We may think we know all about how we make decisions, but when it comes to political choices, they can hinge on a number of factors that we rarely notice. Brooke speaks with political psychologists and scientists to get to the bottom of why we make the choices we do at election time.

This is the time when most Americans start paying attention to the campaigns, but political reporters have been on the election beat for more than a year and, according to Politico's Dylan Byers, are just plain sick of it. Brooke Speaks to Dylan about why journalists can't wait for this election cycle to be over with.

Galaxie 500 - Summertime

Twitter has teamed up with Republican and Democratic polling firms, as well as another company called Topsy, to create a new tool called the Twindex. It offers a new way to gauge the political leanings of likely voters. Bob speaks with Adam Sharp, Twitter's manager for government and politics.

An avid political junkie and a thoroughly scarred presidential campaign watcher, Jason Pargin set out to save his fellow man.  He wrote ‘5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds’ and he explains to Bob how he came by his expertise the hard way. 

 

Errors - Tusk

This week Iranians returned to the polls for the first time since 2009’s presidential election, and opposition groups and reformers have called for a boycott of the elections. The government wants high voter turnout to show that the regime is still strong, and so they've attempted to clamp down on the media in order to get their version of the story out. Bob talks to Muhammad Sahimi of Tehran Bureau about the regime's efforts at message control. 

You can be forgiven for watching the republican presidential debates this primary season and wondering what it is all for. Canned answers.  False camaraderie.  But debates are much, much more informative than television advertising, says professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Brooke speaks with Jamieson who says the debates have informed voters and allowed candidates with little money to rise in the polls. Jamieson is the director of Factcheck.org and the new Flackcheck.org.

The results of Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts were a clear repudiation of President Obama’s health care reform plans. Or, a vote of frustration against federal government overspending. Or, a vote against Martha Coakley’s abysmally run campaign. In fact, choose whichever you prefer, because without reliable polling before or after ...

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts surprised many in media and political circles. But surely the local press and pundits who followed the race closely for months saw it coming? Not so much. Boston Phoenix political reporter David Bernstein describes what he, and the ...

We recorded this interview during the presidential campaign when the "Bradley effect" was getting a lot of media play. The term comes from Tom Bradley's 1982 California gubernatorial campaign, in which the discrepancy between polling (which predicted he was ahead) and the actual result (he lost) was attributed to white ...

On Thursday, 20 or so fundraisers, grassroots organizers and political strategists met in Virginia to discuss the future of the conservative movement, soon to be in exile from the federal government. Ross Douthat, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of Grand New Party, says a ...

Lee Atwater became one of the most complicated and successful Republican political operatives in history by employing a triple threat; spin when you can, change the subject when you can’t and if all else fails – mine the voters’ resentment, and fear, usually of blacks. Stefan Forbes, director of

The Barack Obama campaign's winning web strategy employed the latest in social networking to create a highly efficient update of old-fashioned politicking. Marshall Ganz designed the field-organizer and volunteer training systems that turned Obama's campaign volunteers into organizational leaders.

America voted and the world celebrated. Well, most of the world. The Week's Susan Caskie says that while there was much global exuberance, editorials in the Muslim world tempered expectations with a healthy dose of skepticism.

On Tuesday night, by 9:30pm anyone who was able to add could predict Barack Obama’s victory. But as Brooke experienced firsthand, many waited to mourn or celebrate until the authoritative voices on the networks called the race. Brooke reflects back on election night.

As the election comes to a close, many campaign reporters are looking back at their time on the trail. Michael Hastings, who was writing for Newsweek but quit out of disgust with the whole ordeal, explains why he couldn't ...

The bad news for traditional media is seemingly unending. From The Christian Science Monitor to TIME Inc. to ABC News to Radar magazine. In fact, when Radar folded last week, reporter Ana Marie Cox found herself with credentials to cover the ...

Despite the billions spent on elections, there's little research on how effective commercials, phone calls, or door-to-door efforts are at producing votes. Professor Donald Green, who's conducted hundreds of studies over the past decade, found that advertising and robo-calls do very little but that a novel, ...

On election day, whether you pull the lever, touch the screen or punch the card you always pull the curtain. But a number of people this year are advocating you make your vote more public by photographing it and uploading it to the web.

After these many months, the campaign season is finally coming to a close. All of the angles have been explored, all the polls parsed and the candidates thoroughly vetted. Or not. Politico’s Kenneth Vogel rounds up a list of documents that the so-called candidates of change never did ...

Everyone's speculating on whether this election will produce a Bradley effect, a phenomenon where white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate but actually pull the lever for the white candidate. The term comes from Tom Bradley's 1982 California gubernatorial run, but Democratic and ...