Ranking the States Demographically, from Most Republican-Friendly to Most Democratic-Friendly

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Key Points
• For all 50 states, we looked at 3 variables that are increasingly linked with partisan voting patterns: education level, race, and urbanization.
• When the states are rank-ordered by their composite scores on these 3 measures, the Republican-voting states for the 2020 presidential election cluster on one end of the spectrum, while the Democratic-voting states cluster at the other end, with many battleground states somewhere in the middle.
• In both the top (Republican) and bottom (Democratic) halves of our 1-through-50 list, only 5 out of 25 states broke ranks by voting for the presidential candidate who was at odds with the state’s demographic tendencies. This suggests that these 3 demographic factors have a strong influence on presidential voting behavior. CONTINUED

Louis Jacobson, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

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Increasing Public Criticism, Confusion Over COVID-19 Response in U.S.

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Nearly two years after the coronavirus outbreak took hold in the United States, Americans are increasingly critical of the response to COVID-19 from elected officeholders and public health officials.

Amid debates over how to address the surge in cases driven by the omicron variant, confusion is now the most common reaction to shifts in public health guidance: 60% of U.S. adults say they’ve felt confused as a result of changes to public health officials’ recommendations on how to slow the spread of the coronavirus, up 7 percentage points since last summer.

Americans are now almost evenly divided over how well public health officials, such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are responding to the outbreak, with about half (49%) saying they are doing an only fair or poor job and half (50%) saying they are doing an excellent or good job. CONTINUED

Alec Tyson & Cary Funk, Pew Research Center

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Most Americans and Republicans side with Pence over Trump

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Former Vice President Mike Pence has caused an uproar by saying he did not have the lawful ability to overturn the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021. Pence has argued correctly, according to almost every single legal scholar, that his role as president of the Senate was largely ceremonial during the congressional count of electoral votes. “President Trump is wrong,” Pence declared last week.

Normally, taking a position against the former President would be the death knell in Republican politics, but data shows that this looks to be the rare case where Pence is unlikely to face much wrath from the base. CONTINUED

Harry Enten, CNN

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The fight isn’t over whether America will be a democracy, but what kind of democracy

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I and others often say that the partisan conflict in the United States puts our democracy at risk. And it’s true. But that framing implies that the core conflict is about democracy — as if we have one side that supports fair elections while the other prefers dictatorship.

But the real conflict is over what kind of democracy the United States will be: White Christian Wealthy Male Semi-Democracy or Multiracial Multicultural Social Fuller-Democracy. CONTINUED

Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post

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Hotline’s Senate Power Rankings

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Democrats had a rough 2021, and entering 2022, things still look bleak. A president’s party typically loses seats in their first midterm election, and President Biden doesn’t look to be an exception to that rule at the moment, with his approval rating mired in the low 40s.

While the House might all but be lost for Democrats, the Senate figures to be a closer call. Yet with the upper chamber split 50-50, Democrats have absolutely zero margin for error.

If there is one silver lining for Democrats, it’s that the map is favorable to them. CONTINUED

Matt Holt, Josh Kraushaar & Kirk A. Bado, National Journal

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Slightly over half of Americans disapprove of President Biden’s performance in office

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This week’s Ipsos’ Core Political shows that Americans remain mostly disapproving of President Joe Biden’s performance in office. Twenty-six percent of Americans believe the economy is the most important problem facing the country today, this is up four points from early January when it was 22%. …

After a steep decline in approval among Democrats last week, Biden’s approval rating has slightly recovered by seven points (from 71% to 78%) but remains low among independents (39%) and Republicans (14%). CONTINUED

Ipsos

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