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)

One of the central questions of American politics at the moment is a complicated one: Who was actually president when bad things happened?

Who, for example, was president when the country instituted restrictions meant to curtail the spread of the coronavirus? Who was president when special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed? These are complicated questions that no one can really answer. (Try your luck at doing so!)

Given how hard it is to know what exactly happened three or four years ago, the team at YouGov decided to put Americans to the test. Presented with 20 major events over the course of the past four presidencies, how often could average people actually identify the sitting president at the time? Could they succeed where so many pundits and sitting presidents have failed?

The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes. Out of those 20 events, a plurality of Americans identified the correct sitting president 19 times. We’re grading on a bit of a curve here, since there were some events (like the 2008 bank bailout) where most respondents, not just a plurality, weren’t sure when exactly it occurred. Other than that, though, we (Americans) did OK.

What was the one event where Americans were more likely to guess the wrong president than the correct one? The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. Instead of correctly identifying Joe Biden as the president when that happened, a plurality (and nearly a majority) instead attributed it to the guy who made it happen, Donald Trump.

In fact, it’s interesting to consider not just how often Americans correctly identified the sitting president but also to see who they incorrectly thought was in the White House when these events occurred. Below, you can see the distribution of answers (among those who didn’t say “not sure”).

On some (9/11, Obamacare), there’s little question. On others, like the Flint water crisis, no one seems to be really sure at all.

It is also interesting to compare responses by party. There’s a pattern here: partisans are more likely to say that a negative event occurred under one of the opposing party’s presidents. (See “start of the Great Recession,” for example, or “Ukraine invaded.”) Even so, a plurality of partisans on both sides were still generally able to identify the correct president for each event, except for the repeal of Roe.

There are also divides by age, as you might expect. Younger people, with fewer political events to remember, often did a better job identifying the correct president. (Notice how often the purple circles extend outside the orange ones for incorrect answers below.)

In fact, respondents aged 18 to 29 were the only age group to correctly identify Biden as the president when Roe was overturned — though only by a hair.

Anyway, the important takeaway here is that, for the most part, Americans actually do know who was president when major events happened and, therefore, who deserves credit or blame should such assignments be important. Sure, partisans try to shift things toward or away from their own team, but overall adults in the U.S. got the answer right.

If only pundits and the president were so adept.

Photo: The White House. (Chuck Kennedy/National Archives)

Even by the standards of Donald Trump’s poorly reviewed second term in office, the poll numbers that have come out over the past week are miserable.

An NBC poll found that two-thirds of Americans think Trump’s doing a bad job handling inflation and the economy and that he’s failing at protecting the middle class. An ABC News-Washington Post poll determined that most Americans think that Trump isn’t committed to free and fair elections, or to a fair criminal justice system, or to free speech or to the freedom of the press. New CNN polling has Trump’s approval rating at a second-term low and disapproval of his presidency at an all-time high. Polling from YouGov conducted for the Economist similarly determined that Trump’s approval is as low now as it has ever been.

Not only that, but YouGov finds him viewed more negatively than positively on a range of issues: crime, immigration, foreign policy, abortion, jobs and the economy and inflation.

The reviews are just … bad. And yet, even within those bad numbers, there remains that glimmering core of support from Trump’s own party.

In the new ABC-Post poll, for example, nearly 9 in 10 Republicans still view Trump’s presidency with approval. That’s compared to only 40 percent of all Americans — a percentage that’s inflated by all of those still-loyal Republicans.

This is the most important number for Trump. His presidency is dependent on two overlapping factors: that his base will remain loyal to him, regardless of what he does, and that this loyalty will make it impossible for other Republicans to start going sideways. If Republicans stay in lockstep with the president, so will Republican legislators facing primaries in the near-to-medium term. If the base stays loyal, Trump couldn’t care less about being caught in hypocrisies or lies. He’s shed support since the beginning of the year — but mostly not among Republicans, so what does he care?

That said, there is an aspect of Trump’s polling that might legitimately start to cause him and his advisors some concern.

I don’t believe that Trump’s support will ever get too low, almost certainly not under, say, a third of the population. There’s simply too much partisanship baked into our political culture (and our culture culture) for many of the people who’ve been invested in him personally for the past decade to suddenly declare that they were wrong all along.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t important fluctuations in his support. For example, consider the difference in approval of Trump’s performance as president from February to October, looking at polls released by The Washington Post.

In both months, Trump’s overall approval from Republicans was near 90 percent: 88 percent in February and 86 percent last month. But in February, more than 7 in 10 Republicans who approved of Trump’s presidency did so strongly. Last month, it was less than 6 in 10.

This is how political support works. People don’t simply go from loving a politician to hating him. There’s a waypoint: indifference. Enthusiasm becomes shrugging becomes dislike becomes disgust. And since February, a chunk of Republicans have gone from cheers to shrugs.

It’s risky to extrapolate too much from a two-point trend, so let’s look at YouGov’s weekly polling over the course of the year. Among all adults, Trump’s approval has slipped, in part because he shed “strongly approve” support from non-Republicans.

But notice what happened to his approval among Republicans. The percent of Republicans who strongly approved of Trump dropped … and the percent who somewhat approve increased. Cheers to shrugs.

To see why this is potentially a problem, let’s cherry-pick a bit. Taking monthly averages of Trump’s approval from Republicans, consider his numbers for February, July and October. They’re highlighted below.

From February to July, his overall approval only dropped 3 points. But the percentage of Republicans who strongly approved of him dropped 14 points as the percent who somewhat approved rose 12 points. By October, he was down another 3 percentage points overall, gaining 2 percentage points among those who strongly approve and losing 5 points among those who somewhat approve.

Does this reflect a small portion of Republicans moving from strong support to soft support to no support? Could be. Are these shifts so small as to be of questionable use? Yes.

As I said, though, these are the numbers I’m tracking. If Trump’s Republican support softens, it may not mean that his party starts to view him negatively. It may just mean they’re not as enthusiastic about what he’s doing — potentially opening up the door for other Republicans to exploit that lack of enthusiasm.

At some point in the near future, Trump’s status as a lame duck will also kick in. There will be less reason for Republicans to insist on his greatness as the 2028 presidential campaign heats up. Republican candidates looking to make their mark will navigate to where the base is, even if that’s not where Trump lands.

For a president who embraces an authoritarian approach to power, fervent opposition is a plus. Those are people to demonize and against whom to use an iron fist. What he really ought to fear is what’s buried in these numbers: his supporters become indifferent.

Photo: A picture of someone taking a picture of Trump. (White House/Flickr)

The headline in the New York Post was characteristically cautious: “Nearly a million New Yorkers ready to flee NYC if Mamdani becomes mayor — possibly igniting mass exodus: poll.” Why the departure of almost a million of the city’s 8.4 million residents isn’t itself a mass exodus isn’t really explained in the article that follows, but, look. If the game is constantly ratcheting up the fear factor, you have to have somewhere to take the panic, right?

As someone within the fallout radius of the New York City mayoral race, it’s striking how much of the late-campaign rhetoric is centered on terrifying voters. My sons, aged 6 and 8, had never seen footage of the World Trade Center attack until this weekend when, during the World Series, an Andrew Cuomo ad used the footage to suggest that a Zohran Mamdani victory would somehow lead to a second such attack. You know, because “Muslim.” (That the actual mayor during that attack was an older Italian guy seems not to have occurred to Cuomo’s rabid ad team.)

The Post’s “nearly a million” story is based on a Daily Mail article that is itself derived from a poll completed for the tabloid by the firm J.L. Partners. Incidentally, the “nearly a million” is actually “at least 765,000 citizens,” according to the Daily Mail, a figure that is equivalent to 9 percent of the city’s population.

That 9 percent is the point, actually. According to the poll, that’s the percentage of all city residents who told the pollsters they would “definitely leave” if Mamdani is elected (as other polls suggest he will be). In other words, about 90 people told J.L. Partners they would absolutely, no-question move if Mamdani wins and that became “nearly a million” in New-York-Postese.

J.L. Partners isn’t a terrible pollster, earning a B/C grade in analysis from The Silver Bulletin earlier this year. It was, however, one of three pollsters that overestimated Republican support in the 2024 election cycle, which is perhaps not a surprise.

The problem here, really, is that you can’t extrapolate in the way that the Post and Daily Mail are extrapolating. Not because a poll of 1,000 people is too small to provide insights; it isn’t. But because it’s much, much easier to say “I will definitely move” than it is to actually move.

Consider, for example, that one-fifth of respondents from Staten Island said they would definitely leave the city. No, they won’t! They already barely live in New York City as it is. One percent of Mamdani voters are definitely going to move if he wins? I have to say that that seems a bit incongruous.

There have certainly been moments in the city’s past when people have actually packed up and left. There was a period of stagnation in the mid-1900s that became an exodus during the tumultuous 1970s. More recently, a big chunk of New Yorkers moved out during the coronavirus pandemic, as people were literally dying in the streets.

The covid-inspired departures made up only about 5 percent of the city’s population. The departures during the 1970s made up about 10 percent. (Notice that Staten Island didn’t lose a significant number of residents during the pandemic — and gained residents during the 1970s.) The Post/Daily Mail would have us believe that what’s looming is an exodus akin to the Bronx-is-burning era — simply if Mamdani wins.

Perhaps, if he wins, the city will see the sort of collapse that drove people away in the 1970s. Perhaps some chunk of those saying they’ll leave are certain that it will. But it seems far, far more likely that those people are claiming that they will move are simply making a political statement about their opposition to Mamdani and to Mamdani-esque politics than they are actually planning to leave.

If they did leave, it seems extremely safe to assume that the sudden glut of available rental units (and the accompanying price drop) would lead to a rapid repopulation. There are a lot of reasons that New Yorkers live in New York and there are a lot of reasons that non-New Yorkers want to live there. One reason many don’t is that there simply isn’t enough affordable housing for them to do so. If 8 percent of Brooklyn and 6 percent of Manhattan suddenly leaves (as this polls asserts), I’m very confident that there would be a lot of rental applications in short order.

On social media, the New York Post shared an image they apparently made, showing Wall Street executives wearing cowboy hats over a quote from another executive declaring that “you don’t sacrifice anything by being in Dallas versus being in New York.”

If that were true, a lot of those executives would already live in Dallas, a city with one-sixth the population of New York. But they don’t. They live in New York. And I’m pretty sure that the transition most of them are about to make is from sitting at expensive Tribeca restaurants and loudly complaining about the dire policy possibilities that would accompany a Mamdani victory to sitting in those same restaurants a year from now, loudly complaining about the policies themselves.

Photo: A street scene in New York City. (Eden, Janine and Jim on Flickr, shared under Creative Commons license)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNN Sunday morning, giving host Jake Tapper a chance to note the incongruity between cuts to food assistance programs during the on-going shutdown and President Trump’s Roaring-20s-themed Halloween party at his exclusive Florida club.

After Tapper played a clip of former president Barack Obama criticizing Donald Trump, Bessent (himself worth hundreds of millions of dollars) shrugged off his billionaire boss’s extravagance with a bit of whataboutism.

“I believe President Obama played a record amount of golf of any president,” Bessent said, “so I’m not sure why he’s out there throwing stones.”

There are lots of ways in which we could parse that response, including that it does little to nothing to address the actual tension that Tapper was noting. But, as someone who’s been tracking Trump’s golf habit since his first term, I’ll point out another issue with Bessent’s response: It’s embarrassingly off-the-mark.

Barack Obama did frequently play golf as president, so much so that it became a point of criticism among Republicans (including Trump) and resulted in the creation of a website focused on tracking his outings. From that site we can see how Obama’s golf outings evolved, slowly in his first term and more energetically after his reelection.

When we overlay Trump’s first-term golf outings, though, you can see that he rapidly outpaced his predecessor.

Then Trump was himself reelected (after a four-year hiatus). Since retaking office in January, he’s played golf at an even more rapid pace than he did eight years ago.

You’ll notice the qualifier “likely” on those charts. That’s because Trump, unlike Obama, doesn’t actually report his outings. Sometimes we learn about rounds played from social media reports or photos taken at the private clubs where he invariably plays. But it is possible that some of the times that he goes to Trump Organization-owned clubs and goes off the radar for a few hours, he’s doing something other than hitting the links. History has shown, though, that the safest assumption is that he’s actually playing golf.

The Obama Golf Counter estimated that Obama played just over 300 rounds of golf as president. That’s probably low; CBS News reporter (and keeper of presidential data) Mark Knoller had the count at 333 over Obama’s two terms. That is in fact more than the 259 outings Trump made in his first term — although spread over eight years. Even if we tack another 30 rounds onto the second-term total above, Trump still outpaced Obama by more than 30 rounds.

There’s another important distinction we need to mention. Obama’s golfing almost always took place at publicly owned courses, with partners who were reported to the press. Trump’s golfing, on the other hand, occurs almost exclusively at courses owned by his private company, meaning that his trips to those clubs are an opportunity for Trump Organization customers to hobnob with or lobby him. (The White House rarely reveals the identities of those who join Trump on the course.) Trump supporters often talk about this difference as though it’s somehow better that Trump played at Trump Organization courses, perhaps assuming that makes it less expensive. It doesn’t.

We’re overlooking an important point, though. Again, Trump has returned to the White House and returned to playing golf. So far this term, by my running tally, he’s already at 72 rounds — about one on every four days of his second term. What that means, then, is that Trump has played an estimated 331 rounds of golf over his two terms, just two shy of Knoller’s total for Obama.

And I’m writing this on Sunday morning, with Trump currently at Mar-a-Lago in southern Florida. That usually means that he’ll head to his nearby golf club for a round before heading back to Washington. If he does, he’ll be only one shy of Knoller’s total for Obama.

Bessent could still be proven correct, I suppose, if Trump plays zero more rounds of golf during the three-plus years remaining in his second term. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is unlikely to occur.

Photo: Trump, ready for golf at his private club in Scotland. (White House/Flickr)

Clay Higgins, U.S. representative from the state of Louisiana, thinks it’s the poor’s own fault that they might go hungry if and when SNAP benefits aren’t distributed in November.

“Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked,” he wrote on social media, “should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”

Let’s set aside the ludicrousness of the idea that $11 a day in groceries is enough to feed a family in the U.S. (or even most adults). Let’s also set aside that those families should also have had the foresight to reserve a portion of that money in order to warehouse groceries in the event that there was for some reason interruption to the support (the reason at the moment being “politics”).

Let’s focus on Higgins’ addendum there: “stop smoking crack.” It’s not clear if he meant that literally, that recipients of SNAP (also often referred to as food stamps) are making bad decisions because they are on drugs. But given how energetically Higgins’s party has tried to tie the receipt of federal benefits to laziness, it’s probably not a mistake.

Of course, there’s also a racial subtext to that addendum. Discussion of government support has for decades carried a racist subtext, at least since Ronald Reagan dishonestly singled out a Black Chicago woman as the face of federal subsidies. Smoking crack has been similarly coded for a long time.

But we don’t need to raise an eyebrow and wonder whether the response to the SNAP shutdown is rooted in part in racism. We can simply quote Rob Schmitt, one of the interchangeable faces on one of the interchangeable right-wing video broadcasting sites.

ROB SCHMITT: People are using SNAP benefits to get their nails done, to get their weaves and their hair. This is a really ugly program.

SEN. RON JOHNSON: That program needs to be dramatically reformed. pic.twitter.com/XhmKif3sjP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 31, 2025

“People are selling their benefits,” Schmitt claimed. “People are using them to get their nails done, to get their weaves and their hair. I mean, this is a really ugly program.”

Yeah, OK. That’s racist.

As it turns out, there are a lot more White households receiving SNAP benefits than Black (or Hispanic or Asian) households. Nationally, there are 1.8 White households getting SNAP benefits for every Black one.

In fact, more White households than Black households receive SNAP benefits in 44 states. In six states and D.C., more Black households receive the benefits, in large part because those places have larger Black populations.

It is true that a larger proportion of Black households than White households receive SNAP benefits. But, as I noted earlier this week, that’s in large part because SNAP benefits are (as you’d expect) closely correlated to household income and poverty levels. Since Black households tend to have lower incomes — itself a function of endemic and institutionalized racism! — those households are also more likely to receive SNAP benefits. Benefits, I’ll note, that are almost exclusively used for their intended purpose: food.

Why does Schmitt want to suggest that the aid is going to wasteful Black people? The same reason Higgins wants to suggest it’s going to drug addicts or (at the very least) people inept at taking care of themselves: because it makes it so that their heavily White audiences are inoculated against news reports describing SNAP recipients potentially going hungry.

This is the role such rhetoric has played since the Reagan era. But the people who will be negatively affected by SNAP cuts are a lot more likely to be White than Black.

Photo: Meat for sale in 1936. (National Archives)

1.

When ProPublica emailed questions for a profile of the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, they received a response from the communications director of the state Republican Party. He suggested that the outlet was engaged in a “jihad” against the party and issued an unsubtle threat.

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”

ProPublica also noted that many of those who they’d contacted about the story requested anonymity out of fear that the chief justice “or his proxies would retaliate against them through the courts’ oversight system, the state bar association or the influence he wields more broadly.”

2.

During an appearance on Piers Morgan’s television show on Wednesday, Katie Miller, wife of Trump aide Stephen Miller, lost her temper during a debate with left-wing pundit Cenk Uygur. At one point, she suggested that Uygur, a naturalized citizen, might have his citizenship scrutinized.

STEPHEN MILLER’S WIFE THREATENS TO HAVE CENK UYGUR DEPORTED AFTER LOSING A DEBATE@cenkuygur is a naturalized U.S citizen. pic.twitter.com/6alu4tOMFI

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) October 30, 2025

“You better check your citizenship application and hope everything was [muddled, possibly “legal”] and correct. Because you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar coming next.”

Stephen Miller has been one of the most prominent voices for wide-scale deportations within the administration as well as one of the most fervent advocates for deploying executive power, particularly against perceived opponents. Katie Miller, however, holds no position with the government.

3.

In August, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was stopped by sheriffs’ deputies in Florida on suspicion that he was driving while intoxicated. One of the deputies who stopped Scott Deiseroth, Markens Dorestant, is Black, prompting Deiseroth to ask if he was Haitian. Later, Deiseroth raised a similar question with Dorestant’s partner, Jonathan Lane.

From The Washington Post:

“Your boy, he’s Haitian, right?” Deiseroth asked.

Lane replied that Dorestant is an American citizen, noting that people must be citizens to work as law enforcement in Florida.

“I’m going to run some checks when I get back,” Deiseroth said. He added that he would have Dorestant deported if “not legit,” according to the footage.

Deiseroth’s attorney, who said that his client is now participating in an alcohol treatment program, assured The Post that Deiseroth knows his comments about Dorestant’s nationality “was just not nice”, and promised that “when this is over he’ll be writing a letter to apologize for that.”

All three of these incidents were reported in the past few days.

It’s one of those sentences one can write about the second Trump administration that would have seemed ludicrously hyperbolic one year ago, but it is nonetheless true: The president of the United States unilaterally obliterated one-third of the structure that constitutes the White House. Two weeks ago, the White House had an East and a West Wing. Now it doesn’t.

In part because the demolition of the East Wing was so sudden, the reaction has been broadly negative. It’s almost certainly true that a slow, deliberate, adjudicated process for replacing the East Wing with a large ballroom would have triggered significant opposition. Such a process, though, might have softened the appearance that Trump was simply reshaping the People’s House as though it was instead a Trump Organization property.

Polling conducted by YouGov found that most Americans disapprove of the destruction of the East Wing. Four in 10 strongly disapprove, including 7 in 10 Democrats and almost half of independents.

That said, 3 in 10 Americans approve — including a majority of Republicans. There’s an interesting age split in the YouGov data, with older Americans being more likely to express approval of the destruction, almost certainly a function of the fact that older Americans are more likely to be Republican.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the significance of that support, though. A third of Republicans strongly approve of Trump simply smashing the East Wing into rubble, something that it is extremely safe to assume they would have viewed more skeptically had it been undertaken by, say, Barack Obama. Condemnation from Democrats would likely have been more modest under such circumstances, sure … but no Democratic president would have suddenly taken a wrecking ball to the White House without notice. (Harry Truman, a Democrat, did oversee a renovation of the building, but he did so with guidance and input from appointed officials and experts.)

New polling conducted for ABC News and The Washington Post shows similar disapproval of the East Wing’s destruction. Again, most Americans view the move negatively. Again, most Republicans support it, with a third supporting it strongly. And, again, there’s a divide by age.

It is not the case that support for the destruction of the East Wing is a function of people not understanding what happened. YouGov asked Americans whether they’d seen images or video of the building being demolished. Six in 10 Americans said they had, including a majority of Republicans. In other words, at least some (but probably quite a few) Republicans saw the destruction with their own eyes and approved.

Interestingly, there’s a correlation between having seen photos or videos and approval of the destruction when considering age. In other words, older people are more likely to say they’ve seen photos or videos of the demolition and to say they approve. But this is almost certainly a demonstration of the “correlation does not equal causation” axiom; it’s likely that older Americans are simply more likely to support Trump and more likely to consume traditional news media that covered the destruction.

Update: YouGov generously shared data on views of the demolition relative to whether individuals had seen photos or videos of the destruction. In fact, Republicans who’d seen the destruction were much more likely to say that they approved of it occurring.

One takeaway here is that the demolition of the East Wing is unpopular. But another is that this, too, has collapsed into a partisan framework. An action that would almost certainly have met with condemnation if suggested to Trump voters in October 2024 is, in October 2025, viewed positively for little more reason than that Trump did it.

If the destruction of a substantial portion of the White House is an on-the-nose metaphor for Trump’s attack on American democracy, consider how we might extrapolate Republican support for his doing so.

Photo: The White House during the 1952 renovation. (National Archives)

Analyst Jeff Asher, one of the best sources for up-to-date data about crime in the U.S., shared numbers on Tuesday that struck me as interesting: the age of victims of murder has been trending upward for several years.

You can see that increase below. In 2020, the average age of a murder victim was 34, according to FBI data compiled by Asher. So far in 2025, the average age has been 36.

Asher shared a chart that looked a little bit like the one below. Particularly since the pandemic, the percentage of murder victims who are aged 40 and over has increased as the percentage who are aged 16 to 39 has dropped.

You may not be surprised to hear that I, the author of a book about the baby boom, was immediately curious whether this was simply a function of the increased percentage of over-40 Americans. You can see that below; there are more older Americans than there used to be, so one might assume they would also make up more of the (unfortunate) murdered population.

We can compare these two percentages directly. It remains the case that those aged 16 to 39 make up a disproportionate percentage of the population of the murdered, comprising a much higher percentage of the latter group than they do of the population. The gap between the 40-plus victim population and the U.S. population, meanwhile, has narrowed but is still wider than it was 40 years ago.

I decided to break the numbers out a bit further. Here’s what they look like by generation.

You can see that this tracks with age; when baby boomers were (relatively) young, they made up a higher percentage of murder victims. Likewise with Gen X, millennials and Gen Z.

We can also look at those generational groups (as defined by Pew Research Center) as percentages of the population. (Note the little bumps and dips that are a function of the Census Bureau grouping elderly Americans into one bucket at different points.)

When we directly compare victimhood with population, we see something interesting. While members of the Silent generation (pre-baby boom) made up more of the population than murder victims by the late 1980s and boomers made up more of the population by the late 1990s, Gen X hasn’t made up significantly more of the population than the population of murder victims since its members were little kids. Gen X has, for now, settled in as about the same percentage of murder victims as it is of the population, despite getting older.

Looking at it another way:

(Note that the ratio among silent generation members is returning to zero. That’s less a function of increased victimhood than decreased populations.)

We shouldn’t overread the numbers here. As Asher noted in an email when he (generously) shared his numbers with me, the murder totals aren’t entirely apples-to-apples and the trend shown above hasn’t existed for that long. But this does comport with the general theory that there’s something unusual about Gen X (my generation, I’ll note) — perhaps, some argue, related to lead poisoning. Murder victims often share their killers’ demographics. If Gen X is disproportionately dying, Gen X may also be disproportionately killing.

Worth tracking these numbers over time, certainly.

Photo: The snub-nosed .38 Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill Officer J.D. Tippit. (National Archives)

Political campaigns, the axiom has it, are nothing more than a math problem. Get 50 percent of the vote, plus one, and you win. Doesn’t matter the race; that holds. So all a candidate needs to do, however easier said than done, is to ensure that they get that 50 percent-plus.

The problem is that securing that figure isn’t always itself a matter of simple math. It’s hard to know where that 50-plus point sits and it’s harder still to know what chunks of voters you can add into your expected total. You need to hit a particular number, but knowing that number and how to get there requires a more complex toolset than a calculator.

In other words — and despite how much it pains me personally to admit it — there is an element of politics that isn’t quantifiable. There’s an esoteric, abstract element of running for office, an endeavor that, after all, centers heavily on human emotion. And no political consultant yet has figured out an unfailing calculus for anger, fear and enthusiasm.

This risks being trite, so let me get to the point.

The release this week of a lengthy assessment of the Democratic Party’s electoral problems, given the rather leading name of Deciding to Win, offers what it presents as a precise, mathematical case for Democratic electoral success. In short, candidates that moderate their positions to match public opinion are more likely to be successful than ones who don’t. Democrats have moved too far to the left, the report argues, and that cost them power.

To reinforce the point, the report includes a glut of charts, tables and graphs — presenting a seemingly mathematical case to prove their point. As someone who tracks a lot of charts, though, I will say that this data presentation is not particularly compelling, often because the reality suggested by the charts falls short of the conclusions in the accompanying text.

But that’s beside the important point, which is that this sort of slide-rule approximation is central to the party’s actual problems. The report suggests that Democrats track the views of the public and present campaigns that are centered on those views. But that’s an approach that has been central to Democratic campaigns for decades. It’s how you try to figure out how to get to 50 percent-plus-one! In part because this has been the approach for so long — a sort of cold-blooded effort to match the public temperature — Democrats have gotten a reputation as pandering and insincere.

I’ve said before and I repeat here that I think this is related to the extent to which college education and Democratic politics have been increasingly correlated. The party’s balance between pugilistic union reps and McKinsey consultants have shifted toward the latter, increasing the appeal of marketing-campaign-style analyses of voter preferences.

Mind you, Democratic candidates have a challenge that Republicans don’t. They are representatives of a party that includes a diverse membership — White, Black, Hispanic; urban, suburban, rural; young, old; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist — that the GOP doesn’t. This wasn’t a significant problem back in the 1990s, when a candidate in Montana and a candidate in Brooklyn could run their own campaigns on their own issues. But it is a problem in an environment like the current one, in which people’s political lens extends little further than the national conversation.

That shift from local to national is in part due to the consolidation of the media industry and the collapse of local news outlets and newspapers. But it’s largely about the emergence of cable news channels, websites and social media platforms that have captured an audience attuned to and stimulated by national themes. It’s much harder for Democrats from Brooklyn and Montana to run bespoke campaigns when their races are framed similarly and their prospective voters have a similar sense of what their party stands for.

Any effort to offer the Democratic Party electoral guidance that doesn’t grapple with the ways in which the national media environment disadvantages the party is at best incomplete.

The American right has a sophisticated, streamlined system that serves as a sort of rhetorical rock tumbler, bouncing arguments and ideas around until they’re silky smooth. Unlike traditional media, this system is centered not on informing the public but on compelling them, with an almost entirely unrelenting focus on depicting the left as dangerous or ignorant. It relies heavily on what was once called “nut-picking”: elevating bizarre individual acts or claims from purported members of the left in an effort to malign the left broadly. This process, too, has streamlined, from Twitchy publishing stories about random Democrats to accounts like Libs of TikTok amplifying social media posts that are functionally attributed to the entire political left.

This ecosystem infects the traditional media. It happens in part because many traditional journalists fail to understand its scale and intent. The shift that’s occurred wasn’t immediate and isn’t solely a function of Donald Trump (he didn’t invent it; if anything, he’s leveraged it) so, feeling the water warm, many simply don’t appreciate what’s changed. Traditional media is also influenced because this rhetoric and approach has supplanted what was once the Republican Party. Reporters trained to include the considerations of the right in their coverage are now often opening the door for bad-faith allegations and attacks. The traditional media is rightfully constrained by a commitment to accuracy and to nuance, both of which serve as disadvantages in the battle for informing the public.

Politics has become nationalized and that national conversation benefits the right. So if your campaign recommendations center on meeting Americans where they are, you’re often going to be arguing for acquiescence to right-wing policies and rhetorical frames. You’re going to be agreeing to battle the right in the right’s stadium in a game where the right empowers itself to change the rules. And you’re going to reinforce the idea that Democrats don’t have core beliefs of their own.

What if, instead, Democrats ran on what they believe in, in terms that sincerely reflect those beliefs? There’s still the problem of the national environment and its accompanying media universe, but by taking this approach candidates can at least better avoid charges that they’re simply pandering or using poll-tested rhetoric. Sincerity can be an affect, certainly, but it’s a lot easier to come off as sincere if you’re actually sincere.

Advocates for following public opinion polling might counter that this approach means endorsing ideas that aren’t popular. And, yes. It sure does. But public opinion is not static. We’ve seen, even just this year, how views of major issues like immigration have shifted in response to sincere rhetoric about what’s happening. The job of an elected official is to represent their constituents but the job of a candidate isn’t simply to tell those constituents what they want to hear. It’s to make a case as a prospective leader, not a dutiful follower.

Consider how the Deciding to Win report explains Republican success since the second term of Obama’s presidency.

Between 2012 and 2024, Republicans became more extreme on issues like democracy, the rule of law, immigration, and transgender rights. But Republicans also moved toward the center on several issues, including moderating their stances on Medicare and Social Security and dropping pledges to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ban abortion nationwide, and pass a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Donald Trump did talk less about reforming social programs, but his party has nonetheless pushed forward on implementing policies that reduce spending on those programs. Saying that the party has moderated on abortion, meanwhile, lands pretty flat three years after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Giving up on saying you’ll do something extreme when you can’t in favor of doing something slightly less extreme when you can isn’t really moderation, I’d say.

But what’s really missing in that paragraph is the advent of Trump. The GOP’s success since 2012 hasn’t been about being moderate, it’s primarily been a function of finding someone who is compelling to a lot of Americans (with a boost from the unevenness of the Electoral College). Trump overhauled the Republican Party through sheer will and cult of personality. Moderated rhetoric played at best a modest role in his trips to the White House. Lying about his and his party’s plans, like on IVF? Probably more important.

Incidentally, this analysis of the Democratic Party’s failings does seem to give rather short shrift to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. 2016 came before the supposed woke-pocalypse — but Trump won against a candidate carefully attuned to public opinion. 2020 came at the apex of the woke era, but Trump lost. 2024 came at the height of the backlash against the fringe positions that Trump allies (and the report authors) ascribe to the left, but it’s pretty clear that inflation played a bigger role in his win than concerns about cancel culture.

The Democratic Party needs to win races beyond the presidency, of course. Perhaps candidates will find recommendations in this report useful as they try to do so. But it seems unlikely that the solution is centrally that candidates should reinforce the idea that Democrats are going to say whatever voters want to hear. Who wants to vote for a party that won’t defend its allies or who will downplay the threat to American democracy? Hell, who wants to run for office as a member of a party deeply committed to raising their voices about nothing other than the price of groceries?

Photo: A Trump rally in New Hampshire, 2019.

I will admit at the outset that it has been a long time since I approached the legislative branch with anything resembling humbled awe. The problem is that I have known too many legislators.

Still, there was a time — even fairly recently — when Congress functioned well enough that its work product deserved respect. There was a lot of performative wrestling and outrage from individual elected officials, but bipartisan relationships and the legislators’ own interest in backstopping their collective work served to smooth out most wrinkles in the final product. I mean, in 2020 a Republican-led Senate committee produced a report documenting Russian interference in the 2016 election, even drawing a line between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence. Marco Rubio was on that committee! Five years ago was a different world.

Of course, that was the Senate, which (as Robert Caro will remind us) was designed to be the more sober, serious side of the Capitol. And that was in an era where Donald Trump, while holding the GOP base tight in his grip, still hadn’t completely locked down party officials.

House Republicans, meanwhile, spent Trump’s years out of the White House first trying to shred the Biden administration and then trying to ensure the former president’s unfettered return to power. Over the course of 2023 (when the GOP regained the majority in the House) and until the day Biden announced he wasn’t seeking reelection, Republicans like House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) did everything in their power to impugn the Democratic president and his party.

It’s hard to overstate just how far this went. As one of the relatively few journalists covering what Comer and his allies were doing, I found it frustrating how little attention the effort got — meaning that it’s likely that many Americans and many reporters don’t fully appreciate the extent of the bad-faith attacks. I won’t rehash them here, but I will point to this overview of all of the attempts to smear Biden over the course of 2023, to the collapse of one of the trashiest insinuations offered by Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (with right-wing media’s help) and to the fizzling out of the obviously contrived “impeachment investigation” targeting Biden. It was deeply, deeply dishonest and the only ones paying attention, it seemed, were the Twitter users and Fox News hosts who were cheering it on.

You will forgive me, then, if I don’t take seriously the Oversight Committee’s new report, alleging that key actions taken by the Biden administration were “illegitimate.” And that’s even before reviewing the report itself, flimsy enough to be at risk of disintegration from even a whisper of wind.

To distill the conclusion, Comer and his majority determined that Biden’s mental capacity was diminished during his last year in office, meaning that maaaybeee people on his staff signed stuff without his knowing it and that maaaybeee that included some of his pardons? If this sounds a lot like something Trump himself would say, that’s not an accident. The probe by Comer’s committee developed in concert with Trump’s rhetoric on the issue, functionally handing over to the president the power of congressional oversight activity.

Trump wants someone to say that Biden’s pardons are illegitimate so that he can push his opponents into the Justice Department’s acquiescent crosshairs. Comer and his friends are happy to give him the pretext. As I wrote for The Washington Post in June, there’s no actual question that those pardons were issued on Biden’s instructions. But the game here has always been to whip up a fog of uncertainty — was the 2020 election somehow stolen? can’t a president just destroy a third of the White House? — that lets Trump move forward with what he always intended.

What an Oversight Committee could be doing, of course, is conducting oversight on the executive branch. There’s no shortage of serious questions about the sitting president that would seem to warrant more urgency than unserious questions about a former one. Trump’s own pardons, the enormous sums of money he’s earning from people who are benefitting from the administration’s decisions, his deployment of the military against nebulously defined actors in the Caribbean — the list goes on. Hell, you’d think that the House might be interested in assessing Trump’s willful disregard for Congress’s power of the purse. But that’s only if you think that the intent of Comer and Oversight is to aid Americans instead of simply siding with the president. (Not that this is a surprise; one of the first things Comer did upon taking leadership of Oversight was kill an investigation into Trump’s finances.)

I write all of this centrally because, despite the past three years, Comer and his committee are still granted the baseline assumption that their work product is offered in good faith. The Post’s coverage of its new report, for example, mentions only in passing that Biden has been an ongoing target of Comer’s and doesn’t add the useful context that his targeting has resulted in any number of misfires. This is the same paper that, in 2023, ran the accurate headline, “Comer mischaracterizes Hunter Biden car payment reimbursement to his dad.” Yet we’re led to assume that his current characterizations should be assumed to be legitimate.

No one would credibly argue that questions about Biden’s acuity were baseless. But no one can credibly argue that the output of a Comer-led Oversight Committee is inherently trustworthy. Comer spent years proving that he would embrace any disparagement of Biden as he ignored any criticism of Trump. That should be a focus of assessments of the committee’s output before we consider the output itself.

On Tuesday morning, the next step of the plan swung into action. Speaking to reporters, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) stated that any Biden administration action that involved the use of an autopen “should be voided,” including pardons. Then come contrived investigations and then come arrests and then come administration lawyers telling district courts that the question isn’t settled and maybe they should just head over and ask Samuel Alito his view of the matter.

The balance of powers has tipped heavily toward the executive branch. Since Jan. 20, Comer and Johnson have been doing most of the tipping.

Photo: Comer at CPAC 2025. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)