Kevin Drum

From the New York Times:

Mr. Trump has accused federal officials and social companies of trying to suppress conservative speech, while they have said they were only trying to identify falsehoods about elections, vaccines and the like.

Potayto, potahto.

Yesterday I asked "What changed?" to cause Democrats to lose the election. Today I spent some time diddling around in the General Social Survey to see if I could find out. My question was: What big gaps have recently opened up between Democrats and Republicans.

For starters, here's an example of what I'm not talking about:

The number of people saying they have no religion has increased among both Democrats and Republicans, but it's increased a lot more among Democrats. Thirty years ago the gap was only two percentage points while today it's 15 points.

But this is a long-term trend. It doesn't explain anything recent. And it so happens that nearly everything is like this. General happiness, number of children, approval of gay marriage, abortion, defense spending, affirmative action, tougher courts, confidence in education, you name it. All of these have showed a steadily increasing gap between Republicans and Democrats but nothing new recently.

But a few things did change recently. Here they are:

Confidence in both science and medicine was roughly similar between Democrats and Republicans all the way through 2018. Then both plummeted among Republicans, almost certainly due to COVID-era Trumpian disinformation about masks, vaccines, the origin of the virus, and so forth.

Confidence in the press wasn't very different until the spread of Fox News in the early 2000s. For the next 16 years Republican trust in the press was about 20 points lower than Democrats'.

This became turbocharged after Trump took office and went on his "fake news" crusade. For the last few years Republican trust in the press has been 60 points lower than Democrats'.

Starting in 2014, the number of Democrats who thought we should spend more on welfare programs spiked up. Republican views stayed about the same. This is presumably a Ferguson effect, but I'm not sure about that.

In 2021, the number of Democrats who self-ID as gay spiked upward by four percentage points before settling down slightly. The number of Republicans who said they were gay went down by a point.

This is an old favorite: For years Republicans reported higher financial satisfaction than Democrats by more than 10 percentage points. As soon as Biden became president that plummeted to -5 points despite an objectively pretty good economy.

This chart is a little different: it shows Republicans and Democrats on separate lines. As you can see, Republicans have been growing more conservative fairly steadily for the past 30 years. Democrats showed little change until 2016, when the number saying they're liberal spiked upward 20 points in just six years.

The GSS doesn't have any questions about immigration—though I think other evidence suggests a partisan gap that's big but has been opening up pretty steadily for years. However, the Biden-era surge in illegal crossings may have made it more salient for Republicans than Democrats.

For the time being, this is just raw information. There's nothing super obvious that ties all these things together. But give me enough time and maybe I'll come up with a theory.

More from Ben Dreyfuss:

It's been my assumption that queer, in its current usage, is an umbrella term that means anyone other than a boring cis het person. Maybe you're gay, maybe you're trans, maybe you're questioning, maybe you're pan, whatever. As long as you're not garden-variety ordinary in some sex-related way, you're queer.

It's also an example of reclaiming a word often used as a slur in the past. So it's a little more shocking and radical than plain old gay and trans.

Let's open this up to comments. Is this correct? Or am I misinformed?

Here's the latest weirdness from Donald Trump:

All three of the leading candidates to replace Mitch McConnell immediately replied with some version of "Yes sir!" But what does Trump even mean? Recess appointments are just a thing the president can do when the Senate is in recess. No one has to agree to it. The first recess of Trump's presidency will be next August.

Does Trump mean that the Senate should periodically declare a recess so he can make appointments? Maybe, but Democrats will just filibuster it. Does he mean there should be no more of the pro forma sessions that technically keep the Senate alive during vacations and eliminate recesses? Maybe that too, but the first recess still isn't until August. What does he plan to do until then?

He also wants Republicans to ensure that no judges are approved during the rest of the lame duck session. But how does he expect them to do that? Democrats control the Senate until January, just as they have for the past two years. They can approve anyone they want.

Does Trump actually understand how anything works? He doesn't seem to know how tariffs work. He doesn't understand NATO "dues," as he keeps calling them. And he doesn't seem to understand anything about how Congress works. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

Why does California take so long to count votes? I wanted to find out once and for all, so I started to dig. And I got nowhere. The universal answer was always something like California is a big, complex state that wants everyone to vote. That takes a while.

Please. Voting is complex everywhere; there are other big states; and being big also means you have more ballot counters. What's the real reason?

Well, California is an all-mail ballot state, and ballots can be received up to seven days after Election Day (as long as they're postmarked by Election Day). So things take a while.

Fine. That's progress. But how long does it take in practice to receive the bulk of the ballots? Here's the best I could discover:

Apparently the Secretary of State doesn't tell us how many ballots are received on Election Day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. But on Friday we were told that 16.2 million ballots had been received. That's almost certainly 95%+ of the eventual total, and I'm willing to bet that most of them were received by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.

So, once again, what's going on? Why have we counted only 63% of the vote? Once the ballots are received—and nearly all of them have been—why does it take more than a few hours to process them? We use the same optical scanners as everyone else, so it's not that. Oregon and Washington both vote exclusively by mail, and they have the same 7-day rule as California and the same signature verification process, but they've both counted more than 85% of the vote. That's slow, but nowhere near the molasses-slow rate of California.

So what's the real real deal? Why do we seem able to count less than a million ballots per day? I still don't know.

How big an impact did culture war issues have on Donald Trump winning the election? Here is recent public polling on a variety of hot button issues:

On the old warhorses of guns and abortion, liberals have long held an edge. Large majorities say abortion should be generally legal vs. generally illegal, and voting on abortion initiatives in the states confirms this.

But liberals are underwater practically everywhere else. Small majorities are uncomfortable with they/them pronouns, and building a wall along the border with Mexico has gotten more popular. It's now a majority view.

Other issues have swung harder in the conservative direction. Large majorities favor tougher policing, even among Black voters. Ditto for opposition to affirmative action. Trans issues are more nuanced: large majorities support anti-discrimination laws for trans people, but similarly large majorities oppose both the use of puberty blockers among teens and biological boys competing in girls' sports.

Views of the Middle East are complicated, but on the straightforward question of Israel vs. Hamas, Americans favor Israel by a huge margin. They also approve of Israel's bombing of Lebanon.

Finally, most Americans support some kind of path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but large majorities also say immigration is a very serious problem and we should reduce the level of immigration. Small majorities even favor mass deportation.

By itself, none of this dictates what either liberals or Democrats should do. But there's never any benefit to sticking our heads in the sand. We should at least acknowledge what we're up against.

Everyone—including me!—has a theory about why Democrats lost this year. The leading contenders are:

• Inflation.
• Illegal immigration.
• Too woke.
• Lost touch with working class.

But there are some simple facts to contend with for all of these things. Here are inflation and wages since Joe Biden took office:

In the 2022 election, inflation was above 7% and had been for more than a year. Wage growth for the working class had been falling behind just as long. Here's immigration:

In the 2022 election, illegal border crossings were astronomically high and had been for over a year. Finally, here's the popular vote for the House of Representatives:

The 2022 election was fought on inflation, immigration, and wokeness. It was the height of the DEI/cancel culture/book banning/CRT panic, and it was practically the only thing Fox News could talk about. And the election came after Biden's "disastrous" withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Now, Democrats did lose some ground in 2022. But not as much as this year even though inflation was down, immigration was down, wages were up, and the woke frenzy was subsiding. Every single measure of both culture war and economic issues was considerably worse in 2022 and had been for more than a year.

So for all of us, the question is: What changed between 2022 and 2024? Looking at the popular vote for the House helps to keep some distance from personalities, but it's still worth noting that Donald Trump was either president or the leading Republican candidate the entire time. Nothing much changed on that side.

It so happens that I'm on the wokeness/immigration side of the debate. I have been for a long time. And I think there's a good case to be made that Kamala Harris was viewed as worse along both dimensions compared to Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, those things were at more of a fever pitch in 2022 than today. So why were Democrats in general so roundly rejected?

Ben Dreyfuss, probably from fear of being tossed in a reeducation camp, is trying to think of things he agrees with Donald Trump about:

I have bad news for Ben:

• Republicans are sworn foes of YIMBY shit. They consider liberal efforts to end zoning restrictions and build higher density housing a sinister plot to force everyone into socialist beehives.
• Trump could reinstate his higher shower head standards, but hardly anyone would bother producing them. States and cities still mandate limits (1.8 gpm in California, 1.5 gpm in Miami, etc.) and the shower head folks prefer to make one product for the whole country.
• NATO has already reformed itself. It started in 2014 under Obama and then picked up steam under Biden when Russia invaded Ukraine. Only eight out of 31 NATO countries are still below the 2% requirement for defense spending:
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Ben needs to make a more serious commitment here. Maybe offer up some family expertise on electrocution vs. being eaten by a shark?

The Washington Post investigates why so many poor and working class Latinos in Texas border counties shifted rightward in 2024:

Democratic and Republican party leaders said the Biden administration’s border failings are only part of what explains it. “You can tell me things are better, but if my food stamps don’t last the month, I’m not going to believe you,” said Toni Treviño, the chair of the Republican Party in Starr County, where nearly 58 percent of voters supported Trump.

Well, OK, but I'm going to be that guy again. Here are SNAP (food stamp) benefits compared to inflation over the past few years:

In mid-2021, SNAP benefits jumped thanks to ARRA, Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. After that, SNAP benefits increased more than inflation every single year.

After the 2021 jump, SNAP benefits increased 24% compared to 16% for food inflation. For the entirety of Biden's presidency, they increased 43% compared to 20% for inflation.

Is Treviño right anyway? You can only receive SNAP benefits if you're below the poverty line. That means you're living a pretty rough life and SNAP benefits probably do run out before the end of the month. Who cares if they've (supposedly) gone up if they still aren't enough?

I don't know if people think that way. Then again, I also don't know if they have any idea that Biden gave them a big raise in 2021 and then kept smaller raises coming every year after that. I didn't know that until I looked it up. Did Biden or the DNC or local Democratic Party leaders spend any time in Starr County bragging about this? I don't know that either.

But I'd guess not. After all, bragging about increasing welfare benefits might help with the people getting them, but it might also hurt with all the people who aren't. It's a dilemma.

The weekly YouGov poll came out late this week because they waited to do the fieldwork until after the election. For some reason, I found the shifts from before to after the election amusing:

Last week, Kamala Harris had a higher favorability than Donald Trump by four points. This week it's suddenly switched. Trump is viewed more favorably by two points.

The same thing happened to the parties. Last week Democrats had a higher favorability by five points. This week it's Republicans by two points.

And the best for last. A week ago only 23% of Republicans thought the election would be fair. This week it's suddenly 77% while Democrats didn't change much at all. Only 1% of Republicans think the election was rigged. 97% think Trump won fair and square. Apparently the lying, cheating Democrats inexplicably took this election off from their usual vote rigging and illegal immigrant stuffing.

POSTSCRIPT: Why the change in favorability? Is it real? Or do parties and candidates just benefit from a winning aura?