THE QUESTION Every four years, somebody points out a candidate can win the popular vote and still lose the election, it happened in 2000 and 2016. Somebody else defends the system as core to American federalism. Who's actually right about what it was built to do? WHAT WE KNOW The Electoral College came out of the Constitutional Convention as a compromise. Some framers worried a direct popular vote would let dense states dominate; others worried leaving it to Congress made the

THE QUESTION "Immigration is driving down wages for American workers." It's one of the most common lines in the immigration debate, and one of the least evidenced, on either side. What does the actual peer-reviewed research say? WHAT WE KNOW Most recent academic research finds immigration has, at most, a small effect on native-born wages overall, and often a modestly positive one. A meta-analysis of 88 studies from 1985 to 2023 found major variation by methodology, but the mo

THE QUESTION Every cycle, fraud claims spread fast, dead voters casting ballots, ballot-stuffing, noncitizens voting en masse. Believers cite anecdotes. Skeptics cite the lack of prosecutions. Neither settles it. So what would large-scale fraud actually look like in the data, and how would anyone catch it? WHAT WE KNOW Real auditors don't chase anecdotes. They look for statistical fingerprints: batches of ballots with identical or sequential signatures, turnout that doesn't a

THE QUESTION "Globalization destroyed the American middle class." You've heard it from the populist right and the progressive left alike. The U.S. lost 5.7 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Was that trade, automation, or something else? And who actually came out ahead? WHAT WE KNOW Both trade and automation played real roles, economists still argue over the split, and the honest answer isn't clean. MIT research from Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found rising Chinese