… Vaccine mandates have many features that make them a good issue to motivate conservative voters. It invokes a fight about the government regulation and personal liberty. But add in the apocalyptic views of anti-vaccine activists and the political power of arguments against vaccine mandates gets punched up to a […] Read more »
Socialism, Capitalism Ratings in U.S. Unchanged
Americans remain much more positive toward capitalism than socialism, and their ratings of each have been largely stable over the past decade-plus. … Socialism ties with “the federal government” as the lowest rated of the six terms included in the 2021 survey. In contrast, Americans are most positive toward small […] Read more »
Turning outrage into power: How far right is changing GOP
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears to have settled on a strategy to deal with a handful of Republican lawmakers who have stirred outrage with violent, racist and sometimes Islamophobic comments. If you can’t police them, promote them. The path to power for Republicans in Congress is now rooted in […] Read more »
The GOP’s fruitless search for the next Glenn Youngkin
In the aftermath of Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race, Republicans have been scrambling to find other candidates in the image of the outsider businessman who was able to keep some distance from former President Trump. As one Youngkin adviser told National Journal, the key to swing-state […] Read more »
Democracy is ‘failed’ or ‘in trouble’ among young voters, a new poll shows
Last week, Harvard’s Kennedy School released a poll of young Americans, ages 18 to 29, and found a generation of voters that looks a little different than many people expected. There was not a lot of youthful optimism in the data and some findings showed that large divisions in the […] Read more »
Saving Democracy Will Require Institutional and Civil Resistance at All Levels
A sense of alarmed fatalism is starting to take hold among pundits and political scientists. It’s not hard to see why: The future of American democracy looks exceedingly grim under threat from a far-right authoritarian movement—and it’s not clear that any particular electoral or legislative response by Democrats can fix […] Read more »