House Republican leaders struggling to pass their alternative to the Affordable Care Act are colliding head-on with the GOP’s new demographic reality: Their coalition is centered on older white voters, many of whom fear losing benefits from the Obama-era law. An Atlantic analysis shows that House Republicans who have expressed […] Read more »
Why White Evangelicals Are ‘Splintering’ Politically
White evangelicals are a formidable force in American politics. Republican candidates hustle for their votes. White evangelical leaders have befriended presidents of both parties. The group even gets its own separate question in presidential exit polls. In The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, journalist Frances FitzGerald writes about the […] Read more »
The Collapse of American Identity
After the British writer G. K. Chesterton visited the United States for the first time, he remarked that America was “a nation with the soul of a church.” Mr. Chesterton wasn’t referring to the nation’s religiosity but to its formation around a set of core political beliefs enshrined in founding […] Read more »
Racially biased people are far more likely to oppose black athletes’ protests. Here’s the evidence.
Last year, Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, was heavily criticized for kneeling instead of standing during the national anthem. The protest was on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. … Decades of research on public opinion has found that negative racial attitudes are strongly […] Read more »
Reaching Out to the Voters the Left Left Behind
The devastating recession that began at the end of 2007 and officially ended in June 2009 was the most severe downturn since World War II. The political, social and even medical consequences of this recession have been duly noted, but even so the depths of its effects are only now […] Read more »
The blogs vs. Case-Deaton
Anne Case and Angus Deaton have a new paper on white mortality rates. This one is getting attacked a lot more than the 2015 one, though the findings and methods are basically the same — increased death rates for U.S. whites, especially for the uneducated. Andrew Gelman is still on […] Read more »