… Very rarely do State of the Union speeches meaningfully improve presidents’ approval ratings. Moving numbers is not really the key objective, and that should not be the criteria by which they are judged. Examining ratings before and after these addresses demonstrates that since 1978, the average State of the […] Read more »
Two-Thirds of White Evangelicals, Most Republicans Sympathetic to Christian Nationalism
A major new national survey conducted jointly by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution finds nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism adherents (29%) or sympathizers (35%), and more than half of Republicans are classified as adherents (21%) or sympathizers (33%). This is […] Read more »
Half in U.S. Say They Are Worse Off, Highest Since 2009
Reflecting on their personal financial situations, 35% of Americans say they are better off now than they were a year ago, while 50% are worse off. Since Gallup first asked this question in 1976, it has been rare for half or more of Americans to say they are worse off. […] Read more »
U.S. Economic Optimism Rises As Investors Turn Bullish
Investors turned bullish on the outlook for the U.S. economy over the past month, mirroring the S&P 500’s current rally, even as noninvestors remained in a deep funk, the new IBD/TIPP Poll finds. The overall IBD/TIPP U.S. Economic Optimism Index rose 1.8-points to 45.1 in February. That put the index […] Read more »
The “State of the Union” is whatever your partisanship tells you it is
In anticipation of President Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, public pollsters released poll results reporting on, well, the “state of the union” and how Americans feel about Biden. There is increasingly only one lesson from these polls: Partisanship determines how we see the nation and our […] Read more »
Large numbers of Americans want a strong, rough, anti-democratic leader
Many Americans, many of them Republicans, seek leaders who would violate basic principles of democracy. AP Photo/Ben Gray Tarah Williams, Allegheny College; Andrew Bloeser, Allegheny College, and Brian Harward, Allegheny College It might be comforting to think that American democracy has made it past the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. But […] Read more »