2022 Election

Why Democratic Appeals To The 'Working Class' Are Unlikely to Work

By Monica Potts

Jul. 6, 2022, at 6:00 AM

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 paradigm shift, he argued, and embracing it would be key to Republicans winning back the House and Senate in the midterm elections. “After five years,” he said, “it’s clear this reversal isn’t a temporary realignment contingent on Donald Trump’s presence in the White House — both parties are undergoing coalitional transformations.”

For Democrats, meanwhile, memos on how to hold on to or win back the working class are perennial favorites from pollsters and strategists. This has been especially true during the midterm cycle as Democrats sound the alarm that their party is out of touch with their constituents. “The starting point for the strategy is seeing that both our base and our target persuasion audiences are working-class and struggling, and we see them and wear their shoes,” the longtime pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in a polling memo in November. What’s left unsaid but is heavily implied in these appeals, though, is that Democrats are primarily concerned with losing the white working class.

These voters are the focus of key Senate races in Pennsylvania and Ohio, two states where the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016. President Biden narrowly won back Pennsylvania in 2020, but Ohio remained unattainable. Yet Democrats are following similar playbooks: In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is talking about unions, and in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan is promising to raise the minimum wage and expand child care. 

These messages, though, are unlikely to work on their own because the dividing line in the American electorate is not economics; it’s race and culture. Democratic strategists often point to Barack Obama’s presidency and his response to the Great Recession as a turning point for the party’s appeals to working-class white people. After all, Obama won many of the Rust Belt states partly on the strength of the white working-class vote, but after his presidency, many of those voters turned to Trump and the Republican Party. That’s because Obama’s presidency marked another big turning point in American society: a step toward greater racial equity. And on this issue, Democrats and Republicans could not be further apart. It’s why Democratic appeals to win back the working class are unlikely to work, too.

The parties’ pitches

In the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, “building a stronger, fairer economy” was the second item listed, after strategies to deal with COVID-19, and it sounded a populist note: that the American economy is tilted toward corporations and the wealthy, and that it’s harder than ever for Americans to move up the economic ladder. “Americans deserve an economy that works for everyone — not just for the wealthy and the well-connected,” their platform reads. 

Indeed, Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill focused largely on the economy and passed soon after he took office. They’ve also concentrated on other priorities meant to help middle-class families financially, including an effort that would expand the child tax credit and help families pay for child care and extend subsidies for health insurance. 

By contrast, the agenda Banks laid out in his memo to McCarthy centers on nationalistic policies and cultural issues — not necessarily economic ones. For instance, Banks devotes an entire category to “Anti-Wokeness,” writing, “Nothing better encapsulates Democrats’ elitism and classism than their turn towards ‘wokeness.’” And the first item on his list is immigration. But even when the memo does turn to the economy, in its section on trade, Banks largely makes an anti-China argument. “President Trump’s push to take on the Chinese Communist Party resonated because voters felt, correctly, that the Communist Party harmed American jobs more than any other foreign government.” Likewise, Banks’s point during a section on “Main Street vs Wall Street” is to rail against the COVID-19 shutdown policies and not point to any economic differences.

What’s clear from the two parties’ approaches is that Republicans mainly think of the working class as a cultural and racial identity, and not an economic one. Democrats, to be sure, are also leaning into a cultural appeal when they pitch themselves to working-class voters — primarily a populist appeal bent on uniting the working class against corporate greed — but it is still rooted more in economics than any national culture-war issue.

One struggle for Democrats in this messaging war is that cultural and ethnic identities have traditionally mattered more to Americans than class identity. “America is the only country that never had a mass socialist movement or a really successful labor movement on the level of even Canada, much less Europe,” said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside. “So I think that America has a sort of skittishness or reluctance to embrace its social class solidarity.” Americans are somewhat divided on class politics: Most say unions have had a positive effect on American life, but many are also skeptical of socialism.

Some Democratic strategists and pundits have argued that Trump was successful because he recognized the anger that the working classes have felt since the Great Recession and because he then channeled it, even if he didn’t have the policies to match. The Democratic strategists, though, argue that they do have such policies. And indeed, legislation like the COVID-19 recovery bill has been popular. Seventy percent of adults were in favor of it, including even 41 percent of Republicans. However, Biden’s popularity has dropped below 40 percent since then, and Republicans are favored to reclaim the House. These policies on their own just aren’t enough to break through an increasingly divided country.

Who is the “working class”?

Part of the problem for Democrats is that since Trump’s election, the definition of “working class” — already a squishy term — has largely come to be defined as people who haven’t graduated from college, especially when it refers to white people. The issue with this definition is that it constitutes the vast majority of Americans: Only about a third of adults in the country over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree, including about 36 percent of white, non-Hispanic people.

For instance, while it’s generally true that not having a college degree leads to lower average earnings than having one, that broad assessment is not always true. (The amount a college degree pays off also varies by race and gender.) It misses groups like small-business owners, who may not have gone to college but whose incomes vary widely. In fact, some blue-collar workers, like those employed in the natural gas industry, might have upper-middle-class income levels. In these cases, the economic threats they often see are from Democrats to their industries, not to their own finances, which is why messaging about the government’s role in helping struggling families can fall flat with them. 

In general, Trump and the Republican Party have solidified a base of support in rural areas, which are overwhelmingly white and have lower rates of college attainment than the country as a whole, at just 21 percent. But understanding class divisions in rural America is challenging. Small-business owners and county leaders, for instance, seem to have supported Trump in just as high numbers as their lower-earning neighbors. Moreover, because fewer people with a bachelor’s degree live in rural counties overall, non-college-educated workers are just more likely to make up the middle class there. 

“If you have enough money to buy a truck and have enough money to feed your family and have a four-person house, you’re certainly not struggling,” said Daniel Laurison, a sociologist at Swarthmore College. But Republicans and Trump, according to Laurison, have used confusion around class to their advantage. “Being a white person without a college degree makes you a regular guy,” said Laurison. “It doesn’t make you economically disadvantaged.”

Yet there’s still a tendency, especially among college-educated, urban workers, to assume that those kinds of cultural differences indicate a different class position and that it’s rural voters’ class position — not their cultural attitudes — driving their votes. 

But this takes it as a given that the long-term trends in economic outcomes, which have affected many Americans, are what Trump’s voters are responding to. This line of thinking, though, ignores other changes in American life and politics, such as an increase in global trade, a shift toward knowledge work instead of blue-collar labor, a relatively new emphasis on sending students to college and a more expansive view of rights and equalities for racial, ethnic and gender minorities. 

These rifts in the kind of work that people do, the lives they live, who their neighbors are and what they think is important are what the educational divide might be picking up as much as income. “We certainly see a lot of mistrust of the elites, of people in positions of power, business leaders and elected leaders,” said Jeffrey Jones, senior editor of Gallup. “Education is a split [that] … we hadn’t seen before.”

When Trump voters are interviewed about why they supported him, they highlight gun rights, abortion, America’s standing in the world and anti-Obama and anti-Clinton sentiment. It’s, in part, why Republicans continue to attack the cultural elite, from elite colleges to the Washington elite, in their messages. They know this resonates with their base as there’s ample evidence that Trump voters’ anxiety is more about racial and gender equality and America’s standing in the world than it is about economic equality.

In reality, voters who rank the economy as their top concern tend to be richer, whiter and more Republican-leaning already, and their economic concerns very likely come from a different viewpoint than a class-based grievance sparked by inequality.

In his bid for a Senate seat in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan is making his appeal to voters based, in part, on a promise to raise the minimum wage and expand child care access. But his argument also has an anti-China component, which sparked criticism from other Democrats for using the “hate” and “fear” of the Republican playbook. Additionally, in his first ad against J.D. Vance, his Republican opponent, Ryan struck a populist chord, criticizing Vance for having left Ohio for San Francisco “to make millions and invest in companies that profit from globalization and free trade.” Ryan says all this while sitting at a diner. “[Vance] became a celebrity, CNN analyst and a big hit at Washington cocktail parties,” says Ryan.

But it’s hard to see how these cultural attacks, normally made by Republicans against Democrats, will work. For starters, the facts of Vance’s post-Ohio life might not matter as much as the basics of his biography — he served in the military and first became famous for writing a book about his Appalachian grandparents. Moreover, as a candidate, he hasn’t shied away from openly nationalistic, anti-Latino appeals. According to Laurison, the elite thing doesn’t stick either, “because [Vance is] not part of the cultural elite in the same way.”

In Pennsylvania, Fetterman is a slightly different case. He’s served as mayor of a Rust Belt town and as a lieutenant governor with just-a-dude authenticity. But the voters who put Biden over the top in 2020 were largely the voters for whom the Democratic message is already appealing or suburban voters who found Trump off-putting. It’s true that Fetterman won the primary pretty much everywhere — and handily — but he lacked support from the Democratic establishment, and it’s unclear whether he can win over more moderate, suburban voters in the general election. Polls show time and again that lower-middle-class voters routinely vote for Democrats, while white voters of all income levels vote for Republicans.

There’s also some evidence that Democratic voters want their party to also concentrate on social issues: A Democracy Corps focus group from May found that Democratic voters positively associated Democrats with “equality; civil liberties and rights; empathy; civil rights; police reform; social issues; and focus on the environment.” The issue on economics and on social issues, the memo said, was that “Democrats always ‘disappoint.’ They promise big change and nothing happens.” 

This is at odds with the advice of strategists like David Shor. “[T]he way we get around [ideological polarization] is by talking a lot about progressive goals that are not ideologically polarizing, goals that we share with self-described conservatives and moderates,” Shor, a Democratic data scientist, told New York Magazine last March. “Even among nonwhite voters, those tend to be economic issues.” But this assumes that voters will forget about the party alignments that are deeply entrenched.

When Democrats lament a bygone era in which they won the working-class vote, they are primarily talking about the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt— a time when the economy was radically shifted toward worker and labor power. But that was also a time when policies meant to favor the working class were specifically designed to help white men. The relative position of many people in the economy — and society at large — has shifted, and if that’s what Republican voters are responding to, messages of economic justices and leveling the playing field for all workers won’t change that. 

NBA

The Hawks, T-Wolves And Knicks Made Moves With Clear Upsides — And Downsides

By Jared Dubin

Jul. 6, 2022, at 6:00 AM

While the NBA community waits with bated breath to find out where Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Deandre Ayton and others will play next year, plenty of this summer’s most important deals have already gone down. Let’s check in on the three most aggressive moves so far, which involved a trio of teams looking to make a leap in 2022-23.

The Atlanta Hawks got the party started early, swinging a trade with the San Antonio Spurs for All-Star point guard Dejounte Murray the day before free agency opened. Atlanta paid a steep price, not in players (they only sent away Danilo Gallinari, who will be waived upon completion of the trade) but rather in draft picks: The Hawks sent San Antonio a 2023 first-round pick (which originally belonged to the Charlotte Hornets), plus their own 2025 and 2027 first-round picks and swap rights to their 2026 first-rounder. They then shipped Kevin Huerter to the Sacramento Kings for Justin Holiday, Mo Harkless and a protected first-round pick in 2024. (It’s a Kings pick, so let’s just assume it’ll eventually become two second-rounders.)

For all of that capital, the Hawks got a player who fills their roster gaps well. Even after making improvements in recent seasons,¹ Murray is not much of a shooter, but he is an excellent defender who can hold his own in almost any perimeter matchup and is one of the best turnover-forcers in the NBA. Murray led the league in steals last season, making him a key addition for a Hawks defense that ranked 28th in opponent turnover rate.

Murray’s defense will spare Trae Young from the more difficult guard defensive matchup on a nightly basis. And on offense, Murray will serve as a second point guard on the floor (and likely run point solo with Young off the court), able to both take advantage of Young’s brilliant passing (Murray’s 54.4 effective field-goal percentage on drives ranked 34th among 151 players who drove to the rim at least 250 times last season, according to Second Spectrum) and allow Young to better weaponize his shooting by playing off the ball in half-court situations more often.

Last season, Trae had the ball in his hands more than every player in the league save for Luka Dončić and James Harden. That’s a taxing job, and it took a toll on Young’s off-ball movement. Among the 178 players leaguewide who ran at least 1 mile per game on offense, per Second Spectrum, Young ranked 150th in time spent moving fast (as opposed to slow or medium speed). Considering he ranked 21st among that same group of players in maximum speed, that seems like a waste of a weapon who could have thrown opposing defenses into chaos. Murray will allow the Hawks to access that weapon more often, assuming Young commits to utilizing it (which is no guarantee based on his history of not exactly being engaged when off the ball).

Murray is also set to make just $34.3 million over the next two seasons combined, giving him one of the most team-friendly contracts in the league. But the ultimate fate of this trade probably depends on what Atlanta does next. Given the extensive draft capital the Hawks gave up to secure his services, they will likely make every effort to re-sign Murray when he hits free agency following the 2023-24 season.² That gives Atlanta two years to convince Murray to stick around, and the team will presumably have to give him reason beyond his friendship with Young (with whom he shares the same agency). While they haven’t yet depleted their entire asset cupboard, the Hawks will need to nail whatever moves they make with John Collins and/or Clint Capela, the Hawks’ last remaining high-level trade pieces who could help build around their new Young-Murray duo.

A similar all-in push came from the Minnesota Timberwolves, who sent Malik Beasley, Patrick Beverley, Jarred Vanderbilt, Leandro Bolmaro, the rights to No. 22 overall pick Walker Kessler, unprotected first-round picks in 2023, 2025 and 2027 and a top-five-protected pick in 2029 to the Utah Jazz for three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert.

Karl-Anthony Towns should fit with Gobert on offense — at least in the regular season. People can joke all they want about Towns declaring himself the greatest big-man shooter of all time, but the guy has a 53-40-83 shooting line for his career, on considerable volume. He’s also an excellent post scorer and a high-level passer, while Gobert has been one of the NBA’s most effective pick-and-roll dive men over the last several seasons. The duo will give Anthony Edwards³ vastly different ball-screen partners, allowing the budding star wing to diversify his game even more than he did during his sophomore season. Meanwhile, the spacing with Gobert next to Towns won’t be much worse than it was with Vanderbilt.

Of course, this trade was not about offense. It was about defense, and Gobert has essentially been a top-10 defense unto himself for his entire career: Utah ranked seventh, third, second, second, 13th, fourth and ninth in defensive efficiency in Gobert’s seven full seasons as the team’s starting center, despite routinely employing subpar perimeter defenders. So it’s a good bet that he will transform Minnesota’s defense immediately. Gobert remains an elite rim protector, and he is arguably the best in the NBA at executing the league’s most common pick-and-roll defensive tactic (drop coverage, where he lapped the field in fewest points allowed per possession last season, according to Second Spectrum).

Minnesota allowed opponents to convert 66.4 percent of their shots in the restricted area last season, per NBA Advanced Stats, which ranked ninth-worst in the league. That will almost certainly not happen again with Gobert in town, considering he has ranked no worse than sixth in opponent field-goal percentage when he was within 5 feet of both the rim and the shooter over the past seven seasons.⁴ Towns ranked significantly lower on those same lists, a clear motivating factor in Minnesota’s decision to pair him with the three-time Defensive Player of the Year.

How Towns will fare defending in space more often is an open question — as is how the Wolves will adjust to likely running a much tamer defensive system than they did a year ago, when they were among the most aggressive defenses in the NBA. Gobert should be able to paper over most weaknesses for at least the next couple of seasons, but it’s worth remembering that the Frenchman turned 30 this offseason, a benchmark after which NBA players tend to decline. What happens when Gobert drops off from being a perennial Defensive Player of the Year front-runner to merely an above-average defender? That day may be coming sooner than the Wolves think, and they’ll likely be paying Gobert more than $40 million per season when it does.

As an aside, in case you’re counting, the Murray and Gobert deals included five unprotected first-round picks, one just-selected first-round pick, one top-five protected pick and one first-round pick swap — all in exchange for two players who were All-Stars but not All-NBA players last season. Sheesh.

The New York Knicks did not surrender nearly as much draft capital to land their man as did the Hawks and Wolves, but they did expend a lot of effort to clear cap space to sign Jalen Brunson (four years, $104 million). In a series of transactions around draft night, the Knicks sent out essentially six future second-round picks⁵ to shed the contracts of Kemba Walker, Alec Burks and Nerlens Noel, while also turning the No. 11 overall pick in last month’s draft (Ousmane Dieng) into three protected future first-rounders. All of that was done with Brunson in mind, to go with adding Isaiah Hartenstein (two years, $16 million) and re-signing Mitchell Robinson (four years, $60 million).

Brunson is an excellent fit for what Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau likes in a point guard. He’s tough and aggressive, he lives in the paint, and (this might actually be the most important part, at least for Thibs) they have known each other for years. The Knicks ran the fourth-most pick and rolls per 100 possession last season, per Second Spectrum, and Brunson is excellent in the action: Among 56 players who ran at least 1,000 ball screens last season, Brunson’s were the 11th-most fruitful when the play resulted in a shot, turnover or foul drawn by either Brunson or a teammate one pass away.

But there are worries that Brunson’s production was the result of his role on the Dallas Mavericks: Second Spectrum classified 799 of Brunson’s 1,691 pick and rolls as “spread,” or coming from a five-out alignment. Dallas’s spacing of the floor with shooters allowed Brunson freer access to the paint than he is likely to get in New York, where Thibodeau almost always has two traditional big men on the floor — at least one of whom is a total non-factor away from the rim. The Knicks ran 2,396 spread pick and rolls last season, out of 6,722 total. That’s a 35.6 percent rate, compared with the 47.2 percent rate Brunson had in Dallas a year ago.

That said, Brunson should be able to form a fortuitous partnership with both Robinson and Hartenstein on pick and rolls, and with Hartenstein on dribble hand-offs.⁶ Brunson, a lefty, likes to operate from the left side of the floor, which could pose a problem for fellow southpaw Julius Randle (if he’s not traded) but makes for a good fit with RJ Barrett, who was among the league leaders in right-corner 3-point attempts in each of the last two seasons and made 39.3 percent of those shots during that time. Keeping Barrett (also a lefty) on the right side of the floor allows him to get to his left hand as a driver on second-side action, where he should thrive working off the opportunities Brunson creates.

New York is still likely to struggle offensively due to an overall lack of spacing and Thibodeau’s maddeningly archaic philosophy, but the Knicks should — finally! — have point guard play good enough to get a clear evaluation of the young players whom Thibs deigns to put on the floor. Unless more moves are coming, however, New York’s two signings could siphon some playing time (and touches) away from Immanuel Quickley, Obi Toppin and Quentin Grimes. That would be unfortunate, considering the flashes each has shown to date.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew plays an Independence Day-inspired statistics game and discusses how the most recent Jan. 6 hearing could affect how Americans view former President Donald Trump. They also analyze a new poll from the University of New Hampshire that shows the state’s likely GOP primary voters favoring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump in the 2024 presidential primary.

In last week’s Jan. 6 congressional hearing, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson outlined the days leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol and testified that then-President Donald Trump and some people in his administration were aware of the threat of violence. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how this hearing could affect Americans’ views of Trump and the Republican nominees running in the midterm who support Trump’s “Big Lie.”

The crew also analyzes a new poll from the University of New Hampshire that garnered quite a bit of media attention for complicating the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. And Kaleigh Rogers and Nate Silver compete in an Independence Day-inspired statistics game where they guess how many Americans know the country’s national anthem and how many prefer burgers over hot dogs.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court's Partisan Divide Hasn't Been This Sharp In Generations

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Laura Bronner and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Laura Bronner

Graphics by Elena Mejía

Jul. 5, 2022, at 1:08 PM

Conservatives got what they wanted from this year’s Supreme Court term — and then some. 

In a flurry of decisions released at the end of June, the court’s Republican-appointed justices released opinions that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights, allowed individual public school employees to pray on the job, made it harder for states to exclude religious schools from public funding programs, and limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate carbon emissions.

It was a stunning display of the conservative justices’ power, less than two years after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave former President Donald Trump the chance to appoint a third justice, leaving the court’s Republican appointees with a six-justice supermajority.  This was the first full term with all three of Trump’s appointees on the court, and at the beginning of the term, we weren’t sure whether they would move incrementally to the right — a tack that Chief Justice John Roberts prefers — or take a more aggressive approach. 

The conservatives answered by delivering the most far-reaching slew of rulings in modern memory. It’s now abundantly clear that Trump’s appointees are in control of this court, and they’re not searching for consensus. In fact, the divide between the court’s Republican and Democratic appointees is deeper than it’s been in the modern era.

Usually, around half of the court’s rulings are unanimous and decisions that pit the conservative and liberal blocs against each other are much rarer. Not this year. According to SCOTUSBlog data analyzed by FiveThirtyEight, 21 percent of rulings were polarized by party of the appointing president, with all Republican appointees voting one way and all Democratic appointees voting the other way, and only 29 percent were unanimous.¹

The data emphasizes that the court is deeply polarized along partisan lines — perhaps more than it’s ever been. There have always been ideological disagreements among the justices, and those have often pitted liberals against conservatives, but those divides weren’t consistently linked to the justice’s appointing party. For instance, former justices like Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor were appointed by a Republican president, but broke with their fellow Republican-appointed justices on key issues like separation of church and state, abortion and same-sex marriage.

Now, though, there really isn’t a “swing” justice. According to preliminary Martin-Quinn scores, a commonly used metric of judicial ideology, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas anchor the right side of the conservative bloc, while the other conservative-appointed justices are basically indistinguishable from each other. 

This means that the justices in the center — Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — are the ones who need to be convinced to join the majority in politically important cases. And although it’s hard to tell from the Martin-Quinn scores, they didn’t agree on everything. The most high-profile division was in Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that overruled abortion rights, where Roberts voted to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but not to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Gorsuch, meanwhile, had some even sharper disagreements with his fellow Republican appointees. Perhaps most notably, he dissented with the liberals in a case where the other conservatives voted to give states more power over Native American reservations, contradicting the court’s position from just two years earlier. But that case wasn’t an outlier. According to SCOTUSBlog’s data, Gorsuch was in the majority in divided cases 65 percent of the time — only slightly more than liberal Justice Elena Kagan (57 percent). 

The most conservative justices on the court, meanwhile, are wielding more power than they have in years. Alito wrote 21 percent of the opinions in ideologically polarized cases, and Thomas wrote 29 percent — more than any other justices except Roberts (29 percent). That means that together, the two far-right justices wrote half of the polarized opinions, including the decision overruling abortion rights and the decision expanding gun rights. And both Alito and Thomas were in the majority more than they’ve been in the recent past, particularly in divided cases. Alito, for instance, was in the majority in 78 percent of divided cases — up from 58 percent of divided cases two years ago.

The court, meanwhile, isn’t just polarized along partisan lines — its decisions also increasingly align with the views of the average Republican voter. In that sense, the Supreme Court’s tack to the right actually started a year ago — at least, according to new research from political scientists Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra and Maya Sen.

In surveys conducted in 2010, 2020 and 2021, the researchers asked Americans what their opinion was about the central issues in the highest-profile cases each term, and then compared their findings to the Supreme Court’s actual rulings. They found that the court’s rulings in 2010 — when Kennedy was the median — fell roughly between liberal respondents and conservative respondents, in the country’s ideological mainstream. Ten years later, in 2020, Roberts had replaced Kennedy as the median, but the court’s decisions were still in that same middle-of-the-road position. But the following year, after Barrett joined the court, its rulings lurched to the right. Rather than falling between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views, its rulings were overall very close to the position of the average Republican respondent.

The researchers haven’t finished analyzing this year’s data yet. But comparing the justices’ rulings to public opinion is helpful because although it’s clear the court is getting more conservative, it’s harder to quantitatively pin down exactly how conservative it’s become. For example, in 2005, his first year on the court, Roberts was tied with Alito as the third-most conservative justice. Now, relative to his peers, he’s the sixth-most conservative justice. Does that mean Roberts moved to the left? Or does it mean the court moved to the right? The Martin-Quinn scores can’t tell us.

It’s important to bear that limitation in mind because this term, the conservative justices didn’t just deliver lots of conservative rulings — they decided lots of cases that dramatically shifted the law to the right. It’s hard to track quantitatively, but cases with a conservative outcome in previous terms likely had more modest effects and didn’t diverge so much from mainstream public opinion, because there wasn’t a clear majority of justices who wanted to do big, sweeping things like overturn Roe v. Wade. So comparing the share of conservative decisions in each term may actually understate the court’s rightward shift quite a bit because many of the cases the court is now hearing are potentially much broader in scope.

Now, the question is just how far the conservative majority wants to go. In last year’s end-of-term round-up, we pointed out that in cases in which the conservative justices disagreed, the more centrist group — Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett — were driving the direction of decisions. That’s still true, but if the past term is any guide, the two most conservative justices — Alito and Thomas — will have a much more powerful role in the conservative bloc going forward. 

And over time, it seems likely that the polarization on the court will only deepen as the justices — like the rest of the country — retreat into their ideological camps. Roberts, after all, expressed dissatisfaction with the scope of his fellow Republican appointees’ ruling on abortion — but he wasn’t unhappy enough to join the other side.

In this episode of ABC News’s “This Week” from July 3, 2022, Nate Silver breaks down Republicans’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections.

Political Outliers

What Do Older Progressive Voters Want?

By Alex Samuels

Jul. 5, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Political Outliers, a column that explored groups of Americans who are often portrayed as all voting the same way. In today’s climate, it’s easy to focus on how a group identifies politically, but that’s never the full story. Blocs of voters are rarely uniform in their beliefs, which is why this column will dive into undercovered parts of the electorate, showing how diverse and atypical most voters are.

Because the midterms are heating up — check out our election forecast, which just published — this will be the last entry in the Political Outliers series for the foreseeable future. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this column!

A native of Austin, Texas, Hunter Ellinger grew up in a progressive hotspot. In a recent phone conversation, he recalled his upbringing in the 1950s, when a group of liberal activists — often organized by his mother and father — would repeatedly protest racist laws passed by the state’s legislature. Ellinger was a teenager at the time and, therefore, unable to vote, but he still remembers feeling “like an anomaly within Texas.” 

Now, at 79 years old, those feelings have only intensified. Ellinger still lives in Austin, one of Texas’s most liberal cities, and boasts that, in a sense, he’s carried on his mother’s legacy: He was involved in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the 1970s alternative press and participated in a slew of anti-war protests over the last several decades.

“I’ve voted in every election I’ve ever been able to vote in, which started in 1964, and I’ve always voted Democratic,” Ellinger said, noting that the current party is further to the right than he is. “I would describe myself as half-commie, half-anarchist,” he said. “I want the government and society as a whole to work for everybody, but I also want everybody to be strong enough and free enough to put things together in their own way.” 

Given his political leanings, Ellinger described himself as a “Silent Generation progressive.” But that’s not the norm for voters his age. In fact, Americans in Ellinger’s age group — those over the age of 65 — were the most likely of any age group to say that they approved of former President Donald Trump’s job performance, and registered voters from his generation were the most likely to favor Republican candidates, according to the Pew Research Center. And among registered voters, Silent Generation men were more likely than women of the same age to favor Republicans as well.

This is in line with the conventional wisdom that there’s a consistent age gap in our politics today, where older voters vote red and younger voters veer blue. And there are myriad reasons why this is the case. For one, older Americans are more likely to be white and religious — two demographic groups that also tend to vote Republican. They’re also more likely to favor less government intervention and are more prone to believing that increased diversity isn’t a good thing for the country — which is in line with many Republicans’ way of thinking.

But these sentiments weren’t shared by the four voters older than 50, including Ellinger, whom I spoke with for this piece. In fact, many were closer to younger generations — like Gen Z or millennials — when it came to their political beliefs; climate change, racial justice, abortion access and higher wages were among some of the top policy priorities they listed, even if they were skeptical that Congress would address these things in their lifetime. Moreover, even though almost everyone I talked with said they wished the Democratic Party would go further left and support policies championed by, say, members of “The Squad,” a progressive group of Democratic lawmakers made up mainly of women of color, they didn’t begrudge President Biden for not pushing forward a more progressive political agenda, as he once promised. Rather, several applauded him for the work he’s done in office post-Trump, but wished the Democratic Party itself would invest more in building a younger, more liberal bench of successors. 

“I do feel like the lack of constant generation change has left Democrats a little stuck,” said Pamela M., a 52-year-old from rural Maryland who preferred to use only her first name and last initial for privacy. “They don’t know how to advertise and haven’t had a great ground-game strategy in a way that a wide swath of people respond to.”

Of course, that hasn’t deterred Pamela M. — a self-described “Warren Democrat” — from supporting and voting for Democratic candidates over the years. But part of the reason for her loyalty might have less to do with her agreeing with establishment Democrats’ policy priorities and more to do with the fact that, on average, voters over 45 years old (and especially those 65 and older) are the age group most likely to turn out to vote. Since 1996 or so, there’s been a correlation between voter participation and age, and in 2020, almost 72 percent of those ages 65 and over cast a ballot — about 10 percentage points more than the national average.

Certain polls and reports by interest groups representing older voters suggest that those over the age of 50 may be slightly competitive as a voting bloc; but on the whole, older voters do lean Republican. In 2016 and 2020, according to Pew’s validated-voter survey, Trump won Silent Generation voters — those born between 1928 and 1945 — by 19- and 16-percentage-point margins, respectively. Meanwhile, baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — were more split between Democrats and Republicans, although Trump still narrowly bested Biden and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among voters in this generation. 

There are always outliers, though. In fact, there’s a small percentage of older Americans who said that they not only lean Democratic — but identify more with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. According to the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, about 6 percent of Americans¹ born in 1955 or before identified as “very liberal,” 12 percent as “liberal” and another 7 percent as “somewhat liberal.” This compares to roughly 50 percent of Americans born in 1955 or before who said they were “somewhat” or more conservative. But many of the left-of-center voters I spoke with didn’t just identify as liberal, they also said that it was detrimental for other people their age to consistently cast ballots for the GOP.

“Typically, the older and wealthier you become, the more likely you are to vote Republican,” said Kathleen Helbing, a 70-year-old living in Indiana and a self-described socialist. “But I don’t know why people vote against their own economic interests. To any old person who votes Republican, especially after [Florida Sen.] Rick Scott put out this 11-point agenda that discussed potentially sunsetting federal legislation, like Social Security, I think, ‘Are you people out of your mind?’”

As is the case for Americans as a whole, the No. 1 issue for voters over 65 is the economy, and the GOP’s messaging there might resonate more with older voters concerned with things like inflation, rising prices of everyday items and unemployment if they’re not retired. “I suspect most of it has to do with accumulating more money as they get older, and wanting to protect their monetary interests. They believe the Republican policies will help protect their interests,” said Liz McGeachy, a 64-year-old from Tennessee. 

Another point might also contribute to why older Americans often lean Republican: They’re more likely to be racist. In a September 2021 Public Religion Research Institute survey, Americans ages 65 and older were 25 points more likely to say that America’s “culture and way of life” had mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s than they were to say it’d mostly changed for the better — a common refrain among the GOP voters these days. And according to data that Pew published in January 2019, older generations were less likely than younger generations to say that they thought more racial and ethnic diversity was a good thing for society. In September 2021, meanwhile, Pew also found that adults ages 50-64 (49 percent) and those ages 65 and older (46 percent) were the age groups least likely to support the Black Lives Matter movement. 

In other words, as the Democratic Party becomes increasingly multiracial, older white voters — especially those with racially conservative views — might be turned off from supporting Democrats. “I don’t know whether it’s racism and the fear that Latino and African American people are going to have more power someday?” Helbing said. “I guess a lot of people see life as a zero-sum game that if you get, I lose.”

The older progressive voters I talked with, of course, don’t buy into that messaging and, as a result, have been loyal Democratic voters for most — if not all — of their lives. That said, just because the people I spoke with identify as progressives doesn’t mean they were necessarily over the moon with the current Democrats holding federal office. Many gave Biden plaudits for handling what one voter called a “disaster” inherited by the Trump administration, but they also weren’t optimistic that more progressive policies would happen anytime soon.

“Sometimes there’s this expectation that everything is going to change now, but I think change is a moderate experience and not necessarily immediate,” said Pamela M., the 52-year-old from Maryland. “I have progressive ideas on what should happen but a realistic timeline on when it’ll happen. A lot of young progressives think you can vote and win an election and everything changes, but that’s not how things typically work.”

Part of this pragmatism could be because, as Ellinger told me, voters his age have been following politics for so long that they know it takes a long time for real change to occur. That’s especially true today, given the fact that a moderate Democrat holds the presidency and Democrats hold only slim majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

“I think Biden and such represent a substantial majority of the Democratic Party. It would be great to the extent that could be changed, to add more people to the left of them in positions of power, but I don’t think, at this moment, that’ll happen,” Ellinger said. “Democracy doesn’t always give you perfect results, but the nature of it is working with people who are representative of most of your political beliefs.”

But there might be another reason why progressive ideas aren’t likely to pass anytime soon: a perception among voters that Democrats are already too liberal. According to data that Morning Consult published in July 2021, the share of registered voters between 2017 and 2021 who said the Democratic Party was “too liberal” rose 5 percentage points. In 2021, a plurality of all voters (45 percent) and independent voters (46 percent) were more likely to say this was the case, compared with 37 percent of voters and 34 percent of independents who said the GOP has gone too far right.

I expected a number of progressives voters I talked with to say that the Democratic Party — and, by default, Biden — should move further left. And while some people either endorsed this idea or admitted that the party now is further right than they are, most said that the best way for the Democratic Party to move forward would be for them to develop a message that can unite everyone in their base and cease infighting. 

“I lean toward wanting the moderate Democrats to embrace the policies of the more progressive members of the party, but I also believe the progressive wing needs to be willing to compromise too,” McGeachy said. “They all need to create a unified message, stand behind it and share it with the whole country — not just preach to the choir.”

That said, many voters think that politicians around the age of, say, Biden, who will turn 80 in November, shouldn’t be the ones running the show — let alone holding the presidency. Many advocated for ushering in younger, nonwhite leaders into the Democratic Party who could help move it further left. 

“I think when you hit 70 years old, you say, ‘It’s time to make room for another generation. I will tend my garden or write poetry or stare out a window, but I will make room so that other people can have a crack at it,’” said Helbing, the 70-year-old in Indiana. “Because they couldn’t screw things up any more than we have.” Biden, she said, is going to be in his 80s in mere months. “I’m going to be 71 soon, and I don’t think I’m as sharp as I was 20 years ago.”

Asking older politicians to step down might be tough, though. Beyond the fact that senators and representatives aren’t term-limited, many will sit in office as long as voters keep electing them, instead of choosing to retire. Because of these factors, young people are badly underrepresented in Congress: The average age of a U.S. senator is currently 64 — roughly 26 years older than the median U.S. resident. In the House, the average age is 58. And going into the 2020 election, many of the leading presidential contenders — Trump, Biden and Sanders — were all septuagenarians. Biden himself was first elected to the Senate in 1972, meaning that  he has been in Washington for nearly half a century — longer than most have been alive.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for a younger, more progressive guard to come into Congress and make the sort of difference that the voters I spoke with want. But it’ll be an uphill battle, especially as party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continue to back more moderate Democrats over their progressive challengers this primary season. 

Plus, as we’ve previously reported, progressive Democrats often need larger, multiracial coalitions to win elections. But several of the people I spoke with said it’d be harmful to the party not to start building out a younger bench and helping these Democrats get elected.

“I think Democrats fail to plan for generational change, and so we have a lot of newer, young people coming in, but there hasn’t been a plan for a changing of the guard and changing ideas along with that,” Pamela M. said. “Democrats need to be focusing on local and state elections to see who they can … train as the next generation. And they should’ve been doing this all along.” 

Additional research by Holly Fuong.

Tennis

Outdoor Tennis Could Be Sports’ First Big Climate Change Casualty

By Jonathon Braden and Matt Fitzpatrick and Jonathon Braden and Matt Fitzpatrick

Jul. 5, 2022, at 6:00 AM

The impending retirements of Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal — winners of a combined 65 major singles titles — have some worried about the end of the glory days of tennis. But a bigger existential crisis is facing the sport: climate change.

All sports, if they haven’t already, are expected to suffer in a warming world. Sea-level rise could flood arenas and stadiums. Greater use of artificial snow could lead to more serious injuries for skiers and biathletes. Stronger storms and wildfires could wreak havoc on schedules across leagues. But few sports are likely to fare worse than tennis. The sport follows the sun 10 months of the year, and more than 80 percent of its tournaments are played outdoors. And there are no substitutions in tennis: Players spend hours on the court without teammates ready to take their place while they rest.

In some ways, tennis could suffer just as much as endurance events such as marathon running, where athletes are always moving and consistently exposed to the heat, said Debra Stroiney, a professor of kinesiology at George Mason University.

“Running a marathon, you’re out there for hours, constantly working,” she said. “But tennis, too, they’re out there sometimes three, four, five hours, depending on the match, and yeah, you’re sitting down once in a while, not hitting the ball once in a while. But they’re also running around, and they’re constantly moving.”

To investigate tennis’s future in a warming world, we used forecasts of maximum temperature and relative humidity from five climate models produced as part of the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These forecasts all assume that we continue on our current fossil-fuel-intensive trajectory, which is expected to lead to between about 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit of warming from pre-industrial levels to the end of this century. (The planet has already warmed about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era, the mid- to late 1800s.)

By using forecasts from multiple-climate models that span a range of expectations, we could determine the highest temperature predicted by any of the models for each day. We calculated the average maximum temperature and extreme maximum temperature, or a “maximum of maximum temperatures,” to provide a sense of what we might expect if a heat wave occurs during a future tournament. For instance, what might be the hottest temperature during the 2050 Australian Open in Melbourne?

To be clear, these daily forecasts are not weather forecasts. But they provide a window into how climate change could shift what we now consider normal weather toward new extremes.

In the 2050 Australian Open finals, it could feel as hot as 147 degrees Fahrenheit,² with an air temperature of 105.4 and relative humidity of 58.2 percent. When Ash Barty made Australian tennis history there earlier this year, the high air temperature in Melbourne Park was more than 30 degrees lower, at 71.

At the 2050 French Open in Paris, players could experience a heat index of 113 degrees, with the temperature potentially reaching 90. The high when Nadal won his record-extending 14th Roland Garros title earlier this month? 72 degrees.

At Wimbledon, the groundskeeping crew will have to work extra hard to keep the lawns lush and tidy as it could feel like 102 degrees in London in 2050. But that might feel like a reprieve compared with the 2050 U.S. Open in New York, where the heat index could rise to 145 degrees.

Tennis has already experienced the perils of a warmer planet. Ivan Dodig of Croatia wondered if he “could maybe even die” before retiring from a 2014 Australian Open match. “Impossible to play in this heat..it’s only about surviving,” Elena Vesnina from Russia tweeted during the tournament.

Last year at the Tokyo Olympics, Russian Daniil Medvedev voiced similar worries: “I’m a fighter, I will finish the match, but I can die,” he said to the chair umpire during play. “If I die, is the ITF [International Tennis Federation] going to take responsible?”

At the 2018 U.S. Open, Roger Federer was upset in the fourth round amid some of the muggiest conditions he could recall. “I just struggled in the conditions tonight. It’s one of the first times it’s happened to me,” he said. “At some point also I was just happy that the match was over.”

Players have already been endangered by the collateral damage from climate change. Smoke from wildfires that scientists say were more likely to have occurred due to the rise of global temperatures caused Dalila Jakupović of Slovenia to retire from the 2020 Australian Open qualifying match that she was leading. “I just couldn’t breathe anymore, and I just fell to the floor,” she said.

The ATP, WTA and Grand Slam tournaments all have extreme-heat policies or ways to give players more breaks in dangerous conditions. But short of more frequent stops during matches, how can tennis survive on a warmer planet?

The key factor will be players’ core body temperatures. Our bodies are typically at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of course, but when they warm to between 101 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the risk of heat illnesses rises, said Ethan Hill, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Central Florida. At 104 degrees or above, we risk suffering heat stroke and potential organ failure.

How a person’s body reacts to heat depends on the individual — and crucially whether the player is well hydrated and acclimated to the heat. Acclimated players typically sweat sooner, helping their bodies stay cooler, Hill said. But, generally speaking, Hill and Stroiney said, tennis players can expect to see more heat illnesses in such extreme weather. “We have that known limit,” Stroiney said. “Our bodies are going to say ‘no,’ or the core temperature increases to a point where our brain will actually say ‘stop.’”

Tennis has ways to mitigate that risk, including hosting more indoor tournaments, Stroiney said, and fewer matches during the heat of the day, Hill said.

Tennis also could use innovative ways to cool players down, Hill said. For instance, during changeovers or set breaks, cooling vests and fans could be deployed to bring down players’ core temperatures. Tournaments often give players ice towels and fans in extreme heat conditions.

Hill is also encouraged by research into using sodium and glycerol supplementation to help electrolyte and hydration levels, although he stressed that more research is needed, especially in extreme heat environments.

“It’s going to be incredibly important that we begin to develop strategies to cool people down,” Hill said. “This obviously will become more important as the planet continues to warm and as we continue to compete in these warm climates.”

Tennis officials understand the risks to the players and emphasize such strategies as maintaining hydration and encouraging players to acclimate. “When players consistently train and compete in higher temperatures, the body adapts through acclimatization, and [that] allows the body to perform at higher levels,” Todd Ellenbecker, the ATP’s vice president of medical services, said through a spokesperson. “Careful planning, preparation, coupled with optimal fitness levels, all help athletes to adapt to sports performance in the heat.”

Hill and Stroiney agree that acclimation will be crucial for athletes. Within a week, acclimated athletes can retain 2 to 3 more liters of water and maintain a lower heart rate while exerting themselves, Hill said.

But it’s not as simple as applying well-worn strategies and expecting similar results. In more intense extreme heat, both Hill and Stroiney wonder how our typical physiological responses will fare, or whether new solutions might somehow be needed. For instance, it generally takes athletes two weeks to fully acclimate, Hill said. “Now as the planet warms, that could be longer,” he said.

The body also naturally moves hot blood from the core to the skin to help cool the body, he said. “That’s a pretty efficient process that improves with heat acclimation,” Hill said. “But … when the planet gets so warm, will that physiological response still be effective?”

Stroiney has similar doubts, and it’s personal. She has played tennis and run 10 marathons. But she, like some tennis players, doesn’t do well in the heat. How will she and other athletes perform in ever-increasing temperatures?

Hill is optimistic that tennis, or the world, will change before waves of heat illnesses exhaust the sport. “I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom,” he said. “We just need to be very cognizant that it’s going to be warmer.”

So nearly 30 years from now, when Federer, Williams and Nadal are sharing their Grand Slam championship stories, they may also be telling tales of the long-forgotten days of outdoor tennis.

MLB

The Toronto Blue Jays' Stars Haven't Delivered — But An Unsung Hero Is Picking Up The Slack

By Neil Paine

Jul. 1, 2022, at 10:00 AM

All throughout last season and into this spring, we raved about the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series potential — and their marquee names were a big reason why. With a lineup led by the slugging trio of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette and George Springer, a rotation featuring former Cy Young candidates Hyun Jin Ryu and José Berríos, and an offseason haul that included All-Stars Matt Chapman at third base and Kevin Gausman on the mound, Toronto’s collection of stars rivals that of any team in MLB.

And yet, the Blue Jays’ most valuable player so far in 2022 — according to wins above replacement¹ — is not one of those stars. In fact, catcher/designated hitter Alejandro Kirk was almost completely unheralded going into the season. He was not a big-time prospect, he certainly doesn’t look the part of a superstar, and he plays like almost no one else in baseball. Put simply, Kirk is the secret weapon Toronto never thought it would need to contend in the stacked American League East.

One reason why the Jays have needed Kirk’s unexpected All-Star turn is that the rest of the roster hasn’t delivered on its promise. Though it fell short of the playoffs a year ago, Toronto’s underlying stats suggested it was nearly a 100-win caliber ballclub in disguise. Considering the Jays had one of the youngest lineups in MLB, a prospect class ranked No. 4 according to Baseball America, a payload of offseason pickups and a long-awaited return to playing home games in Toronto for a full season, it seemed like a no-brainer that they would improve — perhaps dramatically — on their performance from 2021. But instead, the Jays have held steady at best. While their winning percentage is roughly the same as it was last season, their runs-per-game differential and WAR per game are both down significantly from 2021, with each of their top six players (and eight of their top 10) by 2021 WAR playing worse so far in 2022.²

But along with young starting pitcher Alek Manoah, whose breakout has seen him rise to No. 5 in pitching WAR this season, Kirk has picked up the slack for Toronto, helping the club overcome its mainstays’ underperformance by surpassing all expectations himself.

Some of that is merely a function of Kirk not having played enough to warrant much of a baseline for projection: After making his MLB debut more than halfway through the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Kirk had just 69 games and 1.0 WAR to his name heading into 2022. And it wasn’t clear Kirk would carve out more of a role on this year’s Blue Jays, either, with incumbent catchers Reese McGuire and Danny Jansen blocking his path as spring training began³ and legitimate questions about whether Kirk was good enough defensively to earn regular reps behind the plate. Although his bat was regarded as an asset, a career weighted runs created plus (wRC+) of 113 through 2021 pegged Kirk as a fairly average DH as well, on a team with no shortage of players who need to rotate in and out of that position.

However, Kirk has forced Toronto to make room for him — and then some. He already has more plate appearances this season (246) than in his entire career before 2022 (214), and he’s on pace to set a new full-season career high in wRC+ with a 163 mark (a ridiculously good number for a catcher) while also erasing any doubts about his defense behind the dish. According to MLB’s Statcast data, only three other catchers — Jose Trevino of the New York Yankees, Jonah Heim of the Texas Rangers and Sean Murphy of the Oakland A’s — have framed strikes for their pitchers better this season than Kirk. Add everything up, and Kirk has already been worth 3.1 WAR this year, which ranks 13th among all position players and first among regular catchers. (Willson Contreras of the Chicago Cubs is second among catchers, and 15th overall.)

And the way Kirk has earned his place near the top of that list is unique, to say the least.

Listed perhaps generously at 5-foot-8 and 245 pounds, Kirk doesn’t have the physique of towering teammates like Springer (6-foot-3) or Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (6-foot-4). And in a certain sense, he hits like we might expect, based on the historical performances of other pint-sized players. This season, Kirk is one of just eight players who has qualified for the batting title with more walks than strikeouts, a hallmark of hitters with superb plate discipline and eye-hand coordination. But Kirk has far more power than many players in that diminutive club from the recent past. 

Kirk’s isolated slugging is 30 percent better than league average this season, making him one of only three qualified batters — along with Juan Soto of the Washington Nationals and fellow tiny slugger José Ramírez of the Cleveland Guardians — to have an isolated power at least 30 percent higher than average, a walk rate at least 30 percent higher than average and a strikeout rate at least 30 percent lower than average. And while Ramírez doesn’t hit many line drives and is known for pulling the ball, Kirk has ascended as a line-drive masher and one of baseball’s biggest threats to hit to the opposite field, where power is harder to come by.

Kirk will never be confused with a five-tool player. His Statcast sprint speed is slower than 94 percent of MLB players,⁴ and his arm strength is nothing special by catcher standards. He’ll also never be confused for Mike Piazza, Salvador Perez, Carlton Fisk — or any of the classic hulking, power-hitting catchers from baseball history. Kirk doesn’t have many natural comparison points, and that is part of what makes him special.

Regardless of how Kirk gets the job done, the Blue Jays are here for it. Though they are tied for a distant second place in the AL East with the Boston Red Sox, 12½ games behind the streaking, historic Yankees, our Elo forecast model gives Toronto an 87 percent chance to make the playoffs and a 5 percent shot at the World Series. That’s not too bad, considering that their headline stars have been a mixed bag so far. Maybe some of those big names can use the season’s second half to reclaim form that made us so enamored with Toronto in the first place. But until then, the Blue Jays will keep relying on Kirk’s quirky production to keep them right in the thick of the playoff race.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

Evan McMullin is a conservative running for U.S. Senate in Utah … with the backing of the state’s Democratic Party. Democrats have thrown their support behind the former Republican to try and oust Sen. Mike Lee, an ally of former President Donald Trump who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In this video, we explore McMullin’s background and look at whether his coalition of Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and independents in Utah can actually bring him to Washington, D.C.

The Riddler

How High Should You Climb Up The Tower?

By Zach Wissner-Gross

Jul. 1, 2022, at 8:00 AM

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. Two puzzles are presented each week: the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either, win , I need to receive your correct answer before 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. Have a great weekend!</p> </p>">¹ and you may get a shoutout in the next column. Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers! If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Riddler Express

From Andrew Love comes a puzzle about planning ahead and resolving to get things done:

It’s the morning of Jan. 1, 2023, and you have a task you want to complete before the end of the year, on Dec. 31. The task is easily divisible into portions, so you always know exactly what fraction of the task is left.

Your initial plan is to do exactly 1/365 of the task every day. But then you think to yourself, “If I do 2/365 today, I can do a little less every day from now on.” And so, on Jan. 1, you would complete 2/365 of the task. On Jan. 2, 363/365 of the task remains with 364 days left to complete it, so you would do another 2/364 × 363/365 of the task.

If you continue in this fashion every day, dividing the remaining work by the remaining number of days in the year and doing twice that amount, when would you finish?

Submit your answer

Riddler Classic

As the Royal Astronomer of Planet Xiddler, you wake up from a dream in which you measured the planet’s radius using a satellite. “How silly!” you think to yourself. “Satellites haven’t even been invented yet!” And so you and another astronomer set out to investigate the curvature of the planet.

The two of you climb two of the tallest towers on the planet, which happen to be in neighboring cities. You both travel 100 meters up each tower on a clear day. Due to the curvature of the planet, you can barely make each other out.

Next, your friend returns to the ground floor of their tower. How high up your tower must you be so that you can just barely make out your friend again?

Submit your answer

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Congratulations to Mike Strong of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.

Last week, I went to my local 7-Eleven and bought four items. The sum of the four prices was $7.11. A happy coincidence!

But what was even stranger was that the product of the four prices was also exactly 7.11, without any rounding. (When multiplying the prices, I dropped the dollar signs so that the units worked out and then multiplied their decimal values. For example, if the prices of two items had been $2.00 and $0.32, then their product would have been 0.64.)

What were the four prices?

The first part of this puzzle was setting up equations that represented the scenario. If the four prices were a, b, c and d, then you knew their sum was 7.11, i.e., a + b + c + d = 7.11. But what about their product? While it was true that a·b·c·d was equal to 7.11, this didn’t consider the fact that each price had to terminate in the hundredths place. For example, you couldn’t have a price of $1.234 — 7-Eleven doesn’t sell anything (other than gas) that doesn’t cost a whole number of pennies.

To get around this wrinkle, you could define the four prices as a corresponding whole number of pennies, A, B, C and D, where A = 100a, B = 100b, C = 100c and D = 100d. Adding these variables together, you now had A + B + C + D = 711. And multiplying them gave you A·B·C·D = 711,000,000. Since A, B, C and D were whole numbers, it was helpful to write their product in its prime factorization: 2⁶·3²·5⁶·79. The problem was now splitting up these prime factors into four “bins” (one bin for each price) such that their sum wound up being 711.

From there, many solvers like Jenny Mitchell and Nicolás Villagrán used a computer to search through all the ways of splitting up the prime factors. But you could have solved this without a computer. You knew one of the four prices (let’s say A) had a prime factor of 79. Since all values had to be less than 711, A had to be 79, 158, 237, 316, 395, 474 or 632. If A was 632, the remaining three values had to have a sum of 79 and a product of 1,125,000. In other words, their arithmetic mean was about 26, and their geometric mean was about 104. However, for any set of positive real numbers,² the arithmetic mean is always greater than the geometric mean. In other words, A could have been 632. Nor could it have been 474 or 395. That left four possible values: 79, 158, 237 and 316.

From there, solver Gareth McCaughan looked at the factors of 5. If A had been 79, 158 or 237, then the remaining three values had to collectively contain six factors of 5 and a sum of 632, 553 or 474, respectively. Since none of these sums was a multiple of 5, at least one of the three remaining values didn’t have a factor of 5. To keep their sum at most 632, two of the values (say B and C) had to be multiples of 5³, or 125. If B and C were both 125, then no values of A and D resulted in the right sum and product. The same occurred when B and C were 125 and 250, 125 and 375 or 250 and 250.

And that meant A had to be 316. The remaining three values had a sum of 395 and a product of 2⁴·3²·5⁶. Since each value had to be a multiple of 5, dividing through by 5 gave a sum of 79 and a product of 2⁴·3²·5³. One of these numbers had to be a multiple of 25, and it couldn’t be 50 or 75, which meant it was exactly 25. That meant the final two numbers (again, scaled down by a factor of 5) had a sum of 54 and a product of 720. Whether you figured this out by inspection or the quadratic formula, the two numbers were 24 and 30. Scaling everything up by a factor of 5 again gave you A = 316, B = 125, C = 120 and D = 150.

In the end, the four prices were $3.16, $1.25, $1.20 and $1.50. Getting there wound up being a fair bit of casework with some clever pruning, but again, no computer was required!

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Congratulations to Stephen Penrice of Morristown, New Jersey, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.

Last week, a goat tower had 10 floors, each of which could accommodate a single goat. Ten goats approached the tower, and each goat had its own (random) preference of floor. Multiple goats could prefer the same floor.

One by one, each goat walked up the tower to its preferred floor. If the floor was empty, the goat made itself at home. But if the floor was already occupied by another goat, then it kept going up until it found the next empty floor, which it occupied. But if it found no empty floors, the goat would have been stuck on the roof of the tower.

What was the probability that all 10 goats had their own floor, meaning no goat was left stranded on the roof of the tower?

First, let’s consider what could happen with fewer goats and fewer floors. With two goats and two floors, no goat would have been stranded if their preferences (in the order that they approached the tower) were 1/1, 1/2 and 2/1. But if they both preferred the second floor, then the second goat would have wound up on the roof. The probability of two goats on two floors was 3/4.

With three goats and three floors, and hence 27 possible sets of preferences, there were 16 sets that resulted in no goats on the roof: 1/1/1, 1/1/2, 1/1/3, 1/2/1, 1/2/2, 1/2/3, 1/3/1, 1/3/2, 2/1/1, 2/1/2, 2/1/3, 2/2/1, 2/3/1, 3/1/1, 3/1/2 or 3/2/1.

At this point, you probably recognized that the denominator of the probability for N goats was N^N, which was all the ways they could prefer different floors. But the numerator wasn’t as clear, as noted by solver Emma Knight. When N was 2 the numerator was 3, and when N was 3 the numerator was 16. Emma computed that the numerators for the next two values of N were 125 and 1,296. It appeared the numerator was (N+1)^N−1, which meant the probability of every goat having its own floor was (N+1)^N−1/N^N. Could this really be the case?

Indeed it was. Solvers Laurent Lessard, Mark Girard and others recognized that this puzzle was closely related to parking functions, which told you the numerator. As solver Al Shaheen wrote, “That’s no goat tower, that’s a GOAT PARKING LOT!”

Laurent discussed a proof that is credited to Henry Pollak from 1974. Suppose that instead of N floors, there were N+1, the last being the roof, and that goats could have prefered it to the other floors. That meant there were (N+1)^N different ways the goats could have prefered to occupy these floors. Further suppose that if a goat unhappily wound up on the roof, it could circle back to the ground floor and start over. Under these conditions, all N+1 floors were equally likely to be unoccupied at the end, while an unoccupied roof implied that no goat had ever passed through the roof. (If you don’t believe me — or Pollak — you can check this yourself for smaller values of N like 2 or 3.) The parking function of N was then the number of ways the empty floor was never the roof, which was (N+1)^N divided by N+1, or (N+1)^N−1.

Finally, in the case of 10 goats and 10 floors, this probability was 11⁹/10¹⁰, or precisely 23.57947691 percent. There was a roughly three-in-four chance that at least one goat was stranded on the roof of the tower. The poor things!

Want more puzzles?

Well, aren’t you lucky? There’s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers. It’s called “The Riddler,” and it’s in stores now!

Want to submit a riddle?

Email Zach Wissner-Gross at riddlercolumn@gmail.com.

Abortion

Americans’ Views On Abortion Are Pretty Stagnant. Their Views On The Supreme Court Are Not.

By Zoha Qamar

Jul. 1, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has sent states scrambling to restrict abortion or expand access.

We’ve found seven polls conducted since Friday that show whether U.S. adults approve or disapprove of the Dobbs decision, and as you can see in the table below, the takeaway is clear: More Americans disapprove of the ruling than approve of it.

Hints of this disapproval loomed large before Friday, too. According to a poll conducted by The Economist/YouGov from June 18-21, 50 percent of Americans did not want the court to overturn Roe. And when YouGov ran a survey after the release of the Dobbs decision on June 24, it found that the same percentage of Americans disapproved of the court overruling Roe. (Support for overruling Roe didn’t waver much, either: 32 percent were in favor of overturning Roe in the earlier survey, compared with 37 percent in the later survey.)

But it’s not just that Americans largely disapprove of the Dobbs decision. A third YouGov poll, this one fielded June 24-25, gave respondents 11 different choices to describe their reaction to the decision, and Americans reported feeling disgusted (34 percent) at a higher rate than any other emotion. This was closely followed by feeling sad (33 percent), angry (32 percent) and outraged (31 percent). A far smaller share of Americans reported positive emotions about the decision, such as feeling satisfied (19 percent), grateful (18 percent), happy (17 percent) and thrilled (12 percent). Notably, only 20 percent of Americans said they felt surprised by the decision, perhaps due to the notorious leaked draft opinion from early May as well as the court’s recent track record, which has been very conservative. 

Still, even though many Americans don’t approve of the court overturning Roe, their thoughts about the legality of abortion haven’t changed much since early September, when the Supreme Court allowed Texas’s six-week abortion ban to go into effect. As you can see in the chart below, the breakdown of Americans who believe abortion should be always legal, mostly legal, mostly illegal and always illegal has been relatively stable since then.

To be sure, a greater share of Americans consistently think abortion should be mostly or always legal (an average of 58 percent across all surveys) than think it should be mostly or always illegal (an average of 39 percent). But it is telling that there hasn’t been more of a change in how Americans are thinking about abortion.

The reality is that many Americans belong to a gray zone of public opinion when it comes to abortion. Between the “mostly legal” and “mostly illegal” groups, a little over half of Americans think there is no absolute answer as to whether abortion should be legal. Lack of a strong opinion may also correlate with lack of knowledge. As FiveThirtyEight reported last December, Gallup found in May 2018 that 60 percent of Americans believed abortion should be generally legal throughout the first trimester, but only 28 percent said the same for the second trimester. And yet this stands in contrast with Americans’ general support for Roe, which protected abortion until nearly the end of the second trimester.

While public opinion on abortion has remained fairly steady, public opinion on the Supreme Court has not. According to Gallup data, Americans’ confidence in the court has been trending mostly downward since peaking in 1988, but it nosedived in the past year. Last June, Americans’ confidence in the court sat at 36 percent; however, in June 2022 — ahead of the Dobbs decision but after its draft opinion was leaked — it plummeted to 25 percent. This is the lowest confidence level since Gallup began the surveys almost 50 years ago, and it was driven primarily by a dramatic drop in confidence among Democrats and independents. 

This isn’t the first time that the Supreme Court has suffered a favorability problem. One prominent example is the court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, where the Supreme Court overturned an order by the Florida state Supreme Court to recount a subset of ballots. But there’s a clear difference between now and the early 2000s: While many people didn’t like that decision, Gallup reports that 59 percent of Americans approved of the court in January 2001.

That might not be the case this time, though, given today’s incredibly polarized political climate. Additionally, there is evidence of a broader lack of faith in the court, which is at least partly driven by distrust in what is ultimately guiding the court’s decisions. Strikingly, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll conducted June 24-25, 57 percent of Americans said that overturning Roe was “politically motivated and not motivated by the law.” 

Other polling bites

• The Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion isn’t the only issue where it’s out of step with public opinion. Most Americans also disagreed with its ruling that New York’s gun-control law was unconstitutional, according to a recent survey from Monmouth University. Fifty-six percent said that states should be allowed to limit the ability of people to carry concealed handguns through permits and other protocols.
• Sixty percent of Americans overall had “very positive” views on their national flag, though that number changes dramatically when broken out by race, age and party, per a YouGov poll published this week. White Americans were nearly twice as likely as Black Americans to view the flag that favorably (70 percent and 37 percent, respectively). It’s a similar story between adults under the age of 30 (41 percent held a “very positive” view) versus adults over 65 (78 percent), as well as between Democrats (49 percent) and Republicans (83 percent).
• As the Jan. 6 hearings continue, 51 percent of likely voters agreed that Trump-supporting Republicans’ challenges to the results of the 2020 election, including during the Capitol insurrection, were “[a]n attempt to claim and hold power and overturn the will of the people,” according to a poll from Data for Progress conducted June 15-21. Among Democrats, a whopping 87 percent agreed with that view. Only 19 percent of Republicans thought so, however. By contrast, 66 percent of Republicans agreed with the idea that Trump-supporting Republicans’ challenges were “[b]ased on legitimate evidence of fraud, illegal voting, and false results.”
• On the whole, Americans are cutting back on travel, per recent polling from Morning Consult. While the share of Americans planning to travel this summer is up compared with last summer, many said they plan to stick to fewer trips overall. The most noticeable drop comes from the study’s highest income bracket, or those in households that make over $100,000 annually: Only 31 percent planned to go on multiple trips this summer, compared with 44 percent who planned to in 2021. Despite the hike in gas prices, there’s been almost no change in those opting to drive (61 percent of travelers this summer and 59 percent last summer).

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹ 39.0 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 56.2 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -17.2 points). At this time last week, 39.2 percent approved and 55.4 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -16.2 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 40.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.1 percent, for a net approval rating of -13.3 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,² Republicans currently lead by 2.1 percentage points (44.8 percent to 42.7 percent). A week ago, Republicans led Democrats by 2.3 points (44.8 percent to 42.5 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 2.2 points (45.0 percent to 42.8 percent).

The FiveThirtyEight 2022 midterm forecast is live, and it shows that Republicans are strong favorites to win the House while the Senate is a toss-up between the two parties. In the first “Model Talk” episode of the 2022 midterm cycle, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss the factors behind that forecast.

2022 Election

Why Republicans Are Favored To Win The House, But Not The Senate

By Nate Silver

Jun. 30, 2022, at 10:13 AM

Republicans are substantial favorites to take over the U.S. House of Representatives following this November’s midterm elections, but the U.S. Senate is much more competitive, according to FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm election forecast, which launched today. Democrats are also favored to hang on to the governorships in a trio of swing states in the Rust Belt — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — although they are significant underdogs to win high-profile gubernatorial races in Georgia and Texas against Republican incumbents.

The split diagnosis reflects the difference between macro- and micro-level conditions. The national environment is quite poor for Democrats. Of course, this is typical for the president’s party, which has lost seats in the House in all but two of the past 21 midterm elections. But Democrats are also saddled with an unpopular President Biden and a series of challenges for the country, including inflation levels that haven’t been seen in decades, the lingering effects of the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and fraying trust in civic institutions — caused, in part, by Republican efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Democrats, as a predominantly urban party, also face a longstanding problem in the Senate, where every state has equal representation regardless of its population, resulting in a substantial built-in bias toward white, rural states. And although Democrats are very slightly better off following the redistricting process in the House than they were under the 2020 maps, there are still more Republican-leaning seats than Democratic-leaning ones.

True, the political environment is dynamic. The Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade is too recent to be fully reflected in polls, but there are reasons to think it will help Democrats. Roe, which granted the constitutional right to abortion, was a popular precedent, and Democratic voters are more likely than Republican ones to say the decision will encourage them to vote at the midterms.

Moreover, in striking down Roe and other popular laws like restrictions against the concealed carry of firearms, the Supreme Court has in some ways undermined one of the traditional reasons that the president’s party tends to lose seats at the midterms. Typically, voters like some degree of balance: They do not want one party to have unfettered control of all levers of government. But the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is a reminder of how much power Republicans have even if they don’t control the White House.

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 can also serve as a reminder to voters about what might happen if the Electoral College certification process takes place in 2024 amid Republican control of both chambers of Congress.¹ Democrats have had trouble getting the public to treat threats to democracy as a high priority, but polls do show that the public is sympathetic to the Democrats’ case, especially after the recent congressional hearings on the events of Jan. 6.

So, this is not a typical, low-stakes midterm election. On the contrary, there are strong forces tugging at each side of the rope, some of which are potentially of existential importance.

But Democrats’ majorities in both chambers of Congress are narrow, the historical precedent toward the president’s party losing seats is strong, and polls so far — such as the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they would support in an election — suggest that voters slightly prefer Republican control of Congress.

Or at least that’s the story in the House, where there are dozens of competitive races and candidates are relatively anonymous. There, big-picture factors tend to prevail. An unusually weak Republican candidate in one district might be counteracted by a strong one in another, for example.

In the Senate and gubernatorial races, by contrast, individual factors can matter more. And the GOP has nominated — or is poised to nominate — candidates who might significantly underperform a “generic” Republican based on some combination of inexperience, personal scandals or having articulated unpopular conservative positions. This is not a new problem for Republicans: underqualified or fringy candidates have cost them seats in the Senate in other recent cycles. 

So let’s briefly run through the model’s forecast for House, Senate and gubernatorial races. Then I’ll describe some changes to the model since 2020 — which are modest this year but reflect how congressional races are changing in an increasingly polarized political environment.

The House

Republicans have an 87 percent chance of taking over the House, according to the Deluxe version of our model. That’s far from certain, but Democrats are fighting the odds: Their 13 percent chances are equivalent to tossing a coin and having it come up tails three times in a row.

That’s not to say House control will be a matter of luck, exactly. A change in the political environment could have ripple effects. For instance, sometimes one party wins nearly all the toss-up races, as Republicans did in 2020. However, even if Democrats were to win all 13 races that our model currently designates as “toss-ups” (meaning that no party has more than a 60 percent chance of winning), plus hold on to all the seats in which they’re favored, they would still wind up with only 208 seats, 10 short of the number they need for a majority. 

Instead, Democrats will also have to win some seats where Republican candidates are currently favored, and that requires the national political environment in November to be more favorable for Democrats than our model is currently expecting.

On the one hand, the task isn’t that daunting for Democrats. Our model calculates that Democrats would be favored to keep the House if they win the House popular vote — or lose it by less than 0.7 percentage points — something that Democrats did in both 2018 and 2020. 

Moreover, Democrats are down by only about 2 points in our current average of generic-ballot polls. Given the inherent error in polling, and how much time there is between now and November, it isn’t hard to turn a 2-point deficit in the polls into a 1-point win.

However, in important ways, that 2-point deficit understates the degree of trouble that Democrats are in. One reason is because many of those polls are conducted among registered voters rather than likely voters, and the electorate that turns out in November is likely to be more Republican than the broader universe of all registered voters. Historically, the patterns in midterm elections are that: 1) Republicans turn out more than Democrats, and 2) voters for whichever party doesn’t control the presidency are more enthusiastic and turn out more. In 2018, those factors canceled one another out. Democrats, not controlling the presidency, were the more enthusiastic party, helping to neutralize the Republicans’ historical turnout advantage. This year, though, they both work in the favor of Republicans.

Thus, the model adjusts those registered-voter polls based on its estimate of  what likely-voter polls would show, and when it does that, the Republicans’ generic-ballot lead is really more like 4 points than 2 points. I should note that this adjustment is not rigid in the model. Although the model uses historical turnout patterns as its baseline assumption, it will override that based on polls. In other words, if polls come out showing Democrats holding their own among likely voters — such as because of increased Democratic enthusiasm in the wake of Roe being overturned — the model will adjust to reflect that. Put another way, a very strong turnout would give Democrats a fighting chance of keeping the House.

But also, the generic ballot isn’t the only input that the model considers, and some of the other factors look worse for Democrats than the generic ballot does. Based on the historical tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in the midterms and Biden’s poor approval rating, for instance, the situation is more likely to get worse for Democrats than better. The model also evaluates factors such as polling and fundraising data in individual races.

Overall, the Deluxe forecast expects Democrats to eventually lose the popular vote for the House by closer to 6 points, about the margin that they lost it by in 2014. And it expects Republicans to wind up with 237 seats in an average outcome, a gain of 24 seats from the 213 they had at the start of the current Congress.²

As I mentioned, this analysis is based on the Deluxe version of our model, which accounts for polling, “fundamentals” — or factors such as fundraising and incumbency — and expert race ratings such as those put out by the Cook Political Report. The Classic version of our model, which leaves out the expert ratings — sacrificing the additional accuracy they add but sticking to purely quantitative factors — tells a similar story, with Democrats also having a 12 percent chance of keeping the House. The Lite version of our model, meanwhile, which tries to forecast as much as it can based on polls alone, does paint a more optimistic picture for Democrats, giving them a 22 percent chance of keeping the House. But that version leaves out a lot of useful information, especially given that there isn’t much polling in a number of competitive House races.

The Senate

Democratic hopes of keeping the Senate are much more viable, however. Part of this, as I mentioned, is because they appear to have stronger candidates in a handful of key races. Pennsylvania, for instance — which is an open seat after the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — is ordinarily the sort of seat that you’d expect Republicans to win since Pennsylvania is a purple state in a Republican year. However, the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, is ahead of Republican Mehmet Oz, the doctor and TV personality, in every poll conducted so far. The model, though, is trained to be a bit skeptical given the fundamentals of the race, so it hedges against those polls and, at this point, has determined that Pennsylvania is best thought of as a toss-up. Still, that means Democrats have roughly a 50-50 chance of gaining a GOP-held Senate seat, offsetting potential losses elsewhere.

Indeed, our forecast sees the overall Senate landscape to be about as competitive as it gets. The Deluxe forecast literally has Senate control as a 50-50 tossup. The Classic and Lite forecasts show Democrats as very slight favorites to keep the Senate, meanwhile, with a 59 and a 62 percent chance, respectively.

Part of this is because Senate terms last for six years, and so most of these seats were last contested in 2016,³ a mediocre year for Democrats in which they lost the popular vote for the House and also lost Senate races in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs in November, 21 are currently held by Republicans. True, most of these are not competitive, but in addition to their chances to gain a GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, Democrats also have credible chances in Wisconsin and North Carolina (and outside chances in Ohio and Florida, although those are a stretch given how GOP-leaning both states have become).

Republicans don’t have any surefire pickups, meanwhile. Our model regards their best chances as being in Georgia, but that race is rated as a toss-up. And the races in Arizona and New Hampshire merely lean toward the Democratic incumbent, meaning they are still highly plausible GOP pickup opportunities.

Still, the picture isn’t as bad as you might expect for Democrats. If the political environment really deteriorates for them, they’ll be in trouble, lose most of the competitive races and even blue states like Colorado could come into play. But if things are merely pretty bad for Democrats instead of catastrophic, the outcome of the Senate will remain uncertain enough that stronger candidates could make the difference for them.

The Governors’ Mansions

It’s hard to talk about gubernatorial races on a systematic basis since there’s no particular prize for winning a majority of governorships. But, for the record, our model does run these calculations, and the Deluxe version estimates that there’s an 83 percent chance that Republicans end up with a majority of governorships following this November’s elections, compared with a 7 percent chance for Democrats. (There is an 10 percent chance that neither party has a majority.) However, a lot of these governorships are in smaller, lower-population states, and the model thinks there’s a 73 percent chance that the majority of the U.S. population will reside in states run by Democratic governors.

Overall, though, gubernatorial contests take the theme from the Senate a step further: Individual candidates can matter a lot. Indeed, partisanship matters less in gubernatorial races than in races for Congress, even if it matters more than it once did. Consider, for instance, that there are currently Democratic governors in Kansas and Louisiana and Republican ones in Massachusetts and Maryland, although several of those seats could flip parties this year. 

However, incumbency is a powerful force in gubernatorial races. For instance, even though Michigan is a slightly red-leaning state, its incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a clear favorite against a Republican field marred by fraudulent attempts to access the ballot and the arrest of a leading candidate for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s Tony Evers, also a Democratic incumbent, is a favorite against a Republican field where the most likely nominee is Rebecca Kleefisch, the former lieutenant governor. This is the sort of race where abortion could matter: Technically, Wisconsin’s 173-year-old abortion ban — which outlaws all abortions, except in cases to save the life of the mother — is now in effect following the Dobbs decision, although the Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul has said he won’t enforce the ban.⁴ But Kleefisch has said she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

However, Republicans also have some strongly positioned incumbents. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is an 86 percent favorite to hold on against Democrat Stacey Abrams, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is a 95 percent favorite against Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a co-favorite with former President Donald Trump to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is also a 94 percent favorite to win a second term.

Perhaps the most important gubernatorial race is in Pennsylvania, an open-seat race as the Democratic incumbent governor, Tom Wolf, is term-limited. There, the Republican nominee, Doug Mastriano, was present outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and worked to overturn Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, potentially yielding a constitutional crisis if he’s governor in Pennsylvania and the election outcome is close again there in 2024. But Mastriano is an underdog against Democrat Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general.

Changes to the model

Overall, we’re happy with our congressional and gubernatorial forecasts, which last underwent a major revision before the 2018 elections. They performed very well in 2018 and fairly well in 2020 (despite a challenging year for the polls in 2020; it helped that our model also considers a number of other factors in addition to the polling). Therefore, the overall methodology is largely the same. However, after assessing the performance of the models, we did make a few changes around the margins:

1. In evaluating fundraising for congressional candidates, the model now places more emphasis on contributions received within the candidate’s state. Fundraising is a highly nationalized activity these days; Democrats in California and New York regularly contribute to Senate campaigns like that of Democrat Jaime Harrison of South Carolina, who raised a record amount of money in 2020 but nonetheless lost to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham by 10 percentage points. As such, our analysis finds that a dollar received from within a candidate’s state is about five times as valuable as a dollar received outside of it in predicting the eventual election outcome.⁵ That’s why the model now applies that ratio, multiplying any funds raised from voters within the candidate’s state by 5, when assessing which candidate has the fundraising edge.

2. The model now puts more emphasis on basic partisanship as opposed to other fundamentals. The fundamentals component of our model, used in the Classic and Deluxe versions, evaluates a series of variables such as fundraising, incumbency, candidate experience, congressional voting records and even scandals to make a forecast. The formula is fairly complicated, so we tested a simple alternative in an era of high partisanship. Specifically, we looked at what would happen if you made a forecast based solely on the partisan lean of a state or district, plus generic-ballot results. For instance, if the generic ballot favors Republicans by 4 percentage points, and a state leans Republican by 3 points, you might expect the Republican to win there by 7 points. In testing this on 2018 and 2020 races, we found that the more complicated version of our fundamentals formula does outperform this simple alternative. But it’s pretty close, and a blend of the complicated and simple formulas does better than either one taken alone.⁶ What this means is that state partisanship and the generic ballot will have more influence on our model going forward and the other fundamentals factors less, although they certainly matter some.

3. We assume errors are more correlated from race to race. In presidential races, forecast and polling errors are highly correlated from state to state. It wasn’t a surprise that Trump won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016 given that he also won Michigan, for example, since the states are fairly similar demographically. (Accounting for this properly was a big reason that FiveThirtyEight’s model gave Trump a better chance than others in 2016.) This also holds in congressional races, though to a considerably lesser degree since there are different candidates on the ballot in each state. A scandal affecting the Republican candidate in Georgia won’t necessarily have any impact in Arizona, for instance. However, our analysis suggests that polling errors are becoming more correlated in congressional races, too. Certainly, 2020 was a prominent example given that Republicans won nearly every toss-up race for the House and that polls for Congress had a strong overall bias toward Democrats. Therefore, we’ve increased the degree to which race-by-race errors are assumed to be correlated in the model.⁷

4. We’ve reduced the emphasis on sample size when weighting polls. This is consistent with a change in our pollster ratings methodology and is explained in more detail there.

5. We’ve removed a series of changes in the 2020 model that were specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, I know the pandemic isn’t over yet, but voting will take place under far more normal conditions than in 2020.

Finally, a couple pieces of housekeeping. A number of states haven’t held their primaries yet, so in those cases, we guess at the most likely nominees based on polling, fundraising and other factors. These “presumed nominees” are designated with an asterisk in the interactive. If you see anything egregiously wrong — such as a candidate listed as a presumptive nominee when they’ve dropped out of the race — please drop us a line.

We’re also still thinking about how best to handle Alaska, which has a new system in place this year in which the top-four finishers in the primary advance to the general election regardless of political party, and then the general election outcome is determined by ranked-choice voting (or, as some call it, an instant runoff) if no candidate receives a majority. This is not entirely dissimilar to the way elections are conducted in Louisiana, in which all candidates from all parties appear on the ballot in a blanket nonpartisan primary in November, and then there’s a runoff later between the top-two candidates if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote. In fact, we’re currently taking a bit of a shortcut by using the Louisiana code for Alaska, essentially treating the instant runoff as though it’s an actual runoff where voters go to the polls again.

We may revisit this assumption later, but it does avoid one potential pitfall. In Alaska’s House, Senate and gubernatorial races, it’s fairly likely that we’ll end up with one Democratic candidate but two or three Republican candidates following the Aug. 16 primaries. If the Republican vote is divided two or three ways, it may well be that the Democrat initially receives the plurality of the vote. However, this lead is unlikely to survive the instant-runoff process assuming voters for one Republican rank the other Republicans ahead of any Democrat. The process we use for Louisiana assumes that votes mostly tend to stay within the same party in the event of a runoff, and this same assumption is in place in Alaska. Thus, we have Republicans as fairly heavy favorites in the Alaska races, although the new system introduces some uncertainty.

The forecast itself will update continuously whenever new polls or other information are added to our database. We’ll also publish a written update to the forecast once per week or so, usually on Fridays, to review new data and other changes in the landscape, before upping the frequency as the election draws closer. We hope you’ll regularly visit FiveThirtyEight as part of your midterms rotation.

The FiveThirtyEight 2022 midterms forecast is live, and it shows that Republicans are strong favorites to win the House while the Senate is a toss up between the two parties. In the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast’s first “Model Talk” episode of the 2022 midterms cycle, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss the factors behind that forecast. They dig into some of the specifics of battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia and talk about what could change between now and Election Day.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Abortion

Even Exceptions To Abortion Bans Pit A Mother’s Life Against Doctors’ Fears

By Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jun. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Layla Houshmand was eight weeks pregnant in the spring of 2021 when she woke up to find her field of vision smeared with a hazy sheen, like Vaseline rubbed on the lens of a camera. She was already worried about her own health. She’d spent the day before nursing herself through the pain of a migraine. But now the headache was worse and her vision was blurring and Houshmand was even more scared. Then the vomiting began. Nothing would stay down. During one 90-minute appointment with an ophthalmologist, she remembered vomiting 20 times. 

Something was clearly going horribly wrong with Houshmand’s body. Her ophthalmologist suspected a stroke in her optic nerve and told her the condition can be caused by pregnancy, but Houshmand was stuck in a Catch-22: The pregnancy was now also preventing treatment. Doctors told her that she needed steroids and blood thinners and a specific type of MRI that could make sure there wasn’t something even more serious happening. But she couldn’t get any of those things because they could endanger her fetus. 

Houshmand decided she wanted an abortion. She wasn’t willing to risk losing eyesight and continuing to be in pain, vomiting over and over, with no solution … not for an eight-week pregnancy. But her doctors couldn’t help her — abortion wasn’t even an option they brought up. Houshmand had to find a private clinic that could treat her on her own. After the abortion she found out the truth: She had a life-threatening infection in her optic nerve. 

As long as she was pregnant, none of the doctors Houshmand encountered would do the things that needed to happen to diagnose her — or treat her. Without an abortion, she was just a sick pregnant woman, rather than a woman who needed an abortion to save her life. 

With the end of Roe v. Wade’s abortion protections, there are now millions of Americans who won’t be able to get an abortion if they want one. Some, like Houshmand, will be people who are seeking abortion because of the way a pregnancy is affecting their health. In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem, thanks to exceptions for the life of the mother that are common, even in the strictest abortion bans. But the medical professionals, legal experts and researchers we spoke to said those exceptions are usually vague, creating an environment where patients have to meet some unspoken and arbitrary criteria to get treatment. 

When it’s not clear what is legal, patients are often treated as though nothing is. It can be hard to prove your medical emergency is enough of an emergency to get an abortion in a doctor’s office or hospital, or to get Medicaid and other insurers to pay for it. Uncertainty breeds fear and stigma for doctors, who might delay treatment so they can evaluate just how close a person is to dying. In some situations, patients are simply shuttled from one facility to the next like a hot potato until they find a place willing to offer care.

There are a lot of unknowns about what will happen in the wake of the Dobbs decision. But doctors say they do know at least one thing: Overturning Roe v. Wade will lead to more situations where the health and safety of a pregnant person comes second to doctors’ own risks and fears. They know this because it’s already been happening for years. 

As she sat in the ophthalmologist’s office, it was obvious to Houshmand that her symptoms were freaking out the eye doctor. And what that doctor had to say was freaking out Houshmand. Her vision loss might be permanent, and she could also end up losing vision in her other eye. But, Houshmand remembers the ophthalmologist saying, “You’re pregnant so there’s nothing I can do for you.” 

No one ever said the word “abortion” out loud or even suggested it as an option — and this was in Maryland, a state that has very few restrictions on abortion. The doctors just told her what she needed and why she couldn’t have it. When Houshmand tried to call her OB-GYN’s office to ask what kind of abortion would be safe for someone who might have had an optic nerve stroke, the flustered medical assistant who answered the phone didn’t answer her questions and tried to talk her out of making any quick decisions. And the OB-GYN couldn’t even help Houshmand — she worked at a religiously affiliated hospital and Houshmand’s condition didn’t meet its standard for when abortions could be performed. 

Houshmand felt trapped between the parts of the medical system that were ideologically opposed to her choice, and the parts that were too afraid of controversy to help her. 

And it is pretty common for sick pregnant people to end up squeezed in that vise, said Dr. Lisa Harris, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan who specializes in treating pregnant patients with complex medical problems. While she can remember cases where death was certain if an abortion couldn’t be performed — a patient with heart and lung failure, for example — they only come up maybe once a year in her work. But patients like Houshmand happen all the time, she said. “Maybe it’s a 30 or 50 percent chance that someone might die. And they might not die immediately. Maybe it would be in the next week or month, or even year or beyond.” 

Abortion bans and abortion restrictions nearly all contain exceptions that allow abortion to save the life of the mother, and, in some cases, preserve her health as well. But every law and statute that contains this exception is written a little differently, and most of them are ambiguous about what constitutes “life-threatening” and how that should be determined. Maryland’s “life of the mother” exception to its ban on post-viability abortions specifically allows doctors to use their best medical judgment. But that kind of detail isn’t common, said Joanne Rosen, a senior lecturer on public health and law at Johns Hopkins University. What’s more, she said, “the states that are the most hostile to abortion are the states least likely to provide really helpful specificity.” Take Tennessee’s abortion ban, which requires doctors who perform an abortion to prove that “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”

Legislators in these states may worry that if the laws give doctors too much leeway, some will take advantage and use that as an excuse to perform any abortion they want, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law who has studied abortion restrictions. Rosen agreed, saying the ambiguity is part of how states make abortion — even doctor-recommended abortion — hard to get. Even if doctors’ actual liability is kind of nebulous, the fear that they could go to jail, incur legal costs or lose their medical license is acutely clear. “It will massively change the risk calculus,” Cohen said. “People will have to think, ‘Will I spend 10 to 20 years in jail for performing this abortion?’”

There’s no clear answer to that question under an ambiguous law. After Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which banned abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected, as early as six weeks, and opened the door for expensive civil lawsuits against doctors, a group of researchers interviewed 25 clinicians in the state and found a huge amount of variation in how those people were interpreting exceptions in the law. Some were still providing abortion counseling and referrals. Others felt they weren’t allowed to even mention the treatment. Some thought the health of the mother exception in the law allowed them to perform abortions for patients whose water broke before the point of fetal viability. Others were sending those patients home to wait until infection set in and the patient could be admitted to an intensive care unit. 

Meanwhile, hospitals often err on the side of caution even in states without bans. “It’s common when I talk with friends who work at hospitals, where, even though abortion is legal in their state, their hospital or clinic has chosen not to allow them to do abortion, because they don’t want controversy,” said Jonas Swartz, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University Medical School. Several other medical professionals we spoke with also said that secular hospitals often had policies on abortion that were more strict than state law. Jen Moore Conrow, former director of the Pregnancy Early Access Center at the University of Pennsylvania, described setting up the hospital’s internal clinic for handling miscarriage and medically necessary abortion in 2015, and then not being allowed to publicly talk about that clinic in the media for two years. We reached out to the University of Pennsylvania Health System, but did not receive a response in time for publication. “The chair of our department was like, ‘We don’t ever want to be an abortion clinic.’ And I’m like well, we are an abortion clinic,” Conrow said.

“When you’re pregnant, you’re a second-class citizen inside your own body,” Houshmand said. “It was just abundantly clear to me that everyone was prioritizing this eight-week embryo over me.” Houshmand wrestled with those feelings while she argued with her doctor’s office on the phone, while she called abortion clinics on her own, and while she waited overnight for the appointment she’d managed to get. She felt like she was going crazy. The pain was so intense that she’d barely slept in two days. She passed out in her shower. And, seemingly out of nowhere, Houshmand began to have thoughts of suicide. 

She would later find out that was caused by the infection in her brain. But in some ways she was lucky. Her emergency happened at the right place, at the right time. If she’d gone through this experience now, she might not have been able to get that appointment since wait times are rising as remaining clinics struggle to meet a demand for abortions that doesn’t go away just because national abortion rights have.

Delayed treatment has real impacts on the health and welfare of pregnant people. A condition that wasn’t immediately dangerous two weeks ago might be life and death today. And with every week that passes, the fetus gets bigger and abortion becomes more complicated and riskier, as well. Maternal mortality rates are higher in states that have more abortion restrictions, even after scientists account for demographic factors. Suzanne Baird, an obstetric nursing and health care consultant and a member of the board of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, said delays could be one reason why. She pointed to a 2018 report by nine state committees that review individual cases of maternal mortality in the United States. This report found that delayed diagnosis and treatment had been a major factor in those deaths. 

In North Carolina, for example, Swartz has had to follow state restrictions, including a 72-hour waiting period and reading mandatory scripts meant to dissuade a patient from an abortion — even when the patient is sick. It’s common, he told us, to find himself debating whether a patient who isn’t in an emergency situation yet, will be by the time the waiting period is up. 

Likewise, Medicaid and many other state-funded insurance providers can’t use federal funds to pay for abortions unless the life of the mother is at risk. And doctors we spoke to say those exceptions are approved in arbitrary, haphazard ways that vary widely by state as well as the reviewer of that particular case. If the case is denied, the patient has little means to pay out of pocket. Conrow described having to delay the care of a patient with sickle cell anemia, waiting to see if Medicaid would cover the patient’s abortion, knowing that sometimes Medicaid will cover abortions for people with the disorder … and sometimes it won’t. In 2019, a report from the Government Accountability Office found that some states weren’t following federal requirements for Medicaid abortion funding — such as paying for abortion pills, or covering abortions in the cases of rape or incest. 

Even when patients aren’t going to die, they can still be left with lifelong complications that abortion could have helped them avoid, Harris said. One of her first cases at the University of Michigan involved a patient who wanted an abortion because of a fetal anomaly, but who also had placenta previa — a condition where the placenta grows across the part of the uterus that would normally open during childbirth. Instead of giving her a second-trimester abortion, dilating the cervix and removing the fetus through the birth canal, doctors had decided to induce labor with drugs. Days of contractions later, when the patient still hadn’t given birth, her doctors planned a hysterotomy. That procedure is like a C-section, surgery that cuts through the abdominal wall and uterus, but because the uterus is still so small in the second trimester, the scarring resulting from the hysterotomy would have meant the patient would never be able to give birth vaginally — and might have had trouble maintaining a future pregnancy at all. Instead, Harris performed an abortion, leaving the patient’s uterus intact. 

Being pregnant can make you sick, and it can exacerbate existing illnesses you never knew you had. The needs of pregnant people sometimes end up at odds with the needs of a fetus. And in that way, abortion restrictions — and vague life of the mother exceptions — are a thumb on the scale. The end of Roe v. Wade will obviously throw that balance even more out of whack, but the asymmetry was already there. The risks to pregnant people just get bigger as their choices shrink. “Hospitals want to get out of making these decisions but they won’t be able to,” said Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the law surrounding abortion and medical emergencies. “They will see pregnant people who have life-threatening complications and no other options, and they’ll have to make the call.”

A year after the abortion that saved her life — and allowed her to know her life needed saving — Houshmand has vowed to never get pregnant again. After her abortion, when she met with doctors from the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, they told her the immunosuppression that happens during pregnancy had allowed a normally harmless virus that causes cold sores to run rampant, attacking her optic nerves and, possibly, her brain. 

Houshmand has had antiviral medications injected into her eye, and she’s gone through three surgeries. She is still legally blind in her right eye, and she suffers from PTSD. “I never want to live through the experience of not being in charge of my own body ever again,” she said. The risk just isn’t worth it.

When we spoke with her, Houshmand had a fourth eye surgery scheduled. It took place less than a week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

NCAA

College Athletes Suffered When Schools Weren’t Ready For NIL

By Josh Planos

Jun. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

As reports of seven-figure name, image and likeness (NIL) deals for teenagers have swirled on social media — and while fans of The Good Old Days have derided those announcements as shameful evidence of how the NCAA landscape had irrevocably changed — some college athletes were asking journalists on social media how to file their taxes.

Lost in the shuffle of pay-for-play accusations, big-pocketed collectives and transfer portal hysteria is the reality that as the NIL era celebrates its first year in the books, many college athletes continue to navigate unfamiliar, complicated terrain without inclusive guidance. 

“Honestly, in terms of the legal stuff, we don’t have a lot of help at all,” said Hanah Smrt, a graduate track and field athlete at University of Nevada. “I’m a psychology major. I’m sure there’s plenty of athletes who are business marketing majors, but I don’t know what deals to not do…In the end, it’s like, we’re not being told that we’re basically being taken advantage of. There’s really not a lot of guidance.”

Some athletic departments have invested in third-party companies such as INFLCR and Opendorse to facilitate NIL services, including booking, disclosure and education, and some schools even offer for-credit academic courses on NIL-related matters. “They want to make sure that we’re all eligible to play,” said Terrell Brown Jr., a fifth-year senior who earned all-conference basketball honors last season at the University of Washington. Opendorse and INFLCR represent a vast majority of Power Five programs — Opendorse alone claims to represent more than 1,000 college teams, athletic departments and conferences.

But a number of Group of Five programs might not have that luxury — and even the ones with contracts in place cannot guarantee that athletes are prepared for this moment, which calls for at bare minimum financial literacy and life skills education. Countless athletes are afforded little assistance in avoiding situations that directly threaten their eligibility and, in some cases, freedom.

“You have other institutions in the country — especially kind of on the lower level — that don’t have anything in place, that don’t educate their athletes as much or don’t have a disclosure requirement,” said Chris Aumueller, CEO and founder of FanWord, an athlete branding company. “They pretty much leave it up to the athletes.”

These are the inevitable repercussions of an organization — duty-bound to keep its membership safe — that chose not to face a predictable, seismic transition impacting hundreds of thousands of athletes and opted instead for a “wait it out” approach, then was forced to frantically roll out a slapstick framework, devoid of regulation, at the 11th hour.

A year after the Supreme Court’s watershed ruling in NCAA v. Alston, the organization still has not provided a comprehensive educational program centered on NIL, according to Kam Cox, who coordinates the INFLUENCE Program at the University of Illinois. The justification for this information vacuum is that there still isn’t a federal law in place, allowing state laws to run the show. “I just don’t think you’ll see that national standard where a large company can feel really confident that not only do we have one standard to comply for everybody, but also it’s something that won’t change tomorrow, which is what we keep running into,” Cox said. “Therefore they can’t put together a true educational infrastructure.”

Be that as it may, a desire for educational resources dedicated to financial literacy is top of mind for thousands of athletes. A 2021 athlete survey conducted by the NCAA showed that 49 percent of respondents wanted help on tax and financial literacy, and 40 percent wanted help on navigating NIL. 

“We had somebody at our school have a $35,000 deal,” said Smrt. “How are they just supposed to figure out what to do with that amount of money when they have no education on it?”

Most of the athletes monetizing their NIL aren’t generating life-changing sums of money, but they might be moments away from making decisions with profound consequences without a true understanding of what is involved. Pell grant eligibility could be compromised by those who have never so much as seen a 1099 before. One college basketball player at a top 25 program didn’t know who to ask about tax filing assistance. Another nearly signed over exclusive rights to an agency without knowing what they were about to do.

“I had a player come to me in tears,” an SEC recruiting coordinator told On3’s Jeremy Crabtree. “He had no clue that he had to pay taxes for his NIL income. … I asked him where his 1099s were. He stared at me with a blank face and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, coach.’ We later came to find out that he had gotten some 1099s. But he threw them all away.”

“I’m very concerned about deals that athletes are entering into that are extremely exploitative,” said attorney Darren Heitner, who helped write Florida’s NIL law. “I’ve looked at over 100 [NIL contracts], and I’ll be honest, there’s not a single deal — not a single one — where I said to my client, ‘Sign this.’”

Every variable from compensation to grant of rights to dispute resolution deserves to be inspected, Heitner said. But in his experience, few are. The vast majority of athletes likely don’t have legal counsel. “And not just any lawyer, but one who understands this process,” Heitner said. “If they’re hiring a personal injury lawyer, what help is that going to be for someone who needs an expert on intellectual property protection and rights?”

Contracts can follow athletes for years after the ink dries. “We don’t think it’s the best idea in the world to align yourself with Barstool,” Cox said. Brand building is hindered when an athlete partners with a questionable organization, or agrees to promote a controversial product or service; think Gonzaga star Drew Timme dribbling a basketball between slot machines.  

“If you sign up for a partnership today, especially if you’re in those high-profile sports, that might follow you for the next couple of years of your life,” Aumueller said. “I think athletes need to be more mindful of who they partner with, and what the campaign should look like.”

University staff like Cox can answer athletes’ questions, but they cannot approve or deny the deals. “A lot of times what happens is student-athletes want to know stuff about their contract, and so I can explain to them how it works.” Cox fields roughly five inquiries per week, on average. “If we’re doing our jobs really well, they don’t ask questions, right? Our student-athletes are really well educated, and our community is really, really well educated, and everybody feels empowered.”

Student autonomy is at the heart of NIL, which complicates matters, said Cox. “I don’t set the prices,” he said. “Even if I could, I won’t do that. I think it’s antithetical. On one hand, for me, I never want our student-athletes to sign anything that they shouldn’t, like a ridiculous noncompete or some sort of absurd grant of rights or whatever. But at the same time, it’s up to them to be able to negotiate terms that are favorable for them.

“One of the things that we struggle with here is: To what degree should our educational program be mandatory? And like, how does that work? We have to understand these are adults.”

All agree that the education process is lacking and that it needs to begin before athletes arrive on campus. 

“I think we as a society need to rethink whether or not athletes or individuals in general are receiving important practical education even earlier in their lives,” Heitner said. “Whether it be middle school or high school, prior to enrolling at university. I don’t recall receiving that important information about properly managing finances and preparing for filing tax returns, and the importance of legal language within a contract — all of which I think is especially important in today’s day and age.”

It was essential for Heitner that Florida’s state law include a requirement for schools to provide adequate training in financial literacy and life skills. “I do think schools need to be very proactive in this area, to educate the athletes and make sure they understand that they should be setting aside money to pay their taxes, understand the value of properly diversifying your portfolio and not keeping it perhaps totally in cash and not doing very risky investments,” Heitner said. “I put at least some responsibility on the educators.”

But a focus on education may not pay off for athletic departments. Shortly before Wichita State athletic director Darron Boatright was fired this spring amid concerns that the university was unable to compete in the NIL market, he said his department’s struggles could be traced to a collective decision to focus “on educating our athletes about NIL and not just collecting cash and paying kids to come to Wichita State.” 

“It’s really, really important to instill a true educational infrastructure within your NIL program,” Cox said. “You need to have a partnership with your business school, or you need to have a partnership with some sort of local law firm or consulting firm or something where people repeatedly come in and are able to provide that service to your student-athlete. If you don’t have that, you can’t really have a sustainable system.”

That framework simply isn’t in place at far too many campuses.

WNBA

Jackie Young's Breakout Has Lifted The Aces To The Top Of The WNBA

By James L. Jackson

Jun. 29, 2022, at 12:48 PM

In her fourth year in the WNBA, Jackie Young has taken a giant step up — all the way into the All-Star Game. Now the former No. 1 overall pick has only one question to answer: Can her breakout take the Las Vegas Aces to their first league championship?

Young, who trailed only teammate and fellow first-time All-Star Kelsey Plum in total fan votes among guards, has played a crucial role in Las Vegas, adjusting to its new identity this season. The arrival of head coach Becky Hammon and the departure of two-time All-WNBA center Liz Cambage brought a new look to the team. 

Hammon has surrounded 2020 MVP A’ja Wilson with a reliable three-guard rotation of Young, Plum and four-time All-Star Chelsea Gray, the only player on the Aces roster to have won a championship (in 2016 with the L.A. Sparks). Two-time Sixth Woman of the Year Dearica Hamby rounds out the lineup that has the Aces off to a 14-4 record — tied for the franchise’s best start in the five years it’s been in Vegas. In Young, Plum and Wilson, the Aces sport three top-10 scorers, which no team has done since the 2007 Phoenix Mercury took home the title with Diana Taurasi, Penny Taylor and Cappie Pondexter.

It didn’t take long for Hammon to appreciate how valuable Young’s growth could be to the team realizing its potential. In Hammon’s new system, Young has nearly doubled her career scoring average and gotten to the free throw line more efficiently than ever. Her 23 made threes in 2022 are one more than her career total entering this season.

“I don’t think she has a ceiling right now,” Hammon said of Young last month. “I think she’s going to be as good as she wants to be. She’s an assassin — on both ends.”

Young is posting career highs this year in points, minutes and steals per game and 3-point percentage. Her seven 20-point games this season has already surpassed her total from her first three seasons combined.

But it isn’t just Young’s scoring leap that has aided Las Vegas — it’s how comfortable she is from nearly every spot on the floor. Entering Friday’s games, she is fourth among all guards with 116 points scored from the paint, per WNBA Advanced Stats. The Aces are on pace to finish in the top six in interior points scored by guards for a fourth consecutive season.

Young has also worked to turn defense into offense. Her team-high 61 points off turnovers (tied for 10th in the WNBA) is three more than her total from the entirety of last season, which set a career high. Those extra possessions can prove invaluable during the playoffs for the Aces, who currently lead the league in pace after finishing first in each of the previous two years. 

And Las Vegas has certainly benefited from Young’s growth as a long-range shooter. She didn’t shoot higher than 32 percent from deep in any of her first three seasons, but she currently second among all qualified shooters¹ in 3-point percentage. 

Her strides as an outside scorer have played a big part in the Aces’ franchise-record 9.2 made threes per game this season. That volume has been a far cry from previous Aces seasons. Since relocating to Las Vegas in 2018 and playing most of that time under notoriously three-averse coach Bill Laimbeer, the team hadn’t finished higher than 11th in total made threes. 

Here is Young in the first half of last week’s matchup against the defending champion Chicago Sky. She spots up in the corner as Plum draws attention after driving into the paint.

The Aces set a WNBA record with 41 points in the opening frame of this matchup, including a 23-0 run capped by Young pulling up for three before finishing the first quarter with a dozen points. But they ended up dropping the game after Chicago mounted a historic, 28-point comeback. And that’s an example of arguably the team’s only real flaw: It has struggled to beat fellow contenders. All of Las Vegas’s four losses have come against the Sky, Connecticut Sun and Washington Mystics (twice), who have three of the four highest win totals in the league this year after Vegas.

How well the team adjusts to setbacks could determine if it is prepared to get over the hump when it matters most. After that loss to the Sky, Young had thoughts on what the Aces can do to maintain a balanced identity and ensure a 40-minute effort.

“I think we’re at our best when we’re getting defensive stops and going in transition, sharing the ball,” she said.” So we just have to make sure we keep doing that. We had a really good first quarter, we just have to keep that up. I think the biggest thing for us is getting defensive stops and just keep going on offense.”

Young’s leadership in all facets of the game hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Aces’ front office. Vegas recently signed Young to a contract extension, locking her up through at least the 2024 season. Despite bouncing between the starting lineup and bench during her first three years as a pro, Young expressed confidence that Las Vegas would always be where she would blossom.

“I knew this is where I wanted to be,” Young told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I love it here.”

Check out our latest WNBA predictions.

Data Is Plural

The Datasets We’re Looking At This Week

By Jeremy Singer-Vine

Jun. 29, 2022, at 12:41 PM

You’re reading Data Is Plural, a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. Below you’ll find the June 22, 2022, edition, reprinted with permission at FiveThirtyEight.

2022.06.29 edition

State abortion laws, diaspora voting policies, automated driving crashes, Bay Area rents and dendrochronology.

State abortion laws. The Guttmacher Institute, a “research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights,” maintains a table summarizing each U.S. state’s abortion laws. It examines key aspects of the legal landscape — such as gestational age limits, mandated counseling and whether an abortion must be performed by a licensed physician — and links to topic-specific tables with additional detail. A separate table categorizes, as of June 1, the policy implications in each state of overturning Roe v. Wade. Previously: Guttmacher’s state-level statistics on pregnancy, birth and abortion (DIP 2020.10.28) and Global Abortion Incidence Dataset (DIP 2021.04.14), the World Health Organization’s Global Abortion Policies Database (DIP 2021.10.13) and Caitlin Knowles Myers’s dataset of abortion facility distances (DIP 2022.02.02).

Diaspora voting policies. If you don’t live in your country of citizenship, can you still vote there? Nathan Allen et al.’s Extraterritorial Voting Rights and Restrictions Dataset examines 20-plus characteristics of 195 countries’ policies from 1950 to 2020. The dataset’s variables relate to dual citizenship, voter registration, mail-in ballots and more. Read more: An introductory Twitter thread from coauthor Elizabeth Iams Wellman. [h/t Rabbia Tariq]

Automated driving crashes. Last June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a directive requiring manufacturers and fleet operators to report certain crashes involving either advanced driver assistance or higher-level “automated driving systems.” Earlier this month, the agency published its first release of crash report data, which it says “will be updated on a monthly basis.” The files describe each report and include information about the car, location, circumstances and injury level. [h/t Faiz Siddiqui et al.]

Bay Area rents. In 2018, economist Kate Pennington used the Wayback Machine to collect data on two decades of Craigslist posts advertising housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The results span 200,000-plus listings between 2000 and 2018, from which Pennington extracted each post’s date, price, bedroom count, location and more. Previously: Twentieth-century San Francisco rents from the city’s Housing Study DataBook and transcribed from newspaper listings (DIP 2016.05.25). [h/t Alex Albright]

Dendrochronology. The Vernacular Architecture Group’s Dendrochronology Database “provides the tree-ring dates for over 4500 buildings in the United Kingdom, ranging from cathedrals to cottages and barns.” Each entry lists a date range, dating method, location, building type and descriptive notes.

Dataset suggestions? Criticism? Praise? Send feedback to jsvine@gmail.com. Looking for past datasets? This spreadsheet contains them all. Visit data-is-plural.com to subscribe and to browse past editions.

2022 Election

Where The Midterms Could Most Affect Abortion Access

By Nathaniel Rakich, Geoffrey Skelley and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Nathaniel Rakich, Geoffrey Skelley and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Nathaniel Rakich, Geoffrey Skelley and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jun. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving it up to individual states to decide whether abortion is legal within their borders. As of 5 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, nine states have already banned or restricted the procedure, and by the end of July, at least another six will have joined them. But the post-Roe landscape could change even more dramatically after the 2022 midterm elections — especially in states where control of state government is on the line and where the future of abortion policy is up in the air. 

We’ve identified seven states where the results of the midterms could decide whether abortion is protected or banned. Here are the relevant races in those states as well as how abortion policy could change following each possible electoral outcome.

Kansas

The first state where abortion will be on the ballot in 2022 is Kansas. Its state Supreme Court has previously ruled that the state constitution implicitly protects abortion rights, but that could change when Kansans head to the ballot box on Aug. 2 to vote on a state constitutional amendment that says that the Kansas Constitution does not protect abortion rights and explicitly gives the Republican-controlled state legislature the authority to legislate on the issue. 

This is something Republicans in the state have long pushed for, and this specific measure was on the ballot well in advance of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. We haven’t seen any public polls on the referendum, but if it passes, Kansas’s gubernatorial election could determine the future of abortion rights in the state. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly is up for reelection and, given Kansas’s deep-red hue, faces a challenging race against likely Republican candidate Attorney General Derek Schmidt. If Schmidt defeats Kelly, Republicans will have no remaining obstacles to banning or restricting abortion in the state.

Even if Kelly doesn’t lose, however, Republicans could still ban or restrict abortion as long as they retain their veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. Right now, Republicans have 28 of the 40 seats¹ in the Kansas state Senate (a supermajority is 27) and 86 of the 125 seats in the state House of Representatives (a supermajority is 84).

Pennsylvania

Control of the governorship could also determine the future of abortion rights in Pennsylvania. Abortion is currently legal in Pennsylvania until the 24th week of pregnancy (after which there are very few exemptions), and it’s likely to stay that way at least through the midterms. However, abortion isn’t legally protected in the state, and over the years, Republican lawmakers have passed numerous restrictions chipping away access, including counseling requirements and a 24-hour waiting period.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has vetoed multiple laws that would have made it harder to get an abortion, including a 2019 bill that would have banned abortion after a Down syndrome diagnosis. But Wolf is term-limited, and if Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a state senator, becomes Pennsylvania’s next governor, he has indicated he would support a total ban on abortion, with no exceptions for the life of the mother. However, election handicappers believe that the race leans toward Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, who has vowed to veto any bill restricting abortion.

But even if Shapiro wins the governorship, it’s unlikely that Democrats would be able to enshrine abortion protections into state law. Thanks to redistricting, the state House is competitive this year, but the state Senate is likely out of reach for Democrats. Therefore, the only party with a realistic shot at taking full control of Pennsylvania state government — and passing its preferred abortion policy — is the Republican Party.

Arizona

Starting in September, abortion in Arizona will be restricted to 15 weeks, except in the event of life-threatening medical emergencies. But it’s possible that Arizona’s legal framework could become even more restrictive in the post-Dobbs world. When passing the 15-week ban on abortion into law, GOP legislators decided not to repeal a 1901 law that criminalizes abortion, raising the possibility that the older, more restrictive rule could come into effect. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich have said Arizona will follow the recently established 15-week ban, which means that any further changes to the state’s legal code will likely depend on which party controls the state government after the 2022 election (although court decisions could also determine which law has primacy).

On the election front, Ducey is term-limited, so Arizona’s next governor will be decided in what is shaping up to be a toss-up contest between Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and the winner of the GOP primary, likely either former newscaster Kari Lake or state Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson. Both Republicans could back stricter abortion laws, too. Following the Dobbs decision, Lake said that as governor she would “sign bills to protect life when they land on my desk,” while Robson said she’d work to continue Arizona’s “tradition as one of the strongest pro-Life states in the nation.” 

The gubernatorial race will ultimately be key, too, in determining whether Arizona’s state government is divided or under one party’s control. That’s because while Republicans hold very narrow majorities in both the state Senate and House, the new legislative map is marginally more GOP-leaning than the current one, meaning there’s a good chance Republicans retain their edge.

Wisconsin

Since the Dobbs decision, Wisconsin clinics have been proceeding as if abortion is now illegal in the state based on an 1849 law banning the procedure, except to save the life of the mother. However, state Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, has said he won’t enforce the ban, and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers promised to pardon any doctors convicted of performing an abortion. In fact, on Tuesday, Evers and Kaul announced a legal challenge to the 1849 ban. (Evers has also said he is considering executive action that would limit local prosecutors’ ability to enforce the law.)

But Kaul and Evers could both lose reelection in 2022. Evers’s loss would be especially consequential: Not only might doctors once again face jail time for performing abortions if the 1849 ban is determined to be operative, but also, if it is not, a Republican governor could join forces with the Republican-led legislature to pass a modern abortion ban. The opposite situation — Democrats winning the legislature and working with Evers to enact new abortion protections — is pretty much off the table, though. Wisconsin’s state-legislative maps are heavily biased toward the GOP, so Democrats do not have a realistic shot at winning either chamber.

North Carolina

Abortion is still legal in North Carolina, though the Supreme Court’s decision could pave the way for the courts to reinstate the state’s 20-week abortion ban, which was ruled unconstitutional in 2019. But state Senate President Phil Berger and state House Speaker Tim Moore — both Republicans — have said they will not pass any new abortion-related laws this year.

That’s because the governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat and can veto anything the Republican legislature passes. And unfortunately for Republicans, Cooper isn’t on the ballot in 2022 — his term doesn’t end until January 2025. 

However, Republicans are hoping to win three-fifths majorities in this year’s state-legislative elections, which would allow them to override Cooper’s vetoes. They’ve also explicitly said they hope to use such supermajorities to pass “pro-life protections” starting in January. And they may very well get the votes they need. Republicans currently have 28 out of 50 seats in the Senate (two shy of a veto-proof majority) and 69 out of 120 in the House (three shy of a veto-proof majority). Moreover, a recent Cygnal poll found that 51 percent of North Carolina likely voters would vote for a Republican legislative candidate, while only 39 percent would vote for a Democratic one. If that comes to pass, it probably would indeed result in Republicans winning enough seats to unilaterally pass new anti-abortion legislation.

If Republicans do win veto-proof majorities and pass new restrictions, one last 2022 campaign could loom large: the race for two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Democrats currently have a 4-3 majority on the court, and if they hold onto that, they could strike down either the 20-week ban or future abortion restrictions passed by the legislature on the grounds that they violate the state constitution. But if Republicans flip at least one of those seats, the court would be much more likely to uphold them.

Michigan

In Michigan, the future of abortion is complicated because it doesn’t just hinge on what happens in the midterms. First, the courts may decide the future of abortion in the state. There is currently a 1931 state law on the books that bans abortion, except when the mother’s life is in danger. That law, though, is not currently in effect because of a preliminary injunction issued by a Michigan Court of Claims judge in response to a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood against the old statute. But Michigan’s Supreme Court could soon issue an opinion on the constitutionality of abortion, either through that case or one brought by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In April, the governor asked the state’s high court to issue a ruling on whether the 1931 law is legal under the state constitution, and after Dobbs, Whitmer reiterated her call for a ruling.

But if the courts don’t issue a ruling soon, it’s possible voters will decide first via a ballot initiative. Abortion-rights supporters have been campaigning for a proposed ballot measure to codify the right to an abortion in Michigan’s constitution. And if the measure qualifies for the November ballot — we won’t know until July — polls suggest it could pass. 

In May, a Glengariff Group/Detroit Regional Chamber poll found 59 percent of registered voters supported a constitutional amendment making abortion legal in Michigan, compared with 28 percent who opposed it. Similarly, an early June survey by Public Policy Polling on behalf of Progress Michigan found 54 percent supported overturning the 1931 law to keep abortion legal in Michigan, while 30 percent opposed doing so. However, a potential referendum could still end up being competitive. Votes on ballot measures are sometimes unexpectedly close in cases where public opinion surveys suggest that views are lopsidedly in favor of one position.

But if that referendum does not make the ballot — or fails — and the courts still haven’t weighed in, any future abortion legislation will rest on which party controls the governor’s mansion and the state legislature. The most likely outcome is that the government is divided, with Democrats controlling the governorship and Republicans holding onto the state Senate and House, but the possibility that Republicans — or Democrats — sweep can’t be ruled out. And, of course, if Republicans wind up in control of Michigan at all levels of government, abortion rights would likely be curtailed because every notable Republican gubernatorial contender is against them.

Georgia

Unlike many of its Southern neighbors, Georgia didn’t have a law in place that automatically banned abortion if Roe were overturned. The state also also didn’t have an unenforced abortion ban on the books. It does, however, have a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy that’s been tied up in the courts since it was passed in 2019. That law could go into effect as soon as the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals frees it from legal purgatory — which could happen very soon.

Heading into the midterm election, the question now is whether Democrat Stacey Abrams can defeat Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in their rematch, since Republicans are very likely to retain solid majorities in the state Senate and House. Polls show that Abrams is an underdog, but in theory, an Abrams victory would put a veto in place to halt any GOP attempt to create an even stricter law. That said, it’s not clear that, if Kemp were to win, an all-out prohibition on abortion would be likely. Back in 2019, there wasn’t sufficient support in the legislature for even more aggressive legislation, and Kemp has said his goal is to fully implement the measures contained within the six-week ban.

These seven states are where the midterm elections could most impact the future of abortion rights. However, they are not the only states where shifts in the electoral mood could affect abortion access. Most notably, Democrats have full control of government in Maine, but a GOP sweep is not out of the question there, possibly presenting conservatives with an opportunity to roll back the state’s law permitting abortions until around 24 weeks. On the flip side, even if Republicans sweep into power in Nevada, abortion access would likely not change there because a 1990 referendum established the right to an abortion within 24 weeks, and it would take another referendum to undo this. But more generally, remember that the fight over abortion access will extend well beyond the 2022 election.