… Eighty-three percent of American adults believe that testing is appropriate to determine whether students may enroll in special or honors programs, according to one of the country’s longest-running continuous polls of attitudes toward education. Yet across the U.S., blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost […] Read more »
The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump
Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism […] Read more »
Theft Perception: Examining the Views of Americans Who Believe the 2020 Election was Stolen
Key Findings• Republicans widely support Donald Trump and believe his claims about a stolen election. While Republicans support all elements of the ‘Stop the Steal’ narrative in high numbers, the overall electorate largely rejects these claims and propositions.• Among Republicans, 85 percent believe it was appropriate for Trump to file […] Read more »
Americans More Divided on Social Than Economic Issues
The U.S. public is more closely divided on social issues than on economic issues, according to Americans’ description of where they stand on each broad category of topics. Nearly equal percentages of U.S. adults now identify as socially liberal (34%), moderate (35%) or conservative (30%). By contrast, Americans lean decisively […] Read more »
How mainstream Democrats are flexing their muscle in 2021
The first five months of President Joe Biden’s term show the moderate wing of the Democratic Party still has a lot of juice left. We see that in the Senate, where moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are standing in the way of […] Read more »
The ACA Survives, in One More Victory for Boring Old Liberalism
Plain vanilla American liberalism hasn’t been particularly fashionable for a long time, and it certainly isn’t now. Anyone who regularly consumes high-status media like NPR or the Wall Street Journal, or who spends any time at all in the Twitterverse, could well conclude that today’s politics is mostly defined by […] Read more »