… Biologists often talk about the need for biodiversity. In politics, it’s healthy to have parties with internal diversity, not only along lines of gender and race but geographical and ideological diversity, as well. Just as inbreeding can distort certain characteristics in nature, in politics it has an effect too, […] Read more »
What We Know About the Women Who Vote for Republicans and the Men Who Do Not
The deepening gender gap in American voting, with men favoring the Republican Party and women favoring the Democrats, is well known, if not well understood. So what explains the presence of millions of men in the Democratic Party and millions of women in the Republican Party? What distinguishes these two […] Read more »
More Republicans have died of COVID-19. Does that mean the polls are off?
Doctors and demographers recently noticed another tragic example of how polarization shapes America: The pandemic has killed more people in the nation’s Republican enclaves than its Democratic strongholds. They explain the gap by pointing to Republican resistance to vaccines and the GOP’s more cavalier approach to combating the virus in […] Read more »
The Green-Energy Culture Wars in Red States
The battle over the nation’s energy future has become another front in the escalating cultural and political confrontation between what America has been and what it is becoming. The states that are most deeply integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy, either as producers or as consumers, tend also to be […] Read more »
New polls confirm Democratic problems for November
The recently released March 7-13 Pew Research Center survey and the March 18-22 NBC News poll paint a grim picture for Democrats. Even worse for the president’s party, they offer little reason to believe that things will improve for Democrats before the November midterm elections. After watching his performance for […] Read more »
Republicans are winning the culture wars
… Progressive Democrats have staked out ideological territory on cultural flashpoints ranging from race and gender to affirmative action, crime and policing, education, and COVID restrictions that are out of the political mainstream. Some of these fights, like the battle over inclusive language (like the much-discussed debate over Latinx) end […] Read more »