Howdy
Welcome to Good Politics/Bad Politics, a newsletter about government and elections in the US.
So here’s the story. You might know me from my time at Bloomberg Opinion, or before that at A Plain Blog About Politics; I’ve also written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and various other places. Or you might know me as a political scientist…once upon a time I was an academic version of that. With that hat on I’m co-editor of the last three editions of The Making of the Presidential Candidates, which is the premier edited volume about presidential nominations.
I’ve been blogging, columning, and newslettering for 15 years (Yikes!). Notwithstanding Brenden Nyhan’s sensible proposal that there should be term limits on columnists, I still think I have stuff to say and can be a good guide to what’s happening in national politics. And some other politics-related stuff, maybe.
Anyway, come this year and it was time to start a newsletter and yeah everyone has a newsletter so I was sort of hemming and hawing and then it occurred to me that a newsletter might be more interesting with different voices. But after a few minutes, I realized that there were only two people around who I wanted to do this with, and odds are that one or both would not be interested, and I’d be doing it alone.
But huzzah! I asked, they both said yes, and damn this is a good lineup. So:
Julia Azari is Professor of Political Scientist at Marquette University, and a scholar of the presidency, political parties, and American political development. She’s the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and numerous academic articles and book chapters. She’s also way brilliant, but if you read public-facing political scientists you know that from her work at the (sadly inactive until the new group takes over) great group blog Mischiefs of Faction and other pieces in FiveThirtyEight, Politico, and lots more. Expect more of the same here.
David S. Bernstein is not a political scientist at all; he’s a prize-winning journalist, most notably with the (also sadly inactive, but permanently so) Boston Phoenix but his work has appeared in all sorts of places. He’s been covering Boston, Massachusetts, and New England politics since Hector was a pup, but he’s also specialized in reporting on national conservative movement developments, among quite a few other things. He’ll do both reported pieces and, um, non-reported pieces (punditry? opinion? I don’t know what to call it - just know that he’s good at it) here. Full disclosure: He can’t hit my wiffle-screwball.
What I told both Julia and David is to write about what interests them, because they’re smart and interesting people and that’s what I want to read. With the only limit that it should be about politics, broadly defined. And, for better or worse, that’s what I'll do as well (mine will be the one with excess typos and unclear antecedents; I’ll do my best, but we’re working without editors here). We expect to publish four mornings a week, although we might add a fifth if something is going on or one of us has something to say and is impatient. The schedule for now: I’ll show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays, David on Wednesdays, and Julia on Fridays.
I think we have a terrific lineup. I hope you’ll agree.