Democratic mayoral control in big cities is new ‘blue wall’

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One group was noticeably absent among the biggest players in Washington, D.C. this week for the U.S. Conference of Mayors: Republicans.

There are many ways to measure the much-discussed urban and rural divide in American politics, but one area with the steepest divide, at least on the urban side, is who runs the nation’s largest cities.

Take, for example, the nation’s 10 largest cities by population. They aren’t just mostly blue, there isn’t a hint of red to be seen among them. CONTINUED

Dante Chinni, NBC News

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The Politics of Respectability and Black Americans’ Punitive Attitudes

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Existing research largely ignores Black support for punitive policies that target group members, even as this support challenges expectations of in-group favoritism and group solidarity. The current research fills this gap by leveraging a familiar concept: “the politics of respectability.” Building on historical and qualitative accounts of this worldview, which focuses on the behavior of group members, I develop a social psychological framework to understand how identity-based concerns motivate Black support for punishment that targets members of their racial group. I also develop a novel measure of respectability–the Respectability Politics Scale. CONTINUED

Hakeem Jefferson (Stanford), American Political Science Review

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How Right-Wing Media Ate the Republican Party

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Nicole Hemmer, director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, explains why the roots of the G.O.P.’s ongoing identity crisis can be found in the 1990s.

The Ezra Klein Show

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Generation Z is the most racially diverse and fastest-growing segment of the electorate

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Generation Z voters, those ages 18 to 25, represent the fastest-growing portion of the electorate, growing from 0% in 2012 (when they were too young to vote), to 9% of all voters in 2022, according to merged data from NBC News polls during that period. …

Not only the fastest-growing sector of the electorate, Generation Z is also the most racially-diverse.

Thirty-eight percent of voters aged 18-25 identified as people of color, compared to 32% of millennials, 28% of Generation X and 21% of Baby Boomers identifying the same way. CONTINUED

Alexandra Marquez, NBC News

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The polarization paradox: elected officials and voters have shifted in opposite directions

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During the past four decades, the two major political parties have steadily moved farther away from each other and are now as deeply divided as they have been for more than a century. For most of this period, analysts agree, Republican elected officials have moved more to the right than Democratic officials have to the left.

But there’s a paradox: since the early 1990s, according to Gallup, Democratic voters have shifted more to the left than Republican voters have to the right. …

This analysis of ideological change within the parties leaves several questions unanswered. Many voters are liberal on economic issues but conservative on cultural issues, or vice versa. When such voters identify themselves ideologically, it is not always clear which element of their outlook is taking priority. Nor is it clear that the meaning of ideological labels has remained constant over time. CONTINUED

William A. Galston, Brookings Institution

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Abortion Pills Will Be the Next Battle in the 2024 Election

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The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest. President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. …

What’s clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them won’t be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. “It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, ‘It’s just up to the states’ now,” Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. “We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates.” Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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