How Trump Turned the Pandemic Into Identity Politics

No one really knows where the arc of history is bending these days, but this weekend we got a good look at where the arc of conservative activism is heading. The death toll in the United States from the coronavirus has now topped 40,000 but, egged on by presidential tweets, […] Read more »

Message testing coronavirus response

On behalf of Groundwork Collaborative, Data for Progress conducted a message test around President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic in order to determine the most effective messaging for progressives to use in highlighting the President’s responsibility for the public health and economic crises that have arisen due to […] Read more »

What’s Driving the Right-Wing Protesters Fighting the Quarantine?

In an era when hardly anything feels nonpartisan, the coronavirus was starting to look like a consensus issue. … But this week, a rash of well-organized protests against state restrictions broke out — a jolting reminder that not everyone is on board with the new, government-mandated limits on public assembly […] Read more »

Trump Has a Gut Feeling About What Covid-19 Means for 2020

Evidence of President Trump’s mishandling of the current Covid-19 emergency has been building steadily. Most recently, The Washington Post on April 4 (“The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged”) and The Times on April 11 (“He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure […] Read more »

Pandemic raises the stakes in US’ partisan religious divide

The battle over religious exemptions to coronavirus stay-at-home orders, which flared again over Easter weekend, captures the likelihood of steadily rising tension in coming years between an increasingly secular American society and the most religiously conservative voters, particularly white evangelical Protestants. … Compounding the volatility, these religious distinctions increasingly parallel […] Read more »

Another lesson about context: Biden and young voters in 2020

Today, I thought I’d offer another lesson about why context is so important in political reporting and analysis — and how it can affect our view of the 2020 presidential contest. On April 8, NBC News ran a piece online, “Progressive Youth Groups Issue a List of Demands for Joe […] Read more »