Education

Why More States Don't Have Universal Pre-K

By Monica Potts

Feb. 3, 2023, at 1:07 PM

California is in the middle of implementing a plan that will create a free, universal pre-K program (known as transitional kindergarten) for every 4-year-old in the state by the 2025-2026 school year. It sounds like a big, blue state priority, but it’s also a red state one. California will join states like West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma in aiming to provide universal preschool programs that serve all of their states’ 4-year-olds.

Welcome to the weird, patchwork world of preschool politics. 

Both parties seem to agree that spending money to educate young children is a worthwhile mission, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is. Yet national plans for preschool programs have stalled in Congress. So, governors and state legislatures are taking the lead. During the current legislative term, at least 14 states are discussing preschool expansion.¹ But how states choose to do that can vary widely, making uneven contributions to an already uneven system.

Over the past decade, more and more research has found that investing in early childhood education can provide long-term benefits for children that far outweigh its short-term costs. That’s especially true for children from families who cannot currently afford to send them to preschool. Policymakers, advocates and researchers hope that making these programs universal and attaching them to existing public school systems will improve their reach, prove easier for families to enroll in and improve educational quality and teacher pay.

It’s the universal part that is at issue. All but four states — Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming — have a state-run preschool program that reaches some students, but the scope of each varies. The programs usually target specific populations, either in certain cities or certain populations of students, like children from low-income families or with special education needs.

There are several different measures of how many kids are in preschool, but each shows there are many more kids who could be there. The National Institute for Early Education Research said that approximately 39 percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled across Head Start, state-funded preschool and early childhood special education public programs nationwide during the 2020-2021 school year.  NIEER and other research and advocate groups consider a program to be universal when its enrollment reaches 70 percent of all 4-year-olds in the state.²

Not all preschool programs are the same, of course. In general, as with other levels of education, the advocates and researchers I spoke with defined high-quality as having:

• Teachers who are educated at least through college; 
• Opportunities for continued professional development so they can stay updated on the latest education research; 
• Small class sizes and teaching assistants so that classroom student to teacher ratios remain low; 
• And quality materials and curriculum. 

Usually, that means more money, which makes hitting those targets even more difficult for states. Especially since there won’t be a new spigot of money specifically for preschool coming from the federal government. State budgets have been recently bolstered by COVID-19 stimulus packages, but that funding will disappear over the next few fiscal years. 

From the start of his tenure, President Biden has championed early childhood education. Universal, publicly funded pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds became part of the “social infrastructure” priorities that were included in his Build Back Better Plan. The plan initially proposed funding preschool programs through the public school systems, with the federal government picking up the entire tab in the program’s first three years. The size and scope of the plan was whittled down as it worked its way through the House, passing in November 2021 before dying in the Senate. 

Now, many governors are pressing ahead, and Democrats are using Biden’s unpassed plan as a guide. Last spring, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a universal preschool bill into law. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan for pre-K for all 4-year-olds in her state-of-the-state address last week. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker promised state-funded preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old during his inauguration in January. Similar promises have come from governors in Arizona, Hawaii, Maryland, and New Mexico. Most of these plans are in the early stages, and governors say that increasing funding and classroom capacity for the new grades is a multi-year process. 

Build Back Better was an inspiration for California’s design, as well. “In California, people were looking to what was in that package and what was coming from the federal government and decided, like a lot of other states, that we were going to make this a priority,” said Hanna Melnick, a senior policy advisor at the Learning Policy Institute. “There was long standing support and pressure from advocates in the legislature, and then the governor's office, that all came together to make that possible, even without federal funding.” The state already has a state-funded preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds that is smaller and more targeted, as well as the federally funded Head Start, which is limited to children from families living in poverty. This new program will exist alongside those.

Republican governors are taking up the cause in many states, as well. Alabama, which earns top marks from NIEER for the quality of its programs, is opening up new classrooms this year as it moves toward a goal of 70 percent enrollment. A Mississippi lawmaker has vowed to introduce a bill to expand his state’s small preschool program over the next five years. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders listed early childhood education as one of her education priorities, the subject of an executive order she signed on her first day in office.

All this action from Republicans comes despite their party resistance to Biden’s nationwide proposal. Federalism, as always, has been the issue. Republicans did not like the quality standards that would have been mandated by Biden’s plan, as well as the shift from federal to state funding over the years of the proposal. Now, as states cobble together their own plans, state programs are likely to be quite different from one another.

Money will be one reason why. Programs that would aim to recreate Biden’s plan will be very expensive for states implementing them on their own. Alabama has been able to meet NIEER’s quality benchmarks by starting small and slowly expanding, while a program like California’s is instead focused on bringing in as many children as possible, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, as assistant research professor at NIEER. “The smaller programs are sometimes able to meet more of the benchmarks in that they're investing in fewer kids.” More of these states are trying to improve quality over time, she said.

Staffing and teacher pay will be a problem nationwide. Gov. Gavin Newsom did increase California’s education spending by 13 percent in his most recent budget, but the increase is spread across priorities that range from raises in teacher pay to boosting state college financial aid. Some districts have said it is stretching resources.

“What we're looking at is no matter how you cut it, there's just a major workforce expansion that needs to happen,” Melnick said of the California program. There’s also the question of how the expansion of California’s new transitional kindergarten program will affect an already strained workforce in other early childhood education and childcare programs, since the new program’s teachers will earn more, she said.

All of this is why many advocates hope to see the return of some or all of the components of Build Back Better. The COVID-19 recovery plans created additional money for education, but that extra money is waning just as states face a possible economic slowdown. 

Education

Conservatives Are Bringing An Old Policy to A New Fight Over Public Schools

By Monica Potts

Jan. 19, 2023, at 11:47 AM

School vouchers, which use public funds to send some students to private schools, are more than 30 years old. But this year, bills are being introduced around the country that would push school vouchers into a new frontier. 

While traditionally, vouchers and similar programs have been used for specific student populations, more states are seeking to create what’s known as education savings accounts. These accounts would grant money to each public school student under 18 and give it outright to parents to spend as they see fit, allowing them to spend the funds on a range of education expenses that include traditional private schools, but also religious schools, online schools and approved costs for homeschooled children. In the past, education savings accounts have been open to limited populations, like special needs K-12 students, but many of these new bills would make the programs open to everyone, regardless of a family’s ability to pay. 

Advocates have been pushing for education savings accounts, also sometimes called universal school vouchers, for at least a decade, but recent political changes have made them likelier to succeed than ever. They are empowered by a Supreme Court decision last summer allowing people to use taxpayer-funded tuition assistance for religious schools, along with attacks on teachings related to race and gender identity from right-leaning politicians that have eroded support for public schools, especially among Republican voters. 

Public school advocates argue the plans amount to an attack on the foundational idea of public education itself, in effect transferring a public good to a private benefit, and are driven more by culture-war concerns than the educational needs of students. If more states establish these education savings accounts, it could radically change public education, and how American families experience schools could vary a great deal based on where they live and who governs. 

That’s true in Iowa, where lawmakers held a hearing on the proposed legislation on Tuesday. State residents stepped forward to speak out for and against the plan during the hearing, which was streamed online and lasted more than an hour and a half. When a 12-year veteran of teaching approached the microphone, he echoed a common criticism: that the education savings plan will take desperately needed resources away from public schools.

On the other side, Jennifer Turner, a parent and supporter of the accounts, made it clear that she was far more worried about culture than cash. “I hear others talk about how great public schools are, but they’re underfunded,” she said. “That’s not why most of us parents want to move our children out of the public schools. It’s the new curriculums and social, emotional learning and social justice and all of the things that are brought into our schools that don’t align with our values.” 

A similar bill failed in the state legislature last year, but now Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers and a governor who has prioritized the cause. Republican confidence in the bill is so high that it was the first bill introduced in the Iowa House this term. It was passed by committees in both chambers of the state legislature Wednesday, the day after the hearing.³ And legislators in at least 10 more states have introduced bills expanding or creating such programs, and more are reportedly considering them for the current term.

These bills are coming amid a broader effort among some Republican politicians and right-leaning advocates to give parents a greater voice in their children’s education. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” Christopher Rufo, the documentary filmmaker turned activist, told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in November 2021. 

Efforts to expand school vouchers and programs like education savings accounts have been blocked by state courts in the past. But now, with the Supreme Court’s ruling, states are revisiting those plans. Arizona and West Virginia implemented the broadest plans in the nation recently.

In a 2020 speech, Betsy DeVos, former President Donald Trump’s education secretary, framed her push for these programs as a way to give parents power. “The ‘Washington knows best’ crowd really loses their minds over that. They seem to think that the people’s money doesn’t belong to the people,” she said. “That it instead belongs to ‘the public,’ or rather, what they really mean — government.” DeVos’s organization, the American Federation for Children, now advocates broadly for “school choice,” and supports education savings accounts. Details and numbers vary, but the general idea of the education savings accounts is that each parent receives the money the state would otherwise spend on their children, and let parents decide how to spend it instead.

Tools that allowed parents to use government funding to pay for private schools were first introduced in Milwaukee in 1990, but in the beginning they were used almost exclusively for kids with disabilities who had needs local schools couldn’t meet, families with low incomes, and children in high-poverty school districts. Eventually, this expanded to include students who were enrolled in schools deemed failing under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

Now those limits are being removed. For example, the Iowa program, if it passes, would only be available to children in families who earn less than about $84,000 a year (up to three times the federal poverty line). But after three years, the program would open to all families, regardless of income. Those who are organizing against these bills argue that the money to reimburse or subsidize middle-class and wealthy families would come at the expense of already insufficient public education funding, while simultaneously failing to provide low-income families with enough money to cover the cost of private education outright. Nationwide, the average cost of private K-12 tuition is more than $12,000 per year.  

Legislators are also helped by falling support for public schools, especially among Republican voters. A Pew Research Center survey from August 2021 found that just 42 percent of Republicans thought public schools had a positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. A year later, Gallup found that 55 percent of those surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the quality of K-12 education in the United States, while 42 percent were satisfied. In an open-ended question, the fourth-most-cited reason for this dissatisfaction was “political agendas being taught.” 

School funding is more complicated than a per-pupil allocation. Public schools rely on tax dollars contributed to state general funds by all taxpayers and from the federal government, and distribute them based on a district’s enrollment and needs. They are also obligated to educate all students. If enrollment drops because parents withdraw their children from public schools, a district’s budget could fall. That is most likely to hurt children from families with low incomes or who live in neighborhoods that lack non-public options.

Indeed, opposition to these school choice programs have sometimes come from Republicans representing rural districts in very rural states, where public schools are often the only option and a major employer. In other states, such as Texas and Tennessee, school-choice advocates have floated the idea of exempting rural districts from the voucher programs and concentrating their efforts only on cities, potentially draining urban districts — with diverse, and sometimes high-poverty student populations — of students and cash. 

Democrats, long opposed to school vouchers, are also opposed to educational savings accounts. President Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, has advocated for increased school funding and expanded public schools. Democratic governors around the country echo these priorities, including spending more on improving school facilities and improving teacher pay.

But in many states, Republican leaders are leaning into the culture war aspect. Some have already passed legislation banning critical race theory, a legal framework for understanding systemic racism that is not often taught in public K-12, and many more are reaffirming their anti-CRT positions this year, along with rules surrounding gender expression and education. Advocates are also demanding further “curriculum transparency” and “Parents’ Bill of Rights” legislation, which often means a power to view classroom instruction and remove their child from a lesson if they disagree with a topic.

These moves come after a decade of decreases in school funding across the country and teacher strikes and protests for higher pay from West Virginia to Oklahoma. “We’ve all just lost so much over the last 12 years that we just don’t even know what a fully funded classroom would even feel like,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who works with Save Our Schools Arizona.

As these fights continue to unfold this year, they further enmesh public education itself in America’s broader political wars.

Cleveland is one of the poorest cities in the country. It’s far from the expensive coastal cities like New York City and San Francisco, where astronomically high rents are common. Cleveland doesn’t fit the stereotype of a city people want to move to; in fact, it has been losing population since the 1950s. But since 2020, there have been some wild fluctuations in the rental market. Even in many cities that had previously been affordable, rents keep getting higher, stretching more families’ budgets and spreading a largely coastal problem to nearly every part of the country.

Even as the pandemic moves into a maintenance phase, Cleveland families are still getting sick, still struggling financially and still seeking help to find affordable housing and to pay their rents, said Julie Wisneski, director of the housing stability program at the United Way of Greater Cleveland. 

Most of her organization’s clients struggle to get by on low incomes, she said. When they can find places with rent that they can technically afford, those properties are usually in rough shape. “There’s lead paint, there’s broken windows, there’s broken … stairs, there’s plumbing issues,” she said. For Wisneski’s clients, being able to pay rent doesn’t do much good if the apartment is not a safe place to live. “The lack of affordable housing is so bad in Cleveland right now,” she said.

While rents for new leases measured by Zillow and other apartment listing sites finally began dropping nationwide at the end of 2022, the dip came only after a year of historic, nationwide rent increases throughout 2021. (The Consumer Price Index, which surveys a sample of landlords and renters and includes renewals, hasn’t shown a drop yet.) The effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns, intercity moves made at the beginning of the work-from-home era and record-high inflation made the long-standing problem of increasing rents all the worse. Today, rents remain much higher in many cities than they were before the pandemic, even in some cities that had previously been more affordable. Now, with the economy poised on the edge of a recession, the programs established during the pandemic to help families afford housing are expiring. 

In the years leading up to the pandemic, rents steadily increased nationwide by an average of about 4 percent year-over-year, according to Zillow data of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas going back to 2015.⁴ It is worth mentioning, though, that while Zillow’s rent index is a frequently used metric for measuring changes in rent, data sets from apartment listing websites are not a perfect reflection of renters’ on-the-ground experiences, and companies like Zillow aren’t neutral observers of the rental market. Rent indexes by Zillow and others can differ greatly, largely because of rent inflation among new tenants instead of among renewing tenants, as described in this working paper by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That being said, the broad trends captured by Zillow’s index are mostly in line with other data sets.

At that pre-pandemic pace, rents had already been becoming more unaffordable for average families for decades. Then came COVID-19. At first, rents fell in many cities because people stayed home and delayed moves they might otherwise have made. But after the initial shocks wore off, mobility skyrocketed. People who’d delayed moves the previous year packed their bags, as did people who divorced or split from roommates they were sick of, young people who’d delayed leaving their parents’ homes and people who left expensive cities to get more space for less money elsewhere.

The pandemic “greatly increased the importance of home,” said Chris Herbert, managing director for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “For everyone who was living, working, studying from home, and much of your social life was home, the value of having a place to gather was that much more important.”

This trend hit some regions harder than others. Cities in the Mountain West, like Boise, Idaho, and Las Vegas, as well as those in the Sun Belt, like in Florida, saw huge rent spikes. Through summer 2021, rents in Boise and Las Vegas were roughly 20 percent to 26 percent higher than at the same points the previous year. Cape Coral, Florida, saw year-over-year rents swell 33 percent this past January, after months of climbing. And at the end of August 2021, Allentown, Pennsylvania, saw rent prices nearly 18 percent higher than 12 months earlier. Now some of these cities are seeing the biggest slowdowns in the rate of rent increases.

Florida has long been a popular state to move to, but that trend was amplified during the pandemic. In many cities in Florida, rents over the summer of 2021 increased by 20 to 30 percent over what they’d been at the same point in the previous year. 

The vacation-home market also boomed, pushing rents up in smaller resort communities, like Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and towns near ski resorts in Western states. Rents increased too much for low-wage workers and seasonal workers in those areas to afford.

But in cities like Cleveland, the rent increases swelled later. While they never reached the same heights as some of the biggest boom cities in 2021, their rises have lasted longer and are generally increasing less rapidly now. Toward the end of 2022, the year-over-year rent increases weren’t as high as earlier in the year: Rents in Louisville, Kentucky, still increased by 11.2 percent in November 2022, compared with 12 months earlier — a modest 0.1 percent less than during the previous month. Year-over-year rents in November also increased by 10.6 percent in Kansas City, Missouri, which was 0.3 percent less than in October; and they increased by 8.3 percent in Cleveland, which was 0.7 percent less.

It makes sense that some of these cities are not seeing rents fall as quickly, said Rob Warnock, a senior research associate at Apartment List, an online marketplace for listing apartments. “It didn't experience the same dramatic run increases that like Florida did, and so now it's the last part of the country that people are looking toward when they feel like they can go somewhere and get a deal.” 

The price increases in the indexes used by companies like Zillow and Apartment List are for new rental agreements, which means that the increases they capture hit new tenants harder. But they can impact existing tenants, too, by affecting their negotiating power with the current landlords or limiting their ability to move from a bad or unsuitable apartment, like the conditions Wisneski described.

These forces push the people struggling with very low-incomes into more and more marginal areas, said Josiah Quarles, the director of organizing and advocacy for the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. Quarles works to organize tenant groups in Cleveland and says he’s had to stop working in some buildings because he believes they’re unsafe for tenants and his organizers. 

The rental data from Zillow doesn’t capture such complexities, and it can make rents seem more affordable than they truly are.

Some of the trends now affecting Quarles’s clients began during the housing crisis and the Great Recession, and then accelerated during the pandemic, he said. As he put it, investors would buy cheap housing stock in cities like Cleveland and rent it out at market rates without spending money on upkeep. “The large majority of the purchases on the east side of Cleveland are investor purchases,” he said. “So we’re seeing people … who are paying the same amount that they would have been paying five years ago for a place, except now the place is actually a condemned building.” He added that significant investments were being made on higher-end rental units, which has left people searching for the few affordable places to go.

In some cities, prices are still 30 percent higher than they were before the pandemic, Warnock says.  “[That is] certainly not something your average, everyday person can just absorb.”

If rents return to their pre-pandemic normal, we’ll still be in a situation that’s difficult for many families. In 2019, the percentage of renters who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities — an “affordability” benchmark — was 46 percent, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. What’s new is that a growing number of middle-income renters are struggling to afford their housing costs as well. Between 2014 and 2019, the share of middle-class renters (i.e., those with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999) whose housing costs were higher than that benchmark rose 4 percentage points, to 41 percent. 

But even as more people in more places are struggling … there’s suddenly less support. Many of the COVID-19 relief programs have run out of money.

Some cities have tried to fill that gap. This past summer, the Cleveland City Council passed an ordinance that halts eviction proceedings if a tenant can come up with the full amount of back rent and any late fees by their court date. Voters in cities and states around the country passed rent stabilization ordinances, which prevent landlords from increasing rates more than a certain percentage on existing tenants. St. Petersburg, Florida, and some communities in Cape Cod and California are also trying to make it easier to build detached accessory dwelling units on existing properties, which could be rented out to single people or small families.

But those are piecemeal solutions to a fundamental problem that remains: There is not enough housing for people to live in, and it’s gotten more unaffordable for a wider swath of Americans. A recession, if it happens, would hit renters even harder, and more families are stuck in the rental market while interest rates remain high. It’s a big problem that’s been brewing nationwide for decades, just more visible now.

2022 In Review

The Numbers That Defined 2022

By Anna Rothschild

Dec. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

What a year 2022 has been. There was so … much … news. We saw record-high inflation, war in Ukraine, a landmark Supreme Court session, continuing effects of the pandemic, the Winter Olympics, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the World Cup and, of course, the midterms. In typical FiveThirtyEight fashion, we’ve been reflecting on 2022 the way we do best: through numbers. Here, seven of our reporters share some of the most important stats of the year, highlighting big political decisions, feelings of the electorate and hints at what’s to come in 2023.

Poverty

In September, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual supplemental poverty rate for the previous year. That’s the poverty rate after accounting for the impact of key government programs targeted at low-income families, among other things. For reporter and editor Santul Nerkar, the defining number of the year was 7.8 percent, the supplemental poverty rate for 2021 and lowest rate on record. It was the first concrete measure of how COVID-19 stimulus money affected poverty in America.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/us-poverty-rate-hit-record-low-expect-stay-95391465

Abortion

In June, the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. In short order, many states enacted abortion bans, including total bans without exceptions for rape or incest. For senior writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, the defining number of the year was 10,000 — that’s how many fewer legal abortions there were in just the first two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-captures-impact-dobbs-decision-fivethirtyeight-95627922

Forever chemicals

Per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, are used in all sorts of household products, from nonstick pans to dental floss. These pervasive chemicals are dangerous to human health, and the government and industry are finally starting to crack down on them. That brings us to senior science reporter Maggie Koerth’s numbers of the year: four, the number of PFAS the Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines for, and 4,700, the rough number of different PFAS chemicals out there.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/epa-finally-addressing-4-dangerous-forever-chemicals-4000-95750270

Election deniers

Denying the results of the 2020 presidential election was the cornerstone of many Republican campaigns this election cycle. Election denial is hardly a new thing, but it reached unprecedented levels in the 2022 midterms. That’s why 47 is the defining number of the year for politics and tech reporter Kaleigh Rogers. It’s the percentage of Republican candidates who ran for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general this year and didn’t accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-election-denying-republicans-defined-2022-midterms-fivethirtyeight-95710927

Inflation

Heading into the midterm elections, Americans told pollsters that one issue was their top priority: the economy and inflation. For senior writer Monica Potts, the 9.1 percent inflation rate in June topped her list of most important stats of the year. Here she explores the ways — big and small — that historic levels of inflation affected American lives in 2022.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/inflations-41-year-high-impacted-american-life-fivethirtyeight-95850805

The Republican margin in the House

The results of the 2022 election were worse for Republicans than one might expect, given that the president’s party usually loses ground in the midterms. In the U.S. House, Republicans gained a majority but only a slim one. They won by only nine seats, which for editor Maya Sweedler is one of the most important numbers of the year. What Republicans will — and won’t — be able to do with that majority will define American politics for at least the next two years.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-shape-republicans-politics-2023-fivethirtyeight-95905408

Democratic trifectas

With Congress divided between Democrats and Republicans after the 2022 midterms, some of the most important political shifts of the next few years could be coming at the state level. Those new policies might lean liberal because, for the first time in 12 years, more Americans will live in states totally controlled by Democrats than by Republicans. That’s why senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich picked 140 million as his defining stat of the year. It’s the number of Americans who will soon be living in a state where Democrats will have total control over state government.

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

Thanks for watching, reading and listening to FiveThirtyEight this year. We’ll see you in 2023!

Transcript

Monica Potts: One of the most important numbers of 2022 was 9.1 percent. That was the inflation rate in June — the highest yearly increase since 1981.

Inflation affected all Americans, but its severity varied by region. And as you might expect, low-income families were hit the hardest. Many struggled to afford basics like food and rent. A report from The Urban Institute found that about 1 in 5 adults experienced household food insecurity this summer, which matched heights reached early in the pandemic.

High prices changed the ways families made decisions both big and small. As the prices of goods rose, especially in the summer, families shifted their spending to buy cheaper brands and drove less. Increasing pet food costs may have led to fewer families adopting pets and more pets being relinquished to shelters. Some families downgraded their summer vacations. And Americans spent their savings, and saved less.

Inflation has since cooled a bit, but as of November, consumer prices were still 7.1 percent higher than they were at the same time last year. And that’s affected the way families are celebrating the holidays. In a poll from before Christmas, 57 percent of those surveyed said that it was harder to afford the gifts they wanted to buy, up from 40 percent the year before. And 11 percent of respondents in another poll said they anticipated taking on some amount of debt for their holiday shopping.

To control this high inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate more than 4 percentage points over the course of the year, to the highest point in 15 years. Most observers agree that’s likely to cause a recession. What’s less clear is how bad it will be, and whether it curbs inflation as it’s intended to do. These are the unknown questions 2023 is poised to answer, and why the inflation rate is one of the most important numbers of the past year.

That — plus the fact that the majority of Americans dislike changing clocks to begin with — has led to efforts to eliminate standard time … and counterefforts to eliminate daylight saving time. Can either option squeeze more day out of the light we do have? Try your hand at optimizing daylight all year long:

Unfortunately, no solution will make every American happy. Even if you’ve found a combination that satisfies your personal preferences, you may have noticed that those preferences could negatively impact other parts of the country. And advocates for changing the system we currently have — whether pro-DST or anti — feel strongly that their personal preference is the best.

Those who want to permanently stay on standard time (the time we’re on from November to March) say it’s preferential to permanent daylight saving time because standard time more closely aligns the clocks with our natural circadian rhythm, which is dictated by light exposure. Such a change would be better for our health. For instance, daylight saving time has been associated with a host of negative health effects including worse sleep and cardiovascular disease, and permanent daylight saving time could lead to higher rates of depression — prompting groups like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to endorse permanent standard time instead. “The problem is that we don’t adapt. Our bodies align to the sun,” said Dr. Karin Johnson, a sleep medicine specialist and a professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Advocates for permanent daylight saving time, however, argue that Americans live by the clock, not the sun, and that brighter evenings fit with how we live in the real world. Perhaps that’s why in the past five years 19 states have passed a bill or resolution that would implement year-round daylight saving time. A bill that passed the Senate in March would also have made it permanent, but the measure has virtually no chance of being taken up by the House before the next Congress is seated.

There’s some evidence that people are more likely to shop or be active after work if it’s still light out. But the arguments aren’t just economic, said Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. With more people out and about in the evening hours, the chances for traffic accidents go up when the sun sets earlier. He pointed to a study from 2004, which found that switching to permanent daylight savings time could reduce pedestrian fatalities by 13 percent and motor-vehicle fatalities by 3 percent during morning and evening hours.⁵ Other studies suggest more evening daylight could help prevent street crime.

The problem is that both standard time and daylight saving time are fictions. Daylight saving time, which was introduced as a temporary measure for maximizing usable daylight during World War I, tends to get a bad rap for its artificiality, but standard time isn’t exactly natural either. According to Michael O’Malley, a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time,” standard time was introduced in the late 19th century by railroad companies who wanted to standardize their timetables. Not everyone was happy about it. The city of Cincinnati, for example, initially continued to set its clocks to “Cincinnati time,” which was twenty-two minutes different from standard time. “Their argument was, ‘Noon is when the sun is overhead, not when the Pennsylvania Railroad says it’s noon,’” O’Malley said. Our current system of springing forward and falling back is a kludge designed to make everyone happy — which, of course, it fails at.

That’s the fundamental problem with trying to restructure time to fit our schedules. Whether it’s permanent standard time or daylight saving time, any attempt to standardize the clocks will be dislocating for someone. O’Malley’s dream is that the country could somehow return to solutions from before the 20th century, when local communities still responded to changes in daylight by shifting their own schedules to fit the season. That could mean schools might open or close earlier or later depending on when the sun rose and set in a specific place, he said. Adapting to seasonal darkness — and even finding joy in the coziness of the depths of winter — could mean living our lives differently depending on the local hours of light in the day. Slowing down, maximizing activity in sunlight hours and seeking warmth and comfort are ways that people have been coping with the long, dark, cold nights for centuries.

But the promise of daylight saving time — that we can somehow wring more productive hours of brightness out of the day — has always been a false one. No matter how we manipulate the clocks, this will always be a dark time of year. By trying to escape that reality, we may just end up making ourselves more unhappy.

Invisible Divides

How Gen Z Could Transform American Politics

By Monica Potts and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Monica Potts and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Dec. 14, 2022, at 10:41 AM

Welcome to Invisible Divides, a series exploring the profound differences in worldview between Democrats and Republicans. These beliefs about education, religion, gender and race align with partisanship — but run much deeper. Differences like these don’t just influence the ways Democrats and Republicans vote, but also how they think about their place in America. And they help explain why opposing views on important issues today seem increasingly irreconcilable.

Julian Morein was sitting in the back room of a Hillary Clinton campaign office when he realized that Donald Trump was going to win the 2016 election. He was 17 years old, and although he was just a few months away from being able to vote, he had been spending all of his free time working to get out the vote for Clinton in his home state of Pennsylvania. “I remember everyone my age just feeling like our futures had been stolen,” he said. “The older volunteers were devastated, of course, but they weren’t as angry. For us — the younger people — we felt like the older generations had failed us. And now we were the ones who were going to have to pay.”

Six years later, Morein is out of college and working at a nonprofit in Philadelphia. He’s voted in every major election since he turned 18. He’s part of a generation of new voters who became adults in the shadow of the 2016 election. And according to an August FiveThirtyEight/PerryUndem/YouGov survey of likely voters,⁶ politics is especially personal for Generation Z.

The youngest generation of voters is more likely than older groups to vote for Democrats — but it also has a much more radical view of how the country should address long-standing problems. According to our survey and others, voters ages 18 to 29⁷ are more likely than any other cohort — even those only a decade or two older — to say that abortion should always be legal,⁸ that racism and racial inequality are big problems in the U.S.⁹ and that they favored dramatic moves to undo injustices of the past, like cash payments to descendants of enslaved people.¹⁰ What’s more, many young Americans have told us that they feel compelled to vote because their values and goals feel so at odds with the people controlling the levers of power.

Historic events of the past few years have defined many young voters’ worldviews, too. One such watershed moment was the May 2020 video of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling for nine minutes on the neck of a 46-year-old Black man, George Floyd, killing him. A summer of protests against racial injustice throughout the country would follow, along with Chauvin’s conviction.  

Voters under 30 were most likely to view racism as a systemic problem that must be addressed. In our survey with PerryUndem and YouGov, they were the only age group with a majority (57 percent) in favor of cash payments for descendants of enslaved people. When we asked whether they agreed with the statement, “White men are the most attacked group in the country right now,” only 26 percent agreed, the least of any age group. They were also the most likely to think that people of color becoming a majority of the U.S. population would strengthen the country, with 39 percent saying so.

The group overall was also much more likely to support the Black Lives Matter movement, with 63 percent saying they did. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement broke down along especially partisan lines, as it was the biggest predictor of how respondents planned to vote (more than 4 in 5 of those who agreed with the statement “I support Black Lives Matter,” “definitely” or “probably” planned to vote for Democrats, and similarly, more than 4 in 5 of those who disagreed planned to vote for Republicans).

In some ways, this generation of voters is already living in the United States of the future, which may be driving their attitudes. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, the country’s youngest voters are also its most diverse age group, in every region. They’re becoming adults in a nation that already looks more like it will in 2050 — when demographers project that non-Hispanic white Americans will be a minority — than the past. There’s also some evidence these young voters have been learning about racial inequities in and outside of school: Over half said that they had recently read books that dealt with racism.

The young voters we spoke to did not all offer unqualified support for the Black Lives Matter organization itself, but many were generally well informed about the movement’s mission and goals. Matthew Messina, a 20-year-old college student from New Jersey, agreed with most of the group’s values relating to racial equity and social justice, but disagreed with some of their advocacy on specific issues, like defunding police departments. “I think [reforming policing should mean] more of funding social programs, increasing access to counselors for people in mental health crises, like that kind of thing,” he said.

Sergio Mata, a 30-year-old artist from San Antonio, said his support of the Black Lives Matter movement had cooled since he’d heard about New York Magazine reporting that raised questions about how the organization was spending its donations. But he still believed in its ideals and sees racism in his everyday life. Mata, who is Latino, said San Antonio still feels like a very segregated city. “They say the white people live on the north side, Black people live on the east side, and then the Mexicans live on the west side,” he said. “And even to this day, you could still feel that mentality here.” Despite that, he still feels that his home city is a more liberal island in a conservative state. He feels uncomfortable traveling elsewhere in Texas, like when he visits his boyfriend’s family near Waco.

For Mata, legalizing marijuana would be a big step toward erasing racial disparities in the justice system. “I don't want any people I know sitting in prison over something that's fully legalized in other states,” he said. “That still really upsets me.”

Kelly Jacobs, a 26-year-old graduate student who lives in Delaware, wants politicians to start at a more fundamental level. “I want them to publicly acknowledge that racism still exists, and it’s still a huge problem,” she said of the people she voted to elect. “Systematically, we need change.” 

The Dobbs ruling that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion was another turning point for some young voters — evidence to them that the country was going backwards, not just on abortion rights but on a wide range of connected issues. As abortion bans started being implemented in states around the country, Jacobs realized that it was closing opportunities for her. “There will be certain states where I can’t take a job now because I know I won’t have a right to an abortion if I need one,” Jacobs said.

The conservative court’s ruling was particularly at odds with the views of young Americans, who have become much more supportive of abortion rights over the past twenty years. According to Gallup, which has conducted regular surveys of Americans' attitudes toward abortion for decades, nearly half (47 percent) of 18- to 34-year olds in 2022 said they supported abortion rights under any circumstances, up from 28 percent in 2001.

And as with race, many young voters don’t see abortion as a discrete issue, affecting only the people who want to end a pregnancy. A separate PerryUndem survey (not conducted in partnership with FiveThirtyEight) conducted after the Dobbs ruling found that young adults (ages 18-29) were more likely than older age groups to say that it made them think about how abortion relates to other issues like sexism and racism, losing access to birth control and the potential for LGBTQ people to lose the right to marry.

Joshua Martinez, a 21-year-old who identifies as an independent but voted for several Republican candidates in the midterms, told us that he thought the justices were right to let the states set their own agendas on abortion. But he was concerned that the Dobbs ruling might signal the court’s willingness to roll back other protections, like gay marriage. “That could impact people I care about,” he said.

These major news events may reshape the electorate. The PerryUndem survey found that young adults were more likely than any other age group to say that the Dobbs decision made them want to vote in the midterms and would have a long-term impact on who they vote for. But even if younger Americans simply followed the typical pattern for all voters and vote more frequently as they grow older, the experiences that could shape their political evolution are happening now — which could in turn shape the future of the country.

Unions

Americans Generally Support Unions — And Averting A Rail Strike

By Monica Potts

Dec. 9, 2022, at 6:00 AM

When President Biden signed a bill to prevent a rail-worker strike this past Friday, it was only the latest in a series of union actions that have gotten national attention in the past few years. Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize around the country. Nationwide, 78,000 workers went on strike in the first half of the year. Members of The New York Times Guild walked out on Thursday.

The National Labor Relations Board reported a 57 percent increase in the number of union elections in the first half of the 2022 fiscal year — Oct. 1, 2021, through March 31 this year — and unions are winning more than three quarters of their votes. And the share of Americans who support unions, 71 percent, is at the highest level since 1965, according to Gallup. After a decades-long slump, organized labor is on the upswing. 

Some of this undoubtedly results from the tumult in workplaces throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. First, essential workers who couldn’t stay home banded together to demand more safety measures in the months when the virus was new and vaccines weren’t yet available. Then, as workplaces and the country began reopening, unemployment plummeted and has stayed low. Despite some recent mass layoffs, especially in tech and journalism, the labor market is so far mostly defying fears of a recession and ignoring the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame it. That has put workers in a relatively powerful position, at least up to now.

Workers have recently undertaken everything from work stoppages to strikes for better pay and working conditions, according to data from the ILR Worker Institute at Cornell University. The institute has seen a “noticeable uptick” in union activity this year compared with the previous year, according to Johnnie Kallas, a Ph.D. candidate who is the project director of the ILR Worker Institute’s Labor Action Tracker. But it’s hard to know how that compares with the past. Because of budget cuts in the Reagan era, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped tracking all but the biggest labor actions. It’s also unclear if recent labor actions will translate into long-term change for workplaces, unions and the workers they represent.

For most of the time since the 1930s, a majority of Americans have favored labor unions, but support began to decline in the 1960s, dropping from 71 percent in 1965 to 55 percent by 1979. After a slight increase, Americans’ support of unions hit a low of 48 percent in 2009. The share of private-sector workers in unions also declined steadily since the 1980s. This was caused by a multitude of political and economic factors — industrial deregulation, the rise of anti-union politicians, increasing globalization — but American workplaces also fundamentally changed. Employment opportunities moved from traditionally organized workplaces, like factories, into a service industry where union density was already lower. Many workers unionizing today are making coffee instead of cars, and issues like high turnover and irregular worker schedules in those industries led to job instability.

Support for unions today is also divided along partisan lines: Sixty-five percent of Democrats and 43 percent of independents support unions, while a plurality of Republicans (47 percent) oppose them, according to CivicScience. That being said, a majority of Americans think that whether to unionize should be entirely the workers’ choice and that employers should stay neutral.

And despite the partisanship, Americans largely favor the kinds of worker protections and benefits unions fight for. In general, Americans think businesses should treat workers with respect, pay fair wages and provide health care benefits. Sixty-two percent of Americans support a $15 federal minimum wage, and three-quarters of Americans think the current federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, is too low. Americans strongly support paid family and medical leave, a sticking point in the rail-worker negotiations. While the pandemic led to more states and cities mandating paid sick leave and 79 percent of civilian workers had paid leave available to them as of March 2021, the workers least likely to have it are the lowest paid. 

But all of that general support didn’t carry over to the specific case of the rail workers and their requests for paid sick leave to be included in their contract. CivicScience found that 68 percent of Americans approve of Biden blocking the rail strike. A poll from The Economist/YouGov conducted Dec. 3-6 found that 56 percent of Americans approve of government action to avoid a strike that could harm the American economy, suggesting that supply-chain concerns in the middle of the holiday shopping season might have outweighed sympathy to the rail workers’ demands. But rail workers have warned that more disgruntled employees could bail on an industry that is already understaffed. That has been the overall story of how workers in all kinds of industries have flexed their power in the labor market over the past few years, whether or not they personally have a union to back them up. If conditions and pay at one job don’t meet workers’ expectations, many have had an easier time finding a job that does.

Other polling bites

• Americans are more likely than citizens of other countries to be wary of social media’s role in politics, according to polling conducted in 19 different nations and recently published by Pew Research Center. Sixty-four percent of Americans said that social media has had a negative impact on democracy — a percentage higher than that of any other country surveyed, which ranged from 54 percent in the Netherlands down to 15 percent in Poland. Despite their concerns about social media, Americans’ usage has risen over the past ten years: Seventy-two percent of American adults use such sites today, versus just 50 percent in 2012. All in all, this is not so different from places where social media is viewed as less threatening to democracy. Sixty-six percent of Polish citizens, for example, use social media now, up from 40 percent a decade ago. (In 2012, Pew asked the social-media-usage question only of people who first reported they used the internet, whereas in 2022 that question was asked of all respondents.)
• Americans were more confident that their 2022 midterm-election ballot was counted accurately than they were that their 2020 presidential-election ballot was, per Nov. 17-21 polling from Navigator Research. Sixty percent of Americans believed their 2020 ballots were counted correctly and fairly, versus 71 percent who said the same about 2022. The level of confidence reported by Democrats and independents remained virtually the same across the two elections, but the same did not hold true for Republicans: While only 31 percent felt their 2020 ballot was correctly counted, nearly double (58 percent) voiced the same about their 2022 ballot.
• Gun ownership in America varies widely by gender, according to recently released Gallup polling. Just 22 percent of American women reported personally owning a gun, but that rate is nearly double among men (43 percent). Men’s gun ownership levels have remained fairly consistent since 2007, according to annual surveys from Gallup, while the number among women has risen slightly from 13 percent in the organization’s first poll on the matter, conducted in 2007-2008.
• A Nov. 18-22 survey from Data For Progress found that more than two-thirds of Americans (69 percent) were at least somewhat worried climate change will lead to higher consumer prices in the future. High numbers of Democrats were worried about the impact of climate change on prices (82 percent), but 56 percent of Republicans also share these concerns. That said, there’s less consensus on what to do about it. Almost half of Democrats (45 percent), for example, said that renewable energy production will bring down energy costs “a lot,” yet only 12 percent of Republicans were on the same page.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹¹ 42.1 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.5 points). At this time last week, 41.4 percent approved and 53.2 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -11.7 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 41.4 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -12.1 points.

2022 Election

What Can The 2022 Midterms Tell Us About 2024?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Nov. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): The 2022 midterms just ended a couple weeks ago,¹² but the 2024 election has already begun: Just a week after Election Day, former President Donald Trump announced he would run for president again. Given how little of a break we’re getting between the two campaigns, it raises the question: How could the results of the 2022 election influence the results of 2024’s?

To answer that, I’ve convened a meeting of FiveThirtyEight’s brightest political minds. How’s everyone feeling about the campaign whiplash??

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): The permanent campaign is more permanent than ever.  

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Haha, our jobs are never boring — that’s for sure!

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): People often comment that my job is only busy every other year and I laugh and laugh.

Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): It seemed like Trump was forever promising an announcement “tomorrow,” so by the time it happened it felt like it had already happened. But yes, it is a never-ending campaign season.

nrakich: OK, let’s get one thing out of the way. Democrats had a surprisingly strong showing in 2022, especially by historical standards: They kept the Senate, and they lost fewer than 10 seats in the House despite the president’s party losing over two dozen House seats in the typical midterm. Is this reason for Democrats to be optimistic about 2024 as well?

alex: I’m hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about 2024 based off Democrats’ performance in 2022. Sure, Democratic victories give President Biden something to brag about in the meantime, but historically, we haven’t been able to predict presidential results based on midterm elections. And I don’t see why this year would be the exception.

geoffrey.skelley: I mean, they might take it as a reason to be optimistic. But as Alex said, historically, there’s been little relationship between the result in a midterm election and the result of the next presidential contest. So what happened in November 2022 probably has little bearing on how November 2024 will pan out, at least in terms of votes. 

And that’s understandable: We don’t know who the candidates will be in 2024, we don’t know what the political environment will be like and the electorate will be different! Right now, the U.S. Election Project’s preliminary turnout figure for this year is around 46 percent of the voting-eligible population. With California still counting a lot of ballots, that’ll probably hit 47 percent. But in 2020, almost 67 percent of the VEP cast a ballot for president! So a lot of people who didn’t participate in 2022 will probably participate in 2024.

kaleigh: Yeah, I mean midterms generally have very little correlation with presidential elections. In addition to the changes in the electorate, people just think differently about voting for president compared to voting for governor or senator. It’s the highest office, and so much depends on what happens in the months leading up to the actual election. I wouldn’t use the midterms to make any predictions about 2024, personally, other than perhaps who else might run. 

Monica Potts: Two of the biggest issues motivating voters this year seemed to be inflation/the economy and abortion rights, and it’s just so hard to say what conditions will be like in two years. I can see red states continuing to push abortion bans or enforce the ones that already exist, but I can also see purple states moderating and blue states working to protect abortion rights. Who knows what the economy will do, but I think it’s safe to say it won’t be in the same place. I think so much depends on those conditions, who’s at the top of the tickets and what happens in the swing states where Democrats won this year, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

alex: And the issues that motivated voters this fall could be way different than the issues that motivate voters in presidential election years. You might also see, for example, a Democratic backlash toward Trump if he ends up being the GOP’s presidential nominee, similar to what we saw in 2020.

nrakich: Great points all!

Yeah, for every midterm-presidential pairing like 2018-20 (when Democrats had a great midterm and then defeated Trump), there’s one like 2010-12 (when Republicans had a great midterm and then failed to unseat then-President Barack Obama).

geoffrey.skelley: Seriously, Nathaniel. Speaking of whiplash, one of the best examples is 1946-48, when Republicans swamped Democrats in the 1946 midterms to take back the Senate and House, but then former President Harry Truman surprised by winning reelection in 1948, bringing with him sweeping majorities for Democrats in the Senate and House.

nrakich: In fairness, though, 2022 is a different case — the rare example of a midterm where the president’s party did relatively well. What has happened in presidential elections after those midterms?

kaleigh: Ooh, that’s a good question … for Geoff!

(My brain holds very different esoteric knowledge.)

geoffrey.skelley: Nathaniel, a couple examples that come to mind are 1970-72 and 1998-2000. In 1970, Republicans actually gained a seat in the Senate and lost only nine seats in the House, but Democrats retained clear majorities in both chambers. Then in 1972, then-President Richard Nixon won one of the greatest landslide reelections in U.S. history. 

In 1998, Democrats gained five seats in the House and preserved the status quo in the Senate amid a backlash over GOP attempts to impeach then-President Bill Clinton, but then Republican George W. Bush captured the White House in 2000. 

Obviously these are two fairly different circumstances when it comes to an incumbent president running or not, which candidates were running (George McGovern was not the strongest contender for Democrats in ’72), and the events surrounding the election. But that speaks to how hard it is to know what’ll happen next!

nrakich: Yeah, and there’s also 2002-04, when Republicans had a good midterm in the wake of Sept. 11 and then Bush won a narrow reelection. But of course, we’re dealing with a very small sample size here.

Kaleigh, you mentioned that the midterms could influence who jumps into the race for president. Do you guys think the midterms change Biden’s reelection calculus at all?

kaleigh: I don’t know about change, but certainly influence. Biden has a lot of factors to consider and recently said he was going to discuss with family over the holidays. But he’s got to be feeling emboldened after such a strong showing in the midterms. 

Another influential factor has to be Trump’s announcement. Biden won against Trump once before, so there’s this underlying narrative of “he beat him once, he could beat him again,” if Trump wins the nomination.

alex: If Democrats had succumbed to the midterm curse that’s typical for the party in the White House, Biden may have faced outsized pressure to not run in 2024 (as he did before the midterms). But I think, to Kaleigh’s point, you could make the argument that the results of this year’s races, coupled with Trump’s presidential announcement, clear up any doubts over whether Biden is running for reelection.

geoffrey.skelley: Kaleigh, I think that’s right. I’ve said before that Biden’s chances of running again depended in part on whether Trump would run again, and now Trump is running. So I do think Biden may be somewhat more likely to run. 

At the same time, it’s also possible that Biden could decide this is a moment where the Democratic bench of potential candidates is stronger after the success of many big names in the midterms, especially governors of potentially competitive states like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Jared Polis of Colorado.

Monica Potts: I still think it’s worth remembering that Biden remains pretty unpopular (his approval rating is currently below 42 percent), and voters chose their Democratic candidates in House and Senate races for many reasons. I think it would be reading too much into the results to say it boosts Biden’s chances. 

nrakich: Geoffrey, that’s a great point about Whitmer and Polis. Both have been talked about as future presidential contenders, and both absolutely crushed it in their reelection bids: Whitmer won by 11 percentage points, and Polis won by 19! I don’t think they would ever primary Biden, but if Biden doesn’t run, their theories of the case seem stronger than ever, especially if Democratic primary voters are concerned about electability again.

alex: Do we really think Whitmer or Polis stands a chance against Trump, though?

I think winning statewide office is one thing, but winning a presidential election against Trump is another story entirely. Biden already proved that he can beat him in 2020 and can campaign on Democrats’ success during the midterm elections, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t be seen as the strongest Democratic presidential contender (at least at this point in time). 

And if Whitmer thought Biden was a particularly weak president, she wouldn’t have campaigned with him earlier this year.

Monica Potts: Right, I think the really big question for Democrats is who should they nominate if not Biden? A rising star like Whitmer could be risky. Voters don’t really have a favorable opinion of Vice President Kamala Harris, for lots of reasons that include sexism and racism, but she hasn’t been a super visible VP. I’m having flashbacks to the crowded Democratic field in the 2020 presidential election, which didn’t have a clear favorite until House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden. 

kaleigh: I think Whitmer or Polis could absolutely beat Trump. I think a lot of Biden’s win in 2020 was simply based on him being the “not Trump” candidate. Trump is basically just as unpopular now as he was before the 2020 election, and even some of his supporters are saying they don’t want him to run. There are many capable Democrats who could fill the “not Trump” role and defeat him in 2024 if Biden were to opt against running.

geoffrey.skelley: As Nathaniel said, I don’t think these candidates run if Biden does. But if he doesn’t seek reelection, they’d certainly have a decent shot of defeating Trump in a general election. For one thing, both Whitmer and Polis have put together impressive electoral track records in states that are either real swingy or at least not deep blue. Whitmer could make abortion a major issue, as she did in her reelection campaign, while Polis has a bit of a libertarian streak in him that could expand his appeal in a general election context. Plus, Trump is one of the great unifiers in history — for Democrats, anyway. So that would help the eventual Democratic nominee to some extent. Moreover, the country is starkly divided and close presidential elections are just sort of a matter of course these days, so barring a real catastrophe for one party, we should expect another highly competitive contest in 2024.

Monica Potts: Yes, I think so much depends on whether Trump is the nominee.

alex: I’m not totally convinced by the “not Trump” argument, Kaleigh. I think most of the Democratic field in 2020 campaigned on being the “not Trump” or “I’m best positioned to beat Trump” candidate. But there’s a reason why Biden was the victor in the end.

But I largely agree with your point, Geoff. I think Biden running will stop other Democrats from jumping in, so there’s not a split Democratic field. The flip side, though, is that I don’t think a Trump announcement will stop other prominent Republicans from throwing their hat in the ring.

kaleigh: The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be … Ronny!

nrakich: Haha, indeed, Kaleigh. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was another governor who turned in a really impressive reelection performance earlier this month. He won by 19 points in a state that, until recently at least, was considered the quintessential swing state! Do we think this strengthens his hand ahead of his widely expected presidential bid?

alex: That’s a good point, Nathaniel! With his landslide election in Florida, DeSantis was easily the biggest GOP storyline to come out of the 2022 election. I won’t cite exit poll data directly, but reporting suggests that he performed well with Latino voters and flipped Miami-Dade County, which is historically Democratic. I think his performance this year might convince Republicans that he’s the strongest alternative to Trump — if they’re looking for one. Plus, DeSantis has long been viewed as a rising star within the GOP, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he takes on the challenge.

kaleigh: There’s no doubt: The results in Florida solidified DeSantis’s role as a popular Republican rising star, and at least some polls are now showing him ahead of Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted just after the election found 46 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer to see DeSantis as the GOP nominee in 2024, compared to 39 percent who said they’d prefer Trump. 

And while a majority — 60 percent — of Republicans said they wanted to see Trump run in 2024 when asked before the election, just 47 percent did when asked after the election (but before Trump announced his candidacy).

nrakich: I’d be careful about those polls, though, Kaleigh. We often warn people to wait a while to interpret polls after major news events like debates, and the midterms definitely qualify.

kaleigh: That’s true! We’ll have to wait to see if any of these turn into actual trends.

Monica Potts: I can absolutely see Republican party leaders coalescing around DeSantis because they know Trump motivates Democrats to vote against them. DeSantis’s policies and positions are very similar to Trump’s, and he plays to the base on issues like immigration, education and voter fraud (which, as we know, is not a significant concern). Republican voters seem to like him — even before the midterms, 64 percent of registered Republican voters told Morning Consult they had a favorable opinion of him. And this is anecdotal, but Republican voters where I live seem to know who he is and also like him. 

In 2016, Trump didn’t really have any opponents who could get enough support to really challenge him. Many voters thought of him as a businessman and what he would do as a politician was unknown. Now he’s a known quantity, his successful run is six years in the past and there are alternatives like DeSantis. 

geoffrey.skelley: DeSantis might be in a position to make himself almost a co-favorite, assuming he does what everyone expects and runs. Granted, Trump has been ahead in pretty much all national polls that aren’t testing him and DeSantis head-to-head. 

And remember, if other candidates get into the field, they won’t be going mano-a-mano, at least not initially. The size of the eventual field is not a minor consideration either, considering Trump won with just a plurality in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. It remains to be seen if the many bigwig donors and influencers within the GOP who oppose Trump will rally behind one candidate or not. And it's not like Trump had their backing early in 2016, so even if they are unified, that isn't certain to stop him either.

nrakich: Trump has not emerged from the midterms covered in glory, though. Many of the candidates he endorsed in the primary lost the general election; in fact, The New York Times and Washington Post both calculated they performed 5 points worse than expected. And his intervention may have directly cost the GOP multiple seats. For example, he endorsed far-right Republican Joe Kent in the primary for Washington’s 3rd District over incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler because Herrera Beutler voted to impeach him. Kent won the primary but ended up losing the general election — which was a big shock, because this seat is pretty red. Now, many Republican elites are grumbling about him costing the party seats, or at least not embracing his presidential campaign. 

On the other hand, recent history is littered with examples of Republicans appearing to break with Trump, only to fall back in line later. Do you guys think that will happen again, or is this time really different?

geoffrey.skelley: I tend to see this as half a 2016 circumstance, if you will. Many party elites don’t want to get behind Trump and will look to DeSantis as a principal alternative. But depending on the contours of the GOP presidential primary, they could definitely come flooding back to Trump if DeSantis struggles against him for some reason. And Trump will start out with far more institutional support than he had previously. You already see various Republicans announcing their support for him, like Sen.-elect J.D. Vance. 

alex: Agreed, Geoff. I think if voters largely continue to back Trump, it’ll be hard for the party to step in and knock him down. To be honest, Trumpism is so ingrained within the GOP today that I almost forgot about all the intraparty grumbling during his 2016 run! 

Monica Potts: Yes, this is tricky because people underestimated Trump in 2016 and then kept declaring his campaign over — but it never was. But I do think this time is really different. Jan. 6 was a real turning point people haven’t forgotten. And as Kaleigh has written, the election denial that drove the insurrection did not win seats for Republican newcomers this cycle. Voters often have short memories, but I think voters remember that and want to move away from that. 

geoffrey.skelley: Monica, I think Jan. 6 might make Trump a weaker general election nominee, but how much it hurts him in the presidential primary on the GOP side is less clear. After all, for months, even years now, a consistent 60-ish percent of Republicans have said in polling that Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election. If Trump didn’t lose in their eyes, they’re not necessarily going to view him as weaker.

Monica Potts: Geoffrey, that’s fair. I just wonder how much this year’s midterms quieted down those beliefs. I was prepared to see losing candidates claiming election fraud or refusing to concede, and that didn’t really happen. I just wonder if the midterm results might weaken those beliefs in all but the true believers, as voters move on to other issues.

kaleigh: There are Republican voters who love Trump but fear he can’t win, and they want the White House more than they want Trump to be the nominee. The question is how big of a contingent those voters are.

2022 Election

Turnout Was High Again. Is This The New Normal?

By Monica Potts

Nov. 15, 2022, at 11:46 AM

Is the United States in an era of high turnout?

Turnout surged during the last midterm elections in 2018 when 49 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot for the highest office in their state, according to data analyzed by the U.S. Elections Project, an election data website maintained by Michael P. McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida. The Census Bureau, using a slightly different measure, reported that it was the highest recorded turnout for a midterm election since the bureau began keeping records in 1978.

Early signs point to a similar level of turnout in last week’s midterms. Using preliminary estimates from state elections officials around the country,¹³ the U.S. Elections Project estimates a turnout rate of 47 percent for this year’s elections. In 14 states, turnout even went slightly up compared to 2018. (The estimates could change in states where the ballot counting is not yet complete.)

While most state turnout estimates dipped a little compared to 2018 figures, they’re still higher than in previous recent midterm years, and turnout in 2020 was elevated compared to past presidential elections. So what’s going on? Well, probably not just one thing! Instead, there are a bunch of different forces that could have brought people out to vote in the past few elections.

In 2018, according to an analysis by The Brookings Institution, Democratic-leaning groups — young voters, minorities and white college graduates — saw the biggest increases in turnout. That makes sense, since a Republican president was in office, and those demographics make up a big part of the modern Democratic coalition. President Donald Trump also motivated Republican-leaning groups to turn out that year, although they saw smaller increases. In advance of the 2018 midterms, a Pew Research Center survey found that voter enthusiasm was extremely high and that 60 percent of voters viewed their vote as an expression of support for or against Trump. Dislike of the other party, what researchers call “negative partisanship,” has motivated voters in recent elections and may still be increasing.

Turnout was also extremely high in the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Biden. Nearly two-thirds of eligible voters went to the polls, up 7 points from 2016, and Pew Research Center reported voter increases in every state. With Trump running for re-election, voters on both sides showed up, and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states worked to make voting more accessible, making it easier to request absentee ballots and vote by mail, among other changes (at least temporarily).

Of course, a big difference between 2018 and 2022 is that Trump was not on the ballot this year. But Trump-ism was still in the mix, and still could have motivated voters. Sixty percent of Americans had a candidate on their ballots who denied that Biden won the 2020 election, and in some states, those election deniers ran for key offices that would have given them power over election administration in their states. Enabled by Trump’s appointments, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, leading some states to enact draconian and unpopular bans, while voters elsewhere were moved to defeat initiatives that would have done the same in their own states. Trump endorsed candidates up and down ballots across the country.

There isn’t a consistent pattern in the states that saw slight increases in voter turnout compared to 2018. Sure, some states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, were voting on abortion rights in one way or another, but so were Kentucky and California, and turnout wasn’t up in those states.

A state didn’t necessarily need a competitive race to up turnout, either. Yes, Michigan and Pennsylvania had increases and high-stakes races, but so did Arkansas, where the top election was an uncompetitive governor’s race.

Perhaps, then, it’s just getting easier to vote. Some states, like Maine and New York, have lowered voting barriers since 2018, retaining universal mail-in ballots or no-excuse absentee voting measures that went into place during the 2020 pandemic, and some of those states seem to have had an increase in turnout. But that wasn’t true in other states: In Massachusetts, pandemic-era expansions of voting rights were made permanent and there was also a gubernatorial race, but turnout appears to have decreased. 

More than any of these factors, the unifying theme of the past few years has been an increased level of partisan polarization. Voters aren’t just motivated to vote against the other side, they dislike and distrust it. Overall, though, Americans turn out to vote far less than in many similar countries. What the near future holds is a question of laws, stakes and also, to some extent, our political culture. 

2022 Election

Control Of The Senate Could Rest On Abortion And Inflation In Nevada

By Monica Potts

Nov. 6, 2022, at 6:00 AM

On a Saturday morning in early October, Joe S.,¹⁴ an Uber driver in his 40s, was in Freedom Park in East Las Vegas, waiting for his kid’s soccer game to start. Bags and equipment were piled near his sneakered feet as he turned to the woman he was with, who was watching another game then on the field, and said he was voting for “anybody but the Democrats.”

When I heard him say that, I approached him and asked him why. He responded with a mix of local issues and the economy: He blamed Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and other Democratic leaders for teacher shortages and high gas prices, which were especially painful since they ate into his earnings as a driver. Abortion, which he heard the Democrats talking about, was a nonissue, he said. It should be up to the states, and is already protected in Nevada. “Right now you can have an abortion up to childbirth in some places,” he said, repeating a common and misleading Republican claim.

Three hours later and 9 miles away, I was in front of the Bellagio Fountain on the Strip with a small group of protesters. Local and Women’s March groups staged protests around the country that day in support of the right to abortion access, but the Nevada women who gathered feared their state’s extremely close Senate race could tip the balance against abortion rights. And they worried that not enough people knew about it. 

“I think there’s a group of people that stay well informed and are on top of it, and they know what’s at stake, and then there’s the masses that are kind of oblivious to really how bad this is,” said Theresa Barber, a 55-year-old parts manager for a restaurant supply company who stayed at the march until the early evening, after most of the rest of the crowd of about 100 had left. She’d made a sign — Regulate Dick Not Jane — and told me she’d even tried to convince a worker at a Wendy’s drive-through to vote. “I mean, it’s bad,” she said. “We are right on the edge of losing everything.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/parties-making-final-pitches-voters-fivethirtyeight-politics-92670196

Everything feels existential to voters in this midterm election year, and it’s no different in Nevada. The state’s Senate race, between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt, is a toss-up that could determine control of the chamber. And the race, like so many others across the country, has largely played out as a tug of war between protecting women’s rights and alleviating economic pain. 

Republicans nationwide have campaigned against Democrats’ record on the economy, and it’s been no different in Nevada.

For Republicans, soaring gas and grocery prices have revitalized decades-old attacks on Democrats’ approach to the economy as a threat to individual prosperity. For Democrats, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has pushed them to argue that women’s rights could erode further if Republicans gain control of the Senate. 

Polling tells us the top issues on voter’s minds are inflation and the economy. But elections aren’t that simple. Candidates matter. Local conditions matter. Turnout matters. Over five days in Nevada, I saw all of those were swirling as one of the tightest races in the country barrels toward the finish line. Everywhere I went, things kept coming back to that tug-of-war between two seemingly unrelated issues. Nevada, whose economy was hard-hit by the pandemic and whose voters strongly support abortion rights, is a microcosm of the major issues defining this election year.

As Ana Olivas, a 35-year-old whom I met at a Latina business leaders breakfast, put it, “To me, I think human rights are No. 1, and then [the] economy is second. And somehow that’s always the two things that I feel like are in battle.”  

Earlier this year, with inflation soaring and President Biden’s approval rating sinking, it seemed like the economy would propel Republicans to take over both chambers of Congress in a red wave. But then came the June Supreme Court decision overturning Roe V. Wade, and early signs suggested the unpopular decision might drive voters who were angry about it to the polls. And in August, unexpectedly high turnout helped defeat a proposed constitutional amendment in Kansas that would have allowed the state’s legislature to restrict abortion rights, suggesting Democrats had a path toward real electoral gains in November.

After all, the public trusts Democrats on abortion, and the issue was soaring in importance nationally. According to the ongoing FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, in April, 6 percent of likely voters¹⁵ listed it as one of the most important issues for the country, but that number rose to 19 percent after the decision to overturn Roe.¹⁶ The share of likely voters who chose it as one of the country’s top issues dipped again in the months following, but it remains higher than where it started, with 11 percent citing it as a top issue in October. Among all respondents, the trends are fairly similar, as shown in the following chart: 

Despite that movement, inflation remained the No. 1 issue for Americans, with 65 percent in the last wave saying it was one of the most important issues facing the country (likely voters felt similarly, with 63 percent listing inflation). Voters trust the Republican Party more on economic issues, and with the Dobbs decision further removed, the race has tightened nationally and in Nevada.

Cortez Masto is betting that abortion is still an issue that can power Democrats over the finish line. By mid-October, Democrats and outside groups had spent nearly $6.2 million in ads in favor of abortion rights to support Cortez Masto, according to a Washington Post analysis. On Laxalt’s side, only about $391,000 had been spent on the issue. 

Cortez Masto has warned that if Republicans control the Senate, they could pass a national abortion ban, like one proposed in September by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham that would prohibit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “The current legislation introduced by Senator Graham stops the people in pro-choice states like mine, like Nevada, from choosing to protect the rights of women,” she said on the Senate floor. It’s an issue Cortez Masto talks about in English- and Spanish-language ads, in press conferences, in speeches and in meetings with Nevada voters. 

It’s clear where Nevadans stand — and have stood. In 1990, a referendum protecting abortion up to 24 weeks passed with 63 percent of the vote, and an May 2022 analysis by The New York Times estimated that the same percentage of adults in the state still supports access to legal abortion, making it one of the most pro-choice states in the country. In September, an Emerson College poll found that abortion access was the second-most important issue to Nevada likely voters, with 18 percent saying it would determine their vote.

It’s also clear where Laxalt stands, though. He has said abortion regulations are best left to the states, and as Nevada’s attorney general, he signed onto amicus briefs in support of restrictions in other states and said he would support further restriction in Nevada. “A journalist recently asked me if I would support a referendum limiting abortion to the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, essentially, the first trimester,” he wrote in an August op-ed in the Reno Gazette-Journal. “I said that I would, and I stand by that view. I also believe that most Nevadans agree with that position.”

Perhaps because of the contrast between his views and those of his potential constituents, Laxalt has largely focused on inflation during the campaign, particularly high gas prices. Economic conditions have been especially tough in Nevada. In 2019, more than a fifth of the state’s workers were employed by the hospitality industry, which was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing shutdowns. Around three-quarters of the state’s population lives in and around Las Vegas, which is especially reliant on the industry. 

Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, told me that about 80 percent of their workforce is back. Meanwhile, rent, gas, and grocery prices  have climbed throughout the Western United States, and energy prices rose 20 percent year-over-year. 

Cortez Masto and other Democrats in the state have acknowledged the economic difficulties but have also essentially said, ‘We were there for you when you needed unemployment and COVID-19 protections, so trust us to see this recovery through.’ “Today, jobs are up, unemployment is down, and American manufacturing is back,” Biden said in a virtual fundraiser for the Nevada congressional delegation last week. “But even with all this progress, we know folks are still struggling with inflation. …That’s why we’ve been so determined to reduce everyday costs.”

But the tough economy is a present reality for Nevadans, while the threat to abortion access that Cortez Masto has pointed to is a future one. This basic tension could help explain the enthusiasm gap we’ve seen between Republican and Democratic voters nationally. For example, a CNN/SSRS poll from last week found that only 24 percent of Democratic voters said they were enthusiastic about voting, compared with 44 percent in 2018; for Republicans, the decline this year was just 5 percentage points, from 43 percent in 2018 to 38 percent in 2022. 

Each candidate is trying to appeal to key voting blocs, not just to sway them, but to convince them to vote at all. In Nevada, that means trying to win Latino voters. 

On a Thursday afternoon, I met up with canvassers from Somos Votantes, an independent outreach group that has endorsed Democrats and mobilizes Latino voters, as they knocked on doors of registered voters in a North Las Vegas neighborhood of brown stucco single-family homes. Without trees for shade, the midday sun was at its full power. Sunrise Mountain framed the sky to the east. The canvassers and I walked by one family butchering part of a cow in their driveway for a celebration with friends and family visiting from Texas. Another family chased after a puppy that had escaped from its yard. An ice cream truck driver, lingering for the young children just home from school, saw the canvassers’ signs and started chanting, “Masto! Masto! Masto!”

Some voters said they couldn’t vote or that they didn’t pay attention to politics. Some said they needed to do more research. They were generally familiar with Cortez Masto, and many thought they would vote for her but hadn’t quite committed. Another man said Cortez Masto reminded him of Hillary Clinton and that he was voting for the other candidate. Veronica Balentine, a 54-year-old who works in health care, said affordable health care was the most important issue and that voters in the state were hearing a lot of misinformation in ads. Jose Bobadilla, a 30-year-old who’d heard stories about crime in the 1990s, was worried about gun rights. These voters, immersed in their everyday lives, brought their own set of concerns and issues to the election; the back-and-forth of the campaigns felt far away.

Latinos make up 30 percent of the state’s population, and while a majority voted for Biden in 2020, the Republican Party has made inroads with the group nationally and many Latino voters seem undecided this year. Whether this key bloc of voters shows up for Democratic candidates, swings toward Republicans or stays home could be a deciding factor. “My biggest thing that’s sort of keeping me up at night is not actually that Latinos are vote-switching, but it’s that the base is going to stay home,” said Melissa Morales, president of Somos Votantes and Somos PAC, which has endorsed Cortez Masto, the first Latina in the Senate. 

Morales said the economy is an overriding concern for the voters her organization speaks with, but what that means can vary. People are worried about rising rents and the costs of healthcare and medicine as much as they’re worried about prices at the grocery store — so her organization always opens its door-to-door conversations by talking about cost-of-living issues. “I think there’s obviously the relief that, especially in a state like Nevada, that was the hardest hit by unemployment, that the jobs are back,” Morales said. “They’re able to sort of work to make ends meet. But also the realization that it’s just hard. All of it feels hard.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/governors-races-watch-fivethirtyeight-92674801

Morales said that in their focus groups with young Latino voters, abortion remains a top issue. “It has been hard to get them excited or motivated or really sort of mobilized around anything for the past two years,” she said. “But what we’ve seen that’s starting to really take root and with those voters is the abortion and … the climate provisions in the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act].” Overall, Latino voters support access to abortion by large majorities. But will they come out to vote because of it?

In such a tight race, anything could tip the scales. Biden won Nevada by 33,596 votes. “Nevada is an extremely divided state,” Pappageorge said. “More than most folks understand — it’s one-third Democrats, one-third Republican, one-third independent. But most voters aren’t extremists. Most voters don’t believe in extremism on the right or extremism on the left.” Perhaps it’s fitting, then, Nevada could be the state that determines the balance of power in a divided Senate amid an increasingly divided country.

There are just two weeks until Election Day, and according to the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast, the race for the Senate has been a “dead heat.” In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses whether the airtime reservations for each party’s Senate campaign ads are impacting the forecast’s shift. Then, Equis Research co-founder Carlos Odio joins the pod to break down a new Ipsos poll that asked Latino Americans which party they favor in the midterm elections.

Lastly, the team analyzes how an educational divide is shaping American politics and how a college diploma can influence an individual’s beliefs and preferences.

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.

Invisible Divides

Is College Worth It? Voters Are Split.

This invisible divide is reshaping politics.

By Monica Potts

Oct. 24, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our Invisible Divides series.

Welcome to Invisible Divides, a series exploring the profound differences in worldview between Democrats and Republicans. These beliefs about education, religion, gender, race and political extremism align with partisanship — but run much deeper. Differences like these don’t just influence the ways Democrats and Republicans vote, but also how they think about their place in America. And they help explain why opposing views on important issues today seem increasingly irreconcilable.

When Dale Nicholls started college in 1984, he soon realized books weren’t for him. So he entered the workforce, started a job as a truck driver and eventually worked his way up to owning and running his own trucking company. His professional experience, he said, taught him more than what he’d have been able to learn in school.

“A lot of the degrees people are getting, there’s no use for them in the real world, and so you’re finding a lot of people come out of college and then can’t get a job because their degrees are no good,” he said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight.

Nicholls, now 60, doesn’t believe that everyone should go to college no matter how much it costs and no matter how much debt students take on. This belief puts him on one side of a deep and growing divide in the American electorate regarding attitudes about higher education and its value.

FiveThirtyEight has partnered with PerryUndem and YouGov to survey likely voters on how deep these types of fissures run.¹⁷ In this first installment of our series exploring the invisible divides in America — the differences in worldview that shape how people vote and think about their place in America — we look at the education divide. For the past two decades, a voter’s level of education has become an increasingly important predictor in how he or she votes. But we found that the divide is about more than just the level of education someone has: Americans have diverging attitudes about the role higher education itself plays in American society. Like other divides we’ll be exploring, they help explain why Republicans and Democrats seem unable to find common ground on so many issues.

Since the late 1990s, college-educated voters have been moving towards the Democratic Party while voters without a college degree have become more decidedly Republican-leaning. By the time former President Barack Obama left office, those lines had solidified: A majority of college-educated voters identified as Democrats, while a majority of voters without a college degree identified as Republicans. In the 2016 election, education was a better predictor of who voted for former President Donald Trump than income.

As this divide deepened, views on higher education became even more partisan. That has influenced how politicians talk about higher education, as well as their policy approaches to it. During his administration, Trump not only launched attacks on colleges, especially those he deemed elite — despite himself having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania — but began accusing them of spreading liberal propaganda. “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education,” he wrote on Twitter in 2020.

In the FiveThirtyEight/PerryUndem/YouGov survey — which Nicholls participated in — 51 percent of respondents agreed with the idea that “a college education is the best way to get ahead in the U.S.” But agreement differed significantly by respondent’s partisan affiliations: Seventy-one percent of self-identified Democrats agreed while 37 percent of self-identified Republicans did.

Respondents were also asked a series of questions to gauge how they felt about higher education. Fifty-seven percent of respondents disagreed with the statement “college makes you lose common sense,” while 37 percent agreed. Of those who agreed, 65 percent planned to “definitely” vote for the Republican candidate in the upcoming midterms, while 12 percent of those who agreed planned to “definitely” vote for the Democratic candidate.¹⁸ 

More than 4 in 5 Republicans agreed with the statements that “most college professors teach liberal propaganda” and “high schools are trying to teach liberal propaganda,” compared with 17 and 16 percent of Democrats, respectively. Those who agreed with one of these statements generally also agreed with the other (90 percent). There weren’t huge differences in how people answered these questions based on level of education (except for people with postgraduate degrees). Instead, it was partisanship that mattered.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/american-turning-point-politics-public-education-91859671

Voters’ views on college often aligned with how they’d respond to other, seemingly unrelated questions. Those who agreed with statements like “college makes you lose common sense,” were less likely to think climate change (35 percent) and racism or racial inequality (40 percent) were problems than those who disagreed (both 85 percent),¹⁹ and less likely to think that high school students should learn about sexism and gender inequality (32 percent) and systemic racism (28 percent).²⁰ They were also more likely to think inflation and the national economy would be worse a year from now, independent of their household income levels, according to analysis by Duncan Gans, a senior research analyst with PerryUndem.

This hints that the division is about more than simply getting a college education or having a higher income. “College” and, relatedly, “elitism” are concepts that seem to be linked to otherwise unrelated ideas — like support for LGBTQ+ rights or racial justice — which have, in turn, become associated with the identity of the Democratic Party. Increasingly, it seems that when politicians like Trump rail against the elite — a word that might otherwise mean a level of wealth and power he, himself, has — it’s meant as a cultural designation, not a socioeconomic one. 

Sharon Martin, who is 71 and lives in Virginia, participated in an online focus group as part of our poll. “I believe the young people go into college to get an education but instead are taught how to think as a group,” she wrote. “They are taught, or should I say instructed, by professors that I believe are pushing their ideals and desires.”

Jim Burke, a 61-year-old from Pennsylvania who spoke with FiveThirtyEight after taking part in the survey, agreed. He’s a pharmacist who went to a Catholic college and became conservative after having children. “My daughter went to college as a staunch Republican and she came out a liberal Democrat,” he said. “Totally due to her education.” (In 2020, voters under 30 were the most Democratic-leaning age group, although this age group is less likely to vote than older groups.)

It’s easy enough to see how this divide manifests in American society, as concern over what is taught in colleges has also trickled down to lower levels of education. Over the past two years, PEN America has been tracking laws that aim to prevent public college professors and primary and secondary education teachers from teaching “divisive” concepts, which may include racism, sexism or gender identity. Fourteen states have passed such laws, but bills have been introduced across the country. States have also passed laws restricting LGBTQ+ students’ access to school sports and health care and banned school libraries from carrying books on subjects deemed controversial. This fall, a Pennsylvania school district pulled the “Girls Who Code” book series, meant to encourage girls of color to enter careers in tech. Across the country, many Republican candidates have made battles over what’s taught in schools central to their campaigns.

President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan has illuminated the depths of this anti-elitism divide. In September, about a month after Biden announced his plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for certain borrowers, 22 Republican governors sent him a letter asking him to withdraw the plan. They argued it “rewards the rich and punishes the poor” by taxing hourly workers who hadn’t gone to college just to benefit higher earners who had. (Of course, not everyone who owes student loans is a higher earner — the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 87 percent of the debt cancellation benefits will go to those who earn less than $75,000 annually.)

It’s not surprising that polls show voters divided on student loan forgiveness by party. In a Daily Kos/Civiqs Poll from August, right after Biden’s plan was announced, 88 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of independent voters disapproved, while 88 percent of Democrats approved. A Quinnipiac University poll, also from the end of August, found that 81 percent of Republicans disapproved while 88 percent of Democrats approved.

But Rachel Fishman, the acting director with the Education Policy program at New America, said there are partisan divides on whether the government should be funding colleges and universities at all. New America’s annual report measuring attitudes about higher education found this year that 77 percent of Democrats thought the government should be more responsible for funding higher education, while 63 percent of Republicans said students should be more responsible. 

“You can kind of piece together from there how the subsequent answers on questions about funding and value kind of fall into place from that notion,” Fishman said. 

In the New America survey, Republicans viewed attending college as something students themselves benefit from, but did not necessarily see colleges as something that benefited communities or the country as a whole. This could have implications for many battles to come, as Democrats want to increase federal funding for higher education and make at least some colleges free, while Republicans are more focused on scaling back student loan forgiveness and on curriculum battles.

It could also matter for bigger questions, like whether high school graduates should have equal access to higher education regardless of their ability to pay; whether and how to fund alternatives to colleges and universities; how to best prepare students for higher education; and whether research led by academic institutions is trusted. 

Indeed, it’s becoming clearer that some voters think higher education institutions are actually bad for the country. “As much good as I think they do, I think they do as much harm,” Burke said. “The one thing that they do do well is they … make the kids think. Unfortunately, that thinking is guided to a specific point, and not just open ended.”

Holly Fuong and Duncan Gans contributed research.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-odds-controlling-congress-improved-fivethirtyeight-91887598

2022 Election

Why Candidates Are Debating Less Often This Election Cycle

By Monica Potts

Oct. 20, 2022, at 6:00 AM

It’s a time-honored tradition of election season: the debate. But for many midterm contests this year, it’s missing. Take the Senate race in Nevada. As of Tuesday, Oct. 18, three weeks before Election Day, Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and her Republican challenger, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, had not agreed to a debate before the Nov. 8 election. It’s a closely watched, tight race — FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast considers it a toss-up — so the likelihood the candidates won’t meet on a debate stage seems a bit unusual. But it is not so unusual for this year.

Digging into a thorough (but not comprehensive) database of debate schedules maintained by Gregory Giroux of Bloomberg, and supplementing it with our own research, we found that the 2022 cycle has seen fewer debates between candidates for Senate and governors than previous cycles.²¹ There are a number of possible reasons for this, but a big one might be that earlier this year the Republican National Committee left the Commission on Presidential Debates, claiming bias and ending a partnership with the Democratic Party that began in 1987. While that doesn’t directly affect down-ticket races, it helped set a tone.

Let’s look closely at the Senate. Out of 36 contests this year,²² we counted only 19 debates in 15 contests held as of Oct. 18.²³ Candidates in at least four states have had two debates: Ohio and Wisconsin, which are both competitive races; Alaska, in which Republican Kelly Tshibaka is slightly favored to beat incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, according to our Deluxe forecast; and Vermont, which is considered safe for Democrat Peter Welch, currently the state’s at-large representative to the U.S. House. But in the other 11 states where the two major candidates have already debated — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Utah — the candidates have only met once. This means 58 percent of Senate races this year have not had any debates so far.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-odds-controlling-congress-improved-fivethirtyeight-91887598

Some of this cycle’s debates looked like they wouldn’t happen at all until recently. That was the case for the Oct. 10 and Oct. 17 debates in Ohio between Senate candidates Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and venture capitalist  J.D. Vance, a Republican. The candidates negotiated the terms of the debates through August and September, and one debate was canceled after Vance did not respond to an invitation by the Ohio Debate Commission. In the end, Vance and Ryan’s latest debates may have highlighted the differences between the two candidates but don’t seem to have upended the race.

To compare those numbers to previous election cycles, we set a cutoff date of three weeks before Election Day. In 2020, a year marked by special protocols because of the COVID-19 pandemic, candidates in 20 Senate races had held debates by this point in the election cycle, 57 percent of the total. (That year in the Senate, there were 33 regularly scheduled elections and two special elections.) Candidates in nine of those races had held more than one debate. In Maine, where Democrat Sara Gideon hoped to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, the candidates had debated twice by this point in the cycle, and would go on to meet three more times. 

Previous recent election cycles were more similar to 2020 than to this year, and my colleague Nathaniel Rakich kept track of the numbers of debates — again, supplemented by additional research — in 2016 and 2018. In 2016, 65 percent of that cycle’s 34 Senate races had featured at least one debate by this point in the cycle.

2016 and 2020 are presidential election years, though, when more people are tuned into politics and there’s a top-of-the-ticket election to raise the stakes. Yet even when compared with the previous midterm cycle, this year’s debate numbers are lagging. In 2018, 49 percent of Senate races had at least one debate by now. That year, there were also six races in which candidates had already met for two or more debates, leading to a higher overall total of debates held by this point: 24 in 2018 compared with 19 this year.

Moreover, there were more Senate debates in the final three weeks before the 2018 election than there are currently scheduled for this year.²⁴ In 2018, there were at least 27 gubernatorial and 17 Senate debates across the country in the final three weeks until Election Day, including multiple debates in some races. This year, at least 13 gubernatorial and eight Senate debates are scheduled for these final three weeks. Time is running out for this year’s candidates to catch up.

For governor’s races, there is a similar but slightly less dramatic decline. In 2018, the same number of seats up for grabs as this year — 36 — and there had been debates in 72 percent of the races as of three weeks before the election. In 13 states, candidates had already met more than once. This year, candidates in only 58 percent of gubernatorial elections have debated in the same timeframe, and only eight states have held multiple debates. 

This year also saw an acceleration of a similar trend that dates back to at least 2016: high-profile, major-party frontrunners, usually Republicans, skipping debates altogether. In some cases, this has left one candidate to answer questions alone, or led to a debate between a major-party challenger and a third-party or unaffiliated candidate. 

There are a few caveats here: We tried to be thorough, but we could have missed some debates. And there are still three weeks for candidates to add debates to this year’s schedule. Of course, there is also time for currently scheduled debates to be canceled. 

Despite that, it does seem that debates got off to a slower start this year, and there are comparatively fewer contests in which candidates will debate at all, and fewer races where candidates will meet more than once. What’s going on? Most of the COVID-19 restrictions, like candidate testing, social distancing and debates without live audiences, have been lifted, but it’s possible that’s had a lasting effect on some debate traditions.

There are also valid reasons candidates might decline to debate. There’s ample evidence that general-election presidential debates, for example, don’t make much of a difference. By the time debates are held, many voters have made up their minds about who to vote for, and most of those who haven’t aren’t very swayed by the debates. The events can hurt candidates, though, making them high risk and low reward. It would be hard to argue that any one debate misstep cost a candidate an election, but these moments can live on in viral social media and cause a blow to a campaign. That was the case when, in a Republican presidential primary debate, then-Gov. Rick Perry of Texas forgot the name of one of the three cabinet departments he said he’d eliminate. They can also feed into overall perceptions of candidates, as when former President George H.W. Bush checked his watch during a town hall debate in 1992 and then flubbed answering a voter’s question about the economy, making him seem aloof and disconnected.  

Many of the same forces apply in Senate, House and gubernatorial contests, and there are additional factors this cycle too. Nationally, the Democratic Party is spending less on candidates across the country than they did in recent cycles, when they spent millions even on longshot races, which may mean fewer well-funded campaigns with the resources to push for debates. In some states, Democrats running for statewide office are refusing to debate their election-denying opponents. But the bigger trend seems to be that Republican candidates around the country are declining debate opportunities, driven by skepticism of and hostility toward the media outlets that often host, moderate and air the debates.

But voters do tend to watch presidential debates when they happen, and say they find them useful, according to the Pew Research Center. In midterm years like this one, when people are less tuned into politics than during presidential election years, the debates themselves might remind voters there’s an election in their state at all and inspire them to make it to the polls. And there are arguments that regular debates in which candidates spontaneously answer questions on important issues in front of voters are good for democracy as a whole.

Still, the trendline is clear. The number of debates have declined so far this year. The question is whether one day they disappear for good.

Nathaniel Rakich contributed research.

Last week, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced a national 15-week abortion ban, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer postponed a vote on the Respect for Marriage Act. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the strategies behind this proposal — and postponement — before the midterm elections.

The team also covers some original reporting on Colorado Republican congressional candidate Erik Aadland, who told voters in private that how he talks about the legitimacy of the 2020 election depends on whom he’s talking to.

Finally, Galen Druke speaks with Carlos Odio of Equis Research about the recent polling from The New York Times and Siena College on which party Latino voters are choosing in the upcoming midterm elections.

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.

Presidential Approval

What's Driving Biden's Approval Rating Up?

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

Sep. 2, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

After hitting a low of 37.5 percent in July, President Biden’s approval rating has ticked up over 5 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. While he’s still underwater, at 42.7 percent,²⁵ it is nonetheless a substantial change.

But will Biden’s upswing continue?

It’s not a huge mystery why some voters — especially Biden’s own — might be happier with his administration: He’s delivered on quite a few campaign promises recently. After Democratic leaders spent months trying to gain West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s support for broad economic and climate-change legislation, Manchin finally agreed to a compromise at the end of July, and Biden signed the law, the Inflation Reduction Act, on Aug. 16. Among other things, the law reduces prescription drug prices for seniors and invests broadly in green energy, including through tax credits to consumers who buy environmentally friendly goods like electric vehicles. 

The Inflation Reduction Act came after an already busy summer stretch, too. At the end of June, Biden signed a bipartisan gun-safety bill, the first major legislation on the issue in about 28 years. Meanwhile, on Aug. 1, he announced that the U.S. had killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became the al-Qaeda leader after Osama bin Laden’s death in 2011, in a drone strike. That news struck the opposite tone from the big foreign-policy story last August that arguably started Biden’s downward approval trajectory: the messy withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the critical news coverage that followed. And on Aug. 10, Biden signed legislation that makes it easier for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan to receive medical benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

It’s too recent to be picked up in much polling, but last week Biden also announced up to $20,000 of student loan forgiveness, keeping a promise he made on the campaign trail in 2020. So far, a Quinnipiac University poll conducted Aug. 25-29 found that Americans approved of the plan, 53 percent to 43 percent. The move was long a priority of the left wing of Biden’s base. It might also help him with young voters — whom Biden has struggled with lately — as they are more likely to have student loan debt and are worried about their future financial independence.

But more than the impact of any one legislative action, it is likely the steady stream of news that has helped Biden the most. The administration is finally ticking items off a long to-do list, helping to counter the narrative that the White House wasn’t getting much done. 

That said, both Morning Consult and Gallup found that Biden’s approval went up not just with Democrats but also with independents. In the Gallup poll, Biden’s approval jumped 9 points with independents since July.

This is likely because there is more at play than legislative victories. Namely, inflation seems to be cooling, which could hint at a more basic reason for why Biden’s disapproval has declined: Gas prices have steadily tumbled since hitting their peak in June. On top of that, the job market remains strong. Americans’ worry about the economy also seems to be easing some. The Quinnipiac poll found that Americans’ approval of Biden’s handling of the economy had changed the most of any issue surveyed, jumping to 37 percent from 28 percent in July. 

It’s possible, too, that the overall political environment is just better than expected for Democrats. Since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in June, Democrats have outperformed expectations in special elections. They’ve also improved their standing in the generic ballot, which asks voters which party they’d support in the race for Congress, signaling that 2022 could be an unusual midterm election. (Historically, the president’s party usually struggles in the midterms.) In some ways, then, Biden’s approval rating is a lagging indicator of the change in fortune Democrats were already experiencing.

In the meantime, former President Donald Trump continues to dominate the news after the FBI searched his home in Florida for classified information he kept there in violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents to turn over any written materials related to their official duties. Information continues to pour out about the sensitive documents found there. It’s unclear how much this episode will help or hurt Trump, but polls do show that most Americans are aware of this news and think it’s a problem. During his 2020 campaign, Biden promised a return to normalcy after Trump’s tumultuous tenure, so it’s not unreasonable to think that the news from Mar-a-Lago might remind some voters why they chose Biden in the first place. 

But, of course, the midterms are still two months away, and Biden still has two more years in his first term. Given the volatility of the past month in his approval rating, there’s still plenty of time for it to go down once more. Then again, maybe Biden is, at long last, on the rebound.

Other polling bites

• Republicans are more likely than Democrats to view military and law enforcement organizations favorably — except when it comes to the FBI or Capitol Police. According to an Aug. 20-23 poll from The Economist/YouGov, just one-third of Republicans (35 percent) have a very or somewhat favorable perception of the FBI, which is a huge difference from the share who have positive views on the Army (93 percent) or local police forces (87 percent). It also greatly varies from how Democrats view the FBI (72 percent have a favorable opinion). Views toward law enforcement also varied widely by age, with 91 percent of Americans age 65 or older viewing local police favorably versus only 51 percent of those ages 18 to 29.
• It’s not just inflation. Americans are also experiencing “shrinkflation,” the trend in which product quantity decreases despite stagnant or rising prices, especially in grocery stores. Morning Consult recently found that about two-thirds of Americans are very (33 percent) or somewhat concerned (32 percent) about the trend, and those who’ve noticed it are pursuing a host of different options. About half of respondents who’ve noticed shrinkflation said they’ve instead purchased a different brand (49 percent), while a similar percentage (48 percent) reported opting for the generic product. Thirty-three percent have also chosen to buy affected items in bulk, rather than in smaller quantities. Meanwhile, 30 percent said shrinkflation has led them to stop purchasing from a particular brand altogether.
• Parents of school-aged children are less likely than other Americans to support COVID-19 restrictions and protocols, per a YouGov survey conducted Aug. 3-5. Asked about a hypothetical future pandemic, 38 percent said they would oppose vaccine requirements, compared with 31 percent of all adults. The survey, however, revealed glaring differences between parents of kids in school based on their 2020 ballot: Sixty-six percent of parents who voted for Biden would favor future vaccine requirements, while only 20 percent of those who voted for Trump agreed.
• An overwhelming share of Americans predominantly pay for items electronically, as opposed to in cash. A July 5-26 poll from Gallup revealed that almost three-quarters use cash for less than half (13 percent), only a few (49 percent) or none (11 percent) of their purchases, while the other quarter uses cash for half (13 percent), most (8 percent) or all (5 percent) of their purchases. Yet the breakdown is inconsistent across income brackets. A far larger share of those from households annually making less than $40,000 use cash for at least half of their purchases (41 percent), compared with those with household incomes above $100,000 (14 percent). Further, respondents felt a shift in usage from five years ago, when 53 percent said they paid in cash for at least half of their purchases. And with 64 percent of adults saying the U.S. is likely to become a cashless society in their lifetime, that trend seems to fit the bill.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,²⁶ 42.7 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 53.0 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.3 percentage points). At this time last week, 41.5 percent approved and 53.8 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -12.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 39.9 percent and a disapproval rating of 55.8 percent, for a net approval rating of -15.9 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,²⁷ Democrats currently lead by 0.9 percentage points (44.6 percent to 43.6 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 0.4 points (44.0 percent to 43.6 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 0.3 points (44.4 percent to 44.1 percent).

Democrat and former state Rep. Mary Peltola won Alaska’s special congressional election on Wednesday, defeating Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich discusses why it is difficult to draw a broader conclusion about the political environment based on the result. Later, senior politics reporter Monica Potts joins to discuss why voters sometimes contradict their partisan beliefs when it comes to voting on ballot measures.

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.