Over the weekend, ICE agents repeatedly used the killing of Renee Good to threaten Minnesotans recording their activities. "Did you not learn from what just happened?" They thought it was a "lesson" and now they'd be left alone. Didn't work.

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T14:53:10.422Z

   

UNARMED WOMAN: “Shame on you.”ICE GOON: “Have you not learned from the past few days?”UNARMED WOMAN: “Learned what? What’s our lesson?”ICE GOON: *VIOLENTLY SNATCHES HER PHONE*(H/T @Mollyploofkins)

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2026-01-10T17:35:43.714Z

   

"You guys need to stop obstructing us, that's why that lesbian b*tch is dead!..They literally said, have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!"-2 ICE protesters arrested for legally following ICE tell our @jtcestkowski.bsky.social ICE slandered Renee Nicole Good. MORE⬇️

— Status Coup News (@statuscoupnews.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T22:26:52.492Z

   

“The driver, the ICE agent that had pepper-sprayed into the vents of my car, said, ‘You guys gotta stop obstructing us. That’s what that lesbian bitch is dead.”

   

REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official,… pic.twitter.com/xoWDjOctLe

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 13, 2026

 

Photo: Trump speaking on Jan. 6, 2026. (Flickr/White House)

Vice President Vance joined the daily White House press briefing on Thursday in order to talk about a new Justice Department position focused on fraud. But the details of that announcement (think Ronald Reagan’s dishonest “welfare queens” claims aimed at immigrants and updated for the social-media age) got buried by reporters’ questions about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis the day prior.

At the top of the briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had set the tone.

“The deadly incident that took place in Minnesota yesterday,” she said soon after walking to the lectern, “occurred as a result of a larger, sinister, left-wing movement that has spread across our country where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”

Vance similarly accused Good of being involved in an effort broader than herself. In short order, one of the reporters in the room called him on it.

“You just suggested that this woman who was killed was part of a ‘broader, left-wing network,'” the question began. But since it came from Fox News’s Peter Doocy, what followed wasn’t, “What’s your evidence for that.” It was, instead, “Who do you think is behind this ‘broader, left-wing network’?”

Vance tried to offer evidence anyway. Surely there was some undergirding organization, he said. After all, “when somebody throws a brick at an ICE agent or somebody tries to run over an ICE agent, who paid for the brick?”

A red brick costs 64 cents. From whose deep pockets was that fortune drawn?

Vance extended the idea to Good herself.

“How did she get there? How did she learn about this?” he said. “There’s an entire network — and frankly, some of the media are participating in it — that is trying to incite violence against our law enforcement officers.”

We’ve seen this before. When protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza emerged in 2024, the right scrambled to insist that there was some well-funded, interlacing organization behind it. (Then, the indescribably expensive thing protesters could somehow access was $20 tents.) The right often acts as though anyone who disagrees with their politics are brainwashed, deranged into action against their true interests by some nebulous conspiracy.

At this point, though, the charges from the administration are consistently narrow. It’s not just that there’s a “broad left-wing network.” It’s that grassroots organizing over the internet itself comprises that network. If you read a story that prompts you to want to protest ICE, if you see that activists are using whistles to alert community members to the presence of immigration officials, if you scramble to a local school to record immigration actions: Bad news. You’re part of this nefarious conspiracy.

In September, after the killing of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and his allies attempted to tie the shooting to an organized left-wing effort. Trump signed an executive order, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), that directed federal agencies to uproot “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence” that ply their trade “through a variety of fora, including anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”

NPSM-7 is titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” — precisely the allegations leveled against Good by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and others.

The ACLU and others have written about how this directive threatens free speech. We see how that works in the Good killing. Beyond the lies being told about Good’s intent, we see how Vance and Leavitt (and countless others online) loop her into a broad conspiracy simply by virtue of being in that place and apparently expressing opposition to ICE’s actions. Since her death, right-wing media has documented Good’s involvement in grassroots “ICE Watch” efforts. But this is effectively a post hoc rationalization for her killing — after Noem and others had already rushed to identify her as a domestic terrorist.

There is a difference between a community and a terrorist organization. There is a difference between gathering information online and being indoctrinated. There is a difference between seeking to get involved and being a conspirator.

We should not assume that the administration and its allies are blurring those differences because they misunderstand them. We should assume, instead, that they are blurring them in order to increase the cost of engaging in the innocuous activities of grass-roots organizing.

Photo: A protest outside the White House this week. (Geoff Livingston/Flickr)

On Thursday morning, multiple major news outlets published analyses of videos from the killing of Renee Good by federal officials in Minneapolis. The New York Times. The Washington Post. CNN. Each neatly dispels the narrative offered by the Trump administration immediately after the shooting, establishing clearly that Good was not trying to run down ICE agents and, in fact, does not appear to have even injured any as she sought to escape.

This was obvious soon after the shooting. The videos analyzed by the news outlets were available Wednesday afternoon, showing precisely what the annotated and professionally edited presentations do. But the standard of evidence used by news outlets is stricter than the one used by a layperson, so it took longer for them to formally reach the same, obvious conclusion. It took longer for them to dismiss the White House’s presentations as false than it did for external observers, in part because they have an obligation not to be wrong that isn’t shared by regular people or, it seems, the president.

A gray zone emerges. As media outlets push to confirm what happened, people with access to much of the same information have already reached conclusions. Bad-faith actors — again including Donald Trump — are able to make flat assertions about what occurred that their loyal and/or incurious supporters accept. Critics of the administration coalesce around their own, more accurate understanding of events, at times chiding the media for being so slow in joining them.

In the days when news was published in daily newspapers or precisely at 6 p.m., this was less of a problem. Not only because there was no expectation of immediacy but because there didn’t exist independent systems by which regular people could view the same information as professional news-gatherers. But now there is, and an awful lot of framing and debate occurs in the space between an event and its being cemented as objective fact.

It’s a bit like election results, an analogy that I draw intentionally. Votes are cast on Election Day and, often, in the weeks prior. In some places, vote-counting continues for hours or days, creating a similar gray area. Initial results might suggest one thing and final votes another; voters and politicians are urged to wait for the latter instead of making assumptions about the former.

Sometimes, though, those voters and politicians know that waiting is disadvantageous. In 2020, Trump knew that, as more votes were counted, it was likely to mean more votes for Joe Biden. There was a plan in place to take advantage of the gray zone — to insist not only that initial information was correct but that subsequent information (that is, more votes) were suspect. Not only did Trump attempt to establish an election result before vote-counting was done, he tried to position the finalized vote totals as fraudulent because they differed from the premature story he’d presented.

We see this following news events, as well. As mainstream media slowly figures out what happened, Trump and his allies (particularly but not exclusively) rally around a story that comports with their politics. As more information comes out, that information isn’t used to adjust their position; instead, it’s used to demonstrate the bias and untrustworthiness of the media. If the final conclusions of the press don’t comport with their story, it’s the press’s fault, not the story’s.

We’ll see how the Good shooting evolves over the next few days. Recent history, though, suggests that Trump and others who are (grotesquely) attempting to blame Good for her own death are much more likely to decide that reality is inaccurate than that they themselves are.

Photo: Trump at a press conference shortly after the 2020 presidential election. (White House/Flickr)

They will lie about you and then kill you and they will kill you and then lie about you. 

And I don’t mean some ambiguous, imaginary “they” like the one the right invented and blamed for trying to kill President Donald Trump. I mean an actual they, a they that includes federal officials and federal law enforcement and Donald Trump himself. 

The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday was obviously preventable. Confronted by federal law enforcement officers on a snowy street, video recorded from the scene shows Good attempting to maneuver between a stopped car and an agent standing near her front bumper rather than face arrest. As the car moved forward, brushing the agent to the side, he drew his weapon and shot her. Good was killed. 

But Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem offered very different descriptions of Good’s actions. Noem called her a domestic terrorist and suggested that she’d targeted federal officers with her car. Official statements from DHS echoed these claims. Trump shared distant footage of the incident on the social media platform he owns, describing with words a scenario very different than what anyone watching videos from the shooting would have seen. 

Describing Good as part of a “Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” — she was a poet — the president claimed that she had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Based on the clip, he claimed, it was hard to believe the agent survived. Other footage, though, shows him walking to Good’s car and back to other federal vehicles before being driven from the scene. 

What’s striking about the administration’s response isn’t simply that it’s dishonest. A year into Trump’s second term and a year into this era of unshackled immigration officers, we should only be surprised if their initial presentations hold up under scrutiny. Instead, what’s remarkable about the immediate responses is that they include no statements of regret or sympathy. Hours after a federal agent shot and killed a young mother, the government couldn’t even be bothered to extend its condolences. This wouldn’t have made the effort to impugn Good’s life and actions any better, certainly, but it would at least indicate some sense of humanity. It would suggest that even critics of the administration live lives worth preserving and appreciating. 

This administration has no interest in offering that impression. Good, by virtue of being in a position of friction with federal agents, became an Other. And Others are not people for the administration and its allies to mourn. They are people to disparage and mock and accuse. 

The grand theory behind American democracy is that our elected officials hold power with the consent of the governed. This has led past presidents to seek to demonstrate their commitment to even-handedness, to treat those who voted for them and those who voted against them equally, as Americans. There’s an aspect of self-preservation to doing so: the president or his party might need those voters” support in the future. Usually, though, this approach was rooted in the idea that the presidency really was a position centered on the public as a whole. 

This is not how Trump governs. He tends to and cares about only his base, and only as long as his base is enthusiastic about him. He is not an American president but a MAGA president, someone who leads red states with magnanimity and leads blue states like the head of an occupying force. There’s no effort to build consent among his opponents. There is only an effort to redouble his support among his supporters. 

So he and his team and his allies lie. They take the tragic death of a woman who’d just dropped her 6 year-old off at school and turn it into an obviously false narrative about heroic federal agents fending off a deranged left-wing lunatic. And rest assured that they will continue to do so if need be, just as they decided that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life needed to be destroyed because they’d embarrassingly screwed up and deported him. 

The Trump administration empowered a federal officer to shoot a woman from close range, reportedly in the head, and then blamed the woman for her own death. They posthumously determined her to be an enemy of the state because they need her to be one in order to keep their supporters from questioning how Trump uses his power. 

They will lie about anything else they feel the need to lie about, too, and for the same reason.

Photo: A vigil in Minneapolis, Jan. 7, 2026. (Chad Davis/Flickr)

Over the summer, CNN included an unusual question in a national poll of Americans: How politically connected did they feel to others of the same gender, race or generation?

Most Americans replied that neither race nor gender were particularly relevant to their politics. Generation, though? Six in 10 said that they had a lot in common with others in the same age group — about the same percentages that said gender and race weren’t relevant to their politics.

There’s an interesting pattern here. Men are among those most likely to say that gender isn’t relevant to their politics. And White people are among those most likely to say that race isn’t relevant to their politics.

On seeing this, my first thought was a quote from sociologist Robert Terry that I’ve had stuck in my head for years (and that makes numerous appearances in my book): “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.” Men and White people hold disproportionate power in the U.S. and often (though certainly not always) reject the idea that gender and race play a role in their doing so. Their rejection of shared politics with peers might reflect a rejection of the idea that such commonality offers political utility.

How, then, do we explain the results by generation? Older people also hold disproportionate power in the U.S., in part thanks to the growing size of the over-65 population. (I guess I’ll once again point to my book on this subject.)

Well, something interesting happens if you break out the generational splits by party. Democrats (and Democrat-leaning independents) are more likely to reject generational commonality as they get older. Older Republicans (and leaners) are more likely to endorse commonality.

This undercuts my original thesis about the response being downstream from power. After all, an obvious explanation for the inverted trends by party is that young people are more heavily Democratic and old people more heavily Republican, meaning that young Democrats do have more in common with people of their generation than do older Democrats. The same holds for older Republicans, relative to younger ones. Older Republicans, meanwhile, are certainly not lacking for political power.

Maybe, then, what’s being tracked is perceived power. Maybe groups that feel less powerful (regardless of how accurate that is) perhaps see common political concerns with their peers.

If we look at gender and race by party, the picture doesn’t get much clearer.

Democratic (+leaning) men are more likely to say gender isn’t relevant to politics than Republican men and White Democrats are more likely to say that race isn’t relevant than White Republicans. If you squint, you can see how that comports with the revised thesis — the GOP is, at the moment, heavily focused on the false idea that White men have been targets of systematic repression — but it’s not terribly clear.

Which is probably the best place to leave it: Sometimes one set of numbers doesn’t answer all of the questions we might have.

Thanks to Ariel Edwards-Levy for sharing more-detailed breakdowns of the data.

Image: From my 2023 book, a map of where baby boomers lived in 1990 (dashed-line circles) and in 2020 (solid lines).

The report on President Trump’s health published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday was not particularly reassuring. The president has shown increasing signs of aging, the Journal’s reporters noted — unsurprising given that he’s the oldest person ever to have been inaugurated to the position. He continues to eat poorly and to adhere primarily to his own medical advice, a dubious approach for someone coming up on his 80th birthday.

But, of course, Trump spun the report on Friday morning as a complete exoneration of any concerns. On the social media platform he owns he wrote that his doctors had asserted that he is in “perfect health” — an assertion made in the article not by his doctors but by Trump himself.

Trump also asserted that his mental acuity has been tested three times, and that he “ACED” the questions the cognitive exam posed. Rather than providing reassurance, though, one might wonder: Why is Trump’s mental fitness being tested so often?

The answer to that question will probably be unsatisfying for both Trump supporters and Trump critics. He isn’t being tested for cognitive impairment particularly frequently; he’s just talking about old tests a lot.

Here is a timeline of the three reported tests.

January 12, 2018

The first exam was conducted during his first term in office, back when his personal physician was still Dr. Ronny Jackson. During a press conference, Jackson informed reporters that Trump had been given an annual physical and, while delineating the elements of the examination, noted that Trump’s cognition had been screened.

“A cognitive screening exam using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment was normal, with a score of 30 over 30.”

This is not atypical, given that Trump was already in his 70s at the time. What was unusual was that Trump seized on this test as being evidence of his cognitive superiority — which, as I’ve written, is a bit like bragging about your superhuman physicality because your covid test was negative.

Sept. 13, 2023

The next cognitive exam was conducted during the Biden administration, after Trump had already declared his intention to seek reelection to the presidency.

pic.twitter.com/ibBepwOC2e

— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung) November 20, 2023

Again, this is a normal examination for a person who is 77 years old. But it also allowed Trump to elevate his successful navigation of the screening process to suggest that Joe Biden ought to be public with his own results.

April 11, 2025

Trump’s most recent cognitive test was not, as his post on Friday might suggest, conducted recently. Instead, it was given to him after he’d returned to the White House, during a physical last April.

A report from Trump’s current physician detailed the test in sterile language.

Trump had a follow-up exam in October of last year, during which he received seasonal vaccines and in preparation for international travel. A report from the doctor after that examination does not suggest that it included a cognitive screening.

In the abstract, that makes sense. Such tests are currently recommended annually in the absence of any signs of cognitive impairment.

Whether insisting that a test passed nine months prior constitutes a recent measure of cognitive fitness should be considered a sign of impairment would, I suppose, be up to the doctor to judge.

Photo: Trump grins at Mar-a-Lago in December. (White House/Flickr)

During a tour at my son’s new school this summer, another father struck up a conversation. He asked about my son’s reading and described his efforts to get his child to pick up books more frequently. A key problem, he insisted, was that kids weren’t instructed as they had been when he and I were young: no more recitations and writing drills, among other things. He had hired an outside tutor in order to make sure that his child was learning the way he thought they should learn.

Perhaps it’s because I have friends who are teachers or perhaps it’s because I spent some time working in an elementary school, but his approach struck me as ridiculous. Teachers in public schools have spent years learning about teaching methodologies before they even get into a classroom and then hone their techniques as they teach. They necessarily have a much better sense of effective teaching methodologies than does some guy who hasn’t been in elementary school since he was a student during the Reagan administration.

This exchange has popped into my mind sporadically over the past few months, and I’ve come to believe that my response to his insistence wasn’t really a function of who I knew or my experience. It was, instead, a recognition that the world evolves and changes and that how things were is never necessarily better than how things are.

It takes a long time for people to recognize that the world isn’t static. Some probably never do. We are born into a world and learn how the world works as we age and then feel as though we have a handle on things. But the world, frustratingly, has kept on changing and evolving, until the world that we understood has new tweaks and gaps and systems that we don’t recognize or immediately understand.

That’s not what we don’t recognize, really; everyone knows that things change. What we don’t recognize for a long time, if ever, is that even the static world into which we were born was itself a product of change. The static reality that we had a firm grasp on by the age of 10 or 15 was someone else’s bizarre new way of existence that made no sense and was probably not all that sensible. We plunked into a constantly shifting timeline but only really recognize the shifts that diverge from the world we first learned about.

I suspect — and I’ll admit to probably being somewhat parochial here — that this understanding of having been plunked down into a roiling, churning reality probably comes more quickly to people who live in environments where such change is a constant. My wife and I took our kids down to Soho this morning, a Manhattan neighborhood near where she and I used to live. Walking around was a constant stream of “this used to be X” comments about buildings and storefronts. The places that hadn’t changed were the exception.

This is the nature of New York City. I imagine that it is much less the nature of, say, a small town in an agricultural region. I imagine that in such places, with fewer things to change and change happening at a less rapid pace, it’s harder to see change as the constant and easier to see it as anomalous.

I could spin this out into some observation about politics and American culture, but it’s Dec. 31 — about seven hours, as I write, from the new year. I’m writing this in part because the trip to Manhattan reminded me that things change but that the ship of Theseus is still the ship of Theseus. This year has been one of personal change extending far beyond my son’s new school. It is reassuring to remember, to recognize that the universe is chaos, not order. Change is eternal. And it is not necessarily change for the worse.

So trust yourself. And, for God’s sake, trust your kid’s teachers.

Photo: Goldberger’s Pharmacy on 1st Avenue, as it looked in 2016 (and photographed by me). Below, via Apple Maps, what it looks like today.

I’ll cut to the chase: No.

We as Americans do have the habit of being selective about how we describe the motivations and priorities of voters. Most people cast their ballots in support of candidates from the party with which they agree, rather than engaging in a complicated analysis and ranking of policy positions. (This, in fact, is a central reason that political parties exist!) When a candidate loses or wins, however, they — and their supporters — and their detractors! — often ascribe the victory or loss to specific things that they advocated or opposed. If they ran on putting billboards on the Washington Monument and were elected because their opponent was caught on video abusing a puppy, the now-inaugurated candidate will happily inform the public that they must put a Pepsi logo on the National Mall because it’s What The Voters Wanted.™

Over at Bluesky today, there was a little flurry of a debate over the extent to which supporters of Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy were explicitly supportive of the sweeping deportation effort that’s now underway. One side of the debate argued that Trump (and his surrogates) spoke frequently about deporting millions of people; there had even been signs at the convention reading “Mass Deportation Now.” The other side noted that conventions are only rarely considered by the voting public, and that many people voted for Trump for reasons that had nothing to do with any promises about deportation. (Like, for example, inflation.)

Again, the latter argument is correct. And we know that because Trump voters themselves indicate that they oppose the sort of deportations that are underway.

Even before Trump took office in January, polling showed a wide gap between support for deporting any immigrant who was living in the country without proper authorization and deporting those who’d committed crimes. The specific numbers depended on the wording of the poll (see results from AP-NORC and the Wall Street Journal below), but the gap was consistent: Far more people endorsed narrower deportation efforts than broader ones.

Those numbers weren’t broken out by party, however. So let’s look at June polling from YouGov, which presented various deportation scenarios to respondents.

Again, we see that deportations of immigrants convicted of crimes enjoys wide support. But support declines under different circumstances. Only a quarter of Americans — and only half of people who say they voted for Trump last year! — support deporting immigrants who have kids that are citizens. Less than half of Trump voters support deporting people who’ve lived in the country for years without committing crimes.

I’ll note that this doesn’t mean that half of Trump voters oppose deporting people who’ve lived in the U.S. for years without committing crimes. In fact, only a third do; the other 20 percent say they aren’t sure if such people should be deported.

But it is clearly not the case that Trump voters supported sweeping deportation of immigrants regardless of circumstance back in June. From that, it follows that it is unlikely that most of them supported such a sweeping deportation strategy last November, when they were casting their ballots. Some did, yes. But it’s very unlikely that most did.

I’ll add one last thing. While I was still at The Washington Post, I occasionally wrote about Trump’s deportation policies and looked for images from the convention of people holding those “Mass Deportations Now” signs. As it turns out, this was not easy to do. They were not ubiquitous or constant; I believe (and am happy to be corrected) that they were trotted out for only one part of one night.

Meaning that while they came to represent Trump’s position in the eyes of his opponents, it’s probably not the case that they represented the views or understanding of most of his supporters.

Photo: Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 26, 2025. (White House/Flickr)

Every so often, I Google the names of my grandparents. The internet keeps expanding backward as more pre-internet information is digitized so it’s interesting to see if anything else has surfaced.

I wasn’t lucky enough to spend much of my adult life with them or wise enough to spend more of time with them when I could. Swimming through the internet allows me occasional glimpses of slices of their lives, from Census records documenting their existences to tiny vignettes that emerge solely through the twin coincidences of having at one point been documented and that documentation being digitized.

A few months ago, for example, I did a search for my grandfather, Elwood Glass. In the past, I’ve uncovered his name in advertisements related to his work recruiting employees at Sohio or as a member of the American Chemical Society. Did you know that local newspapers used to document people coming to town for visits? Well, they did.

My most recent search, though, uncovered something different: a mention from a 1979 Cornell University alumi magazine. Both he and my grandmother attended Cornell, graduating in 1938. And 41 years later, their classmates were treated to an unusual update on their lives.

A lovely family tradition is that of Flora (Daniel) and Elwood Glass ’38, described in a recent issue of Woman’s Day magazine. Each year, for more than 30 years, they have saved their Christmas tree, cut the trunk in small pieces, and written the year in pencil on the cut ends. On Christmas Eve, the family (five grown children and—at last report—six grandchildren) gathers in front of the fire and throws into it a piece from each year’s tree.
Each child puts on a piece from his birth year and those from special years such as college graduation, marriage, etc, and now the grandchildren put on a piece from their birth years as well. The children who celebrate Christmas in their own homes have also started this beautiful custom.

What struck me about this update wasn’t that it offered some new information about an interesting part of their lives. What struck me, instead, was that this is a tradition in which I still participate.

---

In my garage, I have ten chunks of wood, each a segment of a Christmas tree from each year of the past decade. When I’m taking our tree down after Christmas, I cut about eight inches off of the trunk, adding it to the collection. By the following Christmas Eve, it is seasoned and dry, so I write the year on the base with a marker — and then cut a slice off of it and each of its predecessors.

The night before Christmas is one of the few days each year on which we use our fireplace. I start a fire and my wife and (admittedly reluctant) kids sit around it. I have a file on my laptop that records the events of the years that correspond to each piece of wood — itself a modern update to the heavily scrawled upon piece of paper my grandfather used to use — and I read out what happened in that year. Or, at least, what we thought was important to include; the ceremony (such as it is) ends with our figuring out what events of the current year should be included on the list.

As the Cornell alumni magazine suggests, someone is picked to toss the piece of wood from each year into the fire. New jobs, the kids’ birth years, etc., are reserved for the person for whom the year was the most meaningful.

When we would do this at my grandparents’ house as a kid, there were decades worth of logs (or, in some cases, small slivers of wood) and often more than a dozen people vying for the title of most significant year. At our house these days, the lucky person is generally whichever of my kids wants to throw it in, since a lot of what’s documented occurred before they were born. But that’s the point: It’s a way of documenting and sharing family history that they otherwise don’t know.

Which brings me to the other interesting part of that 1979 update about my parents: That at some point in that time period, this family tradition had earned a write up in a national magazine.

---

My quiet hope was that this mention would turn out to have been some multipage spread, one in which a photographer from Woman’s Day came to my grandparents’ house in Cleveland Heights and took pictures of the process. I remember certain parts of that house distinctly: the green, high-pile carpet and yellow chairs in the living room; the pervasive, slightly acrid smell; the low-ceilinged attic stairs with the bookshelf of kids books on the landing. To be able to see a photo of that space, much less of my grandfather’s list (where did that end up?) would be remarkable.

But this meant tracking the article down. It meant, most likely, another attempt to see how much of the past the internet has already absorbed.

I was hampered by the vagueness of the reference. The alumni magazine was dated February 1979, suggesting that the Woman’s Day issue was probably during the preceding holiday season. At that point, the magazine came out monthly, and I tracked down the November 1978 and January 1979 relatively easily. The latter cost me $5 to access a downloadable PDF — a gamble, since it was unlikely that the magazine would be presenting Christmas tips in January (much less that the alumni magazine worked on such a relatively quick turnaround schedule). And, sure enough, the mention of my grandparents was in neither.

The most likely issue, of course, was the December issue, but I was having trouble locating a digital version of it. There was one accessible through Proquest, a clearinghouse of old periodicals that I could access from the New York City Public Library, but that meant carving out time to head into the city to do so. I set the project aside for a few weeks.

As it turns out, though, no such trip was necessary. Picking the idea back up earlier this month, I remembered that the NYPL allows people outside of the city to get library cards. I did so, allowing me to log into Proquest remotely.

The story about the fireplace logs wasn’t in the December 1978 issue. It was in the December 1977 one, featured in a section of household tips called “Neighbors” just across from a cigarette ad.

MEMORY TREES
Each year for over thirty years we have saved our Christmas tree, and after winter-mulching perennial plants and small shrubs with the lopped-off branches, my husband has cut the trunk into small pieces, each with the year written in pencil on the cut end. Then every Christmas Eve we gather in front of the fire and throw into it a piece from each year’s tree for all those thirty-odd successive years, remembering as we do so the major events of the year. Each child—now grown, of course—puts on the piece from his birth year (as the grandchildren are beginning to do too) as well as from years that held special events for him-college graduation, marriage and such. Thus each Christmas Eve becomes a time filled with happy memories of all the years we have lived in this house. Now the children who have Christmas in their own homes are starting the same custom for their children, and last year when for the first time we spent Christmas with a child’s family, they gave us part of their tree to take home and add to our collection so we could have an unbroken sequence.
Flora D. Glass, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

No photo of the family or of my grandparents’ house, but still a wonderful window into their lives. It’s very fitting that my grandmother would go into unnecessary detail about the handling of the old tree; she was an avid and careful gardener. Just reading the brief description allows me to visualize crowding around their fireplace on that green carpet, my mother, sister and me debating my cousins and their families about who deserved to throw in a particular sliver of log.

I would love to know how this came about. Not only the tradition, the origins of which are murky to me. (Was it something my grandparents themselves had inherited? Or was it something they invented, like saying “Asciugamani!” when toasting — Italian for “hand towel”?) But why did my grandmother send this in? Was she reading Woman’s Day when she spotted a call for family traditions? Perhaps she sat down to type it up at a typewriter in the small office at the top of the stairs — a room that I remember as being off-limits to the grandkids but that we lingered around anyway to review the framed family tree that hung on the wall just outside of it. I remember her and my grandfather as being fairly reserved, but this was obviously a notable enough achievement that it warranted sharing with the other alumni of Cornell University.

Holding the magazine in my hands, I had another thought, one that I’ve had often before: What would my grandparents think of me? What would they have said to me? What might they have told their friends? This is an under-appreciated part of what happens when we lose loved ones: We not only lose them but we lose the bond between them and us. We’re left imagining what present-day interactions might have been like — a longing that’s being exploited by those AI-grandparent apps.

This is a large part of why I was Googling my grandparents in the first place. It’s an effort to add onto the piecemeal memories I have of them with whatever other information exists out there. It’s an attempt to build as complete a picture as I can of people I didn’t really know well, besides what I picked up during visits … or as we were throwing logs into a fire.

Then, as I was holding the magazine, I realized that it was itself the endpoint of a connection between my grandmother and me. I, like her, find enough value in the tradition to share it with others, as I have on social media each year since the pandemic. Without knowing that she’d once done so, I sat at my own keyboard in my own office and sent out a message to the world about a thing that our family did that was important to me. Across a half century and halfway across the country, the same impulse from grandmother and grandson.

And now this essay about it, which will have to substitute for the alumni magazine.

A family tradition: pieces of Christmas trees from past years that are burned as we talk about the highs and lows of those years. pic.twitter.com/2cKmG35GsY

— Philip Bump (@pbump) December 24, 2021

Header photo: The segments of tree trunk that we used for our 2024 tradition.

Americans went to bed on Saturday night with news that a shooter had killed two people at Brown University and woke up on Sunday morning to news that gunmen had massacred 16 people on a beach in Australia. The terror and disgrace of gun violence, hours apart on the opposite sides of the world.

The 16 deaths on Bondi Beach, where two men targeted Jewish people celebrating the start of Hanukkah, were the worst such incident in that country this century. There have been 10 mass-killing incidents using firearms since 2001; more people were killed and wounded on Sunday than in the other nine mass-killing incidents combined.

Here, I’m using a definition of “mass killing” that includes incidents in which at least three people were shot to death, excluding the shooter. This definition is certainly debatable, but it’s what I’m using because it’s also what’s used for Mother Jones’s database of shooting incidents in the U.S.

If we add mass-killing incidents in the U.S. since 2001, you can see that the Australian incidents are quickly dwarfed. (You can mouseover or click the colors to see each country’s incidents.) Nine of the 120-plus incidents in the U.S. since 2001 had larger death tolls than Bondi Beach. Three resulted in more injuries.

You might have noticed that the chart above doesn’t include the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history: the attack on a concert in Las Vegas during Donald Trump’s first term in office. That’s because it obliterates the scale of the chart on both axes.

What happened at Bondi Beach was horrible. It would also have been only the tenth deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this century.

It’s worth noting that the U.S. also has a significantly larger population than Australia. But U.S. mass killing incidents have been deadlier even relative to population. The incidents in Australia killed 1.86 people for every million current residents. The incidents in the U.S. killed 2.12.

In fact, the shooting at Brown University was relatively unremarkable in the context of American gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 22 incidents in which more people were killed in a mass shooting (defined as an incident in which at least four people are shot) and 24 incidents in which more people were wounded this year alone.

The incident at Bondi Beach was only the second-worst mass killing in Australian history. The first was a shooting rampage in 1996 that left 35 people dead. In the wake of that incident, the Australian government implemented a number of strict limits on firearms possession, helping to tamp down incidents like the one this weekend.

Following its more numerous massacres, the U.S. has not done the same.

Photo: An AR-15 at a range in Connecticut. (National Archives)

It remains the case that a good way to learn how people feel about things is to ask them. So you don’t have to simply assume, say, that people are hankering to work up a sweat before hopping onto a six-hour flight or that they think the central failure of the airline industry can be summarized as “sweatpants.” You can just contact a bunch of people over the phone and online and ask them to tell you what it is that they are concerned about.

Which is what YouGov did. And what they found is probably not surprising: The things that people find most annoying about flying are prices, delays and discomfort.

In fact, more than 6 in 10 Americans pointed to ticket prices as a major problem with flying. Half said the same of cramped seats, delays, hidden fees, and staffing shortages (which, of course, lead to delays). And waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom of the list came “passengers dressing too casually,” which only 8 percent of respondents described as a major problem.

I’ve highlighted it above because it’s useful to contrast that issue (such as it is) with other highlighted ones, like delays and fees. Delays and hidden fees are very much issues over which the administration and the Transportation Department have some influence — yet Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has instead repeatedly cajoled people into spiffing up before jumping in their C-group Southwest seat to Bozeman.

On most of these issues, by the way, there isn’t much difference between Democrats and Republicans. When looking only at those with an opinion, we see that the biggest gap in opinion between Democrats and Republicans is on the availability of ground transportation at airports, which is perhaps related to the fact that residents of big cities (where traffic is often more of a problem) are more likely to be Democrats.

The next two biggest partisan gaps are on a lack of aircraft safety — where Democrats, critical of Duffy, see a bigger problem — and on this issue of attire, where Republicans are more likely to offer complaint. (Just after that comes a probably correlated partisan divide, with Democrats being more likely to complain that dress codes are already too strict.)

The takeaway here, though, is that less than half of Republicans see attire as even a minor problem. More than half say that prices are a major problem, including a majority who identify hidden fees as a major problem with flying.

I’m afraid I have some bad news for them on each of those fronts.

Photo: What flying looked like in the 1950s — at least in a British Overseas Airways ad.

Last night, instead of going to bed slightly earlier than usual, I decided that I would instead watch (yet again) the 2006 Alfonso Cuarón film “Children of Men.”

This is a film that evokes strong feelings. It is at best bleak; its ultimate triumph (spoiler alert) sees the protagonist floating through the fog in a small boat. The plot centers on the collapse of humanity and it is resolved with “well, maybe not”? It is not a fun movie, but it does seem fitting for a dark Sunday evening.

So, anyway, that’s what I put on. As it started, I was surprised to realize that it was set in an increasingly approaching future: the once distant year of 2027. Filmmakers are both advantaged and disadvantaged by being unable to completely predict the future. It means that, once that future arrives, we see how far off the mark their predictions might have been. That deviation from reality, though, also means that films set in what was once the future still seem futuristic once that future becomes the past.

When I recently rewatched the original “The Running Man,” a few months ago, I was similarly surprised that the “future” had come and gone. Released in 1987, it was set three decades later — meaning nearly a decade ago. While some aspects of that movie matched the reality of 2017 life (enthusiasm for reality TV foremost among them), it was otherwise … a bit off the mark.

So I assigned myself a project: Find movies set in the future and compare their release dates to the years in which they were set. Which futures are now past? Which are looming? Which aren’t even close to arriving?

The chore of figuring out which movies might qualify and the data on setting and release dates was made infinitely easier by the existence of a Wikipedia page documenting movies set in the future. Some of the included films are dubious (“Home Alone”?) but it was useful for what I had in mind.

So, below: When future-looking movies were released and set, ranked by setting date. I pared the Wikipedia list down significantly, using a few criteria:

• No superhero movies, because who cares.
• The plot had to depend to some extent on the film being set in the future.
• The setting had to be a specific year, not a range or multiple years.
• It had to be a movie I’ve actually seen.
• Only one movie per franchise.
• If I wanted to ignore any of those rules, I could.

Here is the result.

It’s fun to imagine that these movies are all set in the same future. That the train in “Snowpiercer” is also trying to outrun the cyborgs from “The Terminator.” That RoboCop was abandoned so D.C. instead turned to the precogs in “The Minority Report.” That “Avatar” and “Elysium” document different parts of human space exploration in the same year.

There are actually nearly a dozen films on the Wikipedia list that are set in or around 2025. I included only “Her” because of the criteria above — and because it is one of the rare future-set films that actually came close to predicting the actual year in which it was set. (That it was released relatively shortly before that future probably helps.)

“Children of Men” will not prove as prescient, mostly because there have been children born since 2009. The element of the film that centers on the British government rounding up and detaining immigrants, though? Perhaps a bit closer to the mark.

Photo: Promotional still for “Children of Men”. (Universal via IMDB)

The always informative Aaron Reichlin-Melnick brought the Deportation Data Project site to my attention. It does what you would think, providing aggregated data on detentions and deportations undertaken by the federal government.

Obtained directly from the government, the information is useful in part because it is broken down into a number of different categories. One can see, for example, the prior criminal histories (if any) of those arrested by ICE. Data are also broken down by state, date and disposition; if there’s information provided by the government, it’s indexed and available for perusal.

Granted, it’s a bit hard to peruse in its raw, tabular form. So I created a quick interactive, displaying monthly totals by state and category. Want to see arrests by criminal history in Delaware? Want to see the percentage of arrests in D.C. that targeted people with criminal histories? Go for it.

Following Reichlin-Melnick’s lead, I also broke out the data so that you can look at all arrests in a month or just those of people who weren’t already in law enforcement custody. (ICE will often arrest and deport people who were already detained by local law enforcement agencies.) You can play with the tool below.

So far this year, there have been five special elections to the House of Representatives. Republicans have won three of those five races — not surprising, since they also won those three seats in last year’s general election.

What is surprising is that, in each of those five races, the Democratic candidate saw double-digit improvement on the final margin over both last year’s Democratic candidate and how Kamala Harris did in the district. On average, the races shifted 16 points to the Democratic House candidate and 17 points relative to Harris.

Those presidential results come from the essential site The Downballot, which has also tracked special election outcomes. Across those contests in 2025 (meaning, including state-level races), the average shift to the left has been about the same: 13 points.

The most recent contest, as you are probably aware, was in Tennessee’s 7th District on Tuesday. Again, the Republican Party held the seat, but much more narrowly than it or Donald Trump won it last year.

Final vote totals aren’t in yet, with the New York Times estimating that about 95 percent of the vote is in (as of the time I compiled this data). But it’s already clear that turnout in the Tennessee special was relatively high for a House special this year — and the Democrat still improved on last year’s margins by 13 percentage points.

It’s important to reinforce that there aren’t a lot of lessons to be drawn from a set of five elections. Everything that’s available reinforces the idea that Democrats will do well in next year’s midterms, certainly, but we should be cautious about using five unusual contests to assume that Democrats will overperform the GOP by 10 points next November.

But this is also why considerations of turnout are useful. One of the reasons that special elections are an imperfect predictor of future outcomes, of course, is that they usually involve fewer voters. If an election instead includes most or all of the vote total for a November contest, we might assume it’s a better indicator of how that district is likely to vote. There are a lot of squishy words there — all or most, better, etc. — but the idea holds.

In each of the five special House elections this year, the Democratic candidate received fewer votes than the candidate in last year’s general, just as the Republican candidate received fewer votes than last year’s Republican. But in each case, the 2025 Democratic candidates captured a larger share of their party’s 2024 House vote totals than Republican candidates did of theirs. On average, Democratic special election candidates got 52 percent of the 2024 Democratic candidate; the Republican special election candidates got 37 percent of the 2024 Republican.

In Tennessee, Democrat Aftyn Behn got 7 votes for every 10 the 2024 candidate for that seat got. Her opponent, Matt Van Epps, got about 5 votes for every 10 the Republican got last year.

There are a lot of reasons such a discrepancy might exist. Perhaps a lot of people who voted for the Republican last year backed the Democrat this year. Perhaps Democratic voters were more energized to turn out to vote. Perhaps it’s a function of the difference between last year’s specific candidates and this year’s.

Whatever the reason, the dual pattern — less drop-off for the Democrat and a shift to the left in the overall margin — are working against Trump’s party. Even in a race where Republicans managed to turn out some 100,000 voters for a special House election (as will likely be the case in Tennessee), those patterns hold true.

Comparing House races to House races seems like a better point of comparison than contrasting the House special elections with the 2024 presidential contest. But, if you’re curious, here’s that comparison.

In this case, the shift to the left in Tennessee was more modest than in the other four special elections. Republicans investing heavily in the idea that this means that higher relative turnout in 2026 will further erode the leftward shift in House races might scroll up a bit and notice that in Arizona’s 7th, where turnout was relatively modest compared to last year’s House race, the shift to the Democrats was about the same as in the relatively higher turnout in Tennessee.

We risk overreading all of this, of course. This is what happens, though: in the absence of concrete information about next year’s midterms, an election of enormous significance, we dig through whatever tea leaves litter the bottoms of our cups.

Above, you can see five leaves in two different cups. Have fun with your forecasting.

Photo: Tracking the results of the 1954 election. (National Archives)

Somewhat buried in the pre-Thanksgiving conversation, Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nyhan offered an interesting observation in an essay for the New York Times.

“[T]he scale of the protests” targeting Donald Trump this year, he wrote, “is still not as large as one might expect, given the severity of the threat. During President Trump’s first term, millions of people protested when the situation was far less dire.” He offered one reason for that decline: “the lack of young people.”

Nyhan pointed to YouGov polling that showed less interest in October’s “No Kings” protests among younger Americans than older ones. He contrasted that with the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in May 2020; then, younger Americans were more likely to tell YouGov that they’d participated in a protest.

I’ll note that this specific comparison is partly a function of interest. In 2020, YouGov polling shows that far more young people expressed agreement with the Black Lives Matter movement than did older people. This time around, older people — who are more likely to have lived through the Cold War struggle between democracy and autocracy — say they are more dissatisfied with the state of American democracy, the issue at the heart of the “No Kings” movement.

In his essay, though, Nyhan also points to another factor: a sense of hopelessness.

“The more persuasive explanation for the relative lack of young people in the anti-Trump, pro-democracy movement is that they are demobilized and demoralized. But it would be a mistake to blame them for this attitude. Older generations should instead recognize that the world we have created does not seem to offer a viable path to making change.”

This is almost certainly true. When Gallup reported that record numbers of young women expressed an interest in leaving the U.S., I noted that this was likely in part a function of feeling as though there was no means by which their frustrations could be addressed. Democracy depends on the idea that power jostles back and forth between interests. If you feel as though the system has excluded or marginalized you indefinitely, what’s the point of sticking with it?

Such a sentiment isn’t only detectable in protest apathy or an expressed (though generally not manifested) interest in emigrating. It’s visible in the prevalence of independent voter registrations among young people, in skepticism about the media as an institution and in the quick collapse of both Trump’s and Joe Biden’s approval numbers among the youngest Americans.

It’s also suggested by the broader contraction of young people’s engagement in politics.

I’m not referring to voting. Young people consistently vote less heavily than older Americans, for a number of largely structural reasons. (For example, young people often hold jobs that afford them less flexibility to cast a ballot and move more often, meaning that they need to re-register to vote and perhaps figure out where to do so.) But young voters were more likely to vote in 2024 than they were in 2008, once considered a high-water mark for young-voter participation.

But they voted more heavily still in 2020. And even with relatively higher voting rates in 2024, young people made up much less of the electorate than they do the adult population.

Again, though, that’s not what I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about other engagement with the political system.

The Cooperative Election Study is a national poll conducted around each federal election. It includes an evolving set of questions measuring how often respondents engaged in non-voting political activity: going to meetings, putting up a sign, participating in a protest, donating to a candidate.

On many of those metrics, young people — and older people! — indicated less participation in 2024 than they had in 2020 or prior years.

There were only two activities in which young people were more likely to report participating than older people in the 2024 survey: attending political meetings and attending protests. The percentage reporting participation in protests was down nearly 7 percentage points from 2020, the biggest drop among any of the three age groups. Meanwhile, the percentage of younger people who reported having engaged in none of the identified actions was up more between 2020 and 2024 than was the case among older respondents.

It’s worth noting that this was also true just among young people who identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents. In 2020, only 44 percent of them indicated they’d engaged in none of the identified political actions (compared to 60 percent of young Republicans and Republican leaners). In 2024, more than half of young Democrats indicated that they hadn’t engaged in any of the activities (while young Republicans held steady at 60 percent).

It has been a disheartening political moment for young Americans (who are more likely, for example, to oppose the government’s approach to the war in Gaza), for young Democrats (who watched a Democratic president about whom they were often apathetic be replaced by Trump) and for young women in particular (given the revocation of Roe v. Wade, among other things). The response from older Democrats has often been something like “well, you should vote!” which isn’t wrong, as such, but is still clearly not going to be seen as sufficient.

There’s another interesting aspect to the numbers here that is worth pointing out. Remember: young Americans were least likely to express dissatisfaction with democracy in the U.S. in YouGov’s recent polling … perhaps in part because they don’t expect any better. Maybe that will change after the 2026 election, a point at which — should democracy actually be functioning normally — power is likely to jostle back toward the left.

Photo: A “No Kings” protester in October. (~jar{} on Flickr under Creative Commons license)

It is a truism by now well-established that many or most Republicans will agree with President Trump, no matter what. There are issues on which parts of his base will go sideways (like on immigrant visas) but they (and the legislators they’ve elected to Congress) are generally content to clap along with whatever Trump is doing.

You might therefore find it mildly surprising that, in a poll conducted by YouGov in September, a plurality of Republicans expressed opposition to invading Venezuela — a possible action suggested by a build-up of American military forces in the area. More nuanced questions about U.S. involvement evoked more support (both from Republicans and overall), but in no case did at least half of Trump’s party say they supported deployments.

That was then.

Over the weekend, CBS News published new YouGov polling, showing that most Republicans now support military action against Venezuela. A large majority of everyone else opposes it.

What changed? Two things. First, the more recent poll eliminated the “not sure” option, forcing people to choose between support and opposition. Probably the most significant shift, though, was that Trump and his administration have more openly embraced the idea of launching military strikes, moving the idea from something abstract to something that has the president’s potential blessing. With that comes Republicans approval.

Before you accuse me of being cynical, allow me to point out that most Republicans also say they know little to nothing about Venezuela. So a chunk of Trump’s party that admits to not knowing much about the country is also supportive of going to war with it.

That said, Republicans still align with the public overall in thinking that Trump should get Congress’s approval for any action and make a stronger case for the need for action, something he hasn’t yet done. They are less likely to think those things are necessary than are Democrats or independents, but a majority still holds those views.

But it probably doesn’t actually matter. If, as has been hinted, military strikes are imminent, Trump’s supporters would be forced to choose between their interest in Trump’s building consensus and his having already taken action. As noted at the outset, history suggests that this wouldn’t be a particularly difficult choice after all.

However much the rationale echoes one the party has spent more than a decade rejecting.

Rep. Salazar on Venezuela: "We're about to go in … we need to go in … Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day" pic.twitter.com/S8c3hsDxEv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2025

Photo: Jets fly over the White House. (White House/Flickr)

It’s quite tidy how the whole thing worked out, in a way.

Democratic members of Congress, recognizing that President Trump would be more than happy to dispatch the military to aid his political objectives, created a video reminding U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen of the oath that they (including each of those six Democrats, all veterans) had taken to uphold the Constitution and the law. Trump, incensed at the idea that troops were being told to potentially disobey his directives — or, at least, incensed at right-wing covered that leaned on that idea —  furiously condemned the legislators on social media.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR,” Trump wrote, referring to the Democrats’ actions, “punishable by
DEATH!”

The Democrats didn’t say what illegal orders they feared. Perhaps they anticipated a call for soldiers to be illegally engaged against the public. Maybe they feared an unauthorized international conflict. Maybe the warning was offered in anticipation of Trump trying to use the military to keep himself or his party in power during or after an election. At the very least, we can say that it was presented out of concern that Trump would leverage his position to call for the use of deadly force against his perceived enemies.

Which Trump, posting on “Truth Social,” promptly demonstrated his interest in doing.

It’s been noted before but bears repeating now that members of the armed forces already swear an oath to do precisely what the Democratic legislators had demanded. Upon joining, they swear an oath to defend the Constitution and to obey the orders of the president — but that latter pledge carries an asterisk: they must obey orders “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” In other words, legal orders.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, a functional extension of the right-wing media conversation into the West Wing, defended Trump’s comments during her press briefing on Thursday by suggesting that some sort of investigation into the legislators was warranted.

“They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty service members,” she said, “to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.”

They were literally not saying that, but who’s counting. If the Trump administration depended on accuracy when it announced or called for investigations of its critics, there would be a lot less work for our nation’s grand juries.

What is clear is that Trump’s response was very sincere. This is a man, after all, who less than 48 hours previously had defended the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s role in the murder of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi by indicating that Khashoggi was to blame for his own death.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” he said on Tuesday in response to a reporter. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Trump has in the past shrugged at the deaths of journalists, a group for which he feels little affection. But the idea that someone who was disliked or controversial had somehow earned execution by a state actor? On Thursday morning, he extended that concept to a half-dozen folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

We’re more than a decade into Trump’s emergence in national politics, a trajectory that began with a wild, off-the-cuff tirade about the putative threat of state-directed criminal immigrants. Back then, other Republicans, believing Trump to be a crank or gadfly, quickly distanced themselves from his rhetoric. But that furious hyperbole captivated the Republican base, and declining to contradict Trump became a loyalty test. So Trump has pushed lower and lower, dragging a decreasingly trepidatious GOP down with him.

The problem is that we’re so used to this pattern that its effects are muted. This is the president of the United States suggesting that members of the opposition party should be killed because they took a relatively tepid stand against his obvious interest in exceeding his executive power. It is not as bad as actually trying and killing them, but it is a multitude of steps past what would have been considered acceptable rhetoric a decade ago. Or even ten months ago, really.

Given those past ten months, it is more than possible that actual charges might be filed by the Attorney General. So, a reminder: It is not the case that criticizing the president is treason or sedition, as he and his allies have often claimed. Nor is reminding members of the military that they took an oath of service to the country and its laws. Trump, though, sees the state as indistinguishable from himself (l’etat, c’est lui) just as he apparently sees the state’s coffers as indistinguishable from his account at Chase Manhattan.

Of course, there’s not much that can be done in the moment about Trump’s comments. Despite the fact that even a large chunk of Republicans now think Congress has ceded too much power to the president, the initial response from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — endorsing the idea that some sort of legal probe of the Democrats was warranted — suggests that no accountability will be forthcoming from that chamber. Perhaps this will be an issue in next year’s primaries or midterm elections, but there will be so many other things jockeying for voters’ attention, so many more recent things by then, that it’s likely this will barely warrant mentions by candidates.

The question is just how much further Trump’s rhetoric and actions will have slipped downhill by then.

Photo: Trump in the Oval Office. (Flickr/The White House)

Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana, shot his shot.

He took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that business leaders worried about the imminent mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani might consider his own state as an alternative. New Yorkers were going to embrace socialism, he wrote, and “we know what that looks like. It’s going to be a mess.” So why not swap the Hudson for the Mississippi?

Look, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, as Michael Scott once said. But there are at least two problems with Landry’s pitch.

The first is that the idea businesses and business leaders are about to engage in a mass exodus from the city is silly. New York is already enormously expensive, but rich people stick around because of its social and cultural advantages. “I’m going to leave the city” has been a threat so long that The Daily Show compiled annual examples stretching back to Barack Obama’s first year in office. Many of those examples featured clips from Fox News, the channel still based on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

The other problem is that Louisiana is a particularly unappealing destination for New Yorkers.

The Census Bureau compiles annual data on where people are moving within the U.S., the most recent of which covers 2023. From it, we see evidence of New York’s population drain, with 31 states and D.C. receiving more residents from New York than New York gained from those states. In total, about 178,000 more people moved out of New York to other states than moved from other states into New York.

Now that’s New York broadly, not just New York City. It’s safe to assume that many of them were moving from other parts of the state, where more than half of state residents live. Nonetheless, the data are fascinating, showing (for example) that 46,000 more New Yorkers decamped for Florida (for some reason) than moved from Florida back north.

That was the biggest differential between New York and other states, followed by North Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Many of the states that sent fewer residents to New York than they received are located in the Sun Belt, comporting with the pattern of Americans moving from (colder) Northern states to (warmer) Southern ones.

That said, eighteen states sent more new residents to New York than they received. Foremost among them was Massachusetts. But there were also a few Sun Belt states — including Louisiana.

In 2023, about 1,600 people moved from Louisiana to New York. Only about 500 moved the other direction. These numbers are roughly the inverse of migration between New York and Alaska — with more than twice as many New Yorkers deciding to decamp for the frozen North than for the Bayou State.

This doesn’t mean that no one will move from New York to Louisiana or that Landry’s pitch won’t convince some people to do exactly that. It simply suggests that there might be some other reasons that there were 43 states to which New Yorkers were more likely to move during 2023.

Photo: New Orleans from the air, 1943. (National Archives)

Over the weekend (and bleeding into the week), there was an interesting conversation on Bluesky about the geography of racism in the United States.

The discussion originated with writer Elizabeth Spiers, a native of the South who objected to the tendency of Northerners — particularly liberal Northerners — to wave off the region where she grew up. Yes, it’s conservative … but there are swathes of blue in the deep red. And, yes, there’s racism … but there’s plenty of racism in the North as well.

Spiers suggested that the more important distinction was not North-vs.-South but, instead, urban-vs.-rural. It’s an interesting argument — and one that we can test.

Well, to some extent. It’s a bit hard to measure “racism,” as such, since so few people (although not no people) are willing to tell pollsters that, yes, they think non-White people are somehow inferior. That said, there is a set of questions that is included in the biannual General Social Survey which I think helps us get there.

It presents respondents with four answers to the question of why Black people in the U.S. tend to have worse jobs, lower income and poorer housing than Whites. Americans are asked if it’s mainly due to discrimination, a function of “less in-born ability to learn,” due to less educational opportunity or because of a lack of motivation. As you can probably see, two of those explanations are generally in line with research (discrimination and lack of opportunity), one is at best racism-adjacent (they are lazy) and the fourth is explicitly racist (less ability).

We can break out responses to those questions over time by Census regions, pitting the North and Midwest against the South and everything from the Plains states west. This isn’t exactly the standard definition of “The South,” including Maryland and Delaware along with Texas, Alabama, and so on. But most of the respondents in the GSS/Census Bureau South are residents of the Deep South or former Confederacy.

Here’s the percentage of each region that expressed agreement with the reasons for racial disparity over time. Notice the big surge in attribution to discrimination about a decade ago — a documented function of the BLM movement.

You will notice that the line for the Southern states (pink) is lower than the line for the Northern/Midwestern ones (blue) on the responses that center opportunity and discrimination as causes. In other words, Northerners are more likely to cite those reasons than are Southerners. Southerners used to be more likely to identify the racist or at-least-almost-racist answers, but the gap has vanished in recent years.

We can also break down responses by race and community. If we do, looking at the discrimination and motivation questions, we see that Whites are less likely than respondents overall to point to discrimination and more likely to cite motivation. The same is generally true of rural residents. Urban residents are generally more likely to point to discrimination and less likely to cite motivation.

If we look at South-vs.-North and rural-vs.-urban directly, we see that the two differences have often moved in sync. But, to Spiers’ point, the gap between rural and urban is, at this point, wider (that is, further from the middle point) on all four questions than the gap between North and South.

The gap is particularly wide on the question about discrimination — probably the most politically polarized question, again because of the recent discussion.

Of course, race itself is often a more significant factor in politics. If we look just at the (Census Bureau’s) Southern states, it is the case that more-urban counties supported Kamala Harris by wider margins last year. But counties with the highest percentages of Black residents almost always cast more votes for Harris regardless of population density. The most rural counties only voted more for Harris than Trump when they had lower percentages of Black residents.

If we run the same comparison looking at White populations, the results flip. The least-White counties generally cast more votes for Harris regardless of whether they were urban or rural. The most-White counties cast way more votes for Trump, even when they were very urban.

Spiers’ point, though, is that rural, White racists are not something that exist solely below the Mason-Dixon line. Rural Northerners are only slightly more likely to cite discrimination and slightly less likely to point to motivation as reasons for economic disparities in the U.S.

And if you think there are no racists in Northern cities? Well, perhaps you didn’t pay as close attention to the Black Lives Matter protests as you thought.

Photo: Restroom for White men at Chickamauga Dam, 1941. (National Archives)

Polling, like anything else that involves human beings, is not strictly analytical. There is an emotional aspect to the results, a natural side effect of asking people how they feel about candidates or issues. That tendency is exaggerated in the current political moment (as the great Ariel Edwards-Levy has written), when partisanship runs high and polling offers Americans a non-Election-Day opportunity to express their enthusiasm or distaste for what’s unfolding in our country.

It is through that lens that we should consider new polling from Gallup indicating that 2 in 5 young women would like to permanently move out of the country. But we should not consider those numbers solely through that lens.

The Gallup finding is striking, if not sudden. The pollster has been asking a version of this question since 2008, finding that young people were consistently-but-only-slightly more likely to express interest in moving out of the U.S. than were older Americans and Americans overall. Since 2016, though — that is, since the year that Donald Trump first won election to the White House — the percentage of young women who’ve expressed that desire has surged.

It’s useful to remember that we’re not talking about one group of people who are changing their minds. A woman aged 18 to 44 in 2025 was not necessarily a woman in that age group in 2016, and vice versa. This shift likely reflects both an expressed decline in enthusiasm for the U.S. among women and an increase in the number of women who never would have expressed enthusiasm in the first place.

Gallup also found that there was a clear connection between interest in moving out of the U.S. and dissatisfaction with the country’s leadership. From 2008 until 2016, there wasn’t really a difference between those who approved and those who disapproved of the country’s leaders when it came to wanting to leave the U.S. Since then, though, a gap has emerged — one that is clearly tied to Trump’s role in government. 

In 2017, there was a 12-point gap in interest in leaving between those who approved and those who disapproved of the country’s leadership. That fell to 7 points in 2021, the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency — presumably in part because there were fewer young people frustrated with the country’s new leadership. This year, though, the gap surged to 25 points, with very few of those who approve of the country’s leadership expressing an interest in leaving while more than a quarter of those who disapprove saying they just might.

Again, they probably won’t; it is much easier to say you will move out of the country (or, uh, out of a city) than it is to actually do so. Put another way, the moving-away question is actually mostly a measure of that disapproval of leadership than of actual intent to move.

But it isn’t only that. It is also clearly a measure of how a large segment of the population feels as though America has failed them and — importantly — that they don’t have an obvious way to reverse that shift.

Gallup also looked at the level of confidence different age/gender groupings had in American institutions like the military and elections. Since 2015, one year pre-Trump, confidence among older men jumped by 15 points. Among young women, though, it fell by 17 points.

There is a theoretical solution built into the system. Americans can vote out politicians who are driving that eroded confidence and replacing them with politicians who can increase it. The solution, in other words, is democracy. And there exists an institution predicated on aggregating power to defeat Republicans like Trump: the Democratic Party.

Data compiled from the American National Election Studies poll shows that views of the Democratic Party among young women have dropped significantly over the past 20 years. In 2024, the most recent point at which the ANES poll was conducted, the average measure of warmth toward the Democratic Party fell below 50 (on a zero-to-100 scale) for the first time on record.

Since 2008, the average rating of the Democratic Party has fallen 13 points among young women (and 15 points among young men). If young women felt as though the Democratic Party was fulfilling its mandate to counterbalance the decline of American institutions, it’s probably safe to assume that those numbers would look quite different.

Again, American democracy is dependent on the idea that losses (and victories) are temporary, that power is shared with your ideological opponents over time and that you are only ever one election away from seeing the nation’s forward progress lurch back onto the path that you prefer. If, however, Americans feel as though that won’t happen, that democracy doesn’t provide any such corrective and that losses are not temporary setbacks, confidence in institutions will collapse alongside confidence in the experiment itself.

It is certainly true that the interest expressed by young women in leaving the country is mostly a reflection of their dissatisfaction with the country’s leadership. But it’s probably also in part a measure of something deeper and more worrisome: concern that America no longer effectively provides the sort of electoral checks and balances that it’s supposed to. That there won’t be any further correction to the country’s course.

Photo: No Kings protesters. (Susan Ruggles/Flickr used under Creative Commons license)

As I mentioned earlier this week, the poll numbers I’m paying the closest attention to at the moment are those showing President Trump’s support softening among Republicans (as opposed to the idea that his support is “collapsing” or “cratering” or whatever other descriptor is most effective at getting people to click links on social media). After all, Trump’s power relies heavily on Republican legislators sticking with him, something they do in large part because they’re afraid of his supporters. But if his supporters start to become indifferent? The dynamics shift.

On Thursday, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted a possible manifestation of that softening. In statewide races this week, exit polls showed that a chunk of people who said they voted for Trump last year decided this year to vote for the Democrat.

That is true. Exit polls published by CNN from California (where there was a statewide ballot proposition), New Jersey and Virginia (both of which had gubernatorial races) show defections among voters for both major-party candidates last year — but bigger shifts among Trump voters.

In California, 5 percent of Kamala Harris voters opposed Prop 50, a measure centered specifically on countering a Trump-backed Republican power grab. But 12 percent of 2024 Trump voters backed the measure.

In New Jersey and Virginia, a small number of Harris voters cast ballots for the Republican candidates for governor. But in each state, 7 percent of Trump voters supported the Democrat.

These aren’t huge numbers and are subject to margins of error. But that 7 percent jumped out at me because of another number that I spotted in another poll.

Asked by CNN whether their next congressional vote was intended as a referendum on Trump or not, a plurality of Americans said it was — to express opposition to the president. Among Republicans, you won’t be surprised to hear, most indicated that their vote would be an expression of support for what he’s doing.

A number of Republicans, though, said their congressional vote would be an expression of opposition to Trump. Specifically, 7 percent did.

What’s particularly striking about those results is the ratio between the responses. Most Democrats say their vote will be an expression of their views on Trump; by a 79 to 1 margin, that expression will be negative. Most Republicans also say their vote will express their feelings about the president. But only about 8 times as many Republicans say their vote will express support as say it will express opposition.

Again — as with the exit polls and as with the polling I looked at earlier this week — Trump still has strong support from most Republicans. But this is a country where the Senate and House are about evenly divided. In 2024, 19 House seats were won by Republicans whose margins of victory were 7 points or less.

And that’s not even accounting for the flip. Take 7 percent from Republican House totals last year and give those votes to their Democratic opponents? The House goes from a five-seat Republican majority to a more-than-30-seat Democratic one.

This isn’t how politics works, of course. It is, however, an example of what I’m talking about. If there are 30 Republican members of the House who are suddenly worried that their voters want them to take a harder line on Trump? Trump’s ability to strongarm his way through Washington gets much more difficult.

Photo: Trump descends. (White House/Flickr)

You can see why President Trump might not have been particularly worried about the government shutting down last month. During his first term in office, the government shutdown twice, once setting a new record in duration, but it didn’t really affect him politically. So Oct. 1 this year arrived without a funding bill and the government shutdown and Trump just moved forward with his second-term approach of doing whatever he wanted to anyway.

No prior president had ever seen more shutdown days during his presidency but he won reelection (eventually) anyway. So who cares?

That was all well and good while the government was still able to keep things running without obvious interference or hiccups. It’s probably useful, in fact, that shutdowns are now so common; many parts of the government know how to function without formalized funding, and that experience kicked in. But now, with this shutdown setting daily records for duration, those hiccups are starting to appear.

For example, Trump’s Transportation Secretary and fellow reality-TV veteran Sean Duffy appeared on Fox News this morning to explain how the administration would be forcing flight cancellations in 40 airports given air-traffic-control shortages.

Fox & Friends displays a graphic of the 40 airports where flights will be reduced starting today during interview with Sean Duffy pic.twitter.com/mszwDoqFLT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2025

As he spoke, an on-screen box showed the locations where those stoppages would occur: Boston, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas. Basically any major hub might see cancellations that are a function of the shutdown. Luckily, there are no major travel-focused holidays coming up, right?

Trump, at least, believes that the shutdown was one reason his party fared so badly in this week’s elections. He’s probably right, at least in part. But that was also before problems really started to manifest for the public at large.

Polling conducted by SSRS for CNN in late October found that most Americans, including most Republicans, view the ongoing shutdown as at least a major problem, with 3 in 10 Americans viewing it as a crisis.

Again, that was before this week. It was also already the case on Election Day that Americans were more likely to blame Trump and Republicans in Congress for the shutdown. Polling from NBC News makes that clear.

Granted, the difference between the parties was relatively narrow, as it was when CNN asked whether respondents approved of those groups’ handling of the shutdown. A majority of respondents disapproved of Trump, Republicans and Democrats.

Clearly, Republicans think that they can shunt blame for the negative effects of the shutdown onto the opposition.

“The Transportation Secretary yesterday said 10 percent of flights are going to have to be cut back because we don’t have enough air traffic controllers,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said this morning, “because Democrats chose not to pay them.” That was the gist of Duffy’s Fox News appearance, too: Democrats were forcing a “not-great situation” on the public.

Maybe that will work. It will certainly work in the right-wing media bubble that Fox News and the administration so assiduously inflate. If your media allies let you wave off an electoral decapitation as “blue states being blue states,” they’re probably going to be fine with echoing your insistences that it’s the Democrats fault that the Republican-run government isn’t delivering.

Not sure that will play well in general, though. For example, there are millions of people in red states and districts with Republican legislators who rely on supplemental nutrition assistance programs (SNAP) from the federal government — assistance that Trump has said he doesn’t want to provide during the shutdown. But according to YouGov polling three-quarters of Americans, including 6 in 10 Republicans, think he should.

Again, even before SNAP was halted and before the flight cancellations, Americans thought Trump and Republicans were doing a poor job of handling the shutdown. YouGov shows how quickly perceptions of Trump and the GOP’s performance have been slipping.

What’s interesting about this moment is that it marks one of the first points at which Trump’s upending of traditional practice becomes immediately tangible. He imposed (and removed and re-imposed) tariffs that drove up costs for Americans, but that has been slow to effect the broader economy and plucks money out of Americans’ pockets relatively discreetly. He slashed foreign aid and research spending but those, too, had non-immediate repercussions for most people. But the shutdown — which he himself says his party can end — is obvious and instant and increasingly so. There’s no wondering when the other shoe will drop. It’s wondering how many shoes will drop and who they’ll crush.

The pain is expanding. Trump and his party have ownership over it. At some point, the president might want to spend less time thinking about the ballroom or the arch or his extravagant parties or the bathroom renovation or gilding the Oval Office or ducking out to play golf and figure out how to actually run the federal infrastructure that he was elected to run.

Photo: The president shows gold things in a gold room to bored people. (White House/Flickr)

I am by no means the only person to have made this observation, but the point at which I knew Kamala Harris was in trouble last year was when the results in Virginia weren’t immediately obvious. As the hours dragged on, the fact that a state her ticket had won by 6 points four years prior was too close to call suggested that the shift away from the Democrats was larger than what had been expected.

On Tuesday, the state shifted back.

There’s been a lot made (including by yours truly) about the scale of the shift in Virginia. There’s a reason for that: in addition to being one of the few places where there were statewide races on the ballot, Virginia (unlike New Jersey) has a lot of counties and cities that represent different demographics and political tendencies. In other words, you can more easily get more detailed information about what happened in Virginia than you can for a lot of the other races that unfolded on Tuesday.

And, again, the shift since a year ago was dramatic. As of writing, there were only four counties or cities in the state that shifted to the right relative to the 2024 presidential election. In all of the 120-plus other places, the shift was to the left.

But the shift since the gubernatorial race in 2021 was even sharper. There were no counties or cities (as of writing) that moved right relative to four years ago. On average, they instead moved 13 points to the left.

You can see that on the (laughably huge) chart below. In 103 of the 133 counties and cities, 2021 saw the biggest margin for Republican candidates of any presidential or gubernatorial race since 2012.

If we compare the 2025 results with the 2012 presidential election, we can see the broader patterns that helped turn Virginia from reddish to bluish 20 years ago. Big shifts to the left particularly in the northern, D.C.-adjacent parts of the state. Big shifts to the right in more rural parts of Virginia, particularly the Appalachian west.

Since 2012, 75 of the 133 counties and cities in the state moved to the right. But the places that moved to the left have a lot more people.

One of the questions about the shift from 2024 to 2025 that Virginia can help answer is whether Trump’s improvement with younger and non-White voters (improvements that overlap) eroded this time around. If we group Virginia’s counties and cities into quartiles by age and diversity — that is, four groups from smallest to largest elderly population and four from lowest to highest White percentage — we can get a sense for what shift might have occurred.

For example, the oldest and Whitest counties voted for the Republican candidate by an average of 44 points on Tuesday. The youngest and least-densely White counties backed the Democrat by an average of 35 points.

(Importantly, there are 12 times as many people in the younger/less-White counties than the older/more-White ones.)

If we look at the average margin shift, the young/less-White counties moved the left twice as much as the older/more-White ones.

As you can see, given that the circles at left are so much larger than the ones at right, this was heavily a function of there being bigger shifts among younger counties. Age and party choice do tend to correlate (which is a subtle way of saying that older people are more likely to be Republican), but we’re talking about shifts in margins here, not vote totals.

The data from Tuesday night are literally incomplete, though it’s unlikely the vote totals will change substantially. It is likely, though, that we’ll learn more about the political shifts that occurred over the past 12 months as weeks and months progress. For now, we can simply say that 2021 was a high-water mark for Republicans in the state since 2012, with data indicating a particular shift back to the left among younger voters since 2024.

Incidentally, while 2021 was the Republican high-water mark, 2025 was the high-water mark for Democrats in about half of Virginia’s cities and counties. (For the other about-half, 2012 was the high-water mark.) From 2021 to 2024, all but four counties and cities in the state had already shifted to the left. Then all but four counties (different ones, if you were wondering) shifted further to the left in 2025.

The question is: What will the shifts look like 12 months from now?

Photo: The University of Virginia, seen from the air, 1934. (National Archives)

It seems likely that, once all the votes are in, somewhere around 10 million Californians went to the polls on Tuesday. That’s well short of last year’s turnout of more than 16 million, but last year there were a lot of things on the ballot, including the election of the next president. This year, in many parts of the state, there was only one thing on the ballot: a ballot initiative that would redraw congressional districts. And two voters showed up for every three Californians who voted for president in 2024.

It’s because of how that 2024 presidential race turned out. Donald Trump won, as you probably heard, and returned to the White House seemingly hell-bent on reshaping the entire country to match his vision of a centrally White, centrally planned extension of the Trump Organization. Realizing that midterm elections often go badly for new presidents’ parties, Republican state legislators began trying to wring a few extra House seats out of Census data where they could in order to help cement that vision.

California’s Prop 50 was an explicit response to the GOP’s effort to game the rules rather than win votes. More broadly, it was an opportunity for Californians to take action in opposition to the Trump administration, and they were very clearly happy to do so.

By the time Prop 50’s passage was announced — immediately upon polls closing in the state on Tuesday night — it was already clear that the night would be a big one for Democrats and a bad one for Donald Trump. In Virginia, Democrats swept statewide elections and added double-digits to their legislative majority. An expected-to-be-close gubernatorial race in New Jersey wasn’t. Democrats held three Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania easily. It was already going so badly that Trump preemptively popped up on social media to insist that the fault lay everywhere but with him, a sure sign that it was his fault.

While the scale was surprising, the outcome wasn’t. One of the easiest-to-predict eventualities after Trump eked out his victory in 2024 was that the pendulum would swing the other way. It was inevitable that the narrative of Trump reshaping the electorate and blah blah blah would be rendered lame by a big Democratic night. This is how politics works: A thing happens and people draw sweeping assumptions and those assumptions then get swept away.

That said, while the night was a success for myriad Democratic candidates and issues, it’s not clear how much success it augurs for the Democratic Party. It is the party’s job, after all, to collect and retain power for its members and its candidates. As we have seen repeatedly in recent years, repeated moments of backlash against Trump have not necessarily meant increased aggregated power for the party.

This is clearly due in part to the fecklessness of the party’s leadership, which in turn is due (in part) to the way in which the American political terrain has shifted away from the dynamics to which these established figures had grown accustomed. They’ve been doing politics one way but politics has changed. Their values and policies align with young people, particularly young women, but young people are at best apathetic about committing to the party as an institution.

It very much doesn’t help when, for example, the top Democrats in the House and Senate refuse to treat the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary as legitimate. We get it; Zohran Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist, an outsider to the establishment. But he won an easy victory in the primary and built a campaign in which young New Yorkers in particular were institutionally invested. His victory on Tuesday — winning a majority of votes, with the largest vote total since the 1960s — didn’t see as big a margin as Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial win in Virginia, but she wasn’t running against two people, one of them the state’s former governor.

In his victory speech, Mamdani challenged the Democratic Party and its leadership.

“If tonight teaches us anything,” he said, “it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”

His latter point is obviously true. But it’s the highlighted part that’s interesting.

Mamdani is saying that the Democratic Party has been too timid. He’s echoing the argument that the party has tried too hard to triangulate its politics to public opinion, approaching campaigns the way a helicopter parent approaches a playground. He’s siding (as one would expect) with the left in the left-vs.-centrism bickering that’s consumed Democratic political discussions since 2024. Give or take a few decades.

One thing the results on Tuesday can show us, though, is that this is a false choice. Mamdani won while embracing left-wing policies and politics in New York City. Spanberger won while running a more moderate campaign in Virginia. Democrats won in a lot of places while running a lot of different campaigns. This was in part because, like in California, they provided an opportunity for voters to rebuke Trump. But they still won.

It is a reminder that democracy is centered on diversity. Democracy is the idea that people from various backgrounds can unite and decide on common leadership that represents them — meaning them in their town or their county or their state. Maybe the president isn’t someone you agree with or maybe your city councilman isn’t, but democracy provides the opportunity for everyone’s voice to be heard on the subject.

Particularly at the moment, this seems like a valuable idea for the Democratic Party itself to lean into. Trumpism is about homogeneity, about forcing Americans into his views and his systems. His panicky response to the results on Tuesday reinforces how uncomfortable he is with divergent viewpoints and centers of power. The Democratic Party could easily position itself as the home of diverse argument and diverse policy positions reflecting America’s diverse population — a rejection of the uniformity Trump wants to impose. It’s the party of Spanberger and Mamdani, not the party of Donald Trump and various Donald Trumps Jr.

The centrists will say that this is what they’ve been advocating all along: tailoring message to the electorate. But they often argue that point while conceding two inconcedable points.

The first is that this means the party should be willing to backtrack from or downplay support for civil rights if that support is politically fraught. But a party centered on America’s diversity needs to be predicated on bolstering and supporting rights for every American. You can’t be a party that stands for diverse voices and the party that agrees to allow some of those voices to be muffled.

The second unacceptable concession is that national rhetoric should drive candidate campaigns. It is true, as I’ve written, that political rhetoric at all levels of government is largely driven by national issues and debates. It is also true that the right has gotten very good at taking individuals with less-popular views and making them avatars for the left as a whole.

Democrats and the broader left have not yet figured out how to counter this (in part because some of their allies don’t always mind doing the same thing.) But this is precisely why the approach is unsustainable. You cannot pin your politics to a national conversation that your opponents control. Nor can you make political decisions that are eternally popular. Backing the Iraq invasion in 2003 or supporting trans rights in 2016 were positions that had become difficult to defend five years later. The altar of caution is unstable.

If, instead, your approach and your party’s approach is that you are a big tent that is centered on democracy and diversity? You have a built-in response to efforts to nationalize your views: That’s New York, not Richmond. Our community’s priorities and theirs are different. Our party provides the space for Americans to make different choices in different places. I and many other have observed that the Democratic Party, needing to win with diverse populations in diverse places, has to be a big-tent party. So why not center that at the heart of the party’s rhetoric?

You can see how such an approach would work on nights like Tuesday. How it did work, if tacitly. But it has a broader advantage, given that it reflects the promise and values of America itself — or at least of the America that we understood to exist until noon on Jan. 20.

Ten million Californians came out to stand up to Donald Trump. A million New Yorkers voted for Mamdani. Two million backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. Diverse candidates, diverse issues, overlapping but distinct priorities. It was a good night for big-D Democrats and for little-d democracy. Perhaps the party should sew those things together.

Photo: A polling place sign in Virginia. (Mrs. Gemstone/Flickr under Creative Commons license)

President Trump has announced (on social media, naturally) that his administration will continue to withhold Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds during the government shutdown despite:

1. a court order mandating that the funds be provided, and
2. the fact that millions of Americans who depend on the assistance (often known as food stamps) live in districts that voted for him and/or are represented by Republicans in Congress.

It’s probably safe to assume that those legislators know what a bind Trump’s putting them in. According to my analysis of 2024 SNAP data from the Department of Agriculture, the average Republican in the House has 33,500 households in his district that receive SNAP benefits. That includes an average of 16,000 children, 13,000 seniors and 17,000 people with disabilities who rely at least in part on federal support to pay for food.

For Senate Republicans, the numbers are even larger. On average (which is skewed higher by states like Texas and Florida, admittedly), Senate Republicans have 267,000 SNAP-receiving households in their states, with 127,000 children, 104,000 seniors and 131,000 people with disabilities who will see nutritional assistance vanish.

If you’re curious how many SNAP recipients live in a specific Republican legislator’s district or state: here you go. A sortable, searchable table with those answers. (By default, it shows senators and then representatives in alphabetical order).

Just in Republican-represented House districts, there are 7.3 million households, 3.4 million children, 2.9 million seniors and 3.7 million people with disabilities who used SNAP in 2024. But now — thanks to the Republican president’s interest in using SNAP as a lever to get Democrats to fold on the shutdown — they apparently won’t receive any.

Photo: A grocery store in 1936. (National Archives)