Our constitutional crisis is already here

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The […] Read more »

Americans And Experts Agree That Democracy Is Struggling

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, we assess the state of American democracy with the help of a new survey from Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor threats to our democratic systems. CONTINUED FiveThirtyEight The OPINION TODAY email newsletter is a concise daily rundown of significant new […] Read more »

Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. With all his histrionics and […] Read more »

For Biden, confronting Putin may have been easier than dealing with Republicans back in Washington

With confidence and elan, President Joe Biden rallied allies abroad last week around the viability of 21st century democracy. Proving it here at home will be harder. Members of the transatlantic coalition — at meetings of the Group of Seven, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union — […] Read more »