At Year Three, Americans Split on Whether Pandemic Is Over

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Three years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and much of the U.S. went into lockdown, Americans are evenly divided about whether the coronavirus pandemic is over in the U.S. Forty-nine percent say it is, while 51% say it is not. …

Fifty-two percent of Americans currently report that they have ever tested positive for COVID-19, and another 13% say they have not tested positive but believe they have had it. Self-reported infection is up significantly from last fall, when 44% said they had ever tested positive. CONTINUED

Lydia Saad, Gallup

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The Republican Presidential Primary: Still Early, but Maybe Getting Late

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Key Points
• The calendar year before the presidential primary voting begins is often defined by winnowing, as contenders emerge and then fade.
• But Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are taking up so much oxygen that we may already have the top contenders, with everyone else who runs essentially an afterthought.
• DeSantis is polling well for a non-candidate, but we need to see how he actually performs before assuming that his support is solid.
• If another candidate supplants DeSantis (or Trump), or at least vaults into their stratosphere, don’t necessarily assume it will be someone who is currently well-known now or has a lot of formal political experience. CONTINUED

Kyle Kondik & J. Miles Coleman, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

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National Swing Women Voters Executive Summary

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Funded by Horizon Strategies and directed entirely by the two companies, we took an in-depth look at two small, but consequential groups in the electorate: Republican women who did not vote straight party in 2022 and Independent women who voted for candidates of both parties. CONTINUED

Nicole McCleskey (Public Opinion Strategies) & Jessica Pacheco (Horizon Strategies)

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Examining how U.S. politics became intertwined with personal identity

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America’s divisions often go beyond disputes over policy, regularly spilling into clashes over identity and culture and pitting friends and family against one another. Judy Woodruff explores how that came to be and what it means for our shared future in her latest installment of “America at a Crossroads.”

PBS NewsHour

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Republicans are leaving votes on the table

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The Beltway hosted a dueling set of Republican conferences this past weekend, which perfectly highlighted the party’s struggles: the Conservative Political Action Conference, taken over by former President Trump; versus Principles First, put on by center-right and never-Trump organizations.

Trump triumphantly declared his takeover of the party complete, saying things like “We will never go back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.” Reports say Principles First featured a defeated tone, with attendees wondering if the party will even survive.

And yet, among all registered Republicans, it is far from clear that Trump has irreversibly taken over. My estimates, along with surveys asking whether voters are more loyal to Trump or the Republican Party, show that roughly 30 percent of the potential Republican electorate falls into the Trumpian non-cons camp, who are more concerned with power and control than policy. They seek to win votes by stoking anger and using bigger government to protect existing power structures. That leaves two-thirds of Republicans as possibly moveable. CONTINUED

Natalie Jackson, National Journal

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Immigration continues to be a highly divisive issue

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There is not much support for allowing more migrants into the United States in general, or for accepting more people who are seeking asylum. The public is more likely to say the number of immigrants overall or those seeking asylum should be reduced rather than increased.

Forty-four percent say immigration should be reduced, while only 20% would like to see more immigrants allowed into the country. Similarly, 43% say there should be fewer asylum-seekers allowed entry, compared with 24% who would like to see more people given asylum.

Support for immigration has faded over Biden’s presidency. Twenty-eight percent of the public supported increasing immigration in an AP-NORC poll conducted in March 2021. That has dropped to 20% in the latest poll. Only 11% of Republicans favor increased immigration, along with 27% of Democrats. But when asked specifically about immigrants seeking asylum, Democrats are more likely to favor allowing more immigration, while Republicans have the opposite view. CONTINUED

AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research

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