Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. After hitting a low of 37.5 percent in July, President Biden’s approval rating has ticked up over 5 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. While he’s still underwater, at 42.7 percent, it is nonetheless a substantial change. But will Biden’s upswing continue? It’s not a huge mystery […]
Author: Monica Potts
Why Republican Voters Support Ballot Initiatives Their Red States Do Not
When Kansas voters earlier this month rejected a ballot initiative that would have made it easier for the state legislature to restrict or ban abortion, it was only the latest example of otherwise red-state voters backing a measure seemingly out of step with their usual politics. Over the past decade, voters in 12 states have […]
What’s Behind Senate Republicans’ Hesitancy Toward Same-Sex Marriage?
It’s hard to think of an issue on which public opinion in the United States has changed as completely and rapidly as it has on same-sex marriage. When Gallup began tracking the issue in 1996, support was at about 27 percent, with 68 percent opposed. As of May, however, 71 percent supported same-sex marriage with […]
How Limiting Access To Abortion Limits Access To Birth Control
Planned Parenthood has been controversial since its 1916 founding, but the latest wave of political battles against it began in earnest in 2007, when then-Rep. Mike Pence introduced an amendment to a House of Representatives’ appropriations bill to block federal funds from going to the organization’s nationwide network of reproductive health clinics. Planned Parenthood was […]
Why Democratic Appeals To The ‘Working Class’ Are Unlikely to Work
A year ago, Rep. Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, sent a memo to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about how he thought the Republican Party should work to keep the coalition that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Republicans, he thought, could “permanently become the Party of the Working Class.” It was a […]
A Gas Holiday Might Be Popular, But It’s Unlikely To Do Much To Lower Inflation
Earlier this week President Biden asked Congress to temporarily suspend collection of federal gas and diesel taxes for three months as a way to relieve pressure on Americans as national gas prices rise to $5 a gallon. If the price keeps going up, it could top highs not seen since the summer of 2008. High […]
What Ireland’s Past Can Tell Us About A Post-Roe America
Before 2018, most women in the Republic of Ireland were able to get abortions only if they traveled to a clinic in England or Wales or had a self-managed abortion at home, but figuring out how to do either of those options was difficult. Information on abortion was censored in the first years of the […]
The Work-From-Home Era Left Them Out
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Veronica wasn’t sure how the new disease she’d heard about on the news would affect her. It seemed unreal. She and her friends had just been joking about a game on the Google Play Store, in which the goal was to wipe out humanity with a deadly […]
Why Twitter Is Unlikely To Become The ‘Digital Town Square’ Elon Musk Envisions
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. On Monday, Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the world’s richest man, struck a deal to buy Twitter for about $44 billion. Twitter users have been tweeting all week about what it means — in large part because it’s not clear […]
Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity
By September 2021, the scientists and staffers at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had gathered enough data to know that the trees in its green-tree reservoirs — a type of hardwood wetland ecosystem — were dying. At Hurricane Lake, a wildlife management area of 17,000 acres, the level of severe illness and death in […]