The movement to enact commonsense gun legislation can be exhausting. It feels like no matter how much death the country sees, the Republicans and the NRA are committed to holding back even the most modest reforms. However, it’s critical to remember that the NRA is an extremist group advocating policies out of step with Americans. One of these measures is to enact a “red flag” law, which allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from the homes of individuals who are deemed to pose a risk to themselves or other.
The conversation around the Green New Deal has evolved since we last looked into it six weeks ago. Since then there have been refinements, Jay Inslee entered the 2020 field as an explicit climate change candidate, and we’ve found clear support for a range of Green New Deal policies. At the same time, the right has been attempting to use the Green New Deal as a cudgel against everything but climate change. This led to one of the strangest speeches on the Senate floor in a while.
We have reason to expect then that voters might have new thoughts on the Green New Deal, so in a survey with YouGov Blue we asked voters to describe it in their own words. The results show a lot of consistency among Democrats, but that Republicans and Fox News viewers are beginning to pick up on the new right-wing party line that has been hammered home since the plan’s rollout. Spoiler alert: there are lots of cows.
Amidst a week of turnover at the Department of Homeland Security and ongoing intrigue over the Mueller Report, an important question has gripped popular culture; is the song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X a country song? This metaethical question sprang onto the Twitterscape after Billboard announced that it was removing the song from its country charts as it lacked “elements of today's country music.”
This was met with social media’s usual reticence: celebrities weighed in and “Old Town Road” shot to #1 on Spotify’s USA Chart. The only people seemingly yet to weigh in on this profound question is the general public. Until now.
Data for Progress has long maintained that to the extent electability exists, the most electable Democrat is not an old centrist fogey like Biden. Rather, Democrats need someone who is able to translate progressive policies in a way that persuades swing voters while mobilizing the base. Someone like Tammy Baldwin, who won re-election by 11 points even while Tony Evers knocked off Scott Walker by a point.
Anyways, we polled it and indeed, a Tammy / Tammy ticket would be an electoral behemoth capable of slaying Trump.
No TV show is more famous for portraying life in the White House better than the massively popular show, The West Wing. It’s therefore no surprise that in today’s political climate, rumors of a West Wing reboot are reviving nostalgia among the pundit class for the era of politics it portrays.
But do all Americans remember the West Wing with such fondness? Or is the show’s popularity stratified along political lines, revealing hidden ideological roots in its appeal?
To get a sense of where West Wing’s popularity comes from and how it fits into today’s political arena, Civis Analytics, a data science firm founded by alumni of the Obama campaign, conducted a nationally representative survey of 2,402 Americans, and asked them whether or not they liked the show.
Two weeks ago, we wrote a post analyzing a Data for Progress question about support for statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. What we found was a bit odd: there was significantly more support for Puerto Rico statehood than for DC statehood. In that post, we explored several possible explanations, ranging from partisanship to race to age. So why is support split like this?
The answer is straightforward: people (Democrats and Republicans) see Puerto Rico as a place people actually live, which just suffered a hurricane, and where the people have a right to representation, while they (especially Republicans) see DC as the capital city, a place where for politicians, where the only case for statehood is increasing Democrats’ political power.
In this post we look at the 2016 and 2018 behavior of US voters, and compare some of their attitudes on race based on our What The Hell Happened project. While in previous posts we created full breakdowns by 2012-2016-2018 vote, here we simplify by focusing on who switched from 2016 to 2018 -- largely due to sample size concerns, but also for simplicity. In our survey (full dataset and codebook available here), including weighted counts, we had:
1,343 voters who voted Democrat in both 2016 and 2018 (Dem-Dem)
1,252 voters who voted Republican in both 2016 and 2018 (Rep-Rep)
285 voters who didn’t vote or voted third party in 2016 and voted Democrat in 2018 (Other/NV-Dem)
205 voters who didn’t vote or voted third party in 2016 and voted Republican in 2018 (Other/NV-Rep)
89 voters who voters who voted Republican in 2016 and Democrat in 2018 (Rep-Dem)
Even considering only two cycles of data rather than three, we still don’t really have enough voters who flipped from Democrat to Republican from 2016 to 2018 (just 36, all told), so we’re going to exclude them for now.
This post focuses on certain measures of race and shows that voters who swung from the Republicans to the Democrats from 2016 to 2018 are much closer to the GOP on race issues than to the Democrats. This is important for Democrats to know because the Republicans will have an outspoken racist at the top of the ticket in 2020. We’ve proposed some policy-based ways forward here, but whatever the way forward is, Democrats must be prepared for a voting middle that is significantly worse on race than we might hope.
The 2018 election was in many ways a repudiation of Donald Trump and his deeply regressive agenda. Democratic and progressive candidates won races across the country that no one would have expected two years ago. This pattern was true not only in Congress but also in a range of other offices, such as a variety of wins for progressive district attorneys. But there should have been more wins and the left can do more in 2020, because although those on the left are participating at higher rates, there is still room for them to do more and to bring more volunteers onboard.
For the last decade the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) has asked people about their political activities. Although questions have been added and removed over this time, a few remain consistent across survey years. Each election, the survey has asked respondents if they have donated to a candidate, worked for a candidate, put up a yard sign, or attended a local meeting in the last year. Breaking these responses down by ideology (Very Liberal to Very Conservative) shows relatively good news for those on the left -- liberals have tended to donate and volunteer at much higher rates than conservatives.
To avoid the worst effects of a warming planet, Americans can’t count on electric cars to clean up all of our transportation emissions. We also need better transit in our cities.
Models consistently show that electrifying the motor vehicle fleet will be necessary but not sufficient to achieve targets like net zero emissions by 2050. Only if we shift some travel from cars to transit can we decarbonize the transportation sector rapidly enough to fend off a rise in global temperatures greater than 1.5C.
The centrality of transit to effective climate policy aligns well with the goals of the Green New Deal, the ambitious framework to draw down American greenhouse gas emissions while advancing racial justice and economic fairness. Better transit will not only curb driving, it will reduce barriers to employment for low-income Americans and keep household transportation costs more manageable.
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting Fox News viewers are uniquely conservative compared to the general American electorate. Recentresearch has indicated that Fox News played a causal role in the rightward lurch of the Republican Party. Here, we present some survey data on voters’ Fox News-watching habits and on their political attitudes. Across a variety of political and cultural attitudes, Republicans who report getting their news from Fox are significantly to the right of Republicans who don’t.
Conventional wisdom in American politics, held both by political observers and social scientists, is that whites’ views about racial and ethnic minorities structure their politics. These attitudes help explain the Constitution’s design, the provision of government services, and the structure of public opinion. Social science research indicates racial attitudes are learned early, even before kindergarten, and persist in much the same form over the course of a person’s life. This stability implies that these beliefs are explanations for politics and are not themselves direct political outcomes.
But this perspective cannot completely explain current political trends: whites’ evaluations of black Americans have shifted greatly in recent years. The data revealing these trends come from the American National Election Studies, nationally representative surveys of U.S. citizens 18 and older. The figure below focuses on surveys from 2016 and 2018, with interviews completed online. The plots show the distribution of racial resentment among non-Hispanic whites divided by party. Racial resentment is a well-validated measure of attributions for black Americans’ social and economic status, captured here by averaging together responses to four statements included in the ANES surveys. Lower levels of racial resentment correspond to more positive attitudes about black people and a greater emphasis on structural explanations for their position in the U.S. Higher values denote the reverse.
Last Friday, the teachers in Sacramento overwhelmingly voted to strike - its first in nearly 30 years. Less than three months into 2019, already teachers have mobilized in Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Even before Sacramento, 2019’s teacher strikes affected millions of students, with nearly 100,000 teachers in work stoppages - more than any year between 1993 and 2017.
