Month: January 2024

Donald Trump says he wants to run on the border. Is this a sound strategy? Here's the share of Republicans who say the border is their #1 issue:

The border ranks second in importance among Republicans (the economy is first), generally getting about a 15% share over the past few years. But it's spiked recently, and if the economy continues to improve it could easily go up more. It still seems a little iffy to me given the moderate energy it seems to produce even among Republicans, but it could work.

And while we're at it, I happened to notice another trend while I was looking at the immigration numbers:

Look at that. Since the start of the Biden administration support for universal health care has gone up from 20% to 45% among Republicans. Interesting.

Here's the daily death toll of Palestinians in Gaza through January 24:

The blank space in the middle is the late-November ceasefire. Also, there have been several periods during which the death toll wasn't updated. I've interpolated those figures with a slight adjustment for randomness.

The good news, such as it is, is the trendline. It's gone down from 350 per day at the start of the war to about 150 per day now.

The total death toll is at 25,700 as of today.

It is, as Tom Edsall points out today, both remarkable and dispiriting that so many Americans continue to support Donald Trump. But then he asks:

Has Trump created a broad and enduring Republican coalition out of MAGA supporters, added backing from Republicans hostile to Democrats, a scattering of minority voters as well as white independents and Democrats who reject liberal social justice policies?

I don't mean to downplay the ugliness of what Trump's popularity says about the current state of American politics, but there's really nothing to this notion that Trump has somehow created a new coalition. Consider the trial heats from a recent YouGov poll:

Other polls show slightly different results both up and down, but basically they all exhibit little difference between Republican candidates. The people voting for Trump are the same ones who voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain and George W. Bush. And the main reason is that they hate Democrats:

Trump is, for some reason, more popular among Republicans than other candidates. There's not much question that this represents a destructive and malignant impulse within conservatism. At the same time, Trump hasn't put together a new coalition or created hostility where it didn't exist before. He's merely taking crude advantage of feelings that were already there—created and nurtured since the 1990s by Newt Gingrich and Fox News. As a result, for many years there's been a core of 40-45% of the electorate that hates Democrats no matter who's running.

It's not clear if there's a lot Democrats can do about this. A modest bit of moderation would help among the genuinely undecided, but probably not much among the true believers. They'll vote for any Republican—even if he's not their top choice.

Can we do anything about the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border? Republicans would like to, of course, and they're hopeful they can persuade President Biden to go along with tough legislation.

Or are they? Jake Sherman reports that Mitch McConnell told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans, “The politics on this have changed”:

McConnell referred to Trump as “the nominee” and noted the former president wants to run his 2024 campaign centered on immigration. And the GOP leader said, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.”

“We’re in a quandary,” McConnell added.

Yep, that's quite the quandary. Do what they think is right for the country, or do nothing so that people stay mad and Trump has an issue to run on?

It's commonplace for partisans to claim that the other side doesn't really want to solve a particular problem (racism, abortion, etc.) because they don't want it to go away as a base-mobilizing issue. Very seldom, however, does the opposition actually confirm that. This time they have.

The Washington Post describes a new Pew report about people who answer "none" when asked about their religion:

As the nation’s fastest-growing segment of religion (or nonreligion) in recent decades, the nones may reflect the front line of future spirituality. Fifty-six percent say they believe in “some higher power” aside from the God of the Bible; 67 percent say they believe that humans have a soul or spirit, and majorities say they believe that nonhuman animals and parts of nature can have spiritual energies.

According to the Pew report, 28% of Americans are nones but 69% of them believe in God or a higher power. Only 29% don't. So true atheists come to only about 8% of the country.

But that's me! I believe the universe is just what you think it is: stars and galaxies, electrons and quarks, gauge fields and gravity, all described by quantum mechanics and general relativity. The universe and its components evolve via (surprisingly arcane) mathematical laws. There is nothing more.

We may be getting less religious as a society, but there are still damn few people who belong to my little clique.

POSTSCRIPT: What's kind of weird is that although 29% of nones don't believe in a higher power, neither do 24% of religious people. I'm a little unclear about which religions are compatible with no belief in God or a higher power. Isn't that sort of the whole point?

This is the Morongo Casino just off Interstate 10 on the way to Palm Springs. I pass it regularly when I go out to the desert for some stargazing. I took this photo around 3 am, and I was lucky to get it because a security guard shooed me off right after I snapped the shutter. I asked him (nicely!) why the casino cared if I took a picture, and he just shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. Just following the rules.

Hum de hum:

Didn't the Supreme Court rule just two days ago that the Border Patrol could cut the razor wire that Texas has been installing along the border? Why yes.

So what's the theory here? I suppose Abbott figures the Supreme Court said only that the Border Patrol could cut the wire. It didn't prohibit Texas from putting up more. So now we have an inane race between Texas putting up razor wire and the Border Patrol immediately cutting it down?

Don't mess with Texas. But then again, don't mess with the Supreme Court either. At some point they're going to lose patience.

A recent podcast from the Niskanen Center focuses on whether political elites have a good sense of what the public believes. Short answer: not really. Alex Furnas, a professor at Northwestern's business school, summarizes his research this way:

We found that for policies that elites themselves strongly favored, they overestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. And for policies that they themselves strongly opposed, they underestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. So there’s sort of a 20 to 25 percentage point difference in elite evaluations of public support for policy, depending on whether the individual elite strongly supports or strongly opposes that policy.

Here's the chart:

Basically, liberals think the public is more liberal than it is, and conservatives think the public is more conservative than it is. But there are exceptions:

• The public favors a wealth tax even more than liberals do.
• The public dislikes a path to citizenship even more than conservatives do.
• The public hates carbon taxes.
• But they love low-income clean energy.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Adam Thal, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount, talks about elite perceptions of poor people:

Why do politicians sort of ignore problems facing low income people in the United States?... There’s good reason to think that because they don’t experience a lot of economic problems themselves, they might underestimate the scale of those problems, not really understand how bad things are for low income families.

....I did not find that to be the case.... [But] there’s definite polarization. Democrats in particular tend to really overestimate the scale of these economic problems. Republicans are less likely to overestimate them and in some conditions underestimate them.

It turns out that political elites know perfectly well how tough things are for poor people. In fact, Democrats overplay this significantly. As for Republicans, they have a pretty accurate sense of things but just don't feel like doing anything about it. Their lack of concern has nothing to do with misperceptions. It's deliberate.

There was nothing super interesting about this year's BLS report on union density. Total union density declined slightly from 10.1% to 10.0% and private sector union density stayed the same at 6.0%. But I did notice something peculiar. Even though overall union density barely changed, there were significant movements in individual states. Here are the top ten gainers and losers:

Hawaii, which already had the highest union density in the country at 21.9%, was also the biggest gainer, ending 2023 at 24.1%. Rhode Island was off the charts at the other end, plummeting from 16.1% to 12.3%.

These seem like awfully big movements for a single year. I don't really understand it. And what the hell happened in Rhode Island?

Over lunch I was pondering the fact that people forget so quickly about the problems of the past, which is part of what makes the problems of the present seem so overwhelming and unique. But just compare today to the late '60s, the era of Vietnam, the Cold War, the Six Day War, race riots, rivers catching on fire, assassinations, campus unrest, drugs, the Democratic Convention, the Moynihan report, and so much more. We look pretty good

But that's too easy. How about comparing the present to the calmest decade of recent years? I guess that would be the '90s, right? The Cold War was over, the internet was booming, the economy was great. Those were the days!

But it didn't always seem that way at the time. I trawled through Time covers of the '90s to see what was on our minds back then, and it's sort of amazing—even to me—how much of it is not just familiar, but nearly identical. Just think of all the things we've forgotten about: Good jobs going away;¹ crack babies;² obesity;³ wars in the Gulf, Somalia, and Kosovo;⁴ sarin gas; sex trafficking;⁵ music and movies debasing us;⁶ Los Angeles is doomed;⁷ Asia is out-competing us;⁸ the incredible shrinking president;⁹ gun violence out of control;¹⁰ the AIDS epidemic;¹¹ superpredators; busybodies and crybabies;¹² OJ; genocide in Rwanda;¹³ Timothy McVeigh; Newt Gingrich;¹⁴ Whitewater;¹⁵ Matthew Shepard; rampant crime;¹⁶ Muslim terrorism;¹⁷ impeachment;¹⁸ kids are slackers;¹⁹ Milosovic; cyberporn;²⁰ Columbine;²¹ the new racism;²² is a presidential candidate too old?²³

And that's a good decade.

¹cf. Millennials are screwed
²cf. fentanyl
³cf. obesity and Ozempic
⁴cf. Ukraine and Gaza
⁵cf. Pizzagate, Epstein, etc.
⁶cf. social media disinformation
⁷We're still here!
⁸cf. China taking our jobs
⁹cf. Biden is so unpopular
¹⁰cf. gun violence is out of control
¹¹cf. COVID-19
¹²cf. Karens
¹³cf. genocide in Gaza
¹⁴cf. Donald Trump
¹⁵cf. Hunter Biden
¹⁶cf. allegedly rampant crime
¹⁷cf. Muslim terrorism
¹⁸cf. impeachment
¹⁹cf. kids are slackers
²⁰cf. social media is destroying our youth
²¹cf. Sandy Hook etc.
²²cf. DEI and social justice
²³cf. Joe Biden is too old