John Gasaway

New York

Reporter at ESPN

Writer: https://t.co/kYUmWv5Mr4 (it's free!)丨Author: @twelvebooks丨Election of 1840 revisionist丨Taught basketball analytics: @CU_SPS_Sports

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Articles

Keep March mad

2 months ago | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

I’m on the record as suspecting that a judicious expansion of the men’s Division I NCAA tournament bracket could be a good thing. Mine, however, is decidedly a minority opinion and I have great respect for the legions of commentators who beg to differ. In that spirit of respect here’s what is and is not working for me in the anti-expansion pieces I’ve seen.
Blue population centers are seeing red

Nov 17, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Picture yourself looking out at the world from atop the Freedom Tower in Manhattan. Never mind stereotypes about homogeneous coastal elites. The demographics of the adjoining counties actually vary significantly depending on which view you choose. Levels of educational attainment will fluctuate wildly across your panorama, as will census responses for race and ethnicity. The six adjoining counties you see also elect two different governors across 10 separate congressional districts.
Grover Cleveland is trending

Nov 12, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Over the last decade the most visited grave by far in Princeton, New Jersey, has been that of Aaron Burr. In addition to the usual stones and coins left as tokens, lyrics from Hamilton can be found scrawled on notes. All the while a few paces away a former president’s resting place has remained undisturbed and overlooked. No longer. Grover Cleveland is suddenly topical.
An amended Election Day primer on our electoral college

Nov 4, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

On the eve of Election Day the New York Times published a very helpful guide to the electoral college. Let it be said at the top that a “unique and bespoke system that I think nobody would create again today” is an excellent quote. Kudos to Wendy R. Weiser of the NYU law school’s Brennan Center for Justice. As we prepare for a Tuesday evening of riveting democracy theater, Now and Again is pleased to offer the following notes on the Old Gray Lady’s guide to our distinctive electoral apparatus.
What we can learn from one blue dot

Oct 29, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Every presidential election since 1992 has consisted of 56 separate winner-take-all races. While all 50 states and the District of Columbia tally every ballot from within their respective borders, it is Maine and Nebraska alone that choose to give their statewide winners just two electoral votes instead of all of them. Add to these 51 races five more: Maine’s 1st and 2nd congressional districts, and Nebraska 1, 2, and 3. The winning candidate in each of those five races receives one electoral vote.
A brief history of women voting prior to 1920

Oct 15, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

The most famous instance of a woman voting in a 19th-century American presidential election dates from 1872, when 52-year-old Susan B. Anthony entered her precinct’s polling place in Rochester, New York. There she encountered a startled election worker named Jones. “I made the remark that I didn’t think we could register her name,” Jones would later testify at Anthony’s trial. “She asked me if I was acquainted with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I told her I was.
Give Election Day randomness its due

Oct 10, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway |Dewey came to

British historian Norman Davies penned a sentence that doubles as a recap of every close election ever: “I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.” In the United States our distinctive method for electing presidents perhaps leads us to give the random elements short descriptive shrift.
Four measures of "close" elections

Oct 2, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Octobers in 21st-century years divisible by four tend to be times of uncertainty. An exception perhaps proved the rule eight years ago, when the month in question was instead suffused with what turned out to be badly misplaced certainty. In 2024, the uncertainty feels both pervasive and hard-earned.
The geography of electoral weight

Sep 22, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Welcome to Now and Again, where I’m returning to subjects I once wrote about regularly. It’s free. Subscribe!Every four years we hear that a voter in Wyoming carries roughly four times the weight in the electoral college of any single member of the electorate in California. And in every campaign season many of our more analytically oriented election commentators respond that, while this is indeed the case, the bottom-line importance of this state of affairs can be overstated.
"The most important contest in a generation"

Sep 11, 2024 | johngasaway.substack.com | John Gasaway

Welcome to Now and Again, where I’m returning to subjects I once wrote about regularly. It’s free. Subscribe!“The South faces its greatest opportunity in history,” Atlanta Constitution editor and future Pulitzer Prize winner Ralph McGill wrote in the summer of 1946. “Industry and progress are coming.”McGill captured the zeitgeist. Georgia was drawing the interest not only of “industry” but also of the national press and even political scientists.