find a positive story about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), derisively called Obamacare by its critics. It wasn’t that there wasn’t plenty of good news to share, but the media loves a bad-news story. But now, with […]

In 1999, the Detroit Public School system had a positive fund balance of $246,300,000 according to a ten-year summary in their 2008 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (pages 91-92). That was the same year that the DPS was taken over by the State of Michigan under Republican John Engler. The school district was placed under the control of an Emergency Financial […]

Mohamed Ahmed is a 14-year old Texan from Irving who loves to invent and build things. This week, he built a homemade clock and brought it to school to show his teacher, thinking it would impress him. What happened next is has sent a shockwave of outrage across the country and across the globe and even prompted Hillary Clinton to […]

And it could be Democrats greatest nightmare, too How did Mitt Romney end up losing more of the Latino vote than John McCain who lost more than George W. Bush? It mainly comes down to one utterance of “self-deportation” in one primary debate. Sure, there were other utterances that involved him saying he’d have vetoed the DREAM Act and planned […]

Cindy Gamrat got elected in Allegan County largely because there is such an active tea party presence there. Her over the top politics are so in-sync with this group that even her lying and philandering weren’t enough for her to lose their support. In fact, the head of the Allegan County Tea Party, Stephen Young, told WZZM, “The question now […]

When it comes to our economy, we have one massive problem that’s like a black hole sucking in all hope of rebuilding the middle class: Only the richest are getting richer. From the year before Ronald Reagan was elected to the year before George W. Bush left the White House, the only income gains for most Americans came from working […]

This past weekend, protesters from around the state gathered at the Mackinac Bridge to call for the shutdown of Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline. The pipeline (actually TWO pipelines) are 62 years old and were built in a time when regulations were far more lax than they are now. Had the Great Lakes Submerged Lands Act been in place when the […]

A “low-information voter” has come to mean “anyone not smart enough to vote the way I do.” The discernment is not usually made on facts, since we all choose which facts to focus upon. Voters are not generally rational actors making perfect decisions, no matter how much we like to pretend we are. For instance, I know studies have shown […]

Last month, Republicans in the U.S. Senate introduced a formal resolution of disapproval of the historic deal brokered by the Obama administration that will prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon for the forseeable future. Despite millions of dollars being spent by pro-war groups, yesterday Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) became the 34th senator to come out in support of […]