‘Breaking point’: Why the red state/blue city conflict is peaking over masks

Political and population trends are colliding as the steadily escalating tension between red states and their blue cities across the Sun Belt is reaching a breaking point over the volatile issue of school masking. For more than a decade, GOP governors and Republican-controlled legislatures in states from Florida and Georgia […] Read more »

As New Census Numbers Show, the Biggest Divide Isn’t North v. South Anymore—It’s Metro v. Rural

On Thursday, the Census Bureau released the 2020 census data for cities, counties, and other geographic subdivisions. Just as with the state-level numbers announced in April, there were some surprises. Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the […] Read more »

The Big Question of the 2022 Midterms: How Will the Suburbs Swing?

Pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure deal and trumpeting a revived economy and progress against the pandemic, President Biden is trying to persuade the nation that Democrats are the party that gets things done. His message is aimed at holding on to a set of voters in next year’s midterms who could […] Read more »

Republicans shut out Democrats in Texas’s special election. That’s a bad omen for Team Blue.

President Biden’s success in the suburbs last year has led many Democrats to crow about their chance to create a new version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, which dominated U.S. politics for nearly 50 years. Saturday’s special election in Texas’s 6th Congressional District shows how far the party […] Read more »

How Covid-19 and Deaths of Despair Combine to Affect Communities

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 »

The Biden Agenda Doesn’t Run Through Washington

… Cities and their inner suburbs need an immediate lifeline from Washington to stabilize their finances after the devastation of the pandemic. But once those communities regain their balance, they could become crucial allies for Biden. By working with big metros, the president would be aligning federal policy with powerful […] Read more »