Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index measured -45 in May, down from -39 in each of the previous two months. It is the lowest reading in Gallup’s trend during the coronavirus pandemic, and likely the lowest confidence has been since the tail end of the Great Recession in early 2009. CONTINUED
Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup
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Russia’s war on Ukraine has focused the world’s attention on the ideological battle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism—systems of government based on national sovereignty, freedom, the rule of law, and individual rights versus those based on military aggression, societal repression, one-party rule, and state control of people’s lives. …
But as the war in Ukraine enters its fourth month, where do the people of western nations stand on defending liberal democracy and democratic freedoms—both at home and abroad?
To get at this and other fundamental questions about how democratic countries are performing today, Global Progress and YouGov conducted the most comprehensive multi-national survey to date examining public attitudes about democratic delivery at home and beliefs about the war in Ukraine. CONTINUED
John Halpin, The Liberal Patriot
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Momentous and tragic events are driving public attention back toward abortion rights and gun control, two issues that keyed the Democratic advance in well-educated suburbs over the past generation. And that could create the Democrats’ best chance of defending those gains in the stormy environment of the 2022 midterm elections. …
Although the horrific Buffalo and Uvalde massacres, and the pending Supreme Court decision on Roe, could shift the public’s focus, polls make clear that Democrats still have work to do in persuading voters to focus more on these issues this year. In the recent Public Policy Institute of California poll, for example, just 2% of California voters picked abortion as their top concern, compared with 24% who identified jobs, the economy or inflation. In the May CNN survey, half of the minority of adults who wanted to overturn Roe said they were extremely or very enthusiastic about voting in November, compared with less than two-fifths of those who opposed reversing the decision. …
Most analysts in both parties agree that so many voters are expressing unhappiness over the country’s direction that Republicans are likely to post significant gains in November no matter how much attention shifts from the economy to abortion rights and gun control. The real issue isn’t whether Democrats can reverse that wave, it’s whether they can blunt it by holding on to some of the white-collar suburban voters who looked ready to move back toward the GOP after stampeding away from the party under Trump. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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Georgia Republicans last week rejected two malignant trends within their party — one less conspicuous, but no less important, than the other.
Best-known is the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election. By renominating Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the Peach State GOP rejected former President Donald Trump’s attempt at vengeance against two high-profile politicians he couldn’t bully into summarily overturning the voters’ will and reversing his loss to Joe Biden there.
The second is the increasing propensity of Republican politicians to contrive culture war controversies as a substitute for materially improving the lives of their constituents. Kemp’s victory over former Sen. David Perdue overcame that strategy, too. CONTINUED
John Harwood, CNN
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The sharp polarisation between mainly western liberal democracies and the rest of the world in perceptions of Russia has been laid bare in an annual global poll of attitudes towards democracy.
Within Europe, 55% of those surveyed for the Alliance for Democracies said they were in favour of cutting economic ties with Russia due to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whereas in Asia there was a majority against, and in Latin America opinion was evenly split.
Negative views of Russia are largely confined to Europe and other liberal democracies. Positive views of Russia have been retained in China, Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, Malaysia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. CONTINUED
Patrick Wintour, The Guardian
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… Christian nationalism is emerging alongside and in some cases overlapping with other right-wing movements, such as the conspiratorial QAnon, white supremacy, and denialism over COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Christian prayers and symbols featured prominently in and around the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection there. …
Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, said those Jan. 6 displays were not surprising. According to a recent survey by the institute, white evangelical Christians were among the strongest supporters of the assertion that God intended America as a “promised land” for European Christians. Those who backed that idea were far more likely to agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence … to save our country.” CONTINUED
Peter Smith & Deepa Bharath, Associated Press
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