In the latest round of the apportionment of the US House of Representatives following the 2020 Census, the State of New York lost a seat by an extremely small margin: if a mere 89 people were added to the state’s population of 20 million, the state would have kept the seat. Political observers pointed to the tendency of the US Census to undercount minority and immigrant populations as the primary culprit. However, New York’s seat loss is as much an issue of apportionment as it is of counting. The current apportionment method used by the federal government, Huntington-Hill’s method, is biased against more populous states such as New York. If an alternative apportionment method were used, such as Webster’s method, New York would have kept the seat. This article discusses four historical apportionment methods: Hamilton’s method, Huntington-Hill’s method, Jefferson’s method, and Webster’s method. These methods are evaluated against the three criteria of within-quota, consistency, and unbiasedness. The article shows that Huntington-Hill’s method has produced biased apportionment results in eight of nine apportionments since its official adoption in 1941. The article concludes with a recommendation for replacing the current apportionment method with the only unbiased divisor method: Webster’s method.

Drag has long been part of the LGBTQ rights movement. Drag performers play an important role as community leaders and political activists. Today, drag performers are also popular celebrities in the rest of society. This article explores the role of drag performers as community leaders and celebrities in the context of the 2020 presidential election. To understand this, we interviewed drag performers about their experiences using drag to mobilize voters. Research shows that Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts are more successful if they are led by volunteers and include trusted messengers while still being unexpected in some way. Drag performers are community leaders and volunteers and, when speaking about politics, deliver unexpected—and thus memorable—messages. The drag performers that we interviewed demonstrate the potential for drag artists to be effective GOTV messengers, in both the LGBTQ community and society more broadly.

Using survey data collected less than two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, we investigated why likely Trump voters would support Trump resisting the election results if he lost. We first used an experiment with randomized hypothetical popular-vote margins to test whether support for resistance was contingent on the results of the election. We also directly asked respondents who stated that they would support resistance to explain their reasoning in an open-ended response. In doing so, we gained insight into one of the most turbulent elections in American history and examined how support for resistance existed before the election due to both misinformation about voter fraud and hyperpartisanship that made Trump voters view the electoral process itself as illegitimate.

In January 2019, the House of Representatives voted 418–12 to respond to widespread bipartisan criticism of the inner workings of the legislative branch by creating a Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. This article examines the leadership, participation, and salience of the Select Committee by key reform stakeholders, including individual members, party factions, leaders, interest groups, and the national media that cover Congress. I identify bifurcated participation patterns that overrepresent the interests of junior members, party leaders, and Democratic Party factions. I also find limited salience of Select Committee activities among key stakeholders. The findings raise normative and theoretical questions about procedural reform and reveal a significant challenge to coalition-building efforts in future sessions of Congress.

The phrase “identity politics” has experienced a recent surge in political discourse. However, its meaning varies for highly informed political groups, leaving the term definitionally vague for the general public. Second-level agenda-setting theory can be used to explain how this phrase is communicated to the public by the mass media, a crucial disseminator of political information. We used a quantitative content analysis of major US publications to examine the frequency of this phrase’s use and how it is presented to audiences. We found a surge in mentions beginning in 2016. We also found that it is tied more to the political Left, but there also is a fair amount of linkage to the political Right. The phrase also is portrayed negatively. We advocate for using political communication theories to track emerging political terms in the future.