Tag: national level

Trump Said the ‘Wrong’ Thing on Abortion

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Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on September 22, 2023

A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”

Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”

Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”

A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?

The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.

That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”

Read: It’s abortion, stupid

The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.

“Would you support that?” Welker asked.

“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.

Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign staff posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”

The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”

One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.

Read: The abortion absolutist

Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.

Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”

She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.

Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.

Mary Ziegler: Roe was never Roe after all

None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”

That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.

Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.

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Elaine Godfrey

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September 22, 2023
How Working-Class White Voters Became the GOP’s Foundation

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The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the GOP wants to cut.

A much larger share of Republican than Democratic House members represent districts where seniors exceed their share of the national population, census data show. Republicans are also more likely to represent districts where the median income trails the national level, or the proportion of people without health insurance is greater than in the nation overall.

House Republicans, in their ongoing struggle with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling, have signaled they will push for sweeping reductions in domestic social programs, likely including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the principal federal programs providing health care for working-age adults. And while House Republicans appear to have backed away from pursuing reductions in Social Security and Medicare, the conservative Republican Study Committee has set a long-term goal of cutting and partially privatizing both programs.

Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class

The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the power of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in American politics: the growing tendency of voters to divide between the parties based on cultural attitudes, rather than class interests. That dynamic has simultaneously allowed House Democrats to gain in more socially liberal, affluent, metropolitan areas and House Republicans to consolidate their hold over more culturally conservative, economically hardscrabble, nonurban areas.

Yesterday, Biden forcefully reiterated his charge that Republicans would shred the safety net at a White House ceremony commemorating the 13th anniversary of Barack Obama signing the ACA into law. An extended battle between House Republicans and Biden this spring and summer over the safety net may test whether any economic argument can allow Democrats to break through the cultural resistance that fortifies Republican control of these downscale districts.

While Republicans have gained in some areas primarily around culturally and racially infused disputes such as those over crime and immigration, a struggle over spending priorities will inevitably highlight that “their policies on these bread-and-butter issues remain diametrically opposed to the economic interest of much of their base,” Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, told me.

As I reported last week, to understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

That analysis inverts many traditional assumptions, even within the parties themselves, about whose voters rely on the social safety net. “There has been a massive transformation of the coalitions,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

Democrats, who led the legislative efforts to create Social Security under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson, have long thought of themselves as the party of seniors. But today, Republicans represent 141 of the 215 House districts where adults aged 65 and older exceed their 16 percent share of the national population, while Democrats hold a clear majority of seats in districts with fewer seniors than average, according to the Equity Research Institute analysis.

Republicans now also control most of the House seats in which the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Republicans hold 152 of the 237 seats in that category. Democrats, in turn, hold 128 of the 198 seats where the median income exceeds the national level.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Republicans hold a clear majority of the districts where the share of residents who lack health insurance exceeds the national level of 9 percent. The GOP now holds 110 of those 185 highly uninsured seats. Democrats control 138 of the 250 seats with fewer uninsured than the nation overall.

Equally revealing is to examine what share of each party’s total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.

The economically vulnerable districts that each side holds also present a stark demographic contrast. Low-income Democratic seats tend to be in urban centers with large nonwhite populations. In more than three-fourths of the Democratic seats with a median income below the national level, and in virtually all of the Democratic districts with more uninsured people than average, the minority share of the population is also higher than the national average.

Some low-income Republican districts also have large minority populations, particularly in Texas and Florida, where the GOP has made inroads into culturally conservative Latino communities. But mostly the low-income GOP seats are centered on working-class white areas, many of them outside metropolitan areas.

Read: Are Latinos really realigning toward Republicans?

In the 141 seats Republicans hold with more seniors than the national average, white residents exceed their national share of the population in 127 of them. Likewise, white residents surpass their share of the national population in more than four-fifths of the Republican-held districts that lag the median income. Nearly half of House Republicans represent districts in which all three things are true: They have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.

All of this reflects how working-class white voters, many of them financially squeezed, have become the unquestioned foundation of the GOP’s coalition at every level, from the House through presidential elections.

Biden is laying siege to those voters with a strategy of deemphasizing cultural disputes and stressing kitchen-table economic benefits. “Democrats really are making appeals to these districts in a big way,” Pierson said. “Most of that infrastructure and climate [spending] is going to go on in red states. There really is a big effort to say, ‘We are going to use policy to try to make our electoral coalition bigger.’”

A key element of Biden’s courtship of these voters is defending the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare. The president’s repeated rejection of reductions in those programs, combined with former President Donald Trump’s opposition to potential cuts, has resulted in the most obvious concession by House Republicans to their evolving electoral base: public declarations by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other leaders that they will not target Social Security and Medicare in the cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit this summer.

Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs that many voters in blue-collar Republican districts rely on, potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.

Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. “We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,” Blendon said. “The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.”

The one risk for Republicans in such areas, he noted, would be if voters conclude that they present a genuine threat to Social Security and Medicare. Even most conservative voters strongly favor those programs, Blendon told me, primarily because they view them as an earned benefit that workers have contributed to during their lifetime. If the GOP seriously pushes ideas such as converting Medicare into a voucher program, or diverting part of Social Security revenue into private investment accounts, then “in districts with a lot of older people, they are going to get in trouble,” Blendon said.

Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute, also believes that current Democratic arguments targeted at older and non-college-educated white voters that they are “voting against their interests” economically are unlikely to succeed. The problem, he says, is that those arguments don’t directly address the way many voters also define their interests to include cultural and racial dynamics. Because Republican strength in these older, predominantly white, financially stressed districts is rooted largely in “the alienation of white voters who fear the country is shifting on them demographically,” Democrats must ultimately make a more explicit case to those voters about how all Americans can benefit from a more diverse and inclusive society, Pastor said. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to talk more effectively about race and racism—not try to ignore it, but try to inoculate people against it,” he said.

Read: The four quadrants of American politics

Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, notes that the majority of voters, including seniors, support Biden’s approach to preserving the safety net for retirees: In a recent national survey, his group found that voters were nearly four times as likely to support stabilizing Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent rather than cutting benefits. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bennett told me. Even Medicaid, once seen as a program for the poor, now draws widespread support across party lines, he said.

Yet Bennett, too, is cautious about predicting that Republican efforts to cut the safety net will hurt them in districts that highly depend on it. The GOP, Bennett said, is gambling that it can cut programs that benefit the party’s lower-income white base and still prevent those voters from defecting to Democrats by stressing “other issues like immigration and the culture war.”

If Republicans face any internal resistance to sharp cuts in the safety net, in fact, it may be more likely to come from their members who represent socially liberal white-collar districts that don’t rely as much on these programs than from their members who represent the culturally conservative blue-collar districts that do depend on them. The Republicans who seem least concerned about targeting the social safety net are those who represent the places that need those programs the most. That’s another telling measure of just how fully the concrete has settled beneath a modern political alignment that revolves more around culture than class.

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Ronald Brownstein

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March 24, 2023
Why Congress Doesn’t Work

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Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.

That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.

Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.

This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.

The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided.

Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, substantial overlap remained between the kinds of districts each party held. In those years, large numbers of Democrats still represented mostly white, low-income rural and small-town districts with few college graduates, and a cohort of Republicans held well-educated, affluent suburban districts. That overlap didn’t prevent the House from growing more partisan and confrontational, but it did temper that trend, because the small-town “blue dog” Democrats and suburban “gypsy moth” Republicans were often the members open to working across party lines.

Now the parties represent districts more consistently divided along lines of demography, economic status, and geography, which makes finding common ground difficult. The parties’ intensifying separation “is a recipe for polarization,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

To understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The analysis revealed that along every key economic and demographic dimension, the two parties are now sorted to the extreme in the House districts they represent. “These people are coming to Washington not from different districts, but frankly different planets,” says former Representative Steve Israel, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Among the key distinctions:

*More than three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of the nonwhite population exceeds the national level of 40 percent. Four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts in which the minority share of the population is below the national level.

*Nearly three-fourths of House Democrats represent districts where the share of white adults with a college degree exceeds the national level of 36 percent. More than three-fourths of Republicans hold districts where the share of white college graduates trails the national level.

*Just over three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of immigrants exceeds the national level of 14 percent; well over four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts with fewer immigrants than average.

*Perhaps most strikingly, three-fifths of Democrats now hold districts where the median income exceeds the national level of nearly $65,000; more than two-thirds of Republicans hold districts where the median income falls beneath the national level.

Sorting congressional districts by racial diversity and education produces the “four quadrants of Congress”: districts with high levels of racial diversity and white education (“hi-hi” districts), districts with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of white education (“hi-lo districts”), districts with low levels of diversity and high levels of white education (“lo-hi districts”), and districts with low levels of diversity and white education (“lo-lo districts”). (The analysis focuses on the education level among whites, and not the entire population, because education is a more significant difference in the political behavior of white voters than of minority groups.)

Read: The GOP’s control of congress is only getting stronger

Looking at the House through that lens shows that the GOP has become enormously dependent on one type of seat: the “lo-lo” districts revolving around white voters without a college degree. Republicans hold 142 districts in that category (making up nearly two-thirds of the party’s House seats), compared with just 21 for Democrats.

The intense Republican reliance on this single type of mostly white, blue-collar district helps explain why the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Many of the most militantly conservative House Republicans represent these “lo-lo” districts—a list that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

“The right accuses the left of identity politics, when the analysis of this data suggests that identity politics has become the core of the Republican Party,” Pastor told me.

House Democrats are not nearly as reliant on seats from any one of the four quadrants. Apart from the lo-lo districts, they lead the GOP in the other three groupings. Democrats hold a narrow 37–30 lead over Republicans in the seats with high levels of diversity and few white college graduates (the “hi-lo” districts). These seats include many prominent Democrats representing predominantly minority areas, including Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. At the same time, these districts have been a source of growth for Republicans: The current Democratic lead of seven seats is way down from the party’s 28-seat advantage in 2009.

Democrats hold a more comfortable 57–35 edge in the “lo-hi” districts with fewer minorities and a higher share of white adults with college degrees than average. These are the mostly white-collar districts represented by leading suburban Democrats, many of them moderates, such as Angie Craig of Minnesota, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey. A large share of the House Republicans considered more moderate also represent districts in this bloc.

The core of Democratic strength in the House is the “hi-hi” districts that combine elevated levels of both racial minorities and college-educated whites. Democrats hold 98 of the 113 House seats in this category. Many of the party’s most visible members represent seats fitting this description, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the current House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries; former House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are also the strongholds for Democrats representing what Pastor calls the places where “diversity is increasing the most”: inner suburbs in major metropolitan areas. Among the members representing those sorts of constituencies are Lucy McBath of Georgia, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Though Democrats are not as dependent on any single quadrant as Republicans are on the low-diversity, low-education districts, each party over the past decade has been forced to retreat into its demographic citadel. As Drutman notes, that’s the result of a succession of wave elections that has culled many of the members from each side who had earlier survived in districts demographically and economically trending toward the other.

The first victims were the so-called blue-dog Democrats, who had held on to “lo-lo” districts long after they flipped to mostly backing Republican presidential candidates. Those Democrats from rural and small-town areas, many of them in the South, had started declining in the ’90s. Still, as late as 2009, during the first Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans held only 20 more seats than Democrats did in the “lo-lo” quadrant. Democrats from those districts composed almost as large a share of the total party caucus in that Congress as did members from the “hi-hi” districts.

But the 2010 Tea Party landslide virtually exterminated the blue dogs. After that election, the GOP edge in the lo-lo districts exploded to 90 seats; it reached 125 seats after redistricting and further GOP gains in the 2014 election. Today the districts low in diversity and white-education levels account for just one in 10 of all House Democratic seats, and the “hi-hi” seats make up nearly half. The seats low in diversity and high in white education (about one-fourth) and those high in diversity and low in white education (about one-sixth), provide the remainder.

For House Republicans, losses in the 2018 midterms represented the demographic bookend to their blue-collar, small-town gains in 2010. In 2018, Democrats, powered by white-collar antipathy toward Trump, swept away a long list of House Republicans who had held on to well-educated suburban districts that had been trending away from the GOP at the presidential level since Bill Clinton’s era.

Today, districts with a higher share of white college graduates than the nation overall account for less than one-fourth of all GOP seats, down from one-third in 2009. The heavily blue-collar “lo-lo” districts have grown from just over half of the GOP conference in 2009 to their current level of nearly two-thirds. (The share of Republicans in seats with more minorities and fewer white college graduates than average has remained constant since 2009, at about one in seven.)

Each party is pushing an economic agenda that collides with the immediate economic interests of a large portion of its voters. “The party leadership has not caught up with the coalitions,” says former Representative Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

For years, some progressives have feared that Democrats would back away from a populist economic agenda if the party grew more reliant on affluent voters. That shift has certainly occurred, with Democrats now holding 128 of the 198 House districts where the median income exceeds the national level. But the party has continued to advocate for a redistributionist economic agenda that seeks higher taxes on upper-income adults to fund expanded social programs for working-class families, as proposed in President Joe Biden’s latest budget. The one concession to the new coalition reality is that Democrats now seek to exempt from higher taxes families earning up to $400,000—a level that earlier generations of Democrats probably would have considered much too high.

Republicans face more dissonance between their reconfigured coalition and their agenda. Though the GOP holds 152 of the 237 districts where the median income trails the national level, the party continues to champion big cuts in domestic social programs that benefit low-income families while pushing tax cuts that mostly flow toward the wealthy and corporations. As former Democratic Representative David Price, now a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, says, there “is a pretty profound disconnect” between the GOP’s economic agenda and “the economic deprivation and what you would think would be a pretty clear set of needs” of the districts the party represents.

Each of these seeming contradictions underscores how cultural affinity has displaced economic interest as the most powerful glue binding each side’s coalition. Republicans like Davis lament that their party can no longer win culturally liberal suburban voters by warning that Democrats will raise their taxes; Democrats like Price express frustration that their party can’t win culturally conservative rural voters by portraying Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare.

The advantage for Republicans in this new alignment is that there are still many more seats where whites exceed their share of the national population than seats with more minorities than average. Likewise, the number of seats with fewer white college graduates than the nation overall exceeds the number with more.

That probably gives Republicans a slight advantage in the struggle for House control over the next few years. Of the 22 House seats that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates as toss-ups or leaning toward the other party in 2024, for instance, 14 have fewer minorities than average and 12 have fewer white college graduates. “On the wedge issues, a lot of the swing districts look a little bit more like Republican districts than Democratic districts,” says Drutman, whose own recent analysis of House districts used an academic polling project to assess attitudes in all 435 seats.

But as Pastor points out, Republicans are growing more dependent on those heavily white and non-college-educated districts as society overall is growing more diverse and better educated, especially in younger generations. “It’s hard to see how the Republicans can grow their coalition,” Pastor told me, with the militant culture-war messages they are using “to cement their current coalition.”

Davis, the former NRCC chair, also worries that the GOP is relying too much on squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. The way out of that trap, he argues, is for Republicans to continue advancing from the beachheads they have established in recent years among more culturally conservative voters of color, especially Latino men.

Read: Are latinos really realigning toward Republicans?

But Republicans may struggle to make sufficient gains with those voters to significantly shift the balance of power in the House: Though the party last year improved among Latinos in Florida, the results in Arizona, Nevada, and even Texas showed the GOP still facing substantial barriers. The Trump-era GOP also continues to face towering resistance in well-educated areas, which limits any potential recovery there: In 2020, Biden, stunningly, carried more than four-fifths of the House districts where the share of college-educated white adults exceeds the national level. Conversely, despite Biden’s emphasis on delivering tangible economic benefits to working families, Democrats still faced enormous deficits with blue-collar white voters in the midterms. With many of its most vulnerable members defending such working-class terrain, Democrats could lose even more of those seats in 2024.

Constrained by these offsetting dynamics, neither party appears well positioned to break into a clear lead in the House. The two sides look more likely to remain trapped in a grinding form of electoral trench warfare in which they control competing bands of districts that are almost equal in number, but utterly antithetical in their demographic, economic, and ideological profile.

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Ronald Brownstein

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March 17, 2023
How to Make Sense of This Fall’s Messy COVID Data

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It is a truth universally acknowledged among health experts that official COVID-19 data are a mess right now. Since the Omicron surge last winter, case counts from public-health agencies have become less reliable. PCR tests have become harder to access and at-home tests are typically not counted.

Official case numbers now represent “the tip of the iceberg” of actual infections, Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York, told me. Although case rates may seem low now, true infections may be up to 20 times higher. And even those case numbers are no longer available on a daily basis in many places, as the CDC and most state agencies have switched to updating their data once a week instead of every day.

How, then, is anyone supposed to actually keep track of the COVID-19 risk in their area—especially when cases are expected to increase this fall and winter? Using newer data sources, such as wastewater surveillance and population surveys, experts have already noticed potential signals of a fall surge: Official case counts are trending down across the U.S., but Northeast cities such as Boston are seeing more coronavirus in their wastewater, and the CDC reports that this region is a hotspot for further-mutated versions of the Omicron variant. Even if you’re not an expert, you can still get a clearer picture of how COVID-19 is hitting your community in the weeks ahead. You’ll simply need to understand how to interpret these alternate data sources.

The problem with case data goes right to the source. Investment in COVID-19 tracking at the state and local levels has been in free fall, says Sam Scarpino, a surveillance expert at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Initiative. “More recently, we’ve started to see lots of states sunsetting their reporting,” Scarpino told me. Since the Pandemic Prevention Initiative and the Pandemic Tracking Collective started publishing a state-by-state scorecard of breakthrough-case reporting in December 2021, the number of states with a failing grade has doubled. Scarpino considers this trend a “harbinger of what’s coming” as departments continue to shift resources away from COVID-19 reporting.

Read: Warning signs about the first post-pandemic winter

Hospitalization data don’t suffer from the same reporting problems, because the federal government collects information directly from thousands of facilities across the country. But “hospitalizations often lag behind cases by a matter of weeks,” says Caroline Hugh, an epidemiologist and volunteer with the People’s CDC, an organization providing COVID-19 data and guidance while advocating for improved safety measures. Hospitalizations also don’t necessarily reflect transmission rates, which still matter if you want to stay safe. Some studies suggest, for example, that long COVID might now be more likely than hospitalization after an infection.

For a better sense of how much the coronavirus is circulating, many experts are turning to wastewater surveillance. Samples from our sewage can provide an advanced warning of increased COVID-19 spread because everyone in a public-sewer system contributes data; the biases that hinder PCR test results don’t apply. As a result, Hugh and her colleagues at the People’s CDC consider wastewater trends to be more “consistent” than constantly fluctuating case numbers.

When Omicron first began to wreak havoc in December 2021, “the wastewater data started to rise very steeply, almost two weeks before we saw the same rise” in case counts, Newsha Ghaeli, the president and a co-founder of the wastewater-surveillance company Biobot Analytics, told me. Biobot is now working with hundreds of sewage-sampling sites in all 50 states, Ghaeli said. The company’s national and regional dashboard incorporates data from every location in its network, but for more local data, you might need to go to a separate dashboard run by the CDC or by your state health department. Some states have wastewater surveillance in every county, while others have just a handful of sites. If your location is not represented, Ghaeli said, “the wastewater data from communities nearby is still very applicable.” And even if your county does have tracking, checking up on neighboring communities might be good practice. “A surge in a state next door … could very quickly turn into a surge locally,” Ghaeli explained.

Read: The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like

Ghaeli recommends watching how coronavirus levels in wastewater shift over time, rather than homing in on individual data points. Look at both “directionality” and “magnitude”: Are viral levels increasing or decreasing, and how do these levels compare with earlier points in the pandemic? A 10 percent uptick when levels are low is less concerning than a 10 percent uptick when the virus is already spreading widely.

Researchers are still working to understand how wastewater data correlate with actual infections, because every community has unique waste patterns. For example, big cities differ from rural areas, and in some places, environmental factors such as rainfall or nearby agriculture may interfere with coronavirus tracking. Still, long-term-trend data are generally thought to be a good tool that can help sound the alarm on new surges.

Wastewater data can help you figure out how much COVID-19 is spreading in a community and can even track all the variants circulating locally, but they can’t tell you who’s getting sick. To answer the latter question, epidemiologists turn to what Nash calls “active surveillance”: Rather than relying on the COVID-19 test results that happen to get reported to a public-health agency, actively seek out and ask people whether they recently got sick or tested positive.

Nash and his team at CUNY have conducted population surveys in New York City and at the national level. The team’s most recent survey (which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed), conducted from late June to early July, included questions about at-home test results and COVID-like symptoms. From a nationally representative survey of about 3,000 people, Nash and his team found that more than 17 percent of U.S. adults had COVID-19 during the two-week period—about 24 times higher than the CDC’s case counts at that time.

Studies like these “capture people who might not be counted by the health system,” Nash told me. His team found that Black and Hispanic Americans and those with low incomes were more likely to get sick during the survey period, compared with the national estimate. The CDC and Census Bureau take a similar approach through the ongoing Household Pulse Survey.

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These surveys are “a goldmine of data,” though they need to be “carefully designed,” Maria Pyra, an epidemiologist and volunteer with the People’s CDC, told me. By showing the gap between true infections and officially reported cases, surveys like Nash’s can allow researchers to approximate how much COVID-19 is really spreading.

Survey results may be delayed by weeks or months, however, and are typically published in preprints or news reports rather than on a health agency’s dashboard. They might also be biased by who chooses to respond or how questions are worded. Scarpino suggested a more timely option: data collected from cellphone locations or social media. The Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, provides data on how many people are Googling coldlike symptoms or seeking COVID-related doctor visits. While such trends aren’t a perfect proxy for case rates, they can be a helpful warning that transmission patterns are changing.

Readers seeking to monitor COVID-19 this fall should “look as local as you can,” Scarpino recommended. That means examining county- or zip-code-level data, depending on what’s available for you. Nash suggested checking multiple data sources and attempting to “triangulate” between them. For example, if case data suggest that transmission is down, do wastewater data say the same thing? And how do the data match with local behavior? If a popular community event or holiday happened recently, low case numbers might need to be taken with a grain of salt.

“We’re heading into a period where it’s going to be increasingly harder to know what’s going on with the virus,” Nash told me. Case numbers will continue to be undercounted, and dashboards may be updated less frequently. Pundits on Twitter are turning to Yankee Candle reviews for signs of surges. Helpful sources still exist, but piecing together the disparate data can be exhausting—after all, data reporting and interpretation should be a job for our public-health agencies, not for concerned individuals.

Read: The plan to stop every respiratory virus at once

Rather than accept this fragmented data status quo, experts would like to see improved public-health systems for COVID-19 and other diseases, such as monkeypox and polio. “If we get better at collecting and making available local, relevant infectious-disease data for decision making, we’re going to lead healthier, happier lives,” Scarpino said.

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Betsy Ladyzhets

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October 17, 2022