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)

Thanks to the government shutdown, participants in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) are not expected to receive that aid next month. The effects of this could be dire; SNAP, often referred to as food stamps, helps people afford groceries when their incomes are insufficient to do so.

I was curious how the effects of these anticipated cuts would be felt. So I pulled data from the Department of Agriculture (which administers the program) and compared usage to other benchmarks — including electoral data from The Downballot.

There is a very slight correlation between the extent to which a congressional district voted for Kamala Harris last year and the percentage of households in the district that used SNAP in 2024.

(On these charts, the diagonal line shows the trend in the data.)

The stronger correlation, as you would expect, is with poverty levels.

And, inversely, with median incomes.

Perhaps the most useful correlations from a political context, though, are between SNAP usage among particular groups and 2024 voting patterns.

For example, there is a slight correlation between the percentage of disabled residents in a congressional district receiving benefits and the extent to which that district backed Trump. Slight — but stronger than the overall Harris-SNAP correlation.

The same holds for the percentage of kids receiving benefits…

…and the percent of those aged 60 and over who do.

In fact, while the correlation between elderly SNAP recipients and 2024 voting by congressional district is still rather weak, it’s the strongest of those shown above.

In other words, it’s not the case that people in districts that backed Trump will be more affected by SNAP cuts than are those who live in Harris-voting districts. (About 1 percent more households that receive SNAP are in districts that backed the former vice president.) But it is the case that more members of vulnerable populations who receive SNAP benefits (and not just percentages of them) live in districts that also voted for Trump. For example, 8 percent more kids who depend on SNAP live in congressional districts that backed the president.

It is unlikely that this will have much of an effect on the actual political debate.

Photo: A grocery store in Tennessee in 1935. (National Archives)

Over the past few days, President Trump has returned to one of his central animating issues: purported threats to the security of American elections. He has repeatedly claimed that elections at the local, state and federal level are suspect, exclusively reserving those accusations for elections in which his allies have lost and reserving nearly all of his energy for elections that he himself didn’t win.

The most obvious example is the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost that contest, unquestionably. We know this in part because the results were unambiguous and relatively quick to be finalized. But we know it primarily because Donald Trump and everyone into his outer orbit spent an enormous amount of money and time and energy trying to prove that he didn’t lose, without success. There were movies about how the election was stolen, and there were books and there were conferences and there were probably more social media posts than exist atoms in the Washington Monument, but at no point did anything emerge that suggested that even questions about the election were legitimate, much less anything showing that the election wasn’t.

Yet Trump has recently returned to this idea that he was the true victor in the 2020 election, even as he’s outlining steps that would make future elections — including those in 2026 and 2028 — less free and less open.

After an FBI gambling bust that swept up some prominent names in the NBA, Trump suggested on social media that the cheating involved in that case could hardly compare to what he falsely described as “Democrats cheating on Elections.”

“The 2020 Presidential Election, being Rigged and Stolen, is a far bigger SCANDAL,” he wrote, also targeting mail-in voting like that used in California’s elections. The upcoming referendum that would allow the state to redraw congressional lines — thereby adding Democratic seats — was “totally dishonest,” according to the president, with “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’ “

He presumably means that at-home voters are being sent ballots, which is legal, legitimate and has not been demonstrably tainted by significant fraud. But he knows that many of those voters are Democrats and so, as he did in the months before the 2020 contest, he’s arguing that those votes should be considered suspect from the outset.

It was announced last week that the Justice Department would monitor polling places during upcoming elections in California and New Jersey, an announcement that is doubly nonsensical. First, monitoring polling places won’t do much to catch anyone sending in an illegal ballot through the mail (not that any significant number of such people exist). Second, there’s no rampant in-person fraud to detect, meaning that observers will see nothing at all — or, more alarmingly, generate false alarms about legitimate voters that have the effect of scaring people away from casting a ballot.

The GOP has been smacked for similar behavior in the past. After an effort to police voting in the early 1980s (in New Jersey, in fact), the Republican Party was blocked from poll watching activity until 2016. But that restriction lapsed and the party tasked supporters with watching polls when Trump was on the ballot, including when he lost.

The chilling effect that could result from the efforts this year could be particularly robust. After all, this is a moment in which officers from across the government, including the FBI and Justice Department, are snatching up dozens of people every day. They’ve been cleared by the Supreme Court to target people based on ethnic appearance, and they are. They’ve also detained scores of U.S. citizens. Imagine the effect of plunking a few guys in face masks and FBI vests outside a polling place in a heavily non-White part of Newark or Los Angeles.

In another social media post — which begins with the claim that he had won “THREE Elections, BY A LOT” — Trump suggests that he’s seeing “the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received.” Yet, he complains, “Radical Left Losers are taking fake ads, not showing REAL Polls, but rather saying that I’m Polling at low levels. … These ads should not be allowed to run because they are FAKE!”

Conservatives once successfully convinced the Supreme Court that political ads from outside parties were protected speech. This proved a boon to the party and to Trump. But ads critical of Trump are obviously not the sort of thing to which he extends any grace. Maybe the administration won’t be able to block critical ads, but we can assume — given the trajectory of this year — that he’ll be able to intimidate TV stations and networks into pulling them down in order to avoid spurious lawsuits and public attacks.

Perhaps the most important point here is that Trump wants to ban ads that are telling people the truth. It is not the case that he’s seeing “the best Polling Numbers he has ever received.” His current numbers are, in fact, pretty unexceptional.

In other words, the predicates for his demands are false. It’s not true that he has great polling numbers that are lied about. It’s not true that there is rampant fraud — or even modest fraud! — that’s negatively affecting his and his party’s chances. These are simply pretexts, reasons offered for the administration potentially attacking advertisers and already intimidating voters. As with the troops on the streets of D.C., the administration action is its own reason; the ex post facto rationale is window-dressing meant to excuse the action. It’s analogous to Trump’s response to 2020, in fact. He already had his conclusion and he and his allies worked awfully hard to find any evidence for it.

Here, the actual point is obviously to put his thumb on the electoral scales. He doesn’t care about winning a free and fair election. He just cares about winning an election. So he invents reasons that he can push the elections in the way he wants them to go.

Everything downstream from a lie is illegitimate. And in the critically important realm of voting and elections, Americans should be clear-eyed about what’s happening.

Image: Section of a propaganda poster released in Asia in the 1950s. (National Archives)

There is a certain rhythm to the way in which the House of Representatives conducts its business.

The House begins each year with a few weeks of voting before cutting out for an extended Easter break. Then they come back, spend a few more weeks doing things and then taking a lengthy break for August. September is often spent finalizing spending for the next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1.

After that’s done, things get patchy. In years with midterm elections, the House tends to take most of October off so that they can head to their districts and convince people to re-hire them for their jobs. It’s a bit like knowing that you have an upcoming performance review with your boss so you skip work for three weeks to figure out how to convince her how good at it you are.

Then, a few more weeks of voting and that’s that. Visualized, the pattern looks like the chart below.

You might notice something odd about that chart. There are years with unusual blank periods, like the stretch in 2020 when there weren’t many votes cast thanks to the advent of the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s also a significant stretch in the far-right column — that is, this year — during which no votes have been taken.

Since 2008, the House has cast an average of 91 votes from Aug. 1 to Oct. 31. This year, the House has cast only 64. What’s more, the House has cast no votes since Sept. 19. Since 2008, the House has cast an average of 55 votes from Sept. 19 through Oct. 27, the only exception being in the midterm election year of 2014.

Again, midterm years are an obvious exception. But this isn’t a midterm year.

It’s not as though they weren’t planning to go into session, to pass legislation and resolutions. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) released a calendar earlier this year that showed the House spending 16 days in session this month. That has not happened.

Perhaps it’s because of the government shutdown, you might be thinking. Well, even when the government was shutdown in October 2013, the House was still casting votes and still showing up to work.

The work stoppage really began a bit before Congress’ failure to finalize a spending bill. Sept. 19 was a Friday. The following Tuesday, Sept. 23, Adelita Grijalva won an election to represent Arizona in the House. Ever since, she’s been waiting to take her seat and, ever since, there have been no votes taken.

Conspiracy theorists will note that Grijalva’s election meant that there are now 218 representatives and representatives-elect who support a petition that would force the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so feel free to run with that if you’d like.

Speaking to the press on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was asked why he wouldn’t bring members back to DC to do the work of governance — even work that isn’t voting-related. Johnson insisted that he was eager to bring people back to “regular legislative session,” but that this couldn’t happen while the government was shutdown, for some reason.

Of course, it may not be entirely up to him.

“I’m the speaker and the president,” President Trump is reported to have said, recognizing that his grip on the House Republican caucus, like his grip on Republicans generally, is much tighter than the speaker’s. And with the House out of session and the government shut down, Trump has an excuse (albeit not a valid one) for sidestepping the appropriations process and refusing to disburse money as he is obligated to do. What incentive is there for Trump (and therefore Johnson) to get back to normal, much less to seat another Democrat?

So here we are, with the members of the federal government specifically tasked with representing the people sitting at home while the president does what he wants.

Photo: Trump and one of his staffers. (White House/Flickr)

Meghan McCain would just like someone to explain something to her.

A “nepo baby” (using her own words) born of American political royalty, McCain last week expressed bemusement at the then-looming “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration.

“I don’t understand how Trump is a King,” she wrote, “when he won every single swing state, the electoral college and popular vote in a democratic election.”

On Thursday, historian-turned-Fox-contributor Victor Davis Hanson took the idea one step further.

“So-called King, Donald Trump, ran in two contested Republican primaries,” his essay begins. “He ran three times in a general election. He was elected twice, and his party recently won a Republican Congress.”

From there, Hanson expands outward. Not only is the elected Trump not a king, he insists, but it’s Joe Biden (who, for example, “did not run a typical campaign” in 2020) and Democrats who have been engaged in king-like behavior. Biden’s “DOJ and FBI raided then-former-President Trump’s home”! His White House “helped coordinate 91 indictments” against Trump! That included charges following the Mar-a-Lago raid even though the FBI “found only 102 classified documents among some 14,000 seized”!

“A mere three days after Trump announced his reelection bid on November 15, 2022,” Hanson cries, “Jack Smith was coincidentally appointed special prosecutor of Trump.” Now that’s some king-ing!

But, of course, that appointment was the opposite of a coincidence. It occurred because Trump was running for president and the Justice Department wanted to separate its probe from the influence of the Biden administration. Many of Hanson’s other objections are equally dumb, a mix in which non-presidential actions are attributed to Biden through unmentioned intervening layers or simple presentations of right-wing frustrations as evidence to the point. He looks back over nearly 20 years, including events from the Obama administration, to present his case that “the left” are “the real kings” — a position that has not traditionally been held by collectives of individuals.

To gently explain to Hanson why Trump is being criticized for monarchical behavior, we don’t need to look back over 20 years. We can look back over 20 hours.

He unilaterally obliterated one of the three buildings that constitutes the White House, clearing space for a ballroom paid for by people and corporations looking to curry favor with his administration. He announced that, after talking with some of his friends, he wouldn’t dispatch soldiers to San Francisco in order to usurp that city’s self-governance — but he retained the right to do so in the future. He issued a pardon to a cryptocurrency executive who’d done business with the Trump family, continuing a chain of similar grants of clemency that rewarded his allies and supporters.

If you want a more fleshed out examination of Trump’s king-like actions, writer Julian Sanchez compiled a comparison of Trump’s second-term actions with the complaints against King George III that are articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The reasons the colonists gave for breaking with the British throne have numerous echoes with complaints about the Trump administration.

Of course, the “No Kings” protests aren’t really about monarchy, as such. They were given that name because Trump at one point earlier this year referred to himself as a king, inviting precisely the historical comparison that Sanchez articulates at length.

What’s actually at issue is Trump’s embrace of autocratic power. Monarchy is one flavor of that power, but it’s not really the one that Trump’s targeting. He doesn’t want to be a king; he wants to rule without checks on his power. He wants to do what he wants, to reward his friends and punish his foes, to dip into the government coffers and to make the White House literally his own. And millions of Americans don’t want him to do that.

So, yes, he won the 2024 presidential election, earning more votes than Kamala Harris and returning to the White House. But to imagine, as McCain and Hanson do, that this is the actual critique — that demonstrators are complaining that he is actually a king — is the most lightweight of straw men. It’s not that he gained power as an autocrat, it’s that he’s aggregating and deploying it as one.

It is obviously fraught to invoke events in Europe 90 years ago in conversations about American politics, in part because of the alacrity with which Trump and his allies suggest that any comparison with German fascism is an equation of Trump with Adolf Hitler. But the 1933 election in that country gets to McCain and Hanson’s point directly: The Nazi party gained power through the votes of German citizens. Hitler had already been appointed chancellor and he and his party “used existing laws to destroy German democracy and create a dictatorship,” as one history of the era puts it.

What followed began with voters operating within a democratic system. But that empowered someone hostile to democracy, who worked to coalesce power around himself instead. This is not to say that Trump’s trajectory will mirror Hitler’s. It is, instead, to say that there are examples from the historical record that make obvious why it’s hardly contradictory to suggest that a democratically elected leader might deserve criticism for steering his country away from democracy.

Someone who could attest to that directly is a Silver- and Bronze Star-winning submarine captain who served the U.S. Navy during the war to contain Germany and Japan’s fascist aggression eighty years ago. That would be John S. McCain Jr., Meghan’s grandfather.

Photo: A still from the AI-generated video Trump posted on Truth Social after last weekend’s No Kings rallies.

Even if only intuitively, Donald Trump knows that the White House is a storehouse of power. He understands that, like the government itself, it is an institution that our impartial democratic system has spent two centuries nurturing and investing in. And this is why he wants it to be his, as surely as he wants the government to be his and as surely as he wants the government’s money to be his.

There was a moment at which he tipped his hand on this, when he made explicit what had already become obvious. It came during his 2020 acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination — a speech that, like his Jan. 6 speech five months later, was delivered from the White House complex itself. It was a blatant violation of the longstanding expectation that the White House wouldn’t be used for political purposes, an expectation that had created far bigger headaches for other politicians who engaged in far smaller violations.

During the 2020 speech, he was reading the standard self-celebratory litany from the teleprompter when he went off script for a moment.

“The fact is, I’m here—” he said, pausing as applause from the prior line interrupted him. But then he seemed to find import in that truncated line itself. He turned to the White House behind him, gesturing at it. “What’s the name of that building?”

The crowd applauded and cheered.

“The fact is, we are here and they’re not,” he said, now speaking off the cuff. Extended applause and cheers. “To me, one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world — and it’s not a building, it’s a home as far as I’m concerned. It’s not even a house, it’s a home,” Trump continued. “It’s a wonderful place with an incredible history, but it’s all because of you.”

As I was watching him say that in real-time, it struck me as important. It’s probably because, the night before, I’d written about the incredibly cynical incorporation of an immigrant naturalization ceremony — also taped at the White House — into the Republican convention programming time. It was obviously a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials (excluding the president) from using federally funded resources for campaigning. But Trump and his team did it anyway, just as they’d repeatedly violated the Act’s prohibitions over the preceding three years.

He and they were treating the White House and the presidency as though it was theirs — and here was Trump saying that he was there, not them, in this building that he called a home. He adopted the habit of giving esteemed visitors a ceremonial “key to the White House,” as though this was something that was his to bestow — a practice he continued even after he left office.

But as egregious and unusual as those manifestations of Trump’s sense that the White House was his to do with as he pleased, it was child’s play, a microcosm of the way in which Trump has behaved since January.

First, there was the gilding, the slow and gaudy accretion of gold-tinged objects and appliqués around the Oval Office. Then there was the Rose Garden, paved over to make a patio that felt more like the places where he and his customers would congregate at Mar-a-Lago. There was the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” images representing past presidents that were added along the west colonnade seemingly meant primarily to troll Joe Biden.

Now, as you know, he has authorized the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the visual counterweight to the West Wing.

The West Wing is home to the Oval Office and the president’s staff; the East Wing was where the First Lady has traditionally had her offices and where visitors would begin their tours. But in July, the page with information about visiting the White House was updated to inform Americans that an “upcoming expansion,” the addition of a “White House State Ballroom,” would go “where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits.” In recent days, construction crews have begun ripping the East Wing apart, bypassing input from historians or other branches of government.

Because Trump views the White House as his. For decades, Americans embraced the idea that electing non-politicians to office would improve governance, operating under the assumption that bringing an outsider’s view to calcified systems might spur fixes. This isn’t really how it worked out. We got a president who has no appreciation for the balance of federal power and no concept of the presidency as an entity that sits above the person who holds the title. We got someone with decades of experience in putting his name on things and vacuuming up money from all available sources and he’s putting that experience to work.

The metaphor of Trump crushing a portion of the White House as he aims bulldozers at democracy itself is almost too obvious to note. But it’s not just a symbolic parallel: both are rooted in the same indifference to what these American institutions mean to Americans and to America. Both are rooted in Trump wanting to treat those things as his own and now feeling empowered to do precisely that.

As of writing, by the way, the visitors page at the White House website still encourages people to reserve tours through the offices of their members of Congress. Those tours, the site advertises, will “include the public rooms in the East Wing”; whether hard hats will be provided is not indicated.

And at the top of the page is a ticker noting that the government is shut down — an act, it says, that is the fault of Democrats. That, too, is an inappropriate-if-not-illegal use of federal resources for partisan politics. Set beside the leveling a portion of what we once naively called “the people’s house,” though, that little piece of commentary is positively quaint.

Photo: Edited 1952 photo of the East Wing. (National Archives)

I’ve been traveling this week, so the amount of attention I’ve been able to pay to the world around me is diminished, no doubt to my benefit.

That said, the poll result below did come to my attention, and I thought it was worth elevating. In short, YouGov asked Americans whether last weekend’s almost-entirely-peaceful protests were mostly peaceful or mostly violent. And most Americans correctly said that they were mostly peaceful, because they were.

But the results among Republicans do stand out. Twice as many said they were mostly peaceful as said they were mostly violent — but, again, there’s no evidence of significant violence at all, much less nationally. Still, 1 in 8 Republicans think the protests were mostly violent, a claim that you might be forgiven for allowing to color their complaints about the rampant violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Those, too, were mostly peaceful, but incidents of violence have been amplified for years — including in recent Fox News coverage — in an effort to cast all of those events as dangerous and illegitimate. Now that sentiment has bled over into last week’s events, which are perhaps described by Republicans as violent simply because (like the 2020 protests) they understood to be hostile.

Of course, we must also note that 50 percent of Republicans say they aren’t sure how violent the protests were. This may be a function of limited coverage among media outlets most consumed by Republicans. Or it may be a function of the pattern — present among both parties — of feigning ignorance instead of conceding an inconvenient point. If you are a Republican who opposes the protests and knows they weren’t violent, you might simply say “man, who’s to say” when prompted to evaluate what unfolded.

The real tell here will be how the protests are viewed in the future. It took time for the 2020 protests to become summarized as uniformly violence-soaked and wantonly destructive, just as it took time for other false narratives about American politics to take root. When your perceptions of the world are uniformly filtered through a partisan lens, what you see necessarily diverges from reality.

Photo: A No Kings march in New Jersey. (Jeffrey Hayes/Flickr)

It’s clear that Donald Trump spent a big chunk of the period between his presidencies thinking about what he would do differently if he returned to the White House. One thing he settled on was that he wouldn’t be constrained by staffers and experts who were cautioning him about precedent and the law. Another was that he would use the power of the presidency as a cudgel against his opponents, real and perceived.

This was obvious well in advance of his actual election. During his first term — and particularly after the BLM protests that emerged in mid-2020 — he’d made repeated comments about deploying the military against protesters and immigrants. His interest in invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the streets of American cities became part of Kamala Harris’ argument against his election. When that didn’t work, questions about such deployments became part of the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet.

Those concerns were well-founded. Trump hasn’t invoked the Insurrection Act, but he has federalized state National Guards to use as law enforcement. And over the weekend, he repeatedly suggested that the Insurrection Act was the next step.

“I haven’t used it but, don’t forget, I can use the Insurrection Act,” he said in an interview with his friend Maria Bartiromo. “Fifty percent of the presidents, almost, have used that. And that’s unquestioned power.”

Flying back to D.C. from (another) weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he repeated the claim when talking to reporters.

“I’m allowed as you know as president, like, 50 percent of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act,” he said. “Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything.”

He’s making two claims here, both of them false.

The second claim is that the Insurrection Act allows him to have “unquestioned power” and avoid “court cases.” It does not. The Brennan Center explained what it actually does a few years ago, articulating that it, in essence, allows the president to use the military to “execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” In other words, to stamp out rebellions or to supplement law enforcement.

But I’d like to focus on Trump’s first claim, that about half of presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act. That’s not true.

The Brennan Center has a list of times at which the Act has been invoked in U.S. history. Over the course of 47 presidencies, it has been invoked in 19 — meaning about 2 in 5 presidencies, not 5 in 10.

The reasons for those invocations vary. Early in the country’s history, they were to put down actual rebellions — including at the outset of the Civil War. At a lot of other times, the Act has been invoked to allow a federal response to racist incidents: anti-Chinese riots, efforts by Southern states to retain segregation. In that latter case, the federal government stepped in to enforce laws that state authorities were hoping to ignore.

The most recent invocations — during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — were to provide additional support to states combatting unrest. Not rebellions but riots, like the ones that followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles.

Notice that an invocation of the Act during the Hoover administration was actually not undertaken by Hoover. If we remove that one from the calculus and look at the numbers by president (as Trump did) the percentage drops further: just over a third of presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act.

The most important factor here isn’t that Trump’s math is bad. It’s that he wants Americans to think that invocations of the Insurrection Act are par for the historical course, which they aren’t. He wants people to think that it’s relatively trivial to invoke the Act and that he can do so when he wants to for whatever reason he wants to.

But context matters. It’s also true that 50 percent of President Roosevelts declared war on Germany, but that’s because Franklin Roosevelt had reason to do so. There’s a reason those other presidents invoked the Insurrection Act, and it wasn’t because they wanted their political opponents to bend to their will. It was in defense of law and order, not as a defiance of it.

Another way to look at the data on the Insurrection Act is to note that no president has invoked it in more than 30 years. If Trump were to do so, as he’s hinting, he’d be breaking with precedent, not mirroring it.

Photo: Trump at his birthday parade. (White House/Flickr)

As is inevitably the case after an election — and is especially the case after an election with an unexpected result — allies of the losing presidential candidate in 2024 looked for people to blame.

One quickly identified culprit was “the groups,” advocacy organizations that had built power and used it to pressure Democratic candidates to push for their positions. Organizations that demanded racial justice and climate groups like the Sunrise Movement have been targets of particular ire. They pushed Democratic legislators to take public positions that were seen as unpopular, ushering in Donald Trump’s second term.

Let’s set aside the central problem with that claim — namely, that inflation was almost certainly a far, far bigger problem for the incumbent party than, say, “wokeness” — and instead consider the supposed problem on its own merits. In particular, the role of climate politics on the left.

It is true that addressing climate change has not proven to be something that inspires many Americans to vote for Democrats, even if they agree that planetary warming is a problem. There just happen to be a lot of other, more pressing problems that voters tend to prioritize.

It is also the case that the world is warming and that is being driven by human activity. It is the case that this is a problem that is already manifest and that it threatens to become more immediate and more damaging as time passes. It is an issue that will necessarily affect people who are alive in the year 2100 more than those who will be alive in 2050, meaning it is an issue that has particular salience to younger Americans.

So, for many young and recently young Americans, climate change became a generationally defining problem. It was something that affected them more than older Americans and it involved a fight against deeply entrenched interests with deep pockets. It is analogous (in admittedly incomplete ways) to the baby boom’s fight against the Vietnam War. That, too, was something that disproportionately affected the young and it, too, involved a fight against established power.

It was also a fight that emerged along with an unusually large population of young people. Millennials were between 10 and 25 years old when “An Inconvenient Truth” elevated global warming to national attention. For every 100 boomers in the U.S. two decades after that generation emerged (that is, in 1984), there were 94 millennials two decades after its emergence (in 2016). It’s just that, in part because of the baby boom, millennials made up far less of the total population.

The generational fight against climate change did not see the same success as did the fight against Vietnam. There are a lot of reasons for that, including that Vietnam War produced immediate, visceral examples of death and immorality that were effective in moving public opinion. The fight against climate change featured plenty of imagery of the effects of warmer oceans and air, but it also ran into a system of denial that wasn’t possible in the 1970s. It wasn’t just a battle against carbon dioxide emissions; it became a battle over reality, with corporations and their allies settling on a strategy of contesting every single inch of rhetorical terrain.

For all of the cynicism that accompanied the anti-war movement a half-century ago, at least the war ended. Young people fighting for what they saw as an existential threat to the planet and themselves, incremental progress in reducing greenhouse gases hardly seemed like much of a victory. They fought the system — and the system won a robust victory.

There was an institution that was supposed to aid their fight: The Democratic Party. Often, though, Democratic politicians adopted moderate positions or advocated for carefully triangulated policy proposals aimed at building consensus. Americans generally and young Americans in particular were already drifting away from party membership in favor of political independence; the Democratic Party didn’t offer young people who cared about climate change much of a reason to sign up.

The Democratic Party is supposed to be the storehouse of political power on the left. But the increased polarization of politics and the increased nationalization of it (the centering of national issues even in state and local races) has trained the party to seek out the least offensive possible position as indicated by public opinion data. So those young people — and people of color and the (mostly) retirement-age women who spun up the Indivisible protests during Trump’s first term — built power elsewhere. Then they deployed it as they saw fit.

This is what stokes the frustration of those left-leaning pundits. Why are you applying pressure there, where it doesn’t matter, instead of here, where it does? Why are you doing something that polls say is unpopular? Why are you being so strident? This is why we lost Montana!

Never mind that there’s often little evidence that these pundits have any special insight into winning elections. We can agree that the Democratic Party needs to incorporate a more diverse array of policies and priorities than does the Republican Party (given the Senate and Electoral College benefits of there being a lot of heavily rural and heavily White states) while still arguing that there’s value in people advocating for what they believe in.

We can also point to recent evidence that poll numbers are far from static. President Trump’s approach to immigration was viewed generally positively until (over objections from some of the aforementioned pundits) the left began elevating the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Trump’s numbers went underwater and have stayed there. The rhetoric drove the polls, instead of the inverse.

With massive anti-Trump protests planned for tomorrow, this is important to remember. Sincerity, staking out a position rooted in one’s personal beliefs, has value. You can win elections by tacking to the middle; lots of people have. But you can also win elections by staking a moral position and convincing people to agree with you. You can earn support by demonstrating what is important to you instead of just being determined to nod along with what you hear.

If the problem for Kamala Harris in 2024 was the emergence of climate and racial justice groups that boxed her in, then the problem wasn’t with those groups. It was with a party that left space for those groups to emerge by failing to capture the energy and urgency of their members.

It is also worth remembering that the moment in which there was the most obvious grass-roots energy around racial justice and against Trump in recent years was in 2020. How’d the Democratic candidate do then?

Photo: 2014 Climate march in NYC.

Vice President JD Vance, commenting on random Americans who made light of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

“Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Vance, commenting on adult Republicans — including an elected official and staffers — who participated in a group chat that included racist and pro-Hitler commentary:

“The reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. … I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

In both cases, Vance was speaking on Kirk’s eponymous podcast. Meaning that he was offering those conflicting messages to the same audience, one that he (probably correctly) assumed would find any joke about Kirk’s death to be worthy of punishment and jokes comparing Black people to monkeys to be dismissible.

On Thursday, Pew Research Center released data evaluating the extent to which Americans see calling out offensive social-media posts as valuable. In 2022, 6 in 10 Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) felt that doing so was apt to punish people who didn’t deserve it while about the same percentage of Democrats (and leaders) felt that it introduced accountability.

In the most recent data, that divide is gone. Now, about the same percentage of each party sees accountability as a more likely outcome.

It is probably important both that the above shift overlaps with Trump’s return to the White House and social media companies scaling back their efforts to police abuse and misconduct. Trump and his allies have stoked the idea that America has undergone a sea change, one in which the prevailing ethos has shifted in their direction. Facebook and what was once Twitter have signed onto that idea. The right can’t present themselves as victims of powerful “woke” forces if they see themselves as the ones with cultural power.

But they can police conformity with that power, as they once accused the non-right of doing to them. Monitoring speech is just another tool in the authoritarian toolbox, used as a cudgel against critics or in service of their allies. For my enemies, the law, etc.

In that sense, there is no hypocrisy in Vance’s comments on the Kirk podcast. They are consistent in that they reflect the will of the administration and its approach to power.

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

After Politico reported on the existence of an overtly racist group chat involving a number of leaders of Young Republican groups around the country, some members of their party hoped to wave it all away.

“The reality is that kids do stupid things,” Vice President Vance said on a podcast on Wednesday. “Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.” He added that “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

Vance is being consistent here. In February, he advocated for the re-hiring of an administration staffer who’d been found to have made racist posts on social media. “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” he insisted at the time.

But, of course, the people engaging in this racism aren’t kids. The guy in February was 25. Mother Jones sussed out the ages of most of the participants in the group chat, finding that all were at least in their mid-20s. Some held elected office; others worked for the party or party organizations.

There is a sense in which they are relatively young, however: they are awfully young for Republicans.

Older Americans, who vote more often, are usually registered with one of the two major parties. Young people, though, tend to register either as Democrats or as independents and members of third parties. Among registered voters under the age of 30 in June, only 1 in 5 were registered as Republicans.

As Politico notes, the Young Republican organizations whose leaders were involved in the group chat target Americans between the ages of 18 and 40. Voter data from June shows that only about 20 percent of Republicans fell into that age range.

Compare that with Democrats, more than a third of whom are 40 and under. Among independents and members of third parties, nearly half are.

Relative to Republicans overall, then, a 30 year-old is sort of a kid? If we grade on a curve.

That’s not the game that Vance is playing, though. He claims that these people who hold leadership positions within his party are too immature to avoid making racist and antisemitic comments to one another — an assertion that you may evaluate for yourself.

It is true that younger Americans are more receptive to fringe-right ideologies. Pilot research conducted as part of the 2024 American National Election Studies found that adults 40 and under, and particularly young men, had slightly warmer (though still cold) feelings to explicit racists and fascists.

There wasn’t a big difference by either party or ideology, though, except that moderates and independents had warmer feelings than partisans. It’s possible, then, that this is to some extent in part a function of actual naïveté among younger people about these ideologies.

But that’s average Americans, not politically active members of the GOP. And research looking at another facet of the group chat target — antisemitic and pro-Hitler comments — shows that this is a more comment sentiment among young people on the right.

The study, released in 2022, includes a summary of its findings:

“We oversampled young adults because unlike other forms of prejudice that are more common among older people, antisemitism is theorized to be more common among younger people. Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”

Vance’s effort to wave this away as kids being kids, then, fails on both fronts. Only relative to his unusually old party is a 30 year-old a kid. And only within a particularly toxic subset of young people — one that has some overlap with the party — are the views expressed in that group chat normal young-person behavior.

As at least some other members of his party appear to recognize.

Photo: A middle-aged man visits the president. (White House/Flickr)

On Monday, I jokingly suggested that the dispute over Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day be resolved on a state-by-state basis, considering the ancestral heritage of each state’s residents. New York, which has far more people of Italian than Native American ancestry, would celebrate Columbus Day. Oklahoma, with far more people whose ancestors were Native Americans, would celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Like so many other things I write, this was basically an excuse to do some data analysis. So, using Census Bureau data compiled by IPUMS, I determined what percentage of each states’ residents were Italian or Native American and, therefore, which holiday that state should/will celebrate.

I presented the results in this map.

When I shared this map on social media, a question arose: What was happening in Arizona? Was it really the case that the southwestern state has more people of Italian than Native American ancestry?

And the answer is that, yes, it does — at least according to this CPS data.

That’s only a recent development, though. In 2000, the CPS data indicates that Arizona had about 325,000 people of Native American ancestry but only 235,000 of Italian heritage. Between then and 2023, though, the state grew by 48 percent, with a large number of people from other states (often retirees) moving to the Sun Belt. The number of people of Italian ancestry in Arizona jumped to more than 304,000. During the same period the number of residents of Native American ancestry fell below 300,000. And here we are.

I pulled data from each state for 2000, 2010, 2020 and 2023 to show how the populations have shifted.

You’ll notice that the number of residents of Native American ancestry dropped in a number of states since 2000. In fact, Arizona wasn’t the only one to go from more-Native-American to more-Italian; 13 other states also saw the number of residents of Italian ancestry pass those who have Native American ancestry. (This analysis excludes people who claim both ancestries.) From 2000 to 2023, 41 states saw the number of residents of Italian ancestry increase. Only seven saw an increase in the number of residents claiming Native American ancestry.

It’s likely that this is a function of data collection rather than demography. My former colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Van Dam, wrote a few years ago about an increase in Native American identification, a function of changes to how the Census Bureau asked about race. That conflicts with the CPS data, which shows a substantial decline in reported Native American ancestry.

It’s a more detailed question than I’ll get into here. Instead, I’d like to return to my original theme: The Holiday That Many People Don’t Even Get Off. So: A quarter of a century ago, most states would have more appropriately celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day than Columbus Day. According to this data, that is no longer the case.

Photo: A cactus in Arizona in 1882. (National Archives)

One of Donald Trump’s favorite places in the country is Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Not because there’s anything in the county that’s particularly compelling beyond its natural beauty. No, Trump likes Sweetwater County (even if he couldn’t name it) because it is 1) very large and 2) voted for him by more than a 50-point margin each time he ran for president.

In other words, Sweetwater County is one of the largest splotches of red on the maps of election results that Trump likes to wave around in the Oval Office. Only about 41,000 people live there, but it punches above its weight in making the U.S. look much more red than it actually is.

There is an established (and, for some time, strengthening) link between population density and voting. More urban areas vote more heavily Democratic; more rural, more heavily Republican.

The gap between the most urban and the most rural counties narrowed slightly in 2024 but, relative to 2012, it’s still yawning.

One might assume, as I did, that this means that comparing vote counts to the land area in which voting takes place would mean that the average number of square miles (or, as the charts below indicate, square meters) is lower for Democratic voters in denser parts of the country than it is for Republicans.

Using precinct-level data from 2016, though, we see that, averaged across states, it isn’t. On the chart below, dots below the line indicate an average square-meters-per-voter that’s higher for Hillary Clinton voters than it is for Trump voters in that state. And, as you can see, that’s the case for nearly every state.

If we use median square meters rather than average, the picture is slightly different. States with lower median square-meters-per-voter tended to see more square meters per Trump voters than Clinton. States with higher square-meters-per tended to see more square meters per Clinton voters.

You’ll notice that most of the lower square-meters-per-voter values are in states that voted for Clinton. And that, it turns out, is most of the story.

If we look at the average square meters per Clinton voter in individual counties, we see how urban areas stand out. They have lower square-meters-per-voter because there are more voters in a smaller space. In rural Nevada, there’s a much higher value — more space and fewer Clinton voters.

If we do the same analysis for Trump voters, we see a key difference: much more vote density in the areas around the cities that stand out above.

In other words: more Trump voters in the suburbs, increasing the denominator in our calculation.

Since Trump won more rural areas and Clinton won more urban ones, the ratio of area to votes spikes for the Democrat in places where she got blown out. In Sweetwater County, for example, there were 8.4 square kilometers per Clinton voter compared to 2.2 for each Trump voter.

If we look only at the averages in precincts each candidate won, the chart looks more like what I would have expected at the outset. In nearly every state, Clinton voters cast ballots from more densely-packed areas than did Trump voters.

As I was mulling this over in the first place, I thought it would be interesting to see whether the understood correlation between population density and voting could be measured using these data. I reached an unsatisfying answer: Sort of.

Photo: Trump at a campaign event in 2020. (White House archive/Flickr)

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) has announced her intention to run for Senate against the state’s well-known — ahem — incumbent, Susan Collins. When the next Senate term begins in January 2027, Collins will be 74 years old, well past the typical retirement age in the United States. But Mills will be 79 — well, well past the typical age at which one assumes a new, stressful job.

It used to be relatively rare for anyone as old as Mills would be to serve in the Senate at all, much less as a freshman. Until the 114th Congress (2015–2016), no more than seven senators served in a single congress who would have turned 79 by the end of the congress’s second year. Since the 114th Congress, though, there have been at least eight in each congress. The current, 119th Congress, has 11 senators who will be 79 or older by the end of next year.

You can see on the chart below how the age of sitting senators has slid upward — as, of course, has the age of the American public.

There are some senators who stand out on the chart above. The series of dots that extends all the way to the 100 mark, for example, indicates Strom Thurmond, who served as a senator for nearly 1 in 5 years that the U.S. has been in existence.

Often, freshmen senators who were in their 70s and 80s were appointed to fill vacancies. The oldest new senator (according to my analysis of VoteView data), was Andrew Jackson Houston, appointed at age 86 to fill a vacancy. He started in April 1941. He died in June 1941.

By my count, there are seven freshman senators in U.S. history who would have been 79 or older by the end of the congress in which they first served. All but one, Isaac Stephenson, was appointed. Stephenson was elected, assuming office in 1907 at the age of 77 — more than a year younger than Mills would be.

Until the 1860s, almost or more than half of senators were under the age of 50. That hasn’t been the case since the congress that ended in 1868. Over the past five congresses, an average of just under 10 percent of senators have been under the age of 50. In the current congress, more than 10 percent will be 79 or older by the end of next year.

When Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) announced his intent to retire back in September, I suggested that the Democratic Party was slowly beginning to recognize its generational problem. It will be in part up to primary voters in Maine — given a choice between Mills and a 40-something challenger — to determine the extent to which the party’s base agrees that there’s a problem at all.

Given that Maine’s residents are the oldest of any state, they may not.

Photo: Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond in 1987. (National Archives)

For years, the country has grappled with a difficult question: should we set aside a holiday to honor the man who accidentally discovered North America and its native inhabitants before willfully killing huge numbers of them? Some people say no.

This isn’t the actual issue, of course. Columbus Day has become a proxy for recognizing the contribution of Italian immigrants to the U.S., as seen in the documentary film “The Sopranos.” It’s less about Columbus than it is about recognizing a part of American culture — one that itself took a while to establish a foothold.

Still, though, Columbus’s was the precipitating event for a lot of native deaths. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that accommodated that history, stating that Columbus Day (a congressionally authorized federal holiday) would also serve as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And since Biden did that, this month Trump gleefully undid it, acting as though Columbus Day had been eradicated (which it hadn’t) and he was the salvation of Italian heritage.

Given that history of tension, I am proud to offer a solution. The holiday will now be celebrated as a function of state populations, with states having a larger portion of residents of Native American ancestry celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day and states with more residents of Italian ancestry celebrating Spain’s most notorious contractor.

The Census Bureau collects data on ancestry. In the U.S., there are a bit under three times as many people who report Italian heritage as report Native American. The Native Americans are at a slight disadvantage, having been slaughtered so enthusiastically that it affected the climate, but that’s where we are.

As noted, though, this varies by state. Some, particularly in the Northeast, have far more people of Italian ancestry. A few have more of Native American ancestry.

That map doesn’t include people whose ancestors were Pacific Island natives or identified as being of Hawaiian ancestry. If we add them:

The county-level data are limited, but within that limited set, the county with the biggest ratio of Native American to Italian ancestry is Coconino County, Ariz. The one with the biggest Italian to Native American is Morris County, N.J. — where several scenes from the documentary “The Sopranos” were shot.

Once the nation adopts my proposal for the holiday, here’s what will be celebrated where, at least until people move around.

There is one problem with this plan, I’ll admit. There is a (relatively loose) correlation between the prevalence of residents of Native American ancestry and support for Trump in the 2024 election. Meaning that states that would celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day would be more likely to also support Trump’s presidency.

This, too, has at least some roots in the unhappy history of Native Americans. Oklahoma has a lot more people of Native American than Italian history not entirely because the Native Americans were hoping it would work out that way.

But, look. A solution is a solution. I look forward to a bipartisan Capitol Hill coalition embracing and implementing this idea, one that will leave everyone satisfied.

Photo: Barbara Bush in a Columbus Day parade, 1989. (National Archives)

There is no crisis of unrest in Portland, Oregon.

One way I know this to be true is that President Trump — who is insistent that Portland faces just such a crisis — doesn’t offer any evidence of it. At some point last month, he may have seen old footage from 2020 on Fox News and decided to declare that the city needed the intervention of federal or federalized troops. (We don’t know that he was watching Fox but he did offer the governor the bemused observation that what she was telling him about Portland didn’t match what he saw on TV.)

On Sept. 27, he declared that the city was “War ravaged,” demanding military presence. A few days later, he claimed that “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem,” with “ANTIFA and the Radical Left Anarchists … viciously attacking our Federal Law Enforcement Officers.” He insisted that “[w]e will never allow MOBS to take over our streets, burn our Cities, or destroy America.” That same day, Oct. 1, he insisted that “Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt, and even killed.”

But he hasn’t presented any videos or photos showing this mayhem and murder. No social media clips of rioters running through the streets. No citizens cowering in terror. His social media guru Dan Scavino did post a video showing protesters outside an ICE facility in the city clashing with police and ICE officers. Other than that? You just have to take Trump’s word for it. As when he claimed during a recent White House event that the city “[doesn’t] even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”

No wonder a federal judge (appointed by Trump in his first term) described the president’s push to deploy National Guard troops to the city as being “simply untethered to the facts.”

“You look at what’s happened with Portland over the years; it’s a burning hellhole,” he said this week, disparaging that judge (who had “lost her way,” he said). “There’s a huge problem in Portland. I’ll tell you what the problem is: Crime.”

So let’s look at crime data. The Portland Police Bureau reports that reported incidents of vandalism in the city were down in August — the most recent month for which data is available — relative to the recent average for that month. Assaults were up slightly and homicides down, while reported incidents of arson were up. But bear in mind that there aren’t that many incidents of arson in the city; there were 41 in August 2024 and 46 in August 2025.

This approach of claiming that soldiers are needed to quell unrest while not showing any evidence for that need does not seem to be convincing many Americans. Polling conducted by Ipsos for Reuters found that most Americans, including most Republicans, think that Trump should only deploy troops to counter external threats. A plurality thought that Trump should not be allowed to send troops over the objection of state governors.

One group that Trump has convinced, though, is Republican legislators. The president recently signed a memorandum centered on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” He invoked “riots in … Portland” among evidence of what he described as “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”

The memo claimed that “domestic terrorists” were waging an assault on the country “under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ “

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Again, this is predicated, in part, on the fiction about Portland that Donald Trump has created. Leaders in his party have nonetheless embraced it.

On Friday morning, a number of senior elected Republicans claimed that the upcoming “No Kings” protest in D.C. was an arm of this anti-American hostility. It was a “hate-America rally” involving “antifa people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Fox News. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said this “hate-America rally” was being held by the “terrorist wing of their party.” On Newsmax, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) described it as a “Soros paid-for protest for his professional protesters,” indicating that the National Guard would be needed.

“Hopefully it’ll be peaceful,” he added. “I doubt it.”

There is a throughline here, and it isn’t that the president is taking necessary steps to keep Americans safe. It is that Trump frames dissent — at Portland’s ICE facility, in the streets of Washington, even simply in the abstract — as a threat that demands a governmental and/or military response. He and his allies have gone from describing Portland’s anti-ICE protests (which now regularly feature people wearing inflatable animal costumes) as a danger demanding armed response to preemptively framing an anti-Trump protest as the work of people the president has defined as domestic terrorists.

For his allies and many of his supporters, it seems, his word on the subject is more than enough.

Photo: Trump at Fort Liberty in June. (White House/Flickr)