Going into 2024, Biden has as many challenges as Trump

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Since we’re starting 2024 election talk already, it’s worth discussing the current president as much as the former president. While President Biden has not yet formally announced his candidacy, he has said it is his intention to run. …

Assuming he is running, Biden has some work to do in his own party. He’s not particularly popular right now, and while he is unlikely to face a serious primary challenge, he will need all the help he can get for a possible second face-off with former President Trump. CONTINUED

Natalie Jackson, National Journal

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Among Young Adults, Cigarette Smoking Rates Down Sharply, Marijuana Usage Increasing

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As the percentage of U.S. adults who smoke cigarettes has reached a new low of 11% this year, much of the decline is tied to sharply lower smoking rates among young adults. From 2001 to 2003, an average of 35% of U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 29 said they smoked cigarettes, compared with 12% in the latest estimate. …

In contrast to the decline in cigarette smoking among young adults, use of marijuana in this age group has increased, according to Gallup trends dating to 2013. Between 2019 and 2022, an average of 26% of young adults indicated they smoked marijuana, up from 17% between 2013 and 2015. More than twice as many young adults now say they smoke marijuana as smoke cigarettes. Marijuana smoking is also more common among young adults than vaping. CONTINUED

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup

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What the data show about angry parents rocking the 2022 election

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Angry parents of school-aged children were supposed to rock the gates of the establishment and send a message in the 2022 elections, at least according to the conservative narrative. “Woke” school curricula, extended COVID-19 restrictions in schools, and policies around transgender athletes were supposed to drive voters to the polls and make parents a key voting bloc to watch in the midterms. …

But the election results were more nuanced. Not only did Democrats overperform expectations in 2022, particularly in the House, but exit polling data shows that parents didn’t vote all that much differently than voters without children. CONTINUED

Nathan L. Gonzales, Roll Call

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In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify

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Keynote online lecture by Prof. Pippa Norris (Harvard University, USA) at the WAPOR 75th annual conference on November 11, 2022 in Dubai, UAE.

World Association for Public Opinion Research

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To understand the 2022 midterm vote, look at the state races

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As soon as election results are in, analysts usually scramble to look for large-scale trends and lessons in the vote — but analyzing the 2022 vote is proving to be a complicated task. In some ways, it was a very uneven election.

Was turnout up or down? Did the results follow long-term trends or not? The answer was yes, or perhaps more correctly, it depends.

Democrats had a good Election Night in 2022. They held the Senate, came close to holding the House and did well in important gubernatorial races. But the results did not seem to provide definitive answers on what message the national electorate was sending. At the state level, the turnout data offer some clues. CONTINUED

Dante Chinni, NBC News

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New state voter fraud units finding few cases from midterms

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State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems. That’s just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level. …

The absence of widespread fraud is important because the lies surrounding the 2020 presidential election spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies have penetrated deeply into the Republican Party and eroded trust in elections. In the run-up to this year’s elections, 45% of Republicans had little to no confidence that votes would be counted accurately. CONTINUED

Gary Fields, Anthony Izaguirre & Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press

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