Articles by Rodolfo Cortes Barragan

They say it’s impossible to predict the future, but we all know that history has a way of repeating itself, and the pre-determined outcome of the 2020 race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination is crystal clear to anyone who wants to be honest with themselves. ALSO READ: DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules The Democratic Party has designed ways to keep Sanders from securing the nomination. Their plan consists of four interrelated st...

California is a blue state, but Los Angeles County is way blue: Clinton bested Trump by 50 percentage points. Few local elected officials belong to the GOP, and only 18% of registered voters are Republican. In Central and East/Southeast Los Angeles, the GOP has collapsed to such an extent that not a single Republican filed to challenge the incumbent congressional Democrats of the 34th and 40th Congressional Districts. Instead, true to their generation’s yearning for new parties, Millennial ca...

In recent years, the issue of widening income inequality has ignited a national conversation. It perhaps reached a fever pitch during U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president, as millions of low-income donors donated time and time again to the self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Yet, following his defeat to the Wall Street-funded campaign of Hillary Clinton, many of Sanders’ former supporters are now flocking to the candidacies of third-party candidates like Governor Gary Johnson and ...

There’s a big problem with the phone polls carried out by the major networks: They only represent the one percent of American voters who are willing to answer an unknown number. To combat this problem, some of the polls have started to do online polling. For example, the recent PPP poll, described by respected “stats guru” Nate Silver as “scientific,” runs 20% of its sample through an online panel. In an email, PPP staff disclosed that this panel is Qualtrics, which is used by social scientists...

According to the internet’s wayback machine, retired CBS broadcaster Bob Schieffer was a member of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) between September 2015 and December 2015. This is an oddly short period of service. Most other CPD members seem to serve for years. Co-Chair Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr., for instance, has been around since the commission's beginning, having co-founded the organization in 1987. While the other members' tenure doesn't go back that far, many have been around ...

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Friday that only Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their respective running mates will be included in the first presidential debates. The announcement comes less than two weeks before the first debate in New York. The Commission on Presidential Debates is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. According to the commission's website, its mission is: 1988199219962000200420082012 Yet, as many are now aware, the commission...

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) claims that it uses “nonpartisan criteria” to select participants for the presidential debates. However, publicly available information shows that one of the polls used to determine participants, the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, is run by Democratic and Republican pollsters. The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll is not actually run by those news organizations. It is run by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies. Both are partisan organiza...

This election season has seen groundbreaking engagement of young people from across the political spectrum. At the moment, many are looking beyond the two establishment parties to Governor Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. To introduce themselves to a national audience at the debates, Johnson and Stein need to reach a 15% average in a set of polls hand-picked by the Commission on Presidential Debates. READ MORE: Fox News Poll Drastically Under-Samples...

Are the polls representative? The case of independent voters In a year of disillusion with the two-party system, many Americans believe that the next president should arise from a third party. To gain exposure, Governor Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party hope to attain a 15% average in five polls that are picked by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD is a private organization that is controlled by former and current leaders of the two ...