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 2015.¹ 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

One of the most important numbers of the year that you might not have heard of is 7.8 percent. That’s the share of Americans who were living in poverty in 2021, according to the most recent supplemental poverty rate, which was released by the U.S. Census Bureau in September of 2022. This metric, as opposed to the official poverty rate, captures how many people are living in poverty after accounting for the impact of key government programs targeted at low-income families.

During the pandemic, the government spent unprecedented funds to aid lower-income families. So this is one of the first clear measurements we have of how COVID stimulus influenced poverty in America. And 7.8 percent is, in fact, the lowest recorded poverty rate on record, since the Bureau started tracking this metric. Included in that figure is just 5.2 percent of American children who lived in poverty in 2021, a 46 percent drop from 2020 and also the lowest figure we’ve seen.

A lot of the drop in poverty can be ascribed to the government’s COVID-19 relief efforts in 2020 and 2021, including the expanded child tax credit, which helped significantly reduce child and overall poverty in America by giving low-income families with children extra cash. For all that we often talk about Congress not being able to legislate or being stuck in gridlock, it seems clear that it enjoyed one of the most unquestionable policy victories in recent U.S. history: lifting millions out of poverty.

But of course, it’s more complicated than that. For the same reasons that all that government aid helped reduce poverty, its absence will likely help bring poverty back. You can’t permanently solve poverty with a temporary influx of cash.

The last federal COVID stimulus checks went out all the way back in March of 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was phased out at the end of last year. By early this year, it appeared that child poverty was rising again, and many Americans reported not being able to pay for basic needs. Inflation is a part of that — and some would argue, spurred on by the extra stimulus. And now, rising interest rates — and the fear of a recession — also loom large for lower-income families.

So while just 7.8 percent of Americans living in poverty counts as a policy victory, expect that number to be higher next year.

Additional information about the SPM chart: The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) estimates for 2019 and beyond reflect the implementation of revised SPM methodology; more information is available in “Poverty in the United States: 2021” report from the US Census Bureau, Appendix B. The data for 2017 and beyond reflect the implementation of an updated processing system. The data for 2013 and beyond reflect the implementation of redesigned income questions.

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,² 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

Biden Is Very Unpopular. It May Not Tell Us Much About The Midterms.

By Nate Silver

Jul. 15, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This week, a Siena College/New York Times poll showed President Biden with just a 33 percent approval rating, a result so poor that it touched off speculation — including from yours truly — about whether he would even run again in 2024. The Siena/New York Times number is on the low end of the polling consensus, but Biden’s approval rating in our polling average — about 39 percent³ — is nonetheless a historically low number.

And yet, the same poll showed a neck-and-neck race for Congress. Democrats led by 1 percentage point among registered voters⁴ on the question of which party voters preferred controlled Congress and trailed by 1 point among likely voters.

What to make of this seeming divergence? How much does the president’s approval rating actually matter for predicting congressional outcomes?

From a zoomed-out perspective, the answer is that there’s a reasonably strong relationship. If you knew nothing else about the race for Congress, you’d expect an unpopular president’s party to lose seats. And indeed, that’s likely what will happen this year, too. Republicans are an 87 percent favorite to take over control of the House, according to the Deluxe version of our forecast. The Senate remains much closer to a toss-up, but that has more to do with poor Republican candidates than anything the Democrats are doing well.

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

But predicting the number of seats lost in Congress based on the president’s approval rating is not quite the question we’re interested in from a forecasting standpoint. Rather, we want to know how much the president’s approval rating matters given all the other information we have about the race. In other words, is Biden’s poor approval already “baked in” to the congressional generic ballot polls and polls of individual House and Senate races? Or is there reason to think that the Democrats’ standing will get worse between now and November?

The statistical answer is that it’s mostly baked in. Warning: The following paragraphs are going to be a bit technical. If you want more of an intuitive answer, skip ahead to the bolded bullet points below.

The way our model addresses this is by looking at every congressional race since 1990 and evaluating how predictable the movement in the generic ballot has been based on baseline conditions, which we sometimes refer to as the “fundamentals.” Specifically, the factors it looks at include the president’s approval rating, the result of the previous election for Congress, whether or not the election is a midterm and the degree of political polarization. (Times of high political polarization — like now — will tend to produce less dramatic swings in races for Congress because there are fewer swing voters.)

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

Right now, those “fundamentals” expect Democrats to eventually lose the House popular vote by about 8 points, which would be an awful result for the party and would very likely result in its loss of both chambers of Congress. By comparison, if Biden had a breakeven approval rating instead of being about 17 points underwater, the “fundamentals” would predict Democrats to lose the popular vote by around 4.5 points, which would still mean almost certain doom in the House but might be enough for them to save the Senate.

However, the model also weighs those “fundamentals” against the current state of affairs. Right now, Democrats trail in our generic congressional ballot polling average — a proxy for the House popular vote — by about 2 points. But that’s actually more like a 4-point deficit among likely voters, since Republicans are likely to have a turnout advantage in November. Our model accounts for this, but the model also accounts for factors aside from the generic ballot in forecasting the House popular vote, and when we take into consideration those factors, our model predicts Democrats to lose the popular vote by almost 6 points, not that far from what the “fundamentals” show.

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

Even if there were a bigger gap, though, the “fundamentals” ultimately do not get all that much weight in the model. The reason is simply that, even at this fairly early point in the cycle, the generic ballot (at least if you properly adjust it to account for likely voters) and other indicators directly related to the current election have historically been more reliable predictors than the “fundamentals.” The model does expect conditions to get a bit worse for Democrats, but really just a bit.⁵

So what is the intuition behind this? Here are a few factors to keep in mind:

1. Voters have good reasons to disapprove of Biden without wanting Republicans in Congress

When your approval rating has fallen into the 30s, you’ve not only lost the confidence of most swing voters but also some members of your own party. The Siena/New York Times poll, for instance, showed Biden with only a 70 percent approval rating even among Democrats. However, 90 percent of Democrats in that same poll prefer Democratic control of Congress, compared to just 4 percent who want the GOP in charge.

One concern for Democrats is that those disaffected voters won’t turn out. Still, there’s no particular reason to expect them to vote Republican if they do. A lot of them think Biden is too old — a concern also shared by many independent voters — but that’s more a factor for 2024 than in congressional preferences for 2022.

And on many issues — from abortion to LGBTQ rights to the integrity of the 2020 vote — Republicans are adopting highly right-wing, partisan positions that have little appeal to swing voters and might even motivate otherwise disaffected Democrats to turn out. Parties generally pay a penalty for ideological extremism. In other words, although Democrats have also adopted unpopular left-wing positions on many issues, Republicans aren’t as poised to capitalize on a high inflation and poor electoral environment for Democrats as a more moderate, less Trumpian version of the party would be.

2. It’s usually best to trust a direct measure over an indirect one

This is just a good principle of statistical analysis. If you have a direct measure of the quantity that you’re interested in, there’s not much need for a proxy or an indirect one.

Suppose, for instance, that you’re trying to estimate the volume of home sales in — I don’t know — Indianapolis. You could imagine some clever ways to get at this. You could drive around town and count the number of “FOR SALE” signs. Or you could track the number of clicks on Zillow and other websites that list homes for sale. But all of that is beside the point because home sales can be directly measured, albeit with something of a lag until reports are compiled.

Likewise, if you’re interested in races for Congress, and you ask voters how they’re going to vote for Congress and also how they feel about the president, voters’ preference for Congress is the direct measure and the one that should be more reliable. It’s presumptuous, frankly, to suggest otherwise and to disbelieve a voter who says she disapproves of Biden but also wants Democrats to stay in charge of Congress.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/political-consequences-overturning-roe-wade-85819633

3. Biden and Democrats weren’t that popular to begin with

In the national exit poll in November 2020, 52 percent had a favorable opinion of Biden and 46 percent had an unfavorable opinion. That’s considerably better than his numbers now, and Biden won a fairly comfortable victory in the popular vote. But, it also wasn’t the sort of sweeping mandate that, say, former President Barack Obama had in 2008, which was accompanied by approval and favorability numbers that initially soared into the 60s and 70s. Moreover, Democrats rode into Obama’s first term with 257 House seats, far more than the 222 they held after the 2020 election.

Part of the reason that the 2010 midterms were so awful for Democrats was because they had a long way to fall from being about as popular as a party probably could be in modern American politics. In 2022, Democrats don’t have that problem because they weren’t very popular to begin with. They barely held onto the House.

So while goodwill toward Biden may have been just enough to get him over the hump in 2020 — and a lot of that goodwill has now evaporated — conditions aren’t necessarily that different than they were two years ago. The major parties are both unpopular, there are few if any nationally beloved political figures and the country is highly polarized. What’s more, with unpopular former President Donald Trump potentially set to declare a 2024 bid soon, he could also be a factor in the race — maybe one that helps Democrats.

4. So far, presidential approval and the race for Congress have diverged, not converged

Finally, I’d note that if you had predicted some months ago that polls for Congress and Biden’s numbers would have converged toward one another, you would have been wrong. Since May 1, Biden’s approval rating has declined by about 9 points:

And yet, the generic ballot has been essentially unchanged:

Instead, as voters have gathered more information about the race, they have drawn more of a distinction between how they feel about Biden and what they’d like to see happen in Congress. Maybe this trend will reverse itself. But the “fundamentalists” — the analysts who think the races for Congress are predictable based on presidential approval and other baseline conditions — have been wrong so far.

CORRECTION (July 15, 2022, 11:06 a.m.): A previous version of this article calculated the change in Biden’s approval rating from May 1, 2021 — not May 1, 2022. That calculation has been updated to reflect the change in Biden’s approval since May 1, 2022.

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a temporary Video Producer to join our team full-time from mid-July through mid-November. This person will pitch, storyboard and edit videos about U.S. politics, filling an important role in our coverage of the 2022 midterm elections.

The Video Producer will report to and work with the Senior Video Producer to direct and edit a short-form video series that gives our audience a deeper, data-informed understanding of American politics. They will also be responsible for editing the video version of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, which comes out twice a week. During the primaries, the second weekly episode is often filmed on Tuesday nights after election results come in, so the video producer must be open to working a shifted schedule at times, which will include some late nights.

The Video Producer will work closely with the rest of FiveThirtyEight’s video team; FiveThirtyEight reporters, visual journalists and copy editors; and the graphics team from ABC News Digital. This is a U.S.-based position, and work can be conducted remotely or out of our New York City office. Candidates should be able to work 40 hours a week on an Eastern time zone schedule. To apply, please send a résumé and two clips by Sunday, June 19 to anna.rothschild@abc.com with the subject line “Temporary Video Producer.”

Basic Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Adobe Premiere Pro
• Ability to script and storyboard
• Experience working in a fast-paced environment on a tight deadline
• Experience with multi-cam editing
• Ability to communicate about visual style and provide thoughtful, constructive feedback to animators and other collaborators
• Solid news judgment
• General knowledge of and interest in U.S. electoral politics
• An interest in data journalism

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in a newsroom 
• Proficiency in Adobe After Effects and Illustrator
• Ability to light a studio shoot
• Experience filming with a Canon C300
• Experience directing a remote film crew
• Experience editing a multi-guest podcast video

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a diligent, well-organized and kind Research Assistant to help track down and input polls and other election data, as well as contribute research to political stories and projects. 

This part-time position plays a critical role in supporting FiveThirtyEight’s political coverage and interactive projects like our presidential approval tracker and pollster ratings. You’ll help maintain the databases that keep FiveThirtyEight running, especially our one-of-a-kind polling database. And, what’s most exciting, you’ll be part of the team who feed data into FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm forecast model in real time.

This position is ideal for someone interested in breaking into the world of political data. You’ll work closely with our Senior Research Assistant and collaborate with our politics reporters, copy desk and visual journalists. 

This is a U.S.-based position. Remote work will be considered, or you can work out of our New York City office once it reopens. The exact schedule is flexible (we’ll work with you to set it), but hours are capped at 29 per week. Our hope is that you will stay in the job at least through the 2022 midterms, if not longer. 

To apply, please email a cover letter and résumé to Senior Research Assistant Mary Radcliffe at mary.l.radcliffe@abc.com. Due to the number of applications we receive, we cannot guarantee a response to every applicant.

Responsibilities:

• Monitor polling news, collect and enter new polls into our polling database and upload data to our polling trackers and models.
• Contribute to original research for specific stories and projects.
• Develop an expertise in U.S. poll operators — their methodologies, quirks and quality.
• Respond to inquiries from pollsters and the general public about our projects and datasets.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience with spreadsheets and collecting data.
• A solid understanding of U.S. politics, particularly electoral politics.
• Strong attention to detail and a willingness to perform repetitive tasks (e.g., data entry) in service of important projects.
• Facility using online tools, like search engines and public databases, to track down specific information.
• Comfort with calling, emailing and chasing down sources to get them to send and answer questions about their data.
• Availability and willingness to work odd hours. (Polls often drop late at night or on weekends.)

Preferred Qualifications:

(But lacking one or more of these should not prevent you from applying!)

• Experience working as an academic research assistant or in a newsroom.
• A strong grasp of how polls work and the fundamental statistical concepts necessary to interpret them.
• Familiarity with relational databases.

ABC News and FiveThirtyEight are equal-opportunity employers. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.

Inflation

Were The Stimulus Checks A Mistake?

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

Apr. 26, 2022, at 1:07 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stimulus became political

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will likely learn the wrong lessons from the stimulus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19

Are You A Woman Who Can’t Work From Home During The Pandemic? We Want To Hear From You.

By Monica Potts

Apr. 13, 2022, at 3:03 PM

When people talk about changes in work and office culture brought on by the pandemic — whether it’s returning to the office, working from home or a combination of remote and in-person work — they often overlook one very important group: people who were never able to work from home in the first place.

There are many reasons why some people continued to report to in-person jobs throughout the pandemic, and we’re interested in talking to people — particularly women — who were unable to work from home for at least some or all of the pandemic. We’d like to speak to you if you had or have the kind of job that requires in-person interactions, like in food service, retail or health care, or if you had or have the kind of job that may have been possible to do remotely but for whatever reason you were unable to do so.

We’d like to know how you handled it, how it affected your work and home life, why you weren’t able to work from home and how it’s changed your relationship with work going forward. We’d also like to know whether being unable to work from home made a difference in your decision to continue working, leave the workforce or search for a new job. 

Please fill out the form below if you’d like to tell us your story. No personal details will be shared without your permission.

Parenting

Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Mar. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Imagine the federal government could lift millions of American children out of poverty with a single program. That program would help parents put nutritious meals on the table, pay for school expenses and even save for kids’ college — all with no negative impact on the economy.

You don’t have to imagine. We had it just last year … and now we don’t.

By nearly every empirical measure, the expanded child tax credit (CTC) — the policy passed in 2021 that gave parents a few hundred dollars per month for each child in their family — was a wild success, dramatically reducing child poverty and making it easier for families to buy food and pay for housing and utilities. In combination with other COVID-19 relief measures, particularly the stimulus payments that went out to Americans in April 2020, January 2021 and March 2021, the CTC helped buffer families against the economic upheaval of the pandemic.

It’s rare that researchers can say with certainty that a program like the CTC actually worked. Politicians usually consider policies in an abstract, hypothetical way, knowing that a piece of legislation might not accomplish their aims. But by the time Congress was thinking about extending the CTC, there was a mountain of cold, hard data showing that this program did a lot to help children and families. 

Yet that wasn’t enough to save it. The expanded tax credit ended in December 2021, and chances are low it will be renewed. That tells you all you need to know about which is more powerful in Washington — politicians’ biases or actual evidence.

By the time the pandemic hit, reformers had been pushing for years for the U.S. to establish a universal allowance for families with children. Many other rich countries give some kind of blanket financial support to parents and, not coincidentally, those countries also have lower rates of child poverty. 

But it took the ultimate upheaval — a global pandemic — to nudge American lawmakers into action. In the spring of 2021, Democrats in Congress transformed the CTC, an anti-poverty measure that’s been part of the tax code since 1997, into a kind of emergency child allowance. Unlike the original version, which parents received as a single lump sum when they filed their taxes, the expanded CTC was distributed in monthly payments. From July through December of last year, most parents of children under age 6 received $300 per month per child, and most parents of children between the ages of 6 and 17 received $250 per month per child. The new payment was more generous: Families received up to $3,600 per child per year under the expanded CTC, compared to only $2,000 under the original version. And while the original CTC was mostly available to middle-class families, many more parents were eligible under the expanded program.⁶

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-politics-west-wing-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-83730348

Government programs are often glitchy when they start, but the fact that most families were eligible for the payments meant that they were fairly easy to administer. The IRS already had all the information it needed for anyone who had claimed children on their previous year’s taxes — no additional applications or forms to fill out. The payments went straight into recipients’ bank accounts or they got a check in the mail, with minimal fuss.

And the money helped — a lot. Beginning July 15, the vast majority (88 percent) of families with children received a payment of either $300 or $250 per child. Researchers at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that the July payment kept around 3 million children out of poverty. At the end of 2021, the researchers estimated that the program was keeping 3.7 million children out of poverty.

“Families were living in very precarious economic circumstances,” said Megan Curran, one of the researchers on the Columbia team. “That $300 or $600 per month — it might not sound like much, but when you’re making very little, it can be enough to give you a financial cushion.”

The reduction in child poverty was the big, headline-making finding. But the payments helped in other ways, too. Multiple surveys found that most parents spent the money on essential things like food, rent and bills.

Low-income parents were especially likely to spend the money on basic needs. Several studies found that once the money started arriving, fewer families reported that they didn’t have enough to eat. “The most commonly reported expenditure was food,” Curran said. “After that, it was essential bills — these very basic things that households need.” But the money came in handy for other things, too. When the beginning of the school year rolled around, about one-third of parents who received a CTC payment spent at least some of it on school supplies. Another study found that most parents planned to save some of the money for a rainy day. Some said they would spend the money on tutors for their children — perhaps helping to offset some of the learning loss caused by over a year of school disruptions. The payments helped some families dig themselves out of debt or escape eviction.

The findings were especially striking because there were no strings attached to the money. Parents could spend the payments however they liked. And despite politicians’ longstanding suspicion that if we simply gave people money, they’d run out to buy drugs or cigarettes, families were overwhelmingly likely to spend it in ways that directly benefited their children.

Of course, it was possible that the expanded payments had drawbacks, too. For years, some economists had been concerned that a child allowance for all families — whether the parents had a job or not — would give some people a reason not to work. A study published a few months after the CTC expansion estimated that the move would prompt 1.5 million workers to quit their jobs and leave the labor force, canceling out some of the payments’ benefits. In an October opinion column, two co-authors of the study argued that based on their findings, extending the expanded CTC would do more harm than good.

That doesn’t seem to be what happened. When other economists looked at real life data from when the monthly payments were going out, they found that only a small share of parents said they left their jobs. And those people were balanced out by another group of parents who started working after the expanded CTC went into effect — perhaps because they suddenly had enough money to pay for child care. 

Researchers sliced and diced the data, looking for any negative effect on the economy. It wasn’t there. “​​Any way that we cut it, we just don’t see an impact on whether parents work,” said Elizabeth Ananat, an economics professor at Barnard College and a co-author of one of the studies. “And that’s in contrast with all the work on poverty and material hardship where we see huge, huge effects.”

But the evidence didn’t seem compelling to the one person who controlled the expanded CTC’s fate: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. By the fall of 2021, when Democrats were pondering a renewal of the payments as part of a sprawling social policy bill, it was clear that it wasn’t going to get bipartisan support. That meant if one moderate Democrat defected, the expanded payments would expire at the end of the year. Manchin thought the payments were too broad. He didn’t think parents should be eligible unless they had a job, and he wanted a much lower income cap for parents to qualify. 

There’s a certain logic to his reasoning — the payments shouldn’t discourage people from working, and it should only go to the neediest families. But experts told me that these changes wouldn’t actually translate into money better spent. A complicated formula for determining eligibility can keep the people who most need the money from getting it. And aside from the fact that parents weren’t leaving their jobs because of the payments, work requirements may be counterproductive. “It’s the equivalent of kicking someone when they’re down,” Ananat said. “You might have a sick kid and have to stay home for a day and lose your job. Then you can’t pay for child care to go out and interview for a bunch of new jobs.”

Manchin didn’t agree. By the end of 2021, he reportedly told other senators that without strict limitations, parents would spend the money on drugs — despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The Democrats’ social policy bill died in the Senate in December, and the last round of the expanded payments went out to families that same month, with no sign of a renewal in sight.

The impact of losing the money was as dramatic as gaining it. In January and February, families with children were more likely to say they were struggling to cover household expenses. Child poverty rose. Parents reported struggling to pay for diapers and child care. A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in February found that 75 percent of people who had benefited from the expanded CTC said that losing the money would affect their financial security.

Meanwhile, researchers like Ananat were left standing in frustration on the sidelines, wondering how such a successful program had gone up in smoke. “The thing that’s so heartbreaking to me is that we were able to actually find out what the policy did,” Ananat said. “And now we have an answer. It just helps kids. That’s all it does. And then they just let it go.”

UPDATE (June 2, 2022, 5:15 p.m.): We are no longer accepting applications for this position.

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a kind, collaborative and creative Senior Visual Journalist to join our Interactives and Graphics team. Senior Visual Journalists are design leaders in the FiveThirtyEight newsroom. Though they serve primarily as individual contributors, they also amplify the work of the team by mentoring more junior visual journalists, thoughtfully giving and receiving feedback and leading by example. We’re looking for a seasoned journalist who will exercise strong news judgment, bring a sharp eye for detail and hold our work to the highest standards.

The Senior Visual Journalist will report to either the Deputy Editor, Interactives and Graphics, or the Senior Editor for Interactives and work closely with the rest of the Interactives team as well as reporters and editors across the newsroom. This full-time role with benefits is a U.S.-based position. Full-time remote work may be considered, but because our offices are in New York City, we prefer candidates based in the area.

If you have questions, please email Deputy Editor Chris Groskopf. To apply, submit a cover letter and résumé through the Disney Careers portal.

Responsibilities:

• Producing highly polished, visually impactful stories and projects that attract, excite and engage our readers
• Leading the design process for our larger projects, including by creating principles, specifications and other documentation that enable work to be delegated to the team
• Contributing to a rotation of daily charts production and “seconding” less experienced visual journalists
• Inspiring, mentoring and guiding teammates and colleagues in their visual work
• Participating in larger strategic conversations about visual style, site design, branding, accessibility and more
• Giving thoughtful, candid feedback to peers, colleagues and managers and openly receiving it in turn

Basic Qualifications:

• Three or more years of relevant experience
• Proficiency using design software, particularly Adobe Illustrator
• Fluency in JavaScript and one or more libraries used for creating graphics, such as D3, along with a functional understanding of the “full stack” of web-development technologies
• Fluency in basic statistics — for example, a conversational understanding of concepts such as margin of error and regression analysis
• Eagerness to collaborate with other visual journalists, computational journalists, reporters and editors across the newsroom
• Experience working on deadline

Preferred Qualifications:

• Five or more years of relevant experience
• A solid understanding of U.S. politics, particularly electoral politics, major U.S. sports and/or science
• Experience with statistical programming languages, such as R
• Experience with cartography and mapping tools, such as QGIS and TopoJSON
• Experience applying product-design techniques to large journalism projects, such as user research, rapid prototyping and user testing

Interested candidates are strongly encouraged to apply even if they don’t meet every qualification.

Qualified but ready for a new challenge? We’re also hiring a Senior Editor for Interactives.

ABC News and FiveThirtyEight are equal-opportunity employers. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.

The intern’s main role will be to build up FiveThirtyEight’s video presence, engagement and following on social platforms. This means pitching and executing short social videos while developing and refining FiveThirtyEight’s cross-platform voice and tone. Should they have interest, the intern might narrate or host videos. The intern will also help with general video audience strategy and work with our senior designer and video journalists to repurpose existing assets for distribution on our website and other platforms, including Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.

Journalism experience (whether from a journalism class, school paper, job or internship) is a must, as is some experience reporting on politics. But “politics” doesn’t just mean electoral politics — it could mean you have experience reporting on policy issues, social movements, how polarization affects your community or something else.

The social/video intern will report to the senior editor for social and audience and the senior video producer but will also have the opportunity to work with reporters across the newsroom.

Applicants should be able to commit to a full-time schedule from May or June through August. They must be a current student or have graduated in the past 18 months. This is a paid position and can be done remotely.

Basic qualifications:

• Some journalism experience
• A solid understanding of U.S. politics and a prolific consumption of news
• Enthusiasm for FiveThirtyEight and the kind of journalism we create
• Demonstrated experience creating compelling social videos
• Some experience with Adobe Premiere. Applicants should be able to cut clips and add music
• Experience writing scripts and storyboarding
• Experience behind a camera (a smartphone camera counts)

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience writing social copy
• Experience using WordPress or a similar CMS to publish articles
• Experience in front of the camera (a smartphone camera counts)

Additional information:

If you don’t check every box, that’s OK — we’d still like to hear from you. Apply here with a résumé and brief cover letter. Please include links in your cover letter or résumé to three social videos you’ve produced. They can be personal projects and don’t necessarily need to be journalistic.

At the time of application, the applicant must be enrolled in an accredited college/university and taking at least one class in the semester/quarter prior to participation in the internship program, or the applicant must have graduated from a college/university within six months.

This internship is a paid, remote internship and will run May/June 2022 through January 2023. Candidate must be available to work 40 hours/week on Eastern Time for the duration of the internship.

ABC News and FiveThirtyEight are equal-opportunity employers. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.

This paid internship will run from approximately May/June 2022 through January 2023 and can be fully remote if you live outside the New York City area. Current students at accredited colleges or universities are eligible, as are recent graduates who were enrolled in at least one course in the semester before the internship starts.

The Art and Design Intern may work up to 40 hours per week (with some flexibility in schedule, as needed).

To apply, please send a cover letter, résumé and link to your website or portfolio through the Disney Careers portal. Even if you don’t check all the boxes below, we encourage you to apply as soon as possible! If you have any questions about this role, please email Emily Scherer, Senior Designer. 

Responsibilities:

• Researching, cropping and writing photo captions for stories
• Applying stylistic treatments to photos to create visually consistent art elements for stories in a series (for example, World Cup updates)
• Thinking through the order and pacing of images within a story to find the best way to keep our readers engaged throughout
• Creating custom illustrations to lead daily and feature stories
• Helping assemble stories in WordPress and contributing ideas for headlines and other display text to make sure all elements of the piece work well together
• Collaborating with other FiveThirtyEight teams on video and interactive projects

Basic Qualifications:

• Interest in pursuing a career in graphic design, art direction, photo editing and/or illustration
• Experience in visual arts or photojournalism at the college level
• Proficiency in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
• Kindness and enthusiasm for collaborating

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity and interest in U.S. politics, sports and/or science
• Proficiency in Adobe InDesign, After Effects and/or WordPress

ABC News and FiveThirtyEight are equal-opportunity employers. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a kind and creative Associate Visual Journalist to join our Interactives and Graphics team. This entry-level position is ideal for recent graduates and career switchers, as it offers immediate access to the experience and mentorship necessary to become a thriving member of the Interactives team. Day-to-day work primarily involves creating static charts, but the Associate Visual Journalist will also have opportunities to work on interactives and occasionally pitch their own work.

The Associate Visual Journalist will report to either the Deputy Editor, Interactives and Graphics, or the Senior Editor, Interactives, and work closely with the rest of the Interactives team, as well as with reporters and editors across the newsroom. This full-time role with benefits is a U.S.-based position. As our offices are in New York, we prefer candidates based in the New York area, but full-time remote work may be considered.

If you have questions, please email Deputy Editor Chris Groskopf. To apply, please submit a cover letter and résumé through the Disney Careers portal. 

Responsibilities:

• Crafting static and bespoke charts to accompany daily and feature stories under the supervision of editors or more senior visual journalists
• Contributing code and design to minor components of interactive projects as a sole contributor or to larger components when working in close collaboration with more senior visual journalists
• Proactively learning whatever new technical skills and domain knowledge are necessary to succeed on each project
• Collaborating with the Interactives team and the rest of the newsroom by actively engaging in routine workflow, such as copy editing, story check-ins and project retrospectives
• Communicating project status, including unexpected roadblocks or delays, to collaborators and stakeholders in a timely fashion
• Giving and receiving candid feedback to peers, colleagues and managers

Basic Qualifications:

• A passion for data visualization and crafting graphics that tell a clear story
• Proficiency in Adobe Illustrator
• Some experience using front-end web-development technologies, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• The ability to balance deadlines with opportunities to experiment and create new ways to visualize sports and politics data
• Enthusiasm for collaborating with other FiveThirtyEight journalists on their beats

Preferred Qualifications:

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In fact, sometimes they actively resist doing what the evidence says — especially when it comes to implementing policies that give financial benefits to people low on America’s societal totem pole. It’s not always said out loud, but the reality is that some Democrats, and American voters in general, do not think very highly of poor people or people of color — there are countless examples of how society is quick to dehumanize them and how politicians struggle to address their needs in a meaningful way. These patterns of thinking and misleading portrayals of marginalized people too often mean that the policies that could help them most are opposed time and time again.

That opposition is, of course, rarely framed in terms of antipathy or animus toward a particular group. Instead, it is often framed as “rationality,” like adherence to “fiscal conservatism,” especially among members of the GOP, who have long abided by small-government views. But some Democrats are really no different. Consider President Biden’s reluctance to cancel student loan debt, or the federal government’s hesitancy to provide free community college, or West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s recent opposition to including the child tax credit in the Build Back Better plan, reportedly on the grounds that low-income people would use the money on drugs. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have found a number of scapegoats to use while arguing against expanding the social safety net, including playing to Americans’ fears about rising inflation rates. As a result, various programs that would help people — namely the poor and people of color — have become taboo.

What’s striking, though, is that if you actually look at most social science research, investing in the social safety net is fiscally responsible — it pays large dividends for both individuals and our collective society. Economists have studied this for decades, finding that anti-poverty and cash-assistance programs executed both in and outside of the U.S. are linked to increased labor participation in the workforce, while investing in childcare benefits not only children, but the broader economy and society they are raised in. Moreover, newer initiatives like canceling student debt could add up to 1.5 million jobs and lift over 5 million Americans out of poverty in addition to freeing many Americans of the debt trap that is contributing to a lagging housing market and widening racial wealth gap. Other research suggests that those saddled with student loan debt would be more likely to get married or have children if their dues were forgiven.

That is the evidence. Yet, rather than acting on it, there has been a tendency to highlight stories and tropes about people who might waste the resources invested in them. And that’s oftentimes enough to undermine public and political support for these policies. So what we’re seeing from some “moderate” Democrats today is likely born out of an inherent distrust of what might happen if you just give people money or help them through an expanded social safety net. 

But if we look in the not-too-distant past — less than a hundred years ago, in fact — we quickly see that Democrats didn’t always oppose distributing money to support Americans’ well-being. In fact, former Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt rolled out safety-net programs like Oprah would give away her favorite things. In response to the Great Depression, Roosevelt oversaw a massive expansion of the social safety net during the 1930s and ’40s, which included giving grants to states that implemented unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children and funding to business and agriculture communities. Recognizing the importance of a safety net to protect people from “the uncertainties brought on by unemployment, illness, disability, death and old age,” the federal government also created Social Security, which it deemed vital at the time for economic security. And in the 1960s, long after the Great Depression was over, the government created the Medicare program for similar reasons under former President Lyndon B. Johnson, another Democrat.

What is clear from these examples is that the federal government once understood the importance of a robust safety net for the health, well-being and the broader functioning of our society. The caveat, however, is that this general understanding does not extend to our thinking about all Americans; the government was supportive of these policies when most beneficiaries were white. But when people of color started actively utilizing and benefitting from these same programs, they became harder to attain and, in some cases, overtly racialized. 

That was particularly true in the 1970s and ’80s when conservative and right-wing political candidates vilified Americans on welfare. During his initial presidential run, Ronald Reagan would tell stories and give numerous stump speeches centered on Linda Taylor, a Black Chicago-area welfare recipient, dubbed a “welfare queen.” To gin up anti-government and anti-poor resentment among his base, the then-future Republican president villainized Taylor, repeating claims that she had used “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare” as a way to signal that certain Americans — namely those of color — were gaming the system in order to attain certain benefits from the federal government. Reagan wasn’t alone, however. In fact, his tough stance on alleged welfare fraud and government spending on social programs encapsulated the conservative critique of big-government liberalism at the time. 

Democrats, however, weren’t that different either. Former Democratic President Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” in the 1990s included stipulations like requiring a certain percentage of welfare recipients to be working or participate in job training. This helped foster, in turn, a belief that there were people who played by the rules and those who didn’t (namely Black Americans). And once politicians started worrying about (Black) people taking advantage of the system, the requirements needed to acquire certain societal and financial benefits became even harder to obtain. 

But all of this implicit rhetoric about reducing government waste by cracking down on marginalized people does not hold up to scrutiny when examining the evidence. The reality is that fraud among social safety net beneficiaries is extremely rare, and much less costly to society than, say, tax evasion among the richest 1 percent. Yet we spend an incredible amount of money trying to catch and penalize the poor instead of helping them.

Moreover, polls show that Americans — particularly Democrats — overwhelmingly want to expand the social safety net. According to a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaners (59 percent) and 17 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners said that the government should provide more assistance to people in need. Even this October, around the time when Democrats were negotiating the size of the omnibus Build Back Better Act, a CNN/SSRS poll found that 75 percent of the party’s voters (and 6 percent of Republicans) preferred that Congress pass a bill that expanded the social safety net and enacted climate-change policies.

However, despite many Americans wanting an expansion of the social safety net, it is still often hard to sell voters on these programs — especially if they’re wrapped up in large policy packages (i.e. Obamacare) or associated with someone voters dislike (i.e. former Democratic President Barack Obama). Consider that a Politico/Morning Consult survey from late last year found that only 39 percent of Americans who received the child tax credit said it had a “major impact” on their lives. Moreover, only 38 percent of respondents credited Biden for the implementation of the program.

The fact that many expansions of the social safety net aren’t initially popular makes it all the easier for Democrats to fall back on the stories people tell themselves about different groups of people and whether they deserve help. And sometimes, those portrayals affect the concerns we have about members of those groups and the explanations we generate for why they experience the outcomes they do in life. As earlier expansions of the social safety net show, the U.S. hasn’t always been allergic to giving people money, but there now seems to be this unspoken idea that poor people and people of color can’t be trusted to spend “free” money or government assistance well.

This thinking, though, poses a problem for Democrats because, for years, they’ve branded themselves as the party that promotes general welfare by advancing racial, economic and social justice. At the same time, they continue to fall short on campaign promises to expand the social safety net despite many poor people, and people of color, having fought long and hard to put them in office. The fact that so many of today’s Democrats are still prisoners to antiquated tropes about who gets — or is deserving of — government benefits is a dangerous one, because it causes people to push members of those groups outside of their “moral circles” — the circle of people that they think they have a moral obligation to help.

Of course, breaking this chain of thought won’t be easy because it would require Democrats to break the long-standing mindset that poor people are in their current situation because of a series of “unfortunate” choices. It would also probably require them to stop worrying about how Republicans might falsely reframe social safety net programs as dangerous, especially given ongoing concerns regarding inflation and the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. But at the end of the day, that shouldn’t matter: While the politics might not be immediately convenient and the effects of these programs not immediately seen, that is not necessarily a reason to defer implementing them. Focusing solely on the short-term effects is not only short-sighted, but dangerous. And Democrats stand to lose more than the support of their base if they refuse to act.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/whats-driving-inflation-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-82889923

This, of course, has led to a lot of finger-pointing as to who — or what — is to blame for the price increases we’re seeing. Democrats have blamed supply chain deficiencies due to COVID-19, as well as large corporations and monopolies. Republicans, meanwhile, have attacked President Biden’s legislative agenda, claiming that his signature pieces of legislation — most notably the American Rescue Plan featuring $1,400 stimulus checks paid directly to many Americans — are to blame. And to be sure, whether fair or not, most Americans do blame Biden.

But what is responsible for inflation in the U.S.? Is it all about the pandemic supply chain, as many Democrats claim, or corporate greed? Or does it have more to do with Biden’s policies, as Republicans have posited? 

Inflation isn’t just a supply-chain issue, and the stimulus likely made it worse

One of the Democrats’ most consistent talking points has been that the COVID-19-afflicted supply chain is to blame for our current levels of inflation. Biden has even gone as far as to say that supply chain issues have “everything to do” with it, while House Democrats work to craft legislation targeted at ameliorating supply chain issues. And many economists say that the foundering supply chain has played a heavy hand in driving up prices, too. 

The thinking goes as follows: Americans stopped using their gym, nail salons and other services as their spending patterns rapidly changed in 2020, and the global supply chain — which already had issues —  was not equipped to deal with the surge in demand for consumer durables (e.g., home workout equipment, office furniture) after the initial global economic shutdown. Combine that rapid demand increase with a shortage in supply, and you get higher prices. 

But at the same time, this Democratic talking point has its limits, as it’s become clear to many economists that American inflation isn’t just a supply chain issue: Our economic response — namely, the trillions of dollars of COVID-19 stimulus paid out over the last 24 months — appears to be a meaningful differentiator. 

A good way to tease this out is to look at Europe, which has faced similar supply chain issues and an even worse oil shock, as it is more dependent on foreign oil than the U.S. And yet, European countries have experienced lower inflation, perhaps due in part to their smaller government response. 

“Global supply chain problems affect every country in the world, but the United States has had more inflation than other countries,” said Jason Furman, a professor of economics at Harvard University and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama. “If you look compared to Europe, in the United States goods consumption is higher, and services consumption is higher than what it is [in Europe].”

One reason for that higher consumption is government spending. In 2020, a divided Congress under former President Donald Trump passed two separate pieces of legislation — first the $2 trillion CARES Act in March, which doled out $1,200 checks to most single adults and even more to families, then a $900 billion package in December that, among other aid, issued $600 targeted checks. But then in March 2021, Democrats passed another round of government stimulus in a $1.9 trillion relief package — including $1,400 direct payments to individual Americans — which some experts warned at the time might cause inflation. 

And it does appear that this most recent round of government spending is at least partially responsible for our current levels of inflation. An October 2021 paper found, for example, that the American Rescue Plan likely made inflation slightly worse, causing significant (but small and fleeting) upward pressure on prices, and many experts have stood by their 2021 assertions that the extra stimulus would lead to inflation. Of course, Biden’s additional stimulus was arguably necessary for Americans to participate in the economy at the time, and polling found widespread support among Americans for more relief. But it has also led many Republicans to claim that Biden’s policies are responsible for the historic price increases we’re seeing.

Furman stressed to me that inflation likely would have been high even without a COVID-19 relief bill, however, because of a reopening economy and base effect distortions. Moreover, rising gas prices — one of the most tangible ways in which Americans process inflation — likely have nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan and much more to do with the dynamics of global oil. There is at least some evidence, though, that government spending has caused inflation, beyond the explanation that it’s merely been a supply chain issue.

But not all government spending leads to inflation

Critically, however, despite what many Republicans claim, not all government spending has the same effect on inflation. In fact, historically government spending hasn’t usually led to inflation. A 2015 paper in the European Economic Review found, for example, that the effect of government spending on inflation post-World War II was “not statistically different from zero.” But Bill Dupor, a co-author of that study and vice president of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told me that the size of the intervention matters — and that could help explain why government spending today has spurred inflation but hadn’t in recent memory.

“The big difference, I think, from now relative to that is just the enormity of the government spending,” Dupor said. “That could explain why it wasn’t finding big effects, while there could be big effects now.”

Even still, not all government spending the Biden administration has greenlit has likely contributed to inflation. For example, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law in November is unlikely to have contributed to inflation for a number of reasons. First of all, very little of it has been paid for at this point. Second, it’s targeted at ramping up the productive capacity of the economy — i.e., investing in new technologies and creating jobs — which means it might even tamp down inflation. That’s different from the American Rescue Plan, whose $1,400 stimulus checks don’t build up the economy in the same way, according to the economists I spoke with. 

Americans, however, aren’t necessarily making this kind of distinction when it comes to government spending. According to a January Politico-Harvard survey, 43 percent of Americans think that the bipartisan infrastructure bill will increase inflation, while just 10 percent think it will decrease inflation (although 35 percent did say they think inflation will remain unchanged). 

Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said that his biggest concern with the recent inflation brought about by the stimulus is that it muddies the waters of government spending in the eyes of voters. That, in turn, Philippon said, expends political capital that can’t be used to tackle other key issues, like infrastructure spending or child poverty.

“People then lump together all kinds of government spending, the good and the bad,” Philippon said.

Big corporations aren’t the biggest cause, but …

Finally, some Democrats have singled out big companies and monopolies for their perceived role in driving up prices. Figures across the party’s ideological gamut -— from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Biden — have posited that big businesses, by jacking up their prices in the middle of a pandemic, are to blame for inflation, and that a lack of competition has allowed corporate behemoths to raise their prices unabated.

At first glance, this explanation appears less plausible than other messaging on inflation. Profit-seeking companies didn’t suddenly become more profit-seeking during the pandemic, nor were they more generous before it. Additionally, corporate concentration has grown steadily since the 1990s — an era of historically low inflation. A January survey of economists at the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found most experts in agreement on both questions: Inflation wasn’t explained by big firms deciding to get richer, and antitrust interventions — such as those tossed about by the Biden administration — weren’t likely to curb inflation.

However, there is an element of the prices we’re seeing today — and how Americans are responding to them — that could be explained by big business run amok. Philippon, whose book “The Great Reversal” focuses on how a lack of competition and corporate concentration have defined the modern American economy, told me that one reason why inflation is such a big deal in the U.S. is that prices were already so high to begin with.

“That’s not a statement about rapid inflation, it’s a statement about slowly rising profit margins that slowly choke off the middle class,” Philippon said. “One reason it’s particularly painful in the U.S. is that prices were already high, people’s purchasing power, the real value of their wages was already being eroded by market power before. Then when you add to that a burst of inflation, it’s even more painful.” 

That may explain why recent polling has found that Americans are sympathetic to arguments that attribute inflation to corporate greed, and why Biden is singing a fairly populist tune on inflation. But as with all aspects of messaging on the issue, whether Democrats or Republicans are more right on the facts of inflation has very little to do with its potential electoral impact. Prices have to stabilize for Americans to feel good about the economy — and for Democrats to feel good about their chances in 2022.

“I don’t think there’s any message that would make people feel good about 7 percent inflation,” Furman said.

And, last but not least, check out this calendar with the results from our debate about when each season begins.

Did you enjoy this long list of weird charts? Then boy, do we have content in the archives for you! Check out our lists from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/solve-archery-riddle-fivethirtyeight-81797027

Things aren’t as bad as they were in 1979, but for many, the comparison is still apt. According to the latest consumer price index⁷ numbers, prices in November were up 6.9 percent compared with a year ago, the highest increase since 1982. And that comes alongside near-record-low consumer sentiment and a net approval rating for President Biden of -7.6 percentage points.⁸ Biden has said reversing inflation is a priority for his administration, and he has released strategic reserves of oil and announced plans to “relieve bottlenecks” to address soaring prices, but a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead.

It’s no secret that inflation is politically powerful. You can’t miss rising prices, and research has found that Americans care deeply about inflation. But the politics of handling it is messy, and should prices continue to rise, Biden has a difficult task. He faces a country that views inflation through a highly partisan lens — and that will judge his performance on the issue accordingly. If he ignores inflation, it could spiral as it did with Carter. But at the same time, should Biden react too forcefully, the cure could be worse than the disease. 

Inflation’s unique place in the American psyche is bad for presidents 

Inflation occupies a unique place in American life. That’s in part because price increases can feel far more palpable than something like the government deficit; they’re also front and center for the average consumer. Add to that the power of political memory: The Great Inflation brought along four recessions from 1969 to 1982 and has had an indelible effect on our politics.

Trying to pinpoint what’s causing today’s inflation, though, is challenging. The pandemic transformed the economy, and many experts pointed to the exceptional nature of this economic recovery as the primary driver of inflation. Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, stressed to me that the abnormality of the pandemic-induced downturn is key to understanding the price increases we’re seeing now.

“This was a serious downturn, but it really wasn’t a recession. It didn’t look anything like a recession,” said Goolsbee. “Normally, the thing that drives a recession is long-lived items that get put off, like consumer durables and housing. And those things rose in the downturn.”

But though Goolsbee is on the side of the debate arguing that the current inflation is temporary, he grants that even an economy that’s back to normal by summer would “give heartburn” to the Biden administration. And there’s good reason for that: As the chart below shows, steep inflation has coincided with several sharp downturns in presidential approval since at least 1960. Biden himself is currently in the dumps as far as his approval rating goes.

It’s not entirely clear how much inflation is related to a president’s approval rating, but research does suggest that it can hurt politicians in power. A 1999 study, for instance, found that increases in unexpected inflation hurt incumbent parties’ electoral performance. And a 2010 paper showed that inflation had a significantly negative effect on Americans’ evaluations of the president. Finally, a 2013 paper found that, along with increases in the budget deficit and unemployment, an increase in inflation “cause[d] a deterioration of presidential popularity” in the United States.

But some prices are just more important than others when it comes to inflation. Consider rising gas prices: A 2016 paper found that higher gas prices had a negative effect on presidential approval, in part because Americans are constantly reminded of them. Carola Binder, a professor of economics at Haverford College who researches inflation expectations and monetary policy, told me that high gas prices are particularly likely to affect how Americans evaluate the economy.

“You literally see gas prices and big numbers as you’re driving down the road, and you also purchase it more frequently,” said Binder. “So you’re more likely to remember how much it used to cost if you saw it last week was $2 and now it’s $3.” Binder said the same isn’t true of, say, the price tag of a family vacation.

Americans who lived through the inflation of the 1970s, however, are also more likely to react negatively to steeper gas prices. Per a 2019 paper, Binder and her co-author Christos Makridis found that Americans who lived through the oil crises of the 1970s were more pessimistic about rising gas prices than those who didn’t. That’s because, as Binder put it, “they formed their model of how the economy works based on how it worked back in the late ’70s.”

Recent polling further confirms that Americans are feeling the strain of rising prices. Forty-five percent of households reported facing either “moderate” or “severe” hardship because of rising prices, according to a November Gallup poll, and 56 percent of voters in a November Wall Street Journal survey said inflation was causing a “major” or “minor” financial strain on them. That strain has been particularly hard on poorer Americans, too; according to that Gallup poll, 7 in 10 adults in households earning less than $40,000 a year said the pandemic was causing them hardship.

Though inflation weighs heavily on the American conscience, it’s important not to overstate its influence, especially on presidential approval. The chart above, for instance, shows George W. Bush’s approval falling during the Great Recession, a period of deflation. And even Carter’s reelection was doomed by a number of other key issues, both foreign and domestic. But that doesn’t stop Americans from dwelling on inflation, even when it is low. And, right now, there’s evidence that price hikes are hurting many Americans.

Americans’ views of inflation are strongly shaped by politics

Though inflation affects all Americans, there’s a gulf in perception. In short, whether you share a party affiliation with the president likely looms large for just how bad you think inflation will get. That tracks more broadly with how Americans’ views on the economy increasingly have little to do with the economy itself; rather, they’re about who’s in office.

“When the president of your political party is in power, you tend to be more optimistic about how the economy will be and tend to have lower inflation expectations,” said Binder. “When a president whose politics you disagree with is in power, you tend to be more pessimistic about how the economy will be, and you’re going to have higher inflation expectations.”

Recent research has borne that out, too, finding that Americans expect significantly lower inflation when the party they support is in the White House. According to a 2019 paper, inflation expectations were higher in red states than in blue states when Barack Obama was in office, only for the positions to reverse when Donald Trump arrived.

This trend has existed for a while, too. In the 1980s, for instance, when inflation had fallen nearly 10 points under Reagan, more than 50 percent of “strong” Democrats said that inflation had gotten somewhat or much worse in a 1988 survey, while fewer than 8 percent said it had gotten much better (13 percent and 47 percent of “strong” Republicans, respectively, said the same). Meanwhile, according to a study conducted near the end of another GOP administration, Bush’s in 2008, Democrats were once again more likely than Republicans to say inflation had increased over the past eight years.

Unsurprisingly, this schism is also evident today: Under Biden, Republicans have consistently reported greater fears about the economy — and inflation — than Democrats, and it doesn’t appear that divide is going away anytime soon.

The cure for inflation may be disastrous

On a surface level, inflation is bad. If you hold all other things constant, it erodes purchasing power and the value of your dollar. And if Biden gives the appearance of doing nothing, then fears of inflation may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Americans, anticipating higher costs, could demand higher wages from employers to offset inflation, which would then lead employers to demand higher prices, resulting in even worse inflation. 

The problem is that the solution — economic and political — isn’t as simple as raising interest rates to bring down inflation: There’s a cost to keeping inflation rates low, and we’ve often been too quick to pump the brakes on a recovering economy.

“We only talk about inflation when it’s higher, and not as much when it’s lower,” said Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of political science at Boston College who studies the politics of inflation. But he stressed that whether inflation is high or low, policies that target it end up picking winners and losers in the economy. “There’s no escaping the politics of inflation policy, even when inflation is at very low levels,” Kirshner added.

Moreover, some of the policies designed to deal with inflation — especially when it’s high — have had devastating effects. Take, for instance, the policies set in motion by the Carter administration that eventually stamped out inflation in the 1980s. For starters, the country went into a deep recession, and millions of workers lost their jobs. Disaffected building contractors and construction workers even mailed chunks of two-by-fours to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, claiming the wood was no longer needed because no one was buying houses anymore. The political fallout from inflation didn’t stop with Carter either. Reagan also saw his approval rating tumble even as inflation got under control.

But more recent episodes, such as the slow recovery from the Great Recession, have further called into question the merits of being ultra-tough on inflation. Kirshner pointed to the double-dip recession of the 1930s as a consequence of being too quick to fight the inflation bogeyman. Inflation, of course, hasn’t yet approached the runaway levels of the 1970s, but there is a possibility that we course-correct too quickly, as we did in the 1930s and 2010s. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/high-inflation-political-landmine-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-81734506

And that could pose a big problem considering that most other economic indicators that characterized the country’s 1970s “stagflation” aren’t present. In fact, the American economy has recovered strongly according to a number of measures: Unemployment is falling rapidly — though workers continue to quit their jobs en masse — retail spending has increased, and households have saved more than would have been expected in a non-pandemic world (though there’s some evidence that those savings are falling). 

All of this means that Biden is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He has to address very real concerns about an overheating economy while also being careful not to overreact to prices that may stabilize as things get back to normal. Meanwhile, roughly half of the country will appraise the economy relatively critically as long as a Democrat is in office, which complicates Biden’s approach. What’s good for the economy in the long term may not be good for his political and electoral concerns in the nearer term, and vice versa. 

“People like me think that in the short-to-medium run, at least, you have to let this inflationary wave pass through the economy,” said Kirshner. “Is that good politics? I suspect it’s terrible politics. But you’re selecting from a menu of unpalatable choices, and especially in the current political environment, whatever unpalatable choice you make will be vilified by the opposition.”

But then the 2020 election happened. The Squad did grow by two members, but progressives failed to win the ultimate prize, the Democratic nomination for president, in large part because voters of color threw their support behind now-President Biden. In addition, many Democrats argued after the 2020 general election that progressive messaging might have cost Democrats seats in the House that year. And while a handful of nonwhite progressive candidates have won important elections this year, 2021 also contained a number of high-profile setbacks for the movement. Not only did Eric Adams, a Black moderate, handily defeat a number of progressives in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, but a handful of other progressives of color lost their races to more moderate politicians of color, too. 

As a result, the buzz over the Squad’s initial wins in 2018 has largely been replaced by a narrative that progressives struggle with people of color, and that Black voters especially prefer more moderate candidates. But the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

We looked back at the Squad’s initial primary wins, and found that they’ve often won sizable blocs of nonwhite voters, especially when they have had strong ties to those communities (or at least stronger than their opponent). But at the same time, they haven’t necessarily performed well with all voters of color in their district. In fact, our analysis found that — despite each member’s very different path of Congress — each Squad member’s wins required a multiracial coalition of both white and nonwhite voters. We only found one instance without a clear racial pattern. But even if there is no surefire strategy for progressives to win voters of color, the Squad’s primaries also push back against the idea that progressives consistently struggle with these voters.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The first member of the Squad — and arguably still the most famous — is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few thought the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District on June 26, 2018, would be competitive, but Ocasio-Cortez wound up pulling off an upset, defeating then-Rep. Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, 57 percent to 43 percent. 

In seeking to explain the result, commentators at the time pointed to the district’s changing demographics: Ocasio-Cortez, like 47 percent of the 14th District’s voting-age population, is Hispanic, while Crowley, like only 23 percent of the district’s VAP, is non-Hispanic white.⁹ However, this explanation doesn’t tell the whole story as Ocasio-Cortez performed well in both white and Hispanic corners of the district. According to Sean McElwee, the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, Ocasio-Cortez “benefited from a situation where very highly engaged liberal people were the big constituency that were turning out.”

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez did best in the whiter, more gentrified areas of the 14th District — like the Queens neighborhoods of Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside. She defeated Crowley 64 percent to 36 percent in precincts with a white VAP of at least 60 percent. She also won heavily (70+ percent) Hispanic precincts, 56 percent to 44 percent. “She had liberals, particularly liberal whites and young whites, and Hispanic voters and that was her successful coalition,” McElwee said. But that isn’t to say that Ocasio-Cortez was able to appeal to all voters of color. The data suggests, and McElwee agreed, that Ocasio-Cortez performed less well with Black voters. Crowley actually won the district’s two Black-majority precincts by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin.

Rashida Tlaib

A few weeks after Ocasio-Cortez, the second member of the Squad eked out a win in her primary. On Aug. 7, 2018, former state Rep. Rashida Tlaib edged out Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, another woman of color, in the regularly scheduled Democratic primary for Michigan’s open 13th District, 31 percent to 30 percent.¹⁰ 

This was a close, crowded primary — four other candidates were in the running — but to an even greater extent than Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib won thanks to her strength in precincts with large white populations. She received 42 percent of the vote in the district’s 34 precincts with white VAPs greater than 80 percent. However, this doesn’t show a complete picture: 13 of those precincts were in Dearborn Heights, which has a significant Arab American population, and the U.S. Census Bureau considers Arab Americans to be white. (Tlaib herself is Arab American.) Tlaib won 69 percent of the vote in these 13 precincts versus 26 percent of the vote in the other 21 heavily white precincts, so it’s likely that much of Tlaib’s apparent strength with white voters is in fact due to her base of support in the Arab American community.

Tlaib also did not do particularly well in Black neighborhoods; she received 24 percent in precincts with Black VAPs greater than 80 percent. But that probably had more to do with Jones’s deep roots in Detroit’s Black community than Black voters explicitly rejecting Tlaib. Having served on the city council since 2006, Jones had fairly high name recognition in the city, and she won 41 percent in those 80+ percent Black precincts (almost all of which are in Detroit).

Indeed, given the racial composition of the 13th District’s VAP — 53 percent Black, 35 percent white — Tlaib would have likely lost if the Black vote had not been split among Jones and other candidates. “Rashida did get some support among African Americans, but it wasn’t the lion’s share of her vote,” said Tim Bledsoe, a professor of political science at Wayne State University and former Michigan state legislator. Instead, Bledsoe said, Tlaib won thanks to her strong fundraising, which helped her air broadcast TV ads when no other candidates did, and her appeal to younger, more diverse voters. “There was a more progressive element to Rashida’s campaign,” said Bledsoe. “Brenda is certainly no conservative, but Rashida was talking in a more aggressive way about the progressive agenda and I think that helped mobilize young people.” 

Ilhan Omar

The Squad gained its third member on Aug. 14, 2018, when then-state Rep. Ilhan Omar won the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open 5th Congressional District with 48 percent of the vote. A big reason for Omar’s success was that, as the first Somali-American state legislator in the U.S., she was already somewhat of a household name, both in the 5th District and around the country. Not only did she repeatedly speak out against then-President Trump, but a year prior to her 2018 congressional election, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. She was also featured in a music video for Maroon 5, appeared on The Daily Show and was the subject of a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

That national profile proved hard for any of her opponents to cut through. “All of [Omar’s primary opponents] had a hard time making the case against voting for someone who was already an international figure. It was hard to penetrate and no one quite landed on the right message,” said Javier Morillo, a political strategist who works in Democratic politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given her name recognition, Omar performed well in all corners of the 5th District. In fact, there was no correlation between a precinct’s racial composition and its level of support for Omar. In precincts whose Black VAPs exceeded 40 percent, Omar received 47 percent of the vote. In precincts where the non-Hispanic white VAP was at least 80 percent, she received 44 percent. Her best precincts spanned Minneapolis’s white-majority University neighborhood, heavily Somali Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and diverse Powderhorn neighborhood.

Omar was also the only member of the Squad to face a competitive primary in 2020. Antone Melton-Meaux, a moderate attorney, mounted a bid against her, and even though both Melton-Meaux and Omar are Black, that race actually broke down much more closely along racial lines. 

Perhaps contrary to expectations, though, it was the progressive candidate who did better in Black neighborhoods. Omar won the primary overall, 58 percent to 39 percent, but she lost precincts with the highest white VAPs; Melton-Meaux defeated her 55 percent to 43 percent in parts of the district with white VAPs of at least 85 percent. Rather, Omar prevailed thanks to her strong performance in more racially diverse neighborhoods. She did especially well in precincts that were 40 percent Black or more, defeating Melton-Meaux 73 percent to 23 percent.

Why did Omar’s coalition shift between 2018 and 2020? Michael Minta, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, cautioned that it is impossible to say definitively but said that Omar’s support for the protests that rocked the district in the wake of George Floyd’s murder just a few months before the 2020 primary might have turned off moderate white Democrats in places like affluent, suburban Southwest Minneapolis. He also pointed to anti-Israel comments Omar made in 2019 that invoked anti-Semitic tropes as a possible factor. “That was used against her and highlighted in the campaign,” he said. Finally, he noted that media coverage of Omar’s first primary did not focus much on her progressive views, which may have made those moderate voters more willing to vote for her in 2018 than they were in 2020. “​​If she had that reputation she has now … I don’t know how that primary would have played out.”

Ayanna Pressley

Rep. Ayanna Pressley is the fourth original member of the Squad, and she also performed well in all corners of her district, but it was actually Black precincts that gave her, a Black woman, the highest levels of support. 

On Sept. 4, 2018, Pressley defeated then-Rep. Michael Capuano, a white incumbent who had served for nearly 20 years, 59 percent to 41 percent in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts’s 7th District. That 18-point margin is evidence that Pressley held her own everywhere, but she significantly outperformed Capuano, 76 percent to 24 percent, in the district’s 38 majority-Black precincts, mostly located in the Roxbury and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston.

Why was Pressley so successful in those areas? She had represented them for nearly nine years on the Boston City Council. And according to Beth Huang, the executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, Pressley’s deep roots in the community went over well with voters of color in general. “She had many validators in communities of color who had known her for a long time,” Huang said. “She also targeted a wider set of voters, including more young people and more people of color in Boston.”

But on top of that, Pressley was successful at expanding her appeal to whiter sections of the district, which ultimately elevated her candidacy even further. Per our analysis, she actually edged out Capuano, 51 percent to 49 percent, in the district’s 28 precincts with VAPs that are at least 70 percent white, reflecting her strength with young progressives in areas like Somerville and Allston. But as Huang made clear, Pressley’s win was years in the making. “She was — and is — a very well-known quantity,” Huang said. “She put in the work for 10 years to build a lot of credibility with many different types of voters.”

Jamaal Bowman

The Squad originally consisted of just the four congresswomen mentioned above, but on June 23, 2020, it got a new member: Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who defeated former Rep. Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th District, 55 percent to 41 percent. 

But despite the 16th District abutting Ocasio-Cortez’s, Bowman prevailed by following Pressley’s template of running up the score in heavily nonwhite neighborhoods. Engel, a white man who had represented the 16th District since 1989, won 51 percent to 45 percent in precincts with VAPs that are at least 70 percent white. But Bowman, a Black man, won 59 percent to 34 percent in Hispanic-majority precincts and 63 percent to 34 percent in Black-majority precincts.

Bowman didn’t have Pressley’s advantage of already being an elected official in the district, but according to McElwee (who advised Bowman during his campaign), he still had “real ties to civic and other institutions in the Black communities.” As a former school principal, McElwee said, Bowman was able to use his ties to the voters — particularly Black and Hispanic voters — to “upset the normal advantages that incumbents would otherwise have.”

Another thing that likely helped Bowman’s candidacy was a gaffe Engel made after Floyd’s murder and subsequent racial-justice protests, where he essentially said that he only sought press attention on the issue because of his upcoming primary race. Engel’s comment that “if I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care” may have signaled to Black voters especially that he didn’t share their community’s concerns over police brutality.

Cori Bush

Finally, the newest member of the Squad, Rep. Cori Bush, punched her ticket to Congress on Aug. 4, 2020, when she narrowly defeated then-Rep. Lacy Clay, 49 percent to 46 percent, in the Democratic primary for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District.

Bush’s path to victory was unusual among Squad members in that she actually lost the parts of her district with the highest concentration of voters who share her racial identity. Bush, who is Black, lost the district’s Black-majority precincts 54 percent to 43 percent. But there is an easy explanation for this: The Clay family had been an institution in St. Louis’s Black community for over 50 years. Clay’s father represented the district for 32 years, and the younger Clay had served the area in either the state legislature or Congress continuously since 1983.

In fact, one of the big reasons for the closeness of this race was Clay’s existing ties to older Black voters. According to Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state senator who represented a significant portion of the 1st District, Bush struggled a bit when it came to appealing to these voters since they had become accustomed to supporting the Clay name.

That said, it’s not like Bush didn’t attract any Black support: Her 43 percent performance in Black-majority precincts is actually pretty impressive considering the strength of her opponent. Indeed, Smith said, Bush had strong ties to the Black activist community who wanted to elect a more progressive representative following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which is part of the 1st District. “Bush’s district is really the epicenter for the modern civil rights racial justice movement post-Ferguson, so that nurtured a cadre of young activists that powered her campaign,” Smith said.

Where Bush really excelled, though, was in whiter parts of Missouri’s 1st District. In white-majority precincts, she defeated Clay 54 percent to 38 percent, and she turned in some of her strongest performances in the gentrified neighborhoods of St. Louis like those around Tower Grove Park. And it’s possible the Clay name might have also worked in Bush’s favor in conservative, white enclaves of the city. Smith suggested that some white voters might have voted for Bush as a protest vote against the Clay name. “A longstanding distrust of the Clay machine in some of those places probably helped her even though, ideologically, those wards are closer to him than her.” But Bush’s real base in this primary was white progressives, Smith said. 

In sum, the Squad members’ coalitions have been all over the map. While some members (Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Bush) did better in whiter precincts, others (Pressley and Bowman) did better in predominantly nonwhite areas. And in one case (Omar) there was no obvious pattern (at least in her initial election). 

Even with these differences, though, it’s clear that voters of color aren’t an automatic vote for the establishment-aligned candidate (as Capuano, Engel and Melton-Meaux can attest). Instead, in all the Squad’s primaries, it seems that voters of color opted for the candidate who had a deeper connection to their respective communities. And that shouldn’t be surprising. It makes a lot of sense, actually: Voters vote for the representative who they feel best represents them.

Aaron Bycoffe contributed research. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Curtis Yee. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.