My favorite class to teach is POLS 302, Parties and Elections in the US. I am teaching it this fall. During an election. Anyway, yesterday and today, I was doing some prep for it. Basically, it’s an upper division course that covers elections and the three parts of political parties: party organization, party in the electorate, and party in government. (”PIG-PIE-PO” as I am sure my students tire of hearing.)
Well, here’s some of the PIG material for you. Along with some new visuals and a video!
Further, I figured with the PCSA markup coming Thursday, and some of my readers have been following along and reading my college athletics series, well, you suddenly care about Congress (we call this here a “teachable moment” in the biz) and you’ve now met the number 85.3 several times. That’s the share of 2025 roll-call votes that were party-unity votes, the highest CQ has recorded since it started counting in 1953. I leaned on it when the SCORE Act died its third death, and again in the PCSA targeting memo, where the whole analysis rested on a claim I kept asserting without fully showing: that on the standard yardsticks, the 119th Congress is the most disciplined, most polarized legislature ever measured.