The Covid-19 pandemic has torn through the United States in the last 12 months, leaving more than half a million dead and the nation’s economy in tatters, but the virus didn’t arrive on a blank slate. Long before Covid, the Deaths of Despair epidemic was already taking a massive toll […] Read more »
Why The Suburbs Have Shifted Blue
… Suburban and exurban counties turned away from Trump and toward Democrat Joe Biden in states across the country, including in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. In part, this may be because the suburbs are simply far more diverse than they used to be. But suburbs have also […] Read more »
Density as Destiny?
There were lots of mixed messages that came out of this election. Pres. Donald Trump’s divisive and polarizing style cost him the White House, but his unpopularity didn’t doom down-ballot Republicans. Trump’s attacks on Joe Biden as a secret supporter of socialism fell flat, but that didn’t insulate House Democratic […] Read more »
Trump Is Determined to Split the Country in Two
New offensives against major cities from President Donald Trump and GOP governors are pushing at the central geographic fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions. On one front, Trump is taking his confrontational approach toward big cities to an ominous new level by deploying federal law-enforcement officials to Portland […] Read more »
The Coronavirus Is Deadliest Where Democrats Live
The staggering American death toll from the coronavirus, now approaching 100,000, has touched every part of the country, but the losses have been especially acute along its coasts, in its major cities, across the industrial Midwest, and in New York City. The devastation, in other words, has been disproportionately felt […] Read more »
The Suburban Backlash Against the GOP Is Growing
The shift of metro areas away from the Republican Party under President Donald Trump rumbled on in yesterday’s elections, threatening the fundamental calculation of his 2020 reelection plan. Amid all the various local factors that shaped GOP losses—from Kentucky to Virginia, from suburban Philadelphia to Wichita, Kansas—the clearest pattern was […] Read more »