Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI):
More Acceptance but Growing Polarization on LGBTQ Rights: Findings From the 2022 American Values Atlas
Eight in ten Americans (80%) favor laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing. This includes 48% who strongly support such laws. About one in five Americans (18%) oppose these laws, including 7% who strongly oppose them. Support for these protections has increased over the past few years: around seven in ten Americans favored nondiscrimination provisions in 2015 (71%), 2017 (70%), 2018 (69%), and 2019 (72%), before rising to 76% in 2020 and 79% in 2021.[5]
Overwhelming shares of Democrats (90%) and independents (82%), as well as two-thirds of Republicans (66%), favor nondiscrimination provisions for LGBTQ people. Since 2015, support has increased by 12 percentage points among Democrats (78% to 90%) and nine percentage points among independents (73% to 82%). Support among Republicans has increased by five percentage points (61% to 66%).
Vox:
Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.
Republicans just got a painful reminder that political stunts can backfire.
These attacks did not succeed. The [Affordable care Act] bill became law, and Obamacare is popular now that it has been in full effect for nearly a decade without anyone being forced to stand before a death panel. But there is at least one lasting legacy of these attempts to characterize the Affordable Care Act as an attack on patients’ right to decide whether and when to seek health treatments.
In many states, opponents of Obamacare effectively took the GOP’s talking points and turned them into state constitutional amendments protecting patients’ ability to obtain health care that the government might not want them to have. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
According to Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Widener University, similar amendments are on the books in several other states.
The Wall Street Journal:
Top Progressives Stick With Biden Despite Rightward Moves on Crime, Immigration, Climate
Left wing of party says president remains their best bet in the 2024 election
Mr. Biden sided with Republicans on overturning Washington, D.C.’s crime code, prompting howls from progressives for stepping on home rule, and the White House has drawn scrutiny for considering a return to a policy of detaining migrant families who cross illegally into the U.S. The administration also approved the Willow oil-drilling project over the objections of environmentalists.
Progressive lawmakers and activists criticized the moves, but the blowback has been limited. No major protests have emerged outside the White House, like those seen during former President Barack Obama’s administration, and there has been no talk of a serious primary challenger from the progressive flank. Many see Mr. Biden as critical to winning the coming presidential race and helping take back full control of Congress, even if they aren’t always on the same page.
Eric Garcia/The Independent:
House Republicans declare war – but Senate Republicans don’t want to talk about Trump’s indictment
Even Trump critics in the party don’t want to discuss it
Few Republicans have criticised former president Donald Trump more than Senator Mitt Romney. The 2012 Republican nominee for president and current Utah Senator voted to convict Mr Trump in his impeachment trial in 2020 and his impeachment after the January 6 riot in 2021.
But when your dispatcher caught him in the Senate basement on Tuesday evening ahead of votes, he had little to say about the potential indictment of Mr Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“You know, I’ll have something for you if and when that occurs, but it hasn’t and so I got nothing,” he told The Independent.
That’s actually a smart move, since we have no idea if or when this stuff will happen.
Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:
Jim Jordan’s sordid attack on possible Trump charges demands an answer
If and when Donald Trump faces criminal charges, it will thrust the country into a new type of political war over an unprecedented situation, and Republicans are already rising to the occasion. They’re signaling a willingness to deploy the full levers of their power in sordid but novel ways, to paint any prosecution as the stuff of banana republics.
Democrats will have to marshal some serious creativity in response. The extraordinary move by House Republicans to insert themselves into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation of Trump provides Democrats with an opening to do just that.
Tom Edsall/The New York Times:
The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory
The authors [Sides, Tesler and Vavreck] combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”
“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level.
Now, this earlier scholarship notwithstanding, three political scientists are presenting an alternative interpretation of the 2016 election. In their Feb. 28 paper “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes,” Justin Grimmer of Stanford, William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, also of Stanford, write:
We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, 2017; Mason, Wronski and Kane, 2021). Using the ANES, however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012, came from whites with moderate racial resentment. This result holds despite the fact that the relationship between vote choice and racial resentment was stronger in 2016 and 2020 than in other elections.
How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true? Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau write:
Decomposing the change in support observed in the ANES data, we show that respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views.
In an email, Marble provided more detail:
Whites with high levels of racial resentment supported Trump at a historically high rate compared to prior Republican presidential candidates. Yet, between 2012 and 2016, the number of people who scored at the high end of the racial resentment scale declined significantly. As a result, there were simply fewer high racial resentment voters for Trump to win in 2016 and 2020 than there were in earlier eras. At the same time, the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
Certainly one possible explanation is that with more moderate Republicans voting, the extreme ones didn’t decide the election—the moderates did. Those moderates disliked Hillary Clinton enough for whatever reason to vote for Trump. For them, Trump’s worst qualities were not disqualifying.
I am sure there are other explanations, but that’s what occurred to me. And what also occurred to Edsall to mention in this long piece is that attacks on Trump’s character, therefore, have limited value.
Better to focus on what he did and will do than who he is. Everyone already knows who he is.
Janan Ganesh/Financial Times:
Don’t assume that DeSantis is a safe alternative to Trump
Precisely because the Florida governor is not a natural fit with Maga voters, he tries dangerously hard to please them
Some Conservatives have a theory about this. Having voted Remain, and scolded “nasty” Tories in the past, [Theresa] May was always straining to show the right that she was one of them. The result was textbook overcompensation. A fervent Leaver, with nothing to prove, might have been milder on the status of UK-resident EU citizens, for instance. And slower to invoke Article 50, the formal process of Brexit, when there was no plan.
An ocean away, US Republicans won’t remember her from among the rabble of recent UK premiers. But, as Ron DeSantis courts them, the parable of May is something to keep in mind as a warning. The idea has taken hold that Florida’s governor is a much safer alternative to Donald Trump: a populist, no doubt, but a house-trained one. This is wrong, or at least rash, on two counts.
First, DeSantis is abler and more disciplined than Trump. Even if he believes in just three-quarters of the Maga creed, he can get a greater share of it enacted. Trump’s efforts to subvert the US system always hit against the limits of his own attention span and executive grip. That fail-safe won’t exist with DeSantis.
Second, there is something of May about DeSantis: something of the try-hard.