Washington DC may be politically polarized but most Americans are not

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… During the 2020 election campaign, the American National Election Study, widely considered the gold standard of election surveys, asked 8,268 randomly selected American citizens about their ideological location on the liberal-conservative spectrum, a question they have posed since 1972. The seven response options ranged from extremely liberal to extremely conservative with shades of each and a moderate option in between. The result: As Figure 1 shows, more than any other category, Americans in 2020 turned out to be moderate (or had no clue about the liberal-conservative spectrum). Barely a handful align with the endpoints, extreme liberal or extreme conservative. To be true to the meaning of the concept, polarization requires a bipolar distribution, as seen in the US Congress. That is certainly not currently the case for the American electorate. CONTINUED

Helmut Norpoth (Stony Brook) & Michael S. Lewis-Beck (U. of Iowa), LSE USAPP

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The state of faith

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We’ve all heard the headlines. Church membership is dropping. Secularization is rising. Religious activities no longer anchor the average American’s social life.

And yet a new survey from the Deseret News and Marist Poll shows that the story of faith in America is far more complicated — and nuanced — than a simple narrative of decline. Among many groups, faith is thriving, resilient and even on the rise. CONTINUED

Kelsey Dallas, Deseret News

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Republican Voters Are Now America’s Foreign Policy Doves

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On Wednesday, 15 Republican senators held a press conference to criticize President Biden for insufficient boldness in Ukraine. John Kennedy likened the president to “Bambi’s baby brother.” Ben Sasse accused the administration of treating the war like a “nerd-lawyer” dispute, not “a moral battle.” John Cornyn sternly declared, “The Biden administration’s timidity in the face of this evil needs to end.”

From Richard Nixon in 1968 to Mitt Romney in 2012, this is how Republican politicians talked about foreign policy: They were the party of strength, and Democrats were the party of weakness. But that formulation is no longer true. The GOP, as measured by the expressed beliefs of its voters, has become the more dovish party. CONTINUED

William Saletan, The Bulwark

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Youth turnout could save, or sink, Democrats in 2022

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Soaring turnout and big margins among young voters were central to the Democratic victories in the 2018 congressional and 2020 presidential elections. But with many young people expressing disenchantment with President Joe Biden’s performance, preserving those advantages looms as one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats in the 2022 midterms.

There’s widespread concern among Democrats that turnout for young people this November could fall back from its gains in 2018 toward the meager levels that contributed to the party’s crushing losses in the 2014 and 2010 midterm elections. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, CNN

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How White Victimhood Fuels Republican Politics

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… With President Biden having just passed one full year in office, public opinion research shows that white Americans — and especially Republicans — see whites as victims of discrimination more than, say, Hispanic or Black Americans. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, only 17 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said there is “a lot” of discrimination against Black people in today’s society. That number rose to 26 percent when Republicans were asked whether they believed white people faced “a lot” of discrimination. And intense white racial resentment remains present both among Trump’s base and in our politics today. CONTINUED

Alex Samuels & Neil Lewis Jr., FiveThirtyEight

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Poll: Hispanics aren’t flocking to the GOP, but Democrats still have problems

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Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans have been riding a wave of positive press about their gains among Hispanic voters as Democrats fret about hemorrhaging support from the fast-growing demographic.

But while Democrats clearly have a problem, the GOP’s growing support among Latinos is less dramatic than some headlines suggest, according to a new poll conducted by a top Latino Democratic pollster and underwritten by a conservative Spanish-language network. …

The poll, one of the largest samples of Hispanic voters taken in recent months, provides both a blueprint for conservative outreach efforts like Americano’s, as well as a more complete picture of the challenges both parties face in courting the demographic. CONTINUED

Marc Caputo, NBC News

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