The Biden Administration

In Defense Of The Mostly Pointless State Of The Union

By Kaleigh Rogers

Feb. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The State of the Union is a little like New Year’s Eve. It’s an annual tradition that’s been practiced for more than a century. It can be a great moment to pause and consider the year to come. And if you expect it to be life-changing, you’re gonna have a bad time. 

As we’ve documented here (and here and here), the State of the Union address has increasingly become ineffective when it comes to achieving its ostensible goals. It doesn’t have much impact on what policies Congress pursues. It isn’t a good opportunity for the president to address all Americans. It doesn’t even impact the president’s approval rating. But there are some caveats to all of these shortcomings, and while it might not fully do what we expect it to, the State of the Union also isn’t causing any harm. Like New Year’s Eve, you might enjoy it a lot more if you adjust your expectations.

Yes, It Rarely Impacts Legislation …

The ostensible purpose of the State of the Union is to communicate the president’s agenda to Congress. Here’s what he thinks is important. Here’s what he would like Congress to prioritize. And while the president will certainly say a lot of those things tonight, whether Congress listens is another story. Political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard have analyzed legislation passed after every State of the Union address since 1965¹ to see which policy requests were partially or fully met by Congress in the year that followed. They’ve found it’s uneven at best, and on average only 24.3 percent of requests were fully enacted by Congress, with another 13.8 percent partially enacted. In some years, none of the requests were met at all. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

… But It Still Sets Policy Goals

While highlighting a policy goal in a State of the Union address doesn’t guarantee a president a new bill sitting on his desk a few months later, 24 percent is not nothing. Some of those goals do translate into action by Congress, particularly in years when the president’s party controls both chambers. For example, nearly half of the policy requests made by former President Barack Obama in his 2010 address were fully enacted by a Democratic-controlled Congress that year. In most years, at least some of the legislative actions requested by the president have later been enacted. And even in those rare years when they weren’t, the address still may have affected policy in terms of voter awareness — as long as it made the paper the next day. Research has shown that media coverage of the agenda laid out in the State of the Union increases public knowledge of policy initiatives. So even if Congress isn’t listening, voters might be. 

Yes, Fewer And Fewer Americans Actually Watch It …

There was a time when the State of the Union was, if not must-see TV, at least should-probably-tune-in TV. In 1993, an estimated 66.9 million viewers watched then-President Bill Clinton’s joint address to Congress, according to Nielsen. That’s about three-quarters of the more than 91 million people estimated to have tuned in to Super Bowl XXVII just a couple weeks prior. But since then, ratings for State of the Union addresses have mostly trended downward:

And the audience that does tune in is typically highly partisan: Democrats watch when a Democratic president speaks, Republicans watch when a Republican president speaks, but there’s little crossover. This means that during the address, the president is speaking live to an ever-shrinking sliver of the American population.

… But That Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Hear About It

Among the audience that does tune in are, well, journalists, and follow-up coverage of the State of the Union address can reach a wider audience. Fewer Americans get their news from live TV coverage than they used to, as they now use a variety of sources to stay informed. Thirty-nine percent of American adults still get at least some of their news from network broadcasts and cable channels, while a third get news through social media and 12 percent check national newspapers or their websites, according to a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted last year. Twelve percent also said they get at least some of their news from “Other national news websites, like Yahoo News, Axios, Vox.” As many as 13 percent of Americans get some of their news through podcasts or talk radio and 20 percent through YouTube. Preferences tend to differ by age, too. Older Americans are more likely to watch TV news, while younger Americans are more likely to catch up online or through social media.

All this to say that the message of the State of the Union can still trickle down to the American public of all ages and political stripes, even if they’re not tuning in live. 

Yes, It’s Mostly A Formality … But Maybe That’s Okay

Sure, none of these facts mean the State of the Union is a particularly effective American political tradition. The real reason it continues has less to do with any delusions of its influence and more to do with inertia. Every president since Woodrow Wilson has delivered this address to the nation around this time of year, making it one of the country’s most enduring political rituals. That’s not the most compelling reason to keep doing something, but there’s something to be said about continuity and tradition. And there are certainly more contentious political traditions that endure just because that’s the way we’ve always done it (*cough* caucuses *cough*). If the main reason the State of the Union exists is to keep some semblance of consistency in our increasingly chaotic political system, is that really such a bad thing?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-lonely-political-consequences-fivethirtyeight-politics-96858073

Pollapalooza

Biden’s Approval Rating Is Up. Will His Misplaced Classified Documents Bring It Down?

By Nathaniel Rakich and Zoha Qamar and Nathaniel Rakich and Zoha Qamar

Graphic by Elena Mejía

Jan. 20, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

President Biden still isn’t what you’d call popular, but he’s closer to popular than he’s been in some time. On Jan. 11, Biden hit a 44.1 percent approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s average — his highest mark since October 2021. That was 3 percentage points higher than it was on Nov. 9, which isn’t a huge increase in the grand scheme of things, but in this polarized age where any movement in the president’s approval rating is rare, it’s a veritable Bidenaissance.

This is the part of the story where you expect me to explain why this is happening. Which is understandable, except it’s impossible to know for sure what’s behind this shift. One leading theory, though: It’s because inflation has been slowing down. Prices in December 2022 were just 6.5 percent higher than they were in December 2021, which was the lowest inflation rate in over a year. Gas prices, another highly visible metric of the strain on Americans’ wallets, also plummeted from an average of $3.80 per gallon in November to $3.32 per gallon in December. These seem like pretty compelling explanations, considering how closely Biden’s approval rating was tied to the inflation rate and gas prices last year. For example, when his approval rating reached its all-time low in July 2022, the inflation rate the previous month had been 9.1 percent, and the national average gas price had been $5.03 per gallon.

But is Biden’s luck about to run out? The discovery of a handful of classified documents from the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Delaware home has generated arguably the first bad news story for Biden in months, and it’s fair to wonder whether it will reverse — or at least halt — his miniature political comeback. The few polls that have been conducted since these revelations suggest that Americans think Biden acted badly, and that could be dragging down his approval rating.

According to Quinnipiac University, Americans are aware of the story, and they’re taking it seriously. A combined 67 percent of adults reported that they were following the story very or somewhat closely, and 71 percent said it was very or somewhat serious — including 55 percent of Democrats. Worst of all for Biden, 60 percent of respondents (including 38 percent of Democrats) thought Biden acted inappropriately in the way he handled classified documents after leaving the vice presidency. According to YouGov/The Economist, Americans also believed 39 percent to 28 percent that Biden took the classified documents intentionally — although quite a few respondents (33 percent) weren’t sure.

That said, it could have been worse for Biden. In the Quinnipiac poll, only 37 percent of adults said Biden should face criminal challenges over the matter. And in the YouGov/The Economist survey, they believed 40 percent to 17 percent that Biden had cooperated in returning the documents — though, again, a large share (43 percent) weren’t sure. 

By contrast, Americans believed former President Donald Trump hadn’t cooperated in returning the hundreds of classified documents that he took with him after leaving the presidency, 39 percent to 29 percent (with 32 percent unsure). Indeed, while Biden’s staffers returned his documents to the National Archives shortly after discovering them, Trump at least twice failed to turn over all the documents in his possession, prompting the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago last summer. Despite this, however, a plurality of respondents (40 percent) told YouGov/The Economist that Biden’s and Trump’s offenses were equally serious; only 28 percent said Trump’s was worse, and 15 percent said Biden’s was.

As for how the scandal may be affecting Americans’ overall views of Biden, it’s worth noting that both pollsters showed Biden with a slightly worse approval rating than they did in their previous poll. According to Quinnipiac, Biden’s approval rating among adults was 40 percent in December and is 36 percent now. And Biden went from 47 percent in YouGov/The Economist’s Jan. 8-10 poll to 44 percent in their Jan. 14-17 poll. This could mean that the revelations over these documents have cost Biden a few points of popularity. But the decreases could also just be statistical noise, as they are small enough to be within the polls’ margins of error.

Ultimately, it’s still too early to say with any confidence whether this scandal is hurting Biden politically. We’ll likely have a better idea once we get more than two polls asking about it, and we’ll also just have to wait and see how the story develops. How it is covered in the media and whether there are more shoes to drop could make the story land very differently, say, a month from now.

Other polling bites

• The soaring costs of medical bills are dissuading a record share of Americans from seeking care. Recent Gallup polling found that 38 percent avoided medical treatment in 2022, a number that has doubled over the last two decades. Specifically, 27 percent of Americans said that they were delaying care for a somewhat or very serious medical condition, a number that rises to 35 percent among adults ages 18 to 49. And women (32 percent) were much more likely than men (20 percent) to report putting off treatment for a somewhat or very serious illness.
• A majority of likely voters (70 percent) support the government having a refugee program, according to a Data for Progress survey published on Jan. 18. That number was highest among Democrats (86 percent), Black Americans (81 percent) and college-educated Americans (79 percent). Notably, even among groups least likely to agree, including Republicans (60 percent) and non-college-educated Americans (65 percent), a majority still favored a government-run refugee program. But at 89 percent, the share of support was highest among Americans who reported that they personally knew a refugee.
• Morning Consult polling conducted Dec. 27-Jan. 1 found that most U.S. adults (64 percent) believe major tech companies have too much power. That breakdown was pretty similar among Democrats (67 percent) and Republicans (65 percent). The poll also suggested that Americans support breaking up huge companies to combat some, though not all, problems associated with big tech.
• A plurality of U.S. adults (36 percent) thought that children having more independence would help kids’ mental health, per a Jan. 12 YouGov survey. Just a slightly smaller figure, 29 percent, said the opposite. That belief seems to fluctuate greatly by age: About twice as many 18- to 29-year-olds (42 percent) believed that independence would help mental health, compared with those over 65 (22 percent). (Talk about recency bias!)

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,² 43.4 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 51.3 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -7.9 points). At this time last week, 43.9 percent approved and 50.9 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -7.0 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 43.0 percent and a disapproval rating of 51.6 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.6 points.

Over the weekend, the White House announced that five more classified documents from the Obama administration were found at President Biden’s Delaware home. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew asks whether comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s own classified document scandal are apt. They discuss why gas stoves became such a hot topic of debate on the internet and what the 2024 primary for U.S. Senate in California will look like.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Judicial Appointees

How Biden Could Appoint More Judges Than Trump

By Elena Mejia and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Elena Mejia and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jan. 3, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Democrats now have a slightly bigger Senate majority but not much to do with it. And so, it’s time for more judges.

Retaining the Senate means that President Biden and Senate Democrats will be able to continue nominating and confirming federal judges, and, if they play their cards right over the next two years, Democrats may get as many judges on the federal bench as Republicans did during former President Donald Trump’s term. If they get lucky, they could end up with even more.

As of Dec. 23, 94³ of Biden’s nominees have been confirmed to district and appellate courts — compared to 83 at this point in Trump’s presidency. And there are still plenty of positions left to fill. Right now, there are 79 open seats on the federal bench⁴ and 30 upcoming vacancies — this is when a judge announces they will retire at a future date. If Biden and Senate Democrats manage to fill all of those seats, there will be 203 Biden judicial nominee confirmations, compared to the 228 appointments Trump and Senate Republicans got through.

More could be coming, too. While fewer vacancies are likely to open up in the next two years, there are 85 Democratic-appointed judges who will be eligible to retire with full benefits in 2023 and 2024, according to data compiled by Brookings Institution fellow Russell Wheeler.⁵ Still, it’s very possible for Biden to match or even out-appoint Trump, since that estimate does not account for additional judges who may step down unexpectedly due to health or other factors.

Right now, our analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center shows that 11 percent of federal judges are Biden appointees and 26 percent are Trump appointees. (The rest were appointed by past presidents.) If Biden successfully fills all of the current vacancies, however, he will have appointed 20 percent of all federal judges. That shift is significant for demographic and political reasons. Trump’s appointees were overwhelmingly white and conservative, with traditional backgrounds for federal judges like private law practice and prosecution, while Biden is mostly nominating women and people of color who often come from nontraditional professional paths like public defense. If Biden takes advantage of the vacancies that are still open, his appointees could end up counterbalancing Trump’s — at least in some places. And that, in turn, could make the courts even more politically polarized.

“In some ways, our courts are more divided than they’ve ever been,” said Chad Westerland, a political science professor at the University of Arizona who studies the federal courts. “You have judges that are coming from entirely different political ecosystems — and who will enact policies that follow the ideologies of the major national parties.”

Biden was always going to have a hard time matching Trump’s influence over the courts — and he needed a minimum of four years with a Democratic-controlled Senate to pull it off. This, experts told us, is due to the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate refused to confirm most of former President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees in 2015 and 2016, leaving Trump with 105 vacancies to fill. By contrast, Biden came in with 45 vacancies.

The good news for Biden is that over the past couple of years, a lot of judges have taken senior status — a form of quasi-retirement that opens up their seat — which has given him more vacancies to fill. That includes a decent number of Republican-appointed judges: Our analysis shows that 33 percent of the judges who have taken senior status under Biden were appointed by Republicans. That share is higher than the share of Democratic-appointed judges who took senior status under Trump, and it could be a sign that some Republican appointees who want to retire won’t bother holding out to see who wins the 2024 election.

But the bad news for Biden is that the Republicans he’s replacing are mostly district court judges, which is a lower-impact judicial position. The more highly contested positions are on appeals courts, which have power over entire regions. So while Biden might be flipping plenty of district court seats, the courts with greater sway are still dominated by conservatives. That seems unlikely to change going forward: According to our analysis, only four Republican-appointed appeals court judges have taken senior status since Biden took office (and one of those judges was a holdover from former President Bill Clinton who was appointed by former President George W. Bush as part of a compromise, so she’s not really a Republican appointee), compared to 23 Democratic-appointed appeals court judges. 

More bad news for Biden: His judicial impact thus far has been geographically limited. Those leftover vacancies from the Obama era gave Trump the ability to eventually appoint 104 judges in states that currently have at least one Democratic senator, while there are swathes of the country where Biden isn’t making any judicial inroads. Only eight of Biden’s appointees are in states with at least one senator of the opposing party. This trend is particularly pronounced among appeals court nominees: So far, Biden has only appointed three judges in states with at least one Republican senator, while Trump appointed 24 judges in states with at least one Democratic senator.

If anything, experts told us, Biden’s presidency is setting a new tone for how much a president can change the courts, particularly the appeals courts. During his term, Trump flipped control of three appeals courts from Democratic appointees to Republican appointees and made it difficult for Democrats to ever gain control of at least three others. So far, Biden’s impact has been more muted. He did flip control of the powerful Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in New York and handles many cases in the financial sector, from Republican appointees back to Democratic appointees, and will likely hand control of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals back to Democratic appointees next year. But Biden has yet to appoint a single judge to the Republican-dominated Eighth and Eleventh Circuits, which cover most of the South and Midwest, and he’s only appointed one judge to the hyper-conservative Fifth Circuit.

That, experts told us, isn’t likely to change meaningfully over the next two years, since Republican-appointed judges — especially appeals court judges — will largely try to avoid relinquishing their seats while Biden is in the White House. “Judicial appointments have gotten sucked into partisan political warfare, and if you’re a judge, how can you not be aware of that?” said Neal Devins, a professor of law and government at the College of William & Mary. “We’re going to be increasingly moving into territory where there are red judge seats and blue judge seats, and without an unexpected illness or death, those safe seats will be very hard to flip.”

Biden’s changes to the judiciary — even if they end up being more limited than Trump’s — will still be important for the people whose fates are decided in courtrooms around the country. Christina Boyd, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who studies the courts, said that even though district court judges don’t have the power to set the law for entire regions, their decisions on issues like sentencing are still consequential. Having more public defenders with reliably liberal ideologies serving as judges could mean fewer long sentences, and more skepticism of prosecutors’ claims generally. That’s a sharp contrast with the tough-on-crime perspective that Trump’s conservative appointees are likely to bring, and in that sense, could introduce some balance to a right-leaning judiciary.

But more broadly, the growing polarization in the courts will result in an increasingly wide gulf in the way Republican and Democratic-appointed judges interpret the law. “This whole notion that you can be treated equally by judges wherever you are — that’s just not the case,” Devins said. Whether a case is filed in the Democratic-controlled First Circuit or the Republican-controlled Fifth Circuit could make all the difference in how it turns out.

2022 Election

Could Pot Be Decriminalized Before Biden Leaves Office?

By Lester Black

Oct. 14, 2022, at 10:57 AM

President Biden’s surprise marijuana reform announcement last week has mostly gotten attention for pardoning thousands convicted of simple possession of marijuana, a move that many observers have called a small step towards criminal justice reform. But it’s the mostly overlooked second part of Biden’s announcement — a directive to reevaluate pot’s federal status as a Schedule I drug — that has the potential to change the future of American cannabis policy.

Schedule I is the federal government’s most tightly controlled drug classification, reserved for extremely dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no medical use. That doesn’t describe pot, Biden declared last week, and he is now asking his own administration to start the process of making the drug’s legal classification match its reality.

The reevaluation is more than just an empty gesture. Experts like John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said there’s a very good chance of Biden’s directive leading to actual reform — not decades from now, but by the end of his current term in office. “This is not just a blue-ribbon commission putting together a report,” Hudak said. “This is a formal legal process that is required in order for the executive branch to consider a change in scheduling.” 

In other words, Biden just triggered a process that could end federal pot prohibition as we know it. 

Marijuana landed in Schedule I in 1970, when Congress first passed the Controlled Substances Act, a law that dictates federal drug policy and created five “schedules” under which substances could be classified. Pot’s placement was meant to be only a temporary designation, while officials waited for scientists to finish research on the plant and its effects. But in 1972, after then-Attorney General John Mitchell overruled the scientific commission’s recommendation to decriminalize, marijuana became a permanent Schedule I drug. The decision would later become infamous when interviews with aides to former President Richard Nixon and recordings from Nixon’s White House tapes showed that the administration was using that classification as a way to criminalize, in the words of former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the “antiwar left and Black people.”

Despite the sordid history of pot’s scheduling, cannabis has been paralyzed in Schedule I status for more than 50 years because of a legal dilemma created by the law itself. Before pot can be downgraded to a lower schedule, there needs to be scientific evidence that cannabis can be used safely and has at least some medical uses. But the Schedule I status itself severely limits any research into the drug: Subsequent reviews have inevitably failed to find enough evidence to reschedule the drug.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/races-bringing-democrats-odds-holding-senate-fivethirtyeight-91476350

Pot’s Schedule I status remains the most powerful force in American cannabis policy, even as millions of Americans gain access to medical marijuana through state markets. Schedule I is why federal agents can arrest people for smoking a single joint. It’s why scientists can’t easily study the drug. It’s why most banks won’t lend money to marijuana startups and why pot companies pay some of the highest federal tax rates in the country.

Moving a drug to a different schedule is a lengthy bureaucratic process — previous reviews of pot’s CSA classification took between six and 22 years to complete, Hudak said. But he and other experts think that this reclassification could happen much faster. That’s because Biden is approaching this declassification in a unique — and powerful — way. 

That starts with how the president announced his plans. Biden publicly told his appointees that he wants this done “expeditiously,” pressuring his officials to act before his term ends in 2024. “The president is messaging to those appointees — and the appointees will totally understand it — that this is something he wants done [quickly],” Hudak said. In contrast, former President Barack Obama refused to take this administrative action, telling reporters that a schedule change had to come from Congress. Biden not only directed his agencies to conduct this review, but announced it by saying that Schedule I “makes no sense” for pot.

The process will begin with the Food and Drug Administration conducting a scientific evaluation of cannabis. This study will look at eight different aspects of the drug, including the substance’s pharmacological effects, public health risks and potential for abuse. The FDA will send this information to the secretary of Health and Human Services, who will then make a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The HHS secretary can recommend that pot remain a Schedule I drug, be moved to a lower, less restrictive schedule or be removed entirely.

Both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra are already taking up the charge. Becerra tweeted hours after Biden’s announcement (at 4:20 p.m., in perhaps a nod to stoner culture) that he was “looking forward” to working with Garland to review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. And the Department of Justice announced the same day that it is “expeditiously” reviewing pardons and working with HHS to review pot’s scheduling decision.

This forceful move by Biden has made legal experts like Daniel Shortt, a cannabis attorney based in Seattle, optimistic about the chances marijauna could be removed from Schedule I. 

“This is the most consequential piece of federal cannabis policy since 1937, when federal pot prohibition began,” Shortt said. “However long this process takes, it’s going to end with a significantly different approach to federal prohibition.”

But there are many ways Biden’s scheduling directive could fail. Chief among them is the evaluation of marijuana’s medical effectiveness. This isn’t the first time the federal government has reviewed pot’s Schedule I status. The DOJ and HHS have studied the issue multiple times and each review has concluded the same way: with the FDA declaring that pot is dangerous and has no accepted medical use, and the DOJ refusing to remove cannabis from Schedule I.

As recently as 2016, the FDA ruled that marijuana had not demonstrated medical value — but there have been major medical cannabis developments in the last six years. Nearly half of oncologists reported recommending medical cannabis to their cancer patients, according to a survey conducted in 2016 and 2017. And the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the country’s leading academic body for scientific research, concluded in 2017 that there is substantial evidence that cannabis is an effective treatment for chronic pain in adults. 

Even the FDA has updated its opinion on the medical use of cannabinoids. In 2018, the agency approved Epidiolex, a pharmaceutical cannabinoid derived from cannabis plants, to treat rare forms of epilepsy. Epidiolex showed benefits in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, effectively proving through the gold standard of medical research that pot can have medical value. 

The approval of Epidiolex could be the most important development in changing the FDA’s opinion about pot by demonstrating that cannabis has “medical value and accepted medical use,” Hudak said. But Matt Zorn, an attorney who has handled multiple cases against DEA’s scheduling decisions, said it wasn’t clear if Epidiolex would be a slam dunk for rescheduling cannabis. The agency could decide that a pharmaceutical derived from cannabis is categorically different from cannabis itself.

But there is power in the president clearly and decisively asking for change. Politics inevitably creeps into the FDA’s scientific review and scheduling recommendation, Hudak said. And this is the first time the president himself, rather than an outside group, has requested a reevaluation of pot. This will likely push the agencies to make a different decision simply “because their boss told them to,” Shortt said. 

And not only is the president on record supporting pot — both of Biden’s appointees have a history of defending cannabis. In his 2021 confirmation hearings, Garland, who will eventually make the ultimate scheduling decision as the head of the DOJ, criticized enforcing federal marijuana law as an ineffective use of federal resources and racially discriminatory in its effect.

Becerra is an even bigger advocate for cannabis reform. As a member of Congress, Becerra repeatedly voted to block the DOJ from interfering with medical marijuana programs and to allow cannabis businesses to access banking. As California’s attorney general, Becerra helped administer the state’s medical marijuana program and he attacked pot’s Schedule I status, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2017 that “The federal government has to catch up and get into the 21st century.” It’s hard to see how Becerra could possibly recommend that pot remain a Schedule I substance, Hudak said, given everything Becerra has fought for over the last decade. 

In theory, a drug’s scheduling should be guided by scientists making decisions based on the best available data. But politics has always affected federal drug policy, whether it’s Nixon outlawing pot in the 1970s or Congress creating the discriminatory disparity between crack and cocaine penalties. But this time, with Biden’s announcement, the politics are in pot’s favor.

Marijuana Legalization

Five Decades Into The War On Drugs, Decriminalizing Marijuana Has High Bipartisan Support

By Zoha Qamar

Oct. 14, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Last week, President Biden pardoned federal offenses for marijuana possession, part of a promise he had made on the campaign trail to decriminalize weed. The order to vacate the sentences of at least 6,500 American citizens and lawful permanent residents elicited praise from some cannabis advocates, while others have said the move is only a first step at best. Some activists, especially those who highlight how enforcement of the current law disproportionately targets Black communities, said the pardon doesn’t go far enough.

But, in general, Americans agree that the country’s legislation on marijuana does need an update. According to polling conducted by Morning Consult/Politico just days before the Oct. 6 pardon, 6 in 10 American voters said weed should be legal in the U.S. That number rises to about 7 in 10 among voters under 45 (70 percent), Democrats (71 percent) and Black voters (72 percent). Even among the groups least likely to support legalizing marijuana — Republicans (47 percent) and voters 65 or over (45 percent) — close to half of respondents agreed. There’s no real divide across regions, either.

Current laws, however, do not reflect this sweeping bipartisan, universal support. The legalization of marijuana puts a spotlight on the divide between Americans and politicians, namely Republican members of Congress. Public opinion has changed drastically on this issue in the past two decades, but getting legislation to catch up with an updated national sentiment has not been easy, especially when the topic carries a century of social baggage. 

Support for relaxed weed laws hasn’t always been so widespread. When Gallup surveyed Americans on the topic in March 1972, eight months after then-President Richard Nixon declared the nation’s infamous war on drugs, only 15 percent agreed that the use of marijuana should be legal. Meanwhile, in a separate Gallup survey conducted several days prior to that, just 11 percent said that they had tried marijuana.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/races-bringing-democrats-odds-holding-senate-fivethirtyeight-91476350

By April 1977, support for legalization reached 28 percent but mostly plateaued until 2000. Since then, however, support has risen considerably. As of October 2021, 68 percent of Americans said marijuana use should be legal, and in July, 48 percent of Americans said that they had tried it. In other words, those numbers are the highest they’ve been in five decades.

While Biden’s order was popular with a wide range of politicians, it’s not the sweeping change that some Americans would like to see. For starters, not everyone has been on board, such as a handful of Republicans in Congress who have long pushed a hardline attitude against marijuana. For instance, just two weeks ago, a conservative caucus of House Republicans unveiled its new Family Policy Agenda, which suggested some sort of link between THC use and suicide in children and adolescents. And the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of marijuana as a Schedule I substance, the highest tier in the agency’s hierarchy, deems it unacceptable even for medical use at the federal level, at least for now. Biden also called on the Justice Department and Health and Human Services to begin a review of marijuana’s current categorization.

Of course, the federal restrictions on marijuana use haven’t exactly held up on a regional level: Thirty-seven states, as well as Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes, while 19 states, Washington, D.C., and two territories have also done so for recreational use among adults. In other words, the federal law isn’t just out of touch with most Americans — it’s out of touch with most state legislation, too.

That said, Biden’s pardon is ahead of the curve, as most states have yet not overturned state-level possession convictions. Following the order, the president called on governors to issue similar pardons, which would be a popular move: Recent polling from YouGov found that 62 percent of Americans would back such a measure in their state. In fact, a majority of every demographic group tracked support it except Republicans (41 percent).

But Americans are nonetheless split, nearly down the middle, on whether marijuana use harms society at large. In July, 49 percent told Gallup that the impact was at least somewhat positive, while 50 percent said it was at least somewhat negative. Compared with their views on other controlled substances, though, this actually supports the idea that Americans feel positive about marijuana. For example, a whopping 75 percent of Americans say that alcohol use has at least a somewhat negative impact on society. In other words, it’s clear that sentiments among the American public are heading in a solid direction toward legalization. The question now is how long it will take for nationwide policies to reflect where the people stand.

Other polling bites

• Roughly half of registered voters (49 percent) said they’re more motivated than usual to cast their midterm ballots next month, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking poll conducted Sept. 15-26. That split ticks up slightly among partisan voters, with 57 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats in agreement. When KFF asked voters what issue they’d most like to hear candidates discuss, a plurality brought up economic concerns (35 percent), followed by abortion or reproductive rights (15 percent) and immigration (9 percent). 

• Despite all the buzz about critical race theory, a recent survey from USC Dornsife found that a slight majority have either never heard of CRT (36 percent) or have heard of it but don’t know what it means (15 percent). And just 4 percent said they knew enough about CRT to explain it to others. On the whole, nearly all Americans agree that certain topics should be covered in high school — like slavery (95 percent), contributions of women and people of color (94 percent) and racial inequality (86 percent). However, the consensus is less sweeping on trans rights (59 percent) and gender identity (59 percent). 

• An equal and majority share (66 percent) of both Democrats and Republicans think the other party should have more moderate candidates, per a Sept. 27-Oct. 2 poll by YouGov for the nonprofit More in Common. But each side is less likely to agree that their own party needs moderate options: Only 32 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats say so. Meanwhile, white Americans overall (53 percent) were the most likely of any race or ethnic group to voice a need for more moderate Democrats, while Asian Americans overall (54 percent) were the most likely to say the same about the GOP. 

• Almost half of Americans view the country’s health care system overall in a negative light, according to recent polling from Gallup that asked respondents to rank various attributes by letter grades (A, B, C, D or F). A whopping 75 percent consider the affordability of the system as either a D grade of “poor” (41 percent) or an F grade of “fail” (33 percent), which is a breakdown that doesn’t waver much along socioeconomic lines. Further, Black Americans (66 percent) and Asian Americans (64 percent) were the most likely groups to give a poor rating for getting equitable care, although women (61 percent) weren’t far behind. In fact, 55 percent of women also said that they’re not confident that their families will be able to afford the health care they need as they age, a much higher share than the 45 percent of men who agreed.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁶ 42.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.3 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -9.7 points). At this time last week, 42.7 percent approved and 51.5 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -8.8 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 42.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.0 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.4 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁷ Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1.1 points (45.8 percent to 44.8 percent). A week ago, Democrats led by 1.0 point (45.3 percent to 44.3 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 1.2 points (45.0 percent to 43.8 percent).

Labor Day traditionally marks the point at which general election campaigning truly ramps up — summer vacation is over, TV ads flood the airways and pollsters switch their models from registered voters to likely voters. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how they expect the next few months leading up to the midterm elections to play out, based on historical trends.​​ They then play a game of midterm trivia, reviewing the largest midterm election swings, key policy issues and how Americans have followed past midterm news.

The team also analyzes the media attention surrounding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recently published life expectancy report for 2021 and the political implications of falling life expectancy beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

After plenty of back-and-forth within the Democratic Party, President Biden announced a plan to use executive action to forgive up to $20,000 of student loan debt per person last week. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses which Americans will be impacted and how the executive action will impact politics and the economy.

Then the team debates if a recent analysis of voter registration data showing a surge of women registering to vote after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion is a good or bad use of data. Finally, the crew analyzes why Biden’s approval rating has increased by nearly 5 percentage points since late July.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Climate Change

Americans Are Well Aware Of Climate Change — But Not About The Government’s Efforts To Fight It

By Kaleigh Rogers and Zoha Qamar and Kaleigh Rogers and Zoha Qamar

Aug. 19, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

In most parts of the country, the truth has been inescapable this summer. As the U.S. suffers through heat waves, wildfires and droughts, climate change feels right at our doorstep (and for those of us without air conditioning, doubly so). While climate change is not solely responsible for these harsh weather conditions, it has made them more frequent and more severe. And Americans say they are feeling it. 

A majority of Americans — 71 percent — said their local community has endured at least one of five forms of extreme weather over the last year: heat, flooding, drought, wildfires or rising sea levels, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center conducted in May. And regardless of the type experienced, a majority of those who had faced such weather said climate change played a role. This is true even among Republicans, who are generally less likely to believe climate change is happening. For Republicans who said their local community had experienced extreme heat, for example, 79 percent said climate change contributed a lot or a little, while 21 percent said climate change did not contribute at all.

Whether or not they’ve experienced it firsthand, most Americans are worried about climate change. In a Morning Consult poll from July, 73 percent of Americans said they were at least somewhat concerned about climate change, including 39 percent who said they were very concerned. However, in this case, public opinion is split along partisan lines. While 91 percent of Democrats said they were very or somewhat concerned about climate change, fewer than half — 47 percent — of Republicans said the same.

Clearly, many Americans are feeling the heat and understand its causes. But what are they willing to do about it? Well, many are taking matters into their own hands and trying to make more climate-friendly choices in their personal lives. In that Morning Consult poll, 61 percent of Americans said they had changed their behavior “some” or “a lot” because of concerns about the environment. Democrats and younger Americans were more likely to say they’d changed their behavior. Sixty-six percent of Gen Z respondents said they’d changed behavior, compared with 60 percent of baby boomers and 59 percent of Gen Xers. Fewer than half of all respondents said that they stay away from single-use packaging or that they buy items with limited to no packaging. But most Americans said they recycle, use refillable water bottles, restrict their use of plastics and buy items made of recyclable materials because of concerns over the environment.

Yet, while they’re willing to make these small changes, many Americans are pessimistic about how much impact individual climate-conscious decisions actually have. Just 52 percent of Americans said their actions have an effect on climate change, according to an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in June. That’s down from 66 percent in 2019. And when asked who has “a great deal” or “a lot” of responsibility for addressing climate change, 45 percent of Americans said individual people did. In comparison, 63 percent said the federal government did. 

And there’s substantial agreement among Americans over what the federal government can and should do to address climate change, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this month. A majority of Americans supported measures such as incentives to lower the cost of renewable energy and using government funds to promote oil and gas companies to reduce emissions. These policies are popular even among Republicans: 53 percent of Republicans supported the cost-lowering incentives and 50 percent supported funding to lower emissions from oil and gas companies.

Funnily enough, the federal government has already done both of those things — they were provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law on Tuesday. It’s the most aggressive climate-change law the country has ever enacted, yet many Americans appear unfamiliar with it. In that same Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted a few days before the bill passed the Senate, just 41 percent of Americans said they were familiar with the legislation. So while the effects of climate change have been hard for Americans to ignore this summer, efforts to fight it have been easier to miss.

Other polling bites 

• Given a list of 11 political topics, Americans were most likely to have shifted their stance on foreign policy, according to an Aug. 3-5 YouGov survey. Forty-two percent named foreign policy, with drug policy (40 percent) and health care (35 percent) not far behind. The least-chosen issue was free speech, at 17 percent. Most Americans (78 percent) reported changing opinions on one or more of the issues, but that figure varied widely by ideology: Very liberal (90 percent), liberal (86 percent) and moderate (83 percent) Americans reported a shift at higher rates than their conservative (76 percent) and very conservative (63 percent) counterparts.
• An Aug. 10-16 CivicScience survey revealed that almost 1 in 5 adults under age 25 (18 percent) turned to TikTok first when online shopping. That’s a much larger share than Americans overall (9 percent) or even Americans ages 25 to 34 (9 percent), according to a concurrent CivicScience survey conducted Aug. 10-15. That second survey counted Amazon as the preferred starting point for Americans researching a new purchase, at 46 percent, and Google was a clear No. 2 at 35 percent.
• Texas smoked the competition in a YouGov survey asking Americans which states they associate with having good barbecue — 73 percent chose the Lone Star State, compared with its closest competitor, Tennessee, at 37 percent. The poll, conducted July 28-31, posed the same question for a list of 19 cities, and three of the top four were in Texas: Dallas (41 percent), Austin (38 percent) and Houston (37 percent) were highest alongside Memphis, Tennessee (38 percent). This matches YouGov/Huffington Post polling from July 2020 that found Texas-style barbecue as Americans’ favorite regional variation (22 percent) over other types like Carolina- (10 percent) and Alabama-style (10 percent).
• Gallup polling conducted July 5-26 found that roughly half of Americans (48 percent) have tried marijuana, a share that’s been mostly on the rise since 2013 (38 percent). While that number didn’t change much across age groups, the research found that adults under age 35 were most likely to currently smoke it (30 percent) or consume edibles (22 percent). While there were no major discrepancies among education levels or gender, political leaning was a different story: Experimenting with weed was most common among Democrats (53 percent) and independents (55 percent). Among Republicans (34 percent), the figure just wasn’t that high.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁸ 40.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 54.8 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -14.3 percentage points). At this time last week, 40.0 percent approved and 55.4 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -15.4 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 38.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 55.7 percent, for a net approval rating of -17.0 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁹ Democrats currently lead Republicans by 0.5 percentage points (43.9 percent to 43.4 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 0.2 points (43.9 percent to 43.7 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 1.7 points (44.6 percent to 42.9 percent).

Climate Change

Why Democrats Are Disillusioned Over Climate Change

By Zoha Qamar

Jul. 22, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Senate Democrats’ monthslong effort to negotiate a budget reconciliation bill with ambitious climate change provisions crumbled last week when Sen. Joe Manchin announced he wouldn’t back the proposed legislation. It now appears unlikely that Congress will pass any substantive environmental legislation ahead of this year’s midterm elections. And although President Biden did issue some executive orders on Wednesday to address climate change — and is expected to announce more in the coming days — activists have criticized those measures as not going far enough.

This lack of action on climate change is becoming a real problem for Democrats, as it’s something their voters really want. In mid-January, the Pew Research Center asked Americans which among 18 issues should be a top priority for Congress and the president to address, and 65 percent of Democrats selected climate change, ranking it as their fourth-most-important issue.

For the most part, Democrats overwhelmingly support the Biden administration’s policies combating climate change: 79 percent, per a survey conducted by Pew in early May, said Biden’s environmental policies were moving the country in the right direction. The problem is that, even among Democrats who approve of the Biden administration’s approach, three in five (61 percent) still think the administration could be doing more — and this was even before Manchin torpedoed Democrats’ latest environmental policy efforts.

This has created a situation where Democrats, especially younger ones, are dissatisfied with how climate change is being addressed. Younger Americans of both parties are more likely than older Americans to rate climate change as a top priority, and in the Pew poll from May, younger Democrats were also more likely to say that the Biden administration should be doing more. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. adults under 30 said the administration should be doing more, compared with 54 percent of those over 65 who said the same.

Why haven’t Democratic politicians done more to prioritize this issue, given its importance to Democratic voters? Climate change just isn’t an issue other Americans prioritize.

For instance, even though climate change was a top priority for Democrats in the January Pew poll, it was only the 14th-most-important issue for voters overall. That’s in part because Republicans do not prioritize climate change: Just 11 percent said it should be a top priority for Congress and the president, compared with 65 percent of Democrats. In fact, climate change was the most polarizing issue Pew asked about — even more so than views on dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-court-undermined-bidens-climate-change-agenda-fivethirtyeight-87151207

In Pew’s more recent polling, Republicans were also overwhelmingly likely to disapprove of how the Biden administration was handling climate change. Eighty-two percent said the Biden administration’s climate policies were moving the country in the wrong direction. Notably, however, this was less true among younger Republicans, who are more likely than their older counterparts to prioritize climate change. In fact, 47 percent of Republicans under 30 said that the federal government wasn’t doing enough for the environment.

This means that, practically, there is a very limited set of climate change policies where we see any bipartisan agreement. Of five specific climate change policy issues Pew asked about in May, only two garnered support from a majority of both Democrats and Republicans: a proposal to plant trees to absorb carbon emissions and a proposal to provide tax credits to businesses that are developing methods to store or capture carbon emissions.

Ultimately, this makes passing substantial climate change policy, such as what Democrats were hoping to get through Congress this summer, a nearly insurmountable challenge — especially when a party-line vote is contingent on the support of someone like Manchin, a longtime challenger to sweeping climate change reform.

So where does that leave the many Democrats who think climate change is a key priority? Largely disillusioned and cynical, according to a late-January poll by Pew: 51 percent of Democrats said they didn’t believe the U.S. and other countries would make enough of an effort to combat climate change, and among liberal Democrats alone, that share ticked up to 60 percent. Climate change is a really important issue for Democrats, but it’s not one that resonates as deeply for others.

Other polling bites

• Vanilla reigns supreme as the nation’s top ice cream flavor, per YouGov polling conducted July 13-18. In a multiple-choice question, 59 percent of American adults reported liking vanilla, with chocolate (51 percent), strawberry (43 percent) and cookies and cream (43 percent) rounding out the top four. In terms of toppings, hot fudge was the most popular, at 40 percent, while 41 percent said they preferred their ice cream in a cup or bowl instead of in a waffle (33 percent) or sugar (12 percent) cone.
• Thirty-eight percent of Americans think a lack of child care options very often stops mothers who’d like to work beyond the home from doing so, according to a July 15 poll from YouGov. Meanwhile, a second question from YouGov reveals that only 13 percent of Americans say the same barrier exists for fathers very often.
• Most Americans (58 percent) are “just a little confident” or “not at all confident” that the country’s elections reflect the will of its citizens, per a CNN/SSRS poll conducted June 13-July 13. That share has steadily been increasing since January 2021, when only 40 percent said the same. Overall, almost half of U.S. adults think it’s somewhat (33 percent) or very likely (14 percent) that their elected politicians will “successfully overturn” election results in response to their party’s loss.
• More bad news for the news: Confidence in the media continues to sink to an all-time low, according to Gallup polling from June 1-20. Only 16 percent of Americans said they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in newspapers, while just 11 percent said the same about television news. Newspapers were at their most trusted in 1979 (51 percent), six years after Gallup first asked the question about that platform, while confidence in broadcast journalism peaked in 1993, the first year Gallup began surveys for television news, too. Now, close to half of Americans report very little or no confidence in either print (46 percent) or broadcast (53 percent) news.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹⁰ 37.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 57.2 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -19.7 percentage points). At this time last week, 38.7 percent approved and 56.0 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -17.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 39.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.8 percent, for a net approval rating of -15.2 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,¹¹ Republicans currently lead by 1.1 points (44.3 percent to 43.2 percent). A week ago, Republicans led Democrats by 1.8 points (44.8 percent to 43.1 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 2.2 points (44.7 percent to 42.5 percent).

Presidential Approval

What's Behind Biden's Record-Low Approval Rating?

By Geoffrey Skelley

Jul. 14, 2022, at 6:00 AM

In games such as golf, you win by scoring lower than any of your opponents. But in the realm of presidential job approval, such an approach is a recipe for political upheaval, as President Biden has found over the past few months. Polls continue to show his approval rating in poor shape, and even Democrats are asking questions about his political future amid broad dissatisfaction with the current state of the country.

In fact, Biden is dancing with a bleak bit of history: His approval rating of 39 percent¹² is now the worst of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential approval data. In other words, Biden is arguably in worse shape than any other elected president heading into his first midterm election, including his four most recent predecessors, who, like Biden, were operating in an increasingly polarized political climate.

After entering office, most recent presidents see a decline in their approval ratings, but since Biden’s numbers peaked at 55 percent in March 2021, they have moved in only one direction: down. To some extent, President Barack Obama’s approval rating followed a similar trajectory, but he started off with better numbers than any of the other four most recent presidents and was still well above where Biden is at this point in his presidency. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/latest-jan-hearing-testimony-affect-midterm-elections-86274149

By comparison, President Bill Clinton actually mounted a comeback nearly a year into his presidency before his approval fell again in the latter part of 1994. Even President Donald Trump’s low approval rating ticked back up into the low 40s in 2018 after falling to 36 percent in December 2017. And, of course, President George W. Bush topped them all when his approval jumped to a record-high 88 percent in 2001 due to a rally-around-the-flag moment shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Why is Biden’s approval so low? For starters, Americans have a really dim view of how things are going in the U.S. For instance, about 75 percent believe the country is on the wrong track according to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, while only 18 percent say the country is moving in the right direction. To be sure, Americans have long held negative views about the direction the country is moving in — RCP’s average hasn’t been net positive once in the past 13 years — but this is still the highest level of dissatisfaction since 2011.

Many factors are driving this overall feeling of dissatisfaction among Americans, but inflation is arguably the biggest reason. Inflation, which is at its highest point since the early 1980s, has consistently ranked as the top issue Americans are worried about in our polling with Ipsos. In the most recent FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans told us that inflation or increasing prices was one of the most important issues facing the country, ranking far ahead of any other topic we asked about.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-continue-win-georgia-2022-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-86847505

Notably, too, inflation has soured Americans further on Biden’s job performance. For instance, an early June poll from Ipsos/ABC News found that only 28 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of inflation; along with his handling of gas prices (27 percent approved), inflation ranked lowest of any of the issues the poll asked about. This stacks up with what’s happened to past presidents, too, as notable upticks in inflation have often coincided with sharp declines in presidential job approval. This is particularly true of rising gas prices, as studies have found that gas price increases are linked to lower presidential approval — and gas prices have soared during this period of high inflation.

Recently, the connection between economic perceptions and presidential standing hasn’t been as strong, but political scientists John Sides and Robert Griffin found that falling consumer sentiment is once again a useful indicator for understanding presidential approval, as it explains a lot of what we’re seeing with the decline in Biden’s approval.

Interestingly, that reconnection between the economy and presidential approval may be partly down to the decreasing confidence Democrats have in the state of the economy. In fact, even though Democrats are still more confident than Republicans or independents about the economy, we can see that Democrats’ opinions about economic conditions are actually worse now than at any time during Trump’s presidency, using consumer sentiment data from the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers.

The upshot is that this may have weakened Democratic loyalty to Biden. Just 69 percent to 76 percent of Democrats said they approved of Biden in polls from Ipsos/Reuters, YouGov/The Economist and Morning Consult conducted in early July. This sounds high, but it’s much lower than what these pollsters found for Trump’s approval rating among Republicans during the same period in 2018, when it hovered between 84 percent and 88 percent. Of course, economic conditions were more favorable during Trump’s presidency, which may have helped keep Republicans firmly behind Trump, but regardless of party loyalty, the reality is that Biden has lost ground among pretty much every group we have numbers for, continuing a trend we first observed in October.

Back then, close to 35 percent of independents approved of Biden, a figure that’s now sunk to around 30 percent. Meanwhile, Biden’s approval among Black Americans may have fallen even more, going from the high 60s to about 60 percent; among Latino Americans, his approval has gone from around 50 percent to the low-to-mid 40s. White Americans are more Republican-leaning, so Biden had less ground to lose with them to begin with, but even still, his numbers among them have slipped from the high 30s to the mid 30s.

One other group that has soured on Biden is younger Americans, especially considering they were the most Democratic-leaning age group in 2020 (and in most recent elections). The Pew Research Center and the Cooperative Election Study suggest that around 60 percent or more of voters 18 to 29 backed Biden in 2020, yet recent polls suggest Biden’s approval among that age group has fallen into the 30s, or even lower in some surveys.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-supreme-court-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-86637136

Economic dissatisfaction certainly plays into the disillusionment that young people may have of Biden, but other reports suggest that some of that frustration may also lie in their anger over the Biden administration’s limited progress on issues like climate change and canceling student debt. Looking ahead to the midterm elections, the discontent young people feel toward the president could be a real problem, as it might dampen their enthusiasm to vote — that could be bad for Democrats since young voters are already far less likely to turn out in midterms than in presidential elections.

As it currently stands, polls suggest that Republicans as a whole are more enthusiastic than Democrats about the upcoming election, although most recent surveys asking that question predate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing abortion as a constitutional right. This is an issue that could be motivating for Democrats this fall, and in fact, we’ve already seen some movement toward Democrats in our generic ballot average. It remains to be seen, though, whether that’s a short-term blip or a more long-lasting change in the electoral environment, and of course someone who is unenthusiastic can still vote — an unenthusiastic vote counts the same as an enthusiastic one.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-dems-energizing-abortion-evens-midterms-equation-silver-86558599

Nevertheless, the historical relationship between presidential approval and the performance of the president’s party in midterm elections should scare Democrats. Generally speaking, the worse a president’s approval is, the more seats that party tends to lose in the House.¹³ Thinking back to that first chart, three of the four presidents preceding Biden saw their party lose at least 40 House seats in their first midterm election. The exception was Bush, whose party actually gained six seats in the 2002 election, but he had an unusually high approval rating at the time of his first midterm. That’s still notable, though, because it means it has taken that kind of anomaly to see the president’s party suffer fewer losses — or even achieve gains — in House elections.

We can’t know for sure where Biden’s approval will go from here, but many of the factors playing into his approval rating don’t look likely to disappear anytime soon. And that could be a major anchor weighing down Democrats this fall.

Inflation

A Gas Holiday Might Be Popular, But It’s Unlikely To Do Much To Lower Inflation

By Monica Potts and Zoha Qamar and Monica Potts and Zoha Qamar

Jun. 24, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Earlier this week President Biden asked Congress to temporarily suspend collection of federal gas and diesel taxes for three months as a way to relieve pressure on Americans as national gas prices rise to $5 a gallon. If the price keeps going up, it could top highs not seen since the summer of 2008. High gas prices are also helping to drive overall inflation, which reached 8.6 percent as of May.

It’s no surprise, then, that Biden is responding to pressure to do something — anything — about gas prices. As plenty of people have pointed out, the cost per gallon is displayed on giant signs everyone can see. Transportation and groceries are necessities that are purchased weekly or even daily, which means Americans feel these changes in a visible, visceral way. It also gets at why they’re so important politically, especially as surveys show that Americans are adjusting their budgets. 

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they’ve altered their spending habits to save money because of inflation, according to a Morning Consult poll released this week. More than half, 53 percent, say they’ve changed their eating and drinking habits. Families are eating out less often, cutting back on meat and forgoing alcohol and organic produce.

A similar poll from last month found that middle-income households were spending slightly less on groceries overall and shifting to less expensive options, like store brands instead of name brands. (Higher-income families were just spending more.) 

A Washington Post/Schar School poll conducted April 21 to May 12 found similar levels of bargain hunting — 87 percent of respondents said they took the time to find the cheapest product. The poll also found that 59 percent were reducing their use of electricity and 59 percent were driving less. But one of the biggest impacts was in cutting back on entertainment or eating out (77 percent); perhaps inflation was partially behind the reported drop in Netflix subscribers earlier this year. Respondents are also putting off otherwise planned purchases (74 percent). And though many planned summer vacations that were similar to those they’d had pre-pandemic, they aimed to spend less.

But while some families are changing their habits, that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it — and it probably doesn’t help that they’re making choices based on what they can afford instead of what they want. In a Pew Research Center survey from January, majorities of Americans said 6 out of the 8 economic indicators they were asked about were worse than the previous year. Only 28 percent ranked the economy as good. Purchasing confidence has also fallen, which means people don’t expect inflation to end any time soon.

Moreover, many are dipping into their savings this year to cover increased costs — despite low unemployment and increases in wages. In a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll from last month, two-thirds of people said it would be somewhat or very easy to find a new job, but the boom in the labor market hasn’t been enough to ease the problems elsewhere.

In general, Americans are pretty pessimistic, not just about their own financial situation — more than a third of respondents in that Wall Street Journal/NORC poll ranked their financial situation as poor or not so good — but about the current political system, too. FiveThirtyEight’s collaboration with Ipsos found, for instance, that Americans are especially worried about inflation and political polarization. And a Gallup poll released at the end of May found that “The government/Poor leadership” edged out the high cost of living and inflation as a top concern. 

That said, some experts worry that a gas holiday could make inflation worse by increasing demand, and it would need to be approved by Congress regardless. It may, however, be popular politically: A YouGov poll published Thursday found that 55 percent of respondents would approve of the move. But it’s also possible that a gas holiday just wouldn’t do much to offset the high cost of living that’s squeezing many households. America’s ragged safety net and fluctuating prices for necessities all have causes, and solutions, that are complex and frustrating to tease out, and many of these measures have always been a bit political anyway.

With increasing polarization, Americans could be worried about the same issues but for a variety of reasons. But as with so many aspects of American life, the president remains the most visible person to blame. Earlier this month, Biden’s approval rating fell below 40 percent for the first time, which could argue that the worst, for the economy and for Biden, is still to come.

Other Polling Bites

• One nation under God? Yes, but decreasingly so. At present, 81 percent of Americans believe in God, according to a Gallup poll published last week that surveyed the strength of faith in the U.S. That number may sound high, but it’s the lowest ever reported since Gallup began asking the question in 1944 when 96 percent affirmed their belief. Some of today’s demographic breakdowns aren’t super surprising — liberal and younger Americans are less likely to believe than their conservative or older counterparts. But other findings do challenge common assumptions. There’s no discernible difference among Americans based on where they live — on average, 82 percent in cities, 80 percent in suburbs and 82 percent in rural areas believe in God, putting all three groups all uniformly on par with the national average. Most notably, every single demographic subgroup tracked — attributes spanning everything from ethnicity to age, marital status to education level, or political leaning to geographic region — has fewer believers than the 2013-2017 surveys.
• A growing fraction (59 percent) of Americans said they have a lot or some knowledge about Juneteenth, compared with 37 percent about a year ago. Gallup conducted surveys assessing public knowledge and support surrounding the observance in May 2021 — just weeks before Congress and then Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday — and again starting in late April 2022. At present, 45 percent of Americans are in support of its status as a federal holiday, up from 35 percent last year. That said, opposition toward Juneteenth has also increased, though not quite at the same rate: 30 percent actively disagree with its holiday designation, as opposed to 25 percent a year ago.
• Less than a quarter of Americans — a historic low of 26 percent — trust the news, according to a new report from Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for media understanding. A poll from Pew published last week corroborates this while also suggesting that reporters fail to fully perceive audience hesitations: 65 percent of U.S. journalists told Pew news organizations do a good or very good job reporting the news accurately, but only 35 percent of U.S. adults agreed. Moreover, the Reuters Institute researchers found that 42 percent of Americans actively avoid the news, a trend that has gradually risen in recent years.
• Around 6 in 10 Americans with smartphones believe the relationship with their device is, in reality, not all that smart, finds a new Gallup survey. That’s approximately a 50 percent jump, too, since the organization’s researchers first asked the question (“Do you think you spend too much time using your smartphone?”) in 2015. Each age bracket and gender demographic studied reported a steep uptick in “yes” responses, with increases ranging between 40 percent and 230 percent depending on the demographic category. (Those 65 and over account for the 230 percent jump.) The study also found that 97 percent of respondents owned smartphones, compared with 81 percent seven years ago.
• Although 43 percent of Americans believe self-driving cars will one day become commonplace, 60 percent report they’d feel at least somewhat uncomfortable riding in one, per a YouGov poll conducted last Friday. Disaggregating that figure by age, however, reveals diverging attitudes based on generation. The proportion who voiced discomfort swells to 80 percent for those age 65 and over, while it plummets to 38 percent for 18- to 29-year-olds. The numbers also look a bit different by race, with white Americans more inclined to feel uneasy (65 percent) than any other group.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹⁴ 39.2 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 55.4 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -16.2 points). At this time last week, 39.9 percent approved and 54.3 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -14.4 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 41.1 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -13.4 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,¹⁵ Republicans currently lead by 2.3 percentage points (44.8 percent to 42.5 percent). A week ago, Republicans led Democrats by 2.6 points (45.0 percent to 42.4 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 2.3 points (45.0 percent to 42.7 percent).

Student Debt

Canceling Student Debt Could Help Close The Wealth Gap Between White And Black Americans

By Santul Nerkar

May 31, 2022, at 6:00 AM

UPDATE (Aug. 24, 2022, 12:17 p.m.): On Wednesday, President Biden announced that he planned to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for Americans earning less than $125,000 a year and an additional $10,000 for those who used Pell Grants to attend college.

In an article we published earlier this year, we looked at why canceling student debt is one of the best ways to start to close America’s racial wealth gap. Read more about how Biden’s student loan plan could help with this — or come up short.

America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing Black Americans.

But what if I told you that an effective way to start closing this gap was within reach? According to the scholars I talked with who study this issue, canceling student debt is one of the best ways to start to close America’s racial wealth gap, and although it has its risks, it’s something that President Biden can do on his own by executive order.

“Higher education was supposed to be the engine for some to secure financial security and stability,” said Fenaba Addo, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has researched the links between debt and wealth inequality. But she told me that just hasn’t happened. “The realized gains have not been distributed equally, and student debt has contributed to that,” said Addo.

Today, the typical graduating college student owes about $30,000 in student debt, about four times more than they did 50 years ago. But that topline figure masks some real racial disparities. Consider that because Black students tend to come from poorer households than their white counterparts, they are more likely to take out loans — and take out larger loans. Moreover, even white students who end up borrowing money for college have, on average, more preexisting family wealth at their disposal to pay down their debts. 

In other words, student debt exacerbates the racial wealth gap, starting from the moment that newly christened graduates toss their caps in the air.¹⁶

And the further removed from college young Americans become, the more this disparity grows — more than triple, according to a 2016 report from the Brookings Institution — sapping Black Americans’ net worth even more. A 2018 paper from Addo and sociologist Jason Houle found, for example, that if younger Black adults held the same level of debt as their white peers, the racial wealth gap in young adulthood would be reduced by about 10 percent. Addo and Houle also found that student debt’s contribution to the racial wealth gap increased with age, from 13 percent at 25 to 23 percent at 30. 

Crucially, too, the racial gap in student debt levels has only grown in recent years. A 2017 paper found that the average student debt for Black households — and number of Black households holding any student debt — increased significantly from 2001 to 2013. The authors found, further, that this growing divide was not because of more Black Americans attending college, but due to disproportionate exploitation by predatory lenders. 

Louise Seamster, a professor of sociology, criminology and African American studies at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the paper, said the fact that Black students tend to carry far more student debt contradicts the idea that higher education is a means to mobility. “If the racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans is 10-to-1, at the median for all families, when we just look at the racial wealth gap between Black and white borrowers, it’s actually twice as bad,” Seamster said.

This is the context in which canceling student debt has entered the political discourse. Progressive Democrats have made the case that forgiving student loans would ease the burden on millions of families, while Republicans (and some Democrats) have argued that it would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. 

But the scholars I spoke to pushed back against the idea that canceling student debt would be regressive. Charlie Eaton, a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, Merced, said that such analyses often look at income, not wealth, and discount racial disparities in borrowing and the fact that many college students attend college without borrowing money to begin with.

Eaton’s own research has found that canceling $50,000 of student debt — as some Democratic senators have proposed — would not benefit the wealthiest Americans. Such a cancelation, Eaton and his co-authors found, would disproportionately benefit poorer Black households — while giving little relief to those at the top of the wealth distribution:¹⁷

The amount of debt canceled matters a lot, though, and it’s unlikely that what experts say is an optimal number will be forgiven. Biden has said, for instance, that he won’t consider canceling $50,000 and has recently indicated that $10,000 will be forgiven. But canceling $10,000 wouldn’t do much to help, according to Alan Aja, a professor of Puerto Rican and Latino studies at Brooklyn College, because of the racialization of student debt.

“Twenty years into repayment, the median black borrowers owe 95 percent of what they borrowed, while the median white person has almost fully repaid their loan,” Aja said. “So if you throw $10,000 cancellation into that figure, it’s a drop in the bucket.”

“We tell Black kids, if you go to college, you work hard, you get a good paying job, you’ll have the American dream,” said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University who researches the racialization of the U.S. tax system. But this just isn’t what’s happened. Instead, Black Americans are disproportionately saddled with crippling student loan debt.

The existing solutions to this problem haven’t worked out for Black Americans, either. Take income-driven repayment, a federal program that allows lower-income borrowers to pay a reduced share of their loans every month — with the promise of the remaining principal being forgiven after a certain number of years. This sounds promising, but because Black Americans have lower levels of wealth than white Americans at the same — and even lower — levels of income, this program is still regressive, not to mention complicated. Moreover, a 2021 report found that just 32 people had ever had their student loan balance canceled through this program.

Add in the fact that Black Americans who graduate from college still face a labor market stacked against them — which also contributes to the racial wealth gap — and it’s clear to see how higher education often leaves Black Americans behind, rather than offering them a true path to mobility.

Interestingly, canceling student debt is at least somewhat politically feasible. Polls generally show Americans support student debt forgiveness much more than they do other programs that would help close the racial wealth gap, like reparations:

It’s possible, too, that given Biden’s lagging support among younger voters and Black voters — both of whom overwhelmingly support at least some student debt forgiveness — he could see a boost in his popularity, especially among Democrats, if he cancels student debt. But then again, the expanded child tax credit was broadly popular among Americans, and it didn’t seem to buy Democrats much support. Furthermore, if Biden does end up canceling student debt by executive order instead of via Congress, given it’ll be next to impossible to get the 60 votes needed to pass it, that carries its own political peril.

And of course, canceling even the “right” amount of debt wouldn’t come close to eliminating the racial wealth gap, which could make this a hard political sell. The experts I spoke to were unanimous in the view that canceling student debt would not eradicate the racial wealth gap by itself. Research has found that enacting a set of policies — including student loan forgiveness — could significantly reduce the racial wealth gap, but canceling student loan debt on its own is just one step in that process.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-political-opinions-change-fivethirtyeight-88737506

Nationally, a large majority of Americans support legal abortion in at least some cases, but the politics of abortion are likely to play out on the state level if Roe v. Wade is overturned. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the types of legislation different states may adopt if Roe is struck down, and how those policies jibe with public opinion. They also discuss recent polling showing that President Biden has disproportionately lost support among traditionally Democratic voting groups, such as young people, Hispanic adults and non-Hispanic Black adults.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Inflation

Were The Stimulus Checks A Mistake?

By Santul Nerkar and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Santul Nerkar and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Apr. 26, 2022, at 1:07 PM

It wasn’t long ago that the U.S. economy needed a shot in the arm. Millions of Americans had lost their jobs as the country shut itself down to slow the spread of a deadly virus. At the time, policymakers, advocates and economists agreed that Americans needed immediate relief — and so they quickly acted on it. 

Lawmakers passed a $2.2-trillion stimulus package in March 2020, followed by two more installments of COVID-19 relief later in 2020 and then again in 2021. In total, it added up to one of the most generous fiscal responses to the virus globally.

There would be a catch, though. As U.S. prices continue to rise by rates not seen in decades, it’s become clear that the stimulus came at a significant, unintended cost: inflation. It’s unclear whether inflation has reached its peak, but the situation is now economically and politically toxic, and it has left many of the same policymakers, advocates and economists now asking whether the stimulus checks were a mistake.

The stimulus had big economic benefits — but it also fueled inflation

On the one hand, COVID-19 stimulus undoubtedly helped Americans in some very big, tangible ways. Namely, it reduced poverty — beyond merely keeping people afloat during the early days of the pandemic. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure, the stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty in 2020 — a drop in the poverty rate from 11.8 to 9.1 percent. And the 2021 poverty rate was estimated to fall even further to 7.7 percent, per a July 2021 report from the Urban Institute. We don’t know yet whether this came to fruition, but Laura Wheaton, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the analysts behind the 2021 numbers, told us that it was clear from their analysis that the stimulus checks were driving a dramatic decline in poverty.

More broadly, the stimulus checks also cushioned workers during one of the worst economic crises in modern history, which likely helped the economy bounce back in record time. In April 2020, when Americans were receiving the first round of checks — up to $1,200 with the CARES Act — the unemployment rate was at a disastrous 14.7 percent. But two years later, it’s almost returned to its pre-pandemic levels, with many job openings. “I hope we don’t forget how awesome it was that we supported people so well, and that we recovered as quickly as we did,” said Tara Sinclair, a professor of economics at George Washington University. 

However, there is also evidence that the stimulus, especially the last round, likely stoked higher and higher prices for the very people it was intended to help. Though global supply chain issues (and, more recently, the war in Ukraine) have been significant drivers of inflation, the divergence between U.S. and European inflation suggests there’s more to it than that. In fact, a recent analysis from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that the stimulus may have raised U.S. inflation by about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021. 

Americans are struggling financially as a result — particularly low-income people who don’t have a cushion to absorb higher prices. Moreover, inflation is outpacing wage growth. Despite a 5.6 percent jump in wages year-over-year, 8.5 percent inflation in March 2022 meant that Americans saw a nearly 3 percent decrease in inflation-adjusted wages. 

This wasn’t a completely unforeseen problem, either. Back in early 2021, some economists raised the alarm about the size of the final round of stimulus — the American Rescue Plan, which was headlined by $1,400 direct payments to individual Americans — for its potential to overheat the economy and create an inflationary environment. According to Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the stimulus checks played a chief role in creating excessive demand, which in turn spurred inflation. “The demand boost was very large in the U.S., and the stimulus checks were a large part of it,” Philippon said. But at the same time, many policymakers — including Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve — thought that the risk of putting too little money into the economy seemed greater than the risk of putting in too much.

The stimulus became political

Part of the problem is that the last rounds of stimulus — the checks that went out in December 2020 and March 2021 — may actually have been too big. But the decision to send an extra $2,000 to most Americans wasn’t backed by evidence or economic calculations. It was shaped by politics. 

Though the CARES Act passed on a near-unanimous, bipartisan basis in March 2020, when former President Donald Trump was in office, a much different story played out in the transition from his administration to now-President Biden’s. Toward the end of 2020, Trump pushed for additional $2,000 payments, which House Democrats supported and later passed, but that effort was blocked by Republicans in the Senate who were alarmed by the price tag. Ultimately, direct payments of just $600 were greenlit — despite broad-based support for the bigger checks among voters of both parties. 

But Democrats, with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, decided to campaign for larger stimulus checks in the run-up to the Georgia run-off elections. It’s impossible to know whether support for the checks gave now- Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff their respective edges, but Democrats did end up winning both seats and passing the American Rescue Plan two months later, which included $1,400 checks to meet the desired $2,000 target.

Claudia Sahm, director of macroeconomic research at the Jain Family Institute, said that the March 2021 check should have ideally been smaller. But because of the politics of the issue, there wasn’t room to push for a lower number. “People had been promised the $2,000 checks,” she said. Politically, that meant it was either going to be a $2,000 payment — or nothing at all.

Moreover, a lot of the COVID-19 economic response leaned left, which may help explain why so many policymakers underestimated the threat of inflation. They were instead more worried about not giving Americans enough money — a lesson of a previous era. Democrats who were in office during the Great Recession — including Biden, who helped oversee the 2009 recovery as vice president — approached the COVID-19 recovery determined not to repeat the mistakes of spending too little money. It wasn’t clear at the time, but many economists now believe that Congress’s reluctance to pump money into the economy after the 2008 crash led to a long and grinding recovery.

That’s why this time around, Democrats wanted to pour money into the economy. It seemed like a clear political winner, since support for another round of stimulus payments was extremely high: Polls from late 2020 and early 2021 consistently found that the vast majority of Americans, including many Republicans, supported the proposed stimulus checks. But though Democrats won control of the Senate and passed the overwhelmingly popular stimulus — albeit on a party-line vote — that popularist ethos hasn’t seemed to bear fruit since. In particular, voters don’t seem to be rewarding Democrats and Biden for the extra money granted by the stimulus. A majority of voters blame Biden for inflation — including a sizable chunk of Democrats — and disapprove of his handling of the economy more broadly. 

Instead of helping Biden and his party, then, the stimulus could end up hurting them in the 2022 midterm elections. 

We will likely learn the wrong lessons from the stimulus

The lessons we draw from the response to the COVID-19 recession are important, because they’ll almost certainly shape how we respond to the next economic downturn. In the wake of the Great Recession, policymakers shot too low. Now, they appear to have shot too high. If this were the story of Goldilocks, we’d be poised to get things just right next time — but politics is not a fairy tale, and it’s very possible that we’ll overcorrect whenever another recession hits. 

In many ways, we’re still figuring out what the lessons are as the pandemic still isn’t over. And it’s, of course, hard to disentangle what could have happened had the government’s response not been so aggressive. One clear lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, though, is that America’s social safety net wasn’t prepared to deal with a crisis of this magnitude, which is a big part of the reason why the response had to be so massive.

Our social safety net wasn’t ready to catch everyone who needed it, so it was very difficult to figure out who really needed relief and when the tap should be turned off, according to Sinclair. Rickety state unemployment insurance systems couldn’t be recalibrated to replace people’s incomes, so many people ended up being paid much more after they lost their jobs. It wasn’t easy to target direct payments to people in specific income brackets, so the payments went out to some families who didn’t need them.

But with a better social welfare infrastructure, we might not have been as vulnerable to inflation, according to Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics and urban policy at the New School. Had we been able to identify and reach the people who were most in need of support, a huge, blanket response wouldn’t have been necessary. 

“[T]he automatic stabilizer of that leaves us less vulnerable to economic shocks, like a pandemic recession,” Hamilton said. “We would have that type of policy infrastructure already in place.”

The problem is that politicians’ incentives run the other way — there’s no political benefit to preparing for a nebulous future crisis, so they often don’t. And as anxiety about inflation mounts, there’s little appetite to pump more money into the country’s social safety net. “It would be a sweeping change, and it would look like a huge expenditure,” Sinclair said. “And it’s hard to tell people, ‘Hey, look, if we do this, it’ll look like a lot of money now, but the next time there’s a crisis, we won’t end up just spending a trillion or two, willy-nilly.’”

Depending on what happens with inflation, economists may end up concluding that the tradeoffs of the COVID-19 stimulus were worth it, but that won’t necessarily be the political takeaway. All of this underscores the fundamental tension of any response to an economic crisis — it will be designed by politicians, whose goals are shaped by the prevailing political winds. And at this point, it seems very likely that the political pain inflicted by rising prices will shape the way we remember the current response, regardless of whether economists agree.

Black Voters

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Nomination May Not Be Enough To Turn Out Black Voters For Democrats

By Alex Samuels

Mar. 22, 2022, at 6:00 AM

It was a promise Joe Biden made during a low point in his presidential campaign, after he lost both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. Just days before the South Carolina primary, when Black voters would effectively hand him the Democratic nomination, Biden said at the end of a debate that if he were elected, he would nominate the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s a promise that some Republicans have since derided as discriminatory or akin to affirmative action, but the president’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the seat of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, is the one notable promise to Black voters — perhaps the only one — that Biden has managed to uphold. And according to political science research and experts I spoke to, this promise of appointing the nation’s first Black woman to the Supreme Court is important to Black voters.

In February, political scientists Jaclyn Kaslovsky of Rice University and Andrew R. Stone of Washington University in St. Louis published a piece in The Washington Post about their research showing that Black Americans place a high value on what’s called “descriptive representation.” In other words, having someone who looks like them in a position of power — particularly in the judiciary — is very important to Black Americans. 

Kaslovsky told me one reason why Black Americans may want more Black people in positions of power is that they’ve been historically underrepresented in politics. “There’s research arguing that group consciousness matters for how people evaluate political institutions,” she said. “So, as Black Americans become more represented in the judiciary, they may feel like their voices are legitimated by that institution.”

Jackson’s confirmation process comes at an important time, too, as Black Americans have soured on Biden in the past six months, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of presidential approval polls going back to October. But while it’s possible that Jackson’s nomination offers the president a lifeline with Black voters, who overwhelmingly want to see her confirmed, there are also many reasons why Biden’s nomination of Jackson won’t be enough. Although research shows that a diverse judiciary is important to some Black voters, it’s unlikely that Jackson’s nomination will erase Biden’s longstanding problem of failing to address and implement policies that would benefit Democrats’ most loyal base.

“Biden dropped the ball on so many things, and not just things that people hoped for or expected he’d do, but promises he made to the American public, like restructuring student loan debt or managing the pandemic better or implementing the child tax credit,” said Robert L. Reece, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. “I’d bet that type of stuff starts to become more and more prominent as the election becomes closer, especially given that Jackson’s nomination has less of an immediate impact on people’s lives.”

What’s working in Biden’s favor is that polls suggest that Black voters really want Jackson to make it through the nomination process and that her appointment is motivating them ahead of what’s expected to be a grueling midterm cycle for Democrats. While surveys on midterm enthusiasm among Black Americans are generally sparse, at least one survey from Morning Consult/Politico shows that Black voters became more enthusiastic for the midterm elections in late February — right around the time Biden made Jackson’s nomination public. Other polls similarly show Black Americans’ eagerness to get Jackson through the nomination process. According to Navigator Research, 89 percent of Democratic voters and 88 percent of Black voters said they trusted Biden’s judgment on who should be the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, among all races and ethnic groups, Black voters were the most likely to say they would support the Senate’s confirmation of Jackson, at 71 percent; only 11 percent of Black voters said they would oppose the confirmation, for a net support of 60 percentage points. Asian American and Pacific Islander voters had the second-highest level of support for Jackson’s confirmation: 58 percent would support her confirmation, for a net support of 51 points.

But enthusiasm for Biden’s Supreme Court pick hasn’t translated to support for Biden himself so far. In fact, disillusionment with his administration has increased in the past six months. 

Of course, Biden’s approval ratings started to nose-dive last summer, as my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and I reported in February, but they are more fluid now, as he got a slight bump in the past several weeks. Still, Biden’s approval is down overall, and the dwindling support among Black Americans is particularly notable given that this bloc helped clinch the presidency for Biden in 2020.

That said, not only are Biden’s struggles with Black voters now part of a larger trend in his abysmal approval ratings, but, according to Reece, other frustrations are likely playing a role, too — for instance, a lack of movement on critical policy concerns like police reform, voting rights legislation, COVID-19 rates and inflation, which still disproportionately affect Black Americans.

In the short term at least, it’s possible that Jackson’s confirmation — assuming it goes through smoothly — will galvanize some Black voters. But, Reece warned me, if this is the only thing the Biden administration is banking on to court the Black vote, it’s probably not going to be enough. “People need tangible things. Not just symbolic representation to get out and vote, especially in the midterms,” he said. “Not only do less people typically vote, but Republicans tend to vote in higher shares.”

In other words, while the historic nature of Jackson’s nomination shouldn’t be dismissed, the Biden administration should not discount the fact that appointments and platitudes alone may not be enough to persuade Black voters to turn out in droves this year the same way they did in 2020. 

Democrats have long struggled with engaging Black voters, though, and this is a symptom of a larger problem, as former FiveThirtyEight senior writer Farai Chideya explained ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Because Black Americans reliably vote Democratic, they are treated somewhat as a “captured” voting bloc: That is, they’re often ignored by Republicans but taken for granted by Democrats. As a consequence, Democrats in power, including Biden and current members of Congress, tend to not address or prioritize many of the policy concerns Black communities have.

To be sure, Jackson’s nomination is pretty far away from the midterms, and there’s still plenty of time for voters to either forget Biden took this step or warm up to him before November. As the Morning Consult/Politico poll shows, along with tracking polls from YouGov, Biden’s standing among Black Americans has the potential to rebound. But, as Reece told me, “Biden will have to rely on something else to motivate Black people come November. I’m not sure if Jackson’s nomination will be the thing that gets people out of their seats for a midterm election.”

But higher prices at the pump and elsewhere aren’t new. For nearly a year now, Americans have faced sharply rising inflation, and the latest numbers were further confirmation of that reality: U.S. prices last month rose 7.9 percent year-over-year, the largest such increase since 1982 and a continuation of a worrying trajectory as the country recovers from the pandemic recession and a beaten-down supply chain.

It’s possible that this trajectory worsens, too, as the global economic outlook has gotten a lot more uncertain following Russia’s invasion late last month. Prices for oil, wheat and other resources have skyrocketed as countries around the world impose harsh sanctions against Russian industries, and U.S. gas prices have ticked all the way up to $4.17 per gallon.

It’s a precarious situation for Biden because inflation and, in particular, higher gas prices — including those spurred by overseas oil crises — have been shown to drag down presidential approval. At the same time, presidents haven’t always experienced lower approval as a result of these conflicts, so it’s possible that, given the situation in Ukraine, Americans won’t blame Biden for higher gas prices as they have blamed past presidents.

Higher gas prices are hardly the only result of inflation, but they are one of the most visible and visceral realities of inflation for Americans. Scholarship has found that consumer sentiment gets significantly more pessimistic in response to rising gas prices, and that Americans form higher inflation expectations and change their spending habits when they see higher gas prices. 

Higher gas prices have also been shown to drag down presidential approval. As I wrote back in December, overall inflation has been associated with several periods of downturn in presidential approval, and research has also found that higher gas prices typically have a significant and negative effect on presidents’ approval ratings. But it’s not as simple as higher gas prices meaning lower presidential approval, according to Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who has researched the link between presidential approval and economic indicators.

Namely, situations like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can play a role in whether Americans blame Biden — or something or someone else, like Russia and Vladimir Putin — for inflation, according to Krosnick. And in this particular situation, it’s possible many Americans will tolerate higher gas prices as a result of sanctions against Russia, according to recent surveys from YouGov/The Economist and Quinnipiac University. 

“The impact of economic indicators on presidential approval depends upon the attribution that the public makes for the cause of economic indicators getting better or worse,” said Krosnick. “In other words, what matters here is whether the president can reasonably be held responsible for what happened to gas prices, or anything else [can].”

In fact, higher gas prices resulting from foreign oil shocks haven’t always worsened presidential approval ratings. Take, for example, the 1990 oil shock, which was caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2 of that year. Even as the price of oil spiked, former president George H.W. Bush’s approval jumped over 16 percentage points in less than a month as the international community swiftly condemned Iraq’s actions, and it rose again after the U.S.-led intervention in early 1991. Moreover, the price of oil returned to roughly prior levels in less than a year.

It’s unlikely that Biden will see this kind of upswell in his presidential approval rating, but it is true that we haven’t yet seen a drop in his presidential approval to accompany the long lines at the pump — in fact, we’ve seen the opposite. Biden’s approval today is about the same as it was at the start of the Ukraine crisis and has actually rebounded since the initial days of the invasion, a period of time over which prices have risen considerably. He could be seeing a bump from his State of the Union address and from the Ukraine crisis itself, and as Krosnick noted, U.S. presidential approval often responds positively to international conflicts — even if big swings in approval are mostly a thing of the past.

One other factor working in Biden’s favor is that the U.S. is far less dependent on foreign oil than it was during the 1973 and 1979 energy crises. “At the time, if OPEC countries decided that they wanted to reduce production, that was it,” said Francesco D’Acunto, a professor of finance at Boston College. “Even if we see that prices are increasing [right now], we haven’t yet observed anything close to what was happening in the late ’70s,” he added. 

However, Biden is still walking a tightrope on inflation. Inflation was high even before a foreign conflict pumped more uncertainty into the U.S. economy, and most Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of inflation prior to the Ukraine crisis. Moreover, as with much polling on foreign policy, voters often take their cues from elites on which policies to support, and it’s quite possible that they’ll end up reflecting partisan loyalties when evaluating how Biden has handled what’s happening in Ukraine.

All of that could lead Americans to rate the economy more poorly and, thus, hurt Biden’s political prospects. But it is still far too early to tell whether the conflict’s potentially negative effects on the U.S. economy will be just another economic issue Americans blame him for — or one that they’re willing to tolerate.