The median reported year-over-year change in monthly household spending increased to 7.8 percent in April from 5.1 percent in December, its highest reading since the beginning of the series in December 2014. CONTINUED
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
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Democratic fortunes in the midterms depend on how well they are running in their working base among Blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans (AAPI), unmarried women, the Millennial and Gen Z generations, as well as with the under-fifty white working class women. These voters are deeply discontented with the state of the country, and they are not yet listening to the Democrats in advance of the midterms.
So, to get to a midterm strategy, Democracy Corps conducted focus groups using Change Research to conduct focus groups with Black, white millennial and unmarried women, and white working class women under 50 years. These were the groups we should have the best chance of getting heard, if Democrats were to shift the momentum this year.
Well, Democrats can get heard if they get to a different place on anger with corporate excess and monopoly power, deep anger about the cancellation of Roe, and an escalated attack on the Republicans. They have the potential to raise Democrats’ fortunes. And they have the potential to be heard by both Biden and Trump voters, Democrats and Republicans. CONTINUED
Stanley Greenberg, Democracy Corps
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Americans are about evenly divided on whether the government should require passengers to wear a face mask when flying on an airplane. While 49% of U.S. adults say the federal government should require all travelers aged 2 and older to wear a mask, 51% feel it should not be mandated. CONTINUED
Mohamed Younis, Gallup
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The 2022 midterm election year kicks off in earnest this spring with a series of Republican and Democratic primaries that will set up the November general election. This preview provides an introduction to the year ahead, with a focus on the most important House, Senate and gubernatorial races, as well as a look at the voters and issues that will help to determine which party holds power starting next January. There’s also a little history thrown in that speaks to President Biden’s problems, plus a look at how former president Donald Trump remains a factor. CONTINUED
Dan Balz & Marianna Sotomayor, Washington Post
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… When a man walked into a grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, yesterday and shot 13 people, killing 10, he illustrated the extreme consequences of the same minoritarian, anti-democracy thinking that is used to justify things like ending Roe and the existence of the US Senate, which primarily serves today as a blockade of any policy not favored by the numerical minority of white, rural Americans who control the 40 votes necessary to filibuster any bill proposed by the majority.
To be clear, I am not saying that all Republicans believe in the racist “great replacement theory” that pushed the Buffalo shooter to kill black Americans, who he viewed as political enemies. What I am saying is that the Buffalo shooting — and other terrorist attacks like it, including in El Paso, Texas, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina — is the product of people taking the predominant ideologies of America’s right today to their natural, violent extreme. And I want to share the social science that shows, empirically, how these things are tied together. CONTINUED
G. Elliott Morris, Democracy by the Numbers
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… At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations. CONTINUED
Nicholas Confessore & Karen Yourish, New York Times
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