Elections

Are Australians About To Vote Out Their Conservative Government?

By Geoffrey Skelley

May 20, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

The past year has been full of elections for major democracies and allies of the United States, including elections in Canada, Germany and Japan during September and October of 2021 and in France last month. And on May 21, it will be Australia’s turn to decide its political future — change could be in the air Down Under, too.

That’s because Saturday’s election for Australia’s House of Representatives could spell an end to almost nine years of rule by the Coalition, a political alliance of conservative-leaning political parties led by the Liberal Party¹ and its leader, Prime Minister Scott Morrison.² The Coalition has won a majority of seats in three consecutive elections — 2013, 2016 and 2019 — but polls now suggest the center-left Australian Labor Party is favored to retake power in Canberra, the Australian capital.

Led by Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, the ALP currently leads the Coalition 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent in two-party preference polling, according to The Poll Bludger’s average of recent surveys (more on two-party preference in a moment) run by elections analyst William Bowe. That 7 percentage-point advantage is significant because if the election results hew closely to the polls, such a result would amount to a 5-point swing in Labor’s vote share from the 2019 election, which is likely large enough to help the ALP overtake the Coalition’s narrow majority — 76 seats to the ALP’s 69 in the 151-seat chamber.³ Based on an election swing calculator developed by Antony Green, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s chief elections analyst, a roughly 3-point swing in the ALP’s direction might be enough to give it a majority.

But vote swings in Australia don’t always neatly translate into automatic gains and losses because members are elected from individual districts (“electorates” in local parlance). In elections to the House of Representatives, Australia uses ranked-choice voting to determine winners in each district. This system opens the door to a handful of independent and third-party winners, but most races still end up being narrowed to contests between candidates from the Coalition and the ALP, which is why observers focus heavily on two-party preference polls.

And in a story that will sound familiar to the Democrats, the U.S.’s left-leaning party, the ALP is at a slight disadvantage in how its votes translate to seats: Labor may need to win about 52 percent of the two-party preference vote to earn a majority, whereas the Coalition could retain a majority with around 51 percent; meanwhile, a result that falls somewhere between those outcomes could result in a hung parliament where no party has an outright majority. (Australians will also vote for around half of the 76 seats in the Senate, the parliament’s upper house, using a form of proportional representation that gives seats to a wider range of parties. But while the Senate has a fair bit of power in Australia, it’s the House election that will decide which party is in control of the government, including Australia’s prime minister.)

But before we go anointing Labor as the winner, the polls have narrowed in the last few days, creating some doubt about the outcome. For instance, a survey from Australian pollster Resolve Strategic released on Tuesday gave the ALP a 51 percent to 49 percent advantage, down from 54 percent to 46 percent two weeks earlier. Over a similar period, another Australian pollster Essential Report found Labor’s edge had narrowed from 4 points to 2 points. And this surely is giving the ALP — and pollsters — a sense of déjà vu: Back in 2019, the ALP went into Election Day with around a 3-point lead in the two-party preference polls, only to see the Coalition retain its majority with a 3-point victory in the two-party vote that Morrison called a “miracle” win.

Morrison is not an especially popular leader, but he and the Coalition may still benefit from the lukewarm feelings the electorate has toward the opposition leader, Albanese. Polls have consistently found more voters pick Morrison over Albanese when they’re asked who they prefer as the next prime minister. That said, Morrison’s brash reputation has attracted a fair amount of criticism, even prompting Morrison himself to promise to be more empathetic in the future, so it’s possible there’s still some upside for Labor here. 

As for the issues, Morrison has received somewhat solid marks for his handling of COVID-19, but that goodwill has receded from many voters’ minds with more expressing concern over things like the cost of living, elderly care and climate change. The Coalition has campaigned on a promise to pare back the budget in the aftermath of heavy spending amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has criticized the ALP for its larger spending plans. But the ALP has argued that the country needs investments in childcare, education and cleaner energy, while also shoring up Australia’s universal health care system. Given its proximity and clout, China has also been top of mind for voters. The Coalition has tried to cast the ALP as soft on China, while the ALP has argued the government’s approach hasn’t worked given China recently signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, a nearby small island nation.

Climate change could have electoral repercussions, too. Despite a spate of natural disasters in Australia ranging from massive bushfires to heavy flooding, critics say climate change has not received its due in the campaign. A movement of climate-focused “teal” independent candidates — referencing the color of their campaign materials — are targeting seats controlled by the Coalition. And if these independents are successful at picking off a handful of Coalition-held seats, they could end up controlling the balance of power if the election produces a hung parliament, giving them a chance to push for more climate-friendly policies in exchange for helping one of the major parties govern the country.

Learning how this will all play out, though, could take a bit of time because, much like in the U.S., more Aussie voters than ever are voting by mail — “postal voting” in local parlance. Already, around 5.4 million voters out of about 17.2 million have voted early in-person or by mail, and another 1.2 million mail ballots are still outstanding. Because Australia has compulsory voting — those who fail to vote face a fine if they don’t have a good excuse — we can expect roughly 90 percent of the electorate to cast a ballot, which means that around a third of voters are already using some form of early voting.

So with all this in mind, make sure to check the Australian election results when you wake up on Saturday — Sydney is 14 hours ahead of eastern time in the U.S. — it’s one of the rare instances where you can watch election night coverage while you enjoy your morning coffee.

Other polling bites

• Our first FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll on the top issues facing Americans came out earlier this week. We found that Americans are worried about inflation more than any other issue, and April survey data from Morning Consult shows how this is affecting Americans’ choices at the grocery store. In the poll, 43 percent said they bought generic to save on groceries, up from 36 percent six months prior. In a separate survey, Morning Consult also found Americans are growing more concerned about their financial well-being. In April, only 24 percent of Americans said they could handle an unexpected expense completely or very well, down from 29 percent last June, and 26 percent said they felt the same about securing their future financial security, down from 31 percent.
• Feeling tired of politics? You’re not alone. A new CNN/SSRS survey found just 23 percent of Americans were “fired up” about politics, while 53 percent said they were “burned out.” Moreover, no one really feels like their political party of choice is doing well, as just 9 percent said they felt like they were mostly on the winning side, while 32 percent said their side was losing more than winning. (That said, 58 percent said neither state described how they felt.)
• In the wake of the leak of a draft opinion that could signal the Supreme Court’s intentions to overturn Roe v. Wade, 60 percent of Americans told NBC News earlier this month that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, the highest percentage the poll had found dating back to 2003. By comparison, 32 percent said abortion should be illegal with some exceptions and just 5 percent said it should be illegal in all cases.
• Quinnipiac University’s latest poll found 69 percent of Americans support limiting the number of years a justice should serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, where currently justices have lifetime appointments. Remarkably, there is broad bipartisan agreement on this, too, as 77 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans back some sort of term limit, as did 69 percent of independents.
• Mask-wearing to combat COVID-19 is no longer required on flights, but Gallup found Americans continue to be split on whether the federal government should mandate face coverings in the air. In late April and early May, 49 percent said the government should enforce mask-wearing on flights, while 51 percent disagreed. Unsurprisingly, there were strong partisan divides on this question, as 81 percent of Democrats thought masks should be required, compared with only 13 percent of Republicans. Forty percent of independents also supported a mask mandate on planes.
• Monmouth University found continued support for U.S. actions against Russia given its invasion of Ukraine. In May, 77 percent of Americans said they supported the economic sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Russia, which is roughly the same as what Monmouth found in March. And despite concerns about high gas prices, almost 4 in 5 still support the U.S. ban on Russian gas and oil imports, also unchanged from two months earlier. Additionally, 77 percent said they supported sending weapons to Ukraine. However, these views haven’t boosted President Biden’s standing, as only 43 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the Ukraine situation and 50 percent disapprove, down from his 46 percent approve/48 percent disapprove mark in March.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁴ 41.1 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 53.4 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -12.3 points). At this time last week, 41.4 percent approved and 52.6 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -11.2 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 42.0 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.0 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.1 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁵ Republicans currently lead by 2.3 percentage points (45.0 percent to 42.7 percent). A week ago, Republicans led Democrats by 2.6 points (45.5 percent to 42.9 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 2.3 points (44.7 percent to 42.4 percent).

Abortion

The Real Dividing Line On Abortion

By Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

May 20, 2022, at 6:00 AM

There are certain divides in the American electorate that we return to over and over again to explain why people think and vote the way they do. Age, gender, race, education — you know the drill. But other, harder-to-see divisions can be just as important, if not more so. Those hidden divisions aren’t about vital statistics or affiliations. They’re about how people see the world.

Take the issue of abortion. It’s been in the headlines ever since a leaked Supreme Court opinion suggested that five justices are ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, giving states the power to ban abortion for the first time in about 50 years. Plenty of speculation has focused on how such a ruling would affect female voters, particularly if it could push more women to vote for Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. 

But that framing isn’t the only way to look at the issue. Even though abortion is often presented as a women’s issue, it’s not a topic with a stark division of opinion between men and women. If you dig into the polling and research, it becomes clear that the divide is less about people’s individual genders than the way they think about gender. People who believe in traditional gender roles — and perceive that those roles are increasingly being blurred to men’s disadvantage — are much likelier to oppose abortion than people who don’t hold those beliefs. 

The dividing lines of the abortion debate aren’t just about the morality of terminating a pregnancy. They’re also about views of power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? And who should? And the influence of those beliefs isn’t limited to abortion — it also spills into other culture wars, particularly about whether men face discrimination.

Whenever abortion is in the news, a lot of discussion inevitably hinges on how women will respond. Losing access to safe, legal abortion will mean that more women carry unwanted pregnancies. The issue itself is often framed in terms of women’s rights and autonomy. The problem is that not all women think about abortion that way. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, men and women in the U.S. have exceedingly similar views about abortion’s legality.

The Pew poll did find that more women (40 percent) than men (30 percent) said they’ve thought “a lot” about abortion. But that doesn’t mean women’s views on the issue are more uniform. In fact, some of the most prominent anti-abortion advocates and politicians are women. One reason is that religion is a good predictor of views on abortion, and women tend to be more religious than men. Some people who oppose abortion also see it as a women’s-rights issue but in a different sense of the term — they argue that abortion hurts women.

People with different views on what's needed for gender equality, it turns out, also tend to think pretty differently about abortion — at least, that’s what Tresa Undem, a co-founder of the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem, has found. In a recent survey,⁶ her firm found that 69 percent of voters who want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe agreed with the statement “These days, society seems to punish men just for acting like men,” while a similar share of voters who support Roe (63 percent) disagreed. In a 2019 poll⁷ that PerryUndem ran in partnership with Supermajority, a left-leaning advocacy group that focuses on women as a voting bloc, they found that likely voters who oppose abortion rights were much less likely, in general, to believe that the balance of power between men and women is unequal, or that issues like birth control access and women’s political representation affects women’s equality.

These findings line up with decades of research suggesting that views of abortion are intimately linked to how people think about motherhood, sex and women’s social roles. In the 1980s, the sociologist Kristin Luker argued that abortion is such an intractable issue because the people on either side of the debate have fundamentally different ideas about women’s autonomy. According to her, abortion-rights supporters saw women’s ability to make decisions about their bodies as fundamental to women’s equality, while anti-abortion advocates believed this focus on autonomy undermines the importance of women’s roles as mothers. 

That analysis can feel a little stuck in the Reagan era, particularly since support for women working outside the home has grown significantly since the 1980s. Tricia Bruce, a sociologist affiliated with the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society who has researched attitudes toward abortion, said that people who oppose abortion aren’t “necessarily [coming] from a place where women belong in only one sphere, which is motherhood.” But views about power and control are still crucially important, she said. In contrast with a focus on women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies, anti-abortion advocates see that choice within a broader context where other people have views that matter too. “We hear about women and their spouses, what’s the father’s role,” she said. “The idea is that this is not a decision that women should make in isolation.”

The divide between people who support traditional gender roles — especially those who think modern society is upsetting the balance of those roles by giving women too much power — and people who disagree with that position is spawning other culture wars. It’s partly why former President Donald Trump’s hypermasculine persona worked so well for him politically, and why Republican politicians continue to focus on the idea that men face discrimination, fueled by a backlash to the #MeToo movement and by declining rates of higher education and rising rates of loneliness among men.

These arguments don’t appeal to all men, of course, and they do appeal to some women. 

Those messages tap into anxieties shared by men and women about the waning influence of traditional gender roles — in this case, traditional masculinity. Political scientists have found that when people are thinking about threats to their power and status, political behavior and attitudes change, making leaning on those anxieties a viable political strategy. For instance, in an experimental study conducted in 2016, the authors found that when men’s masculinity was threatened by the prospect of job loss, those men were more likely to say they wanted a masculine president — which, of the two candidates, was Trump.

This also helps explain why there are usually bigger political divides among men and women than between them. For example, studies find that men who adhere to more stringent notions of masculine identity, which is used as a proxy for supporting traditional gender roles, look very different on political issues than men who identify as less masculine, as we wrote in 2020. Another way to see these divides is through the lens of partisanship. According to a recent poll by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, 25 percent of Democratic men and 20 percent of Democratic women agreed with the statement “American society today has become too soft and feminine,” while 78 percent of Republican men and 65 percent of Republican women agreed with it. And just 26 percent of Democratic men and 20 percent of Democratic women agreed with the statement “White men are too often blamed for problems in American society,” compared with 75 percent of Republican men and 60 percent of Republican women.

All of this complicates the conventional political wisdom about how and why voters will respond to political changes and messaging. It’s a little pointless to ask whether women as a whole would mobilize in response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe, since women hold such wildly different views on abortion. Instead, it’s more telling to examine other facets of people’s identities — like their beliefs about gender roles — that are less visible but more politically powerful.

“Abortion is becoming personal for people who see it as a proxy for men, largely white men, taking away power from women,” Undem told us. “It’s not about a procedure. It’s about women’s place in the world.”

COVID-19

The Work-From-Home Era Left Them Out

By Monica Potts

May 19, 2022, at 12:38 PM

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Veronica wasn’t sure how the new disease she’d heard about on the news would affect her. It seemed unreal. She and her friends had just been joking about a game on the Google Play Store, in which the goal was to wipe out humanity with a deadly virus. “We joked about it. We were like … this is the apocalypse,” she said. “And then it happened.”

Veronica, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy, is a 39-year-old Latina single mom who works as a part-time teller at a small bank for $15 an hour near a Gulf Coast city in Texas. She said she remembers feeling left out when she saw people take advantage of new opportunities to work from home. “I mean, we couldn’t do that. People wanted their money. They got scared. So we stayed at work. We didn’t have a choice.”

In March 2020, when Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster, the bank that Veronica works for emailed new directives to combat the pandemic. They locked their lobby doors, closed the building to visitors, used drive-through banking only and avoided transferring personnel from one branch location to another. The employees like Veronica who had to show up for work were encouraged to disinfect surfaces and wash their hands frequently. Soon, they’d be encouraged to wear masks.

“I felt safer with the doors closed, but I still didn’t want to come,” she said. Her branch operates with about two to three people in it at any given time, but during the pandemic’s beginning, she felt there were components to the work that some of them could have done from home at least sometimes to minimize their risk of exposure. “But they weren’t really offering anybody remote [work], except upper management,” she said.

The doors stayed locked until fall 2020, when patrons could once more enter the lobby for regular banking, as if the pandemic were over. Veronica said people were supposed to wear masks, but the bank didn’t enforce the state’s mandate. “And they kind of told us not to make people feel like they had to,” she said. “So we chose our battles.”

Veronica lives with her retired mother and eight-year-old son and was worried about bringing COVID-19 home to them. She also smokes and was afraid that the virus could make her very ill. But neither she nor her son became sick. Instead, during the first summer of the pandemic, her mother contracted COVID-19, possibly through a friend, and she was hospitalized the week after July 4. Veronica had only two weeks of paid leave to take care of her hospitalized mom before she had to return to the office. (Veronica says she tested positive after her mother returned from the hospital, then tested positive a second time, during the delta wave, but she said she never had symptoms.) When her mother came home in August, Veronica was left alone to handle child care, taking care of her mother and continuing to report to work. Her son stayed with his father during the week, and Veronica felt awful about it because he’d always been with her.. 

Trying to balance caring for her mother while her son still had remote and in-person classes was overwhelming. Veronica was also scared her son would bring the virus home, so she decided to withdraw him from school and try homeschooling him, thinking it would be easier to manage. “I didn’t see any other choice at that time, and I’m glad that I did,” she said. “I wouldn’t have made it out.” 

The weight of the pandemic’s changes and dangers have fallen unevenly on different groups in the United States, but women like Veronica are among those who shouldered the biggest burdens. Inequalities existed before COVID-19, of course, but in many ways they worsened over the past two years. One key division has been how our employers adapted to a deadly, rapidly spreading virus. For many workers, March 2020 marked the dawn of the work-from-home era, a change that seems mostly here to stay. But that’s not true for everyone.

The changes in remote work launched by the pandemic have been dramatic. The number of hours worked from home skyrocketed in 2020. An April 2021 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that telework accounted for only 5 percent of paid work hours before the pandemic, but between April and December 2020, it was about 50 percent. Even now, more than two years after the pandemic began, many workplaces still don’t have their entire staff reporting to an office five days a week, and many are unlikely to do so ever again. According to a working paper from Indeed.com and OECD, the share of job postings on Indeed that mentioned remote work roughly tripled during the pandemic — and was still 7.5 percent of job postings in September 2021.

But most Americans don’t have jobs in which telework is an option. There are fields where that’s not surprising: hospital jobs, factory jobs, jobs at grocery stores and retail outlets, jobs delivering food, among numerous others. There are other jobs, too, in which workers might have been able to work from home, but their workplaces lacked the technology or resources.

And it is women who are overrepresented in these jobs.

In March, the Women & Politics Institute at American University and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation released a report showing that 49 percent of women likely to vote in the 2022 election felt burned out since the start of the pandemic. Moreover, among those making less than $50,000 a year, 67 percent said they were not working from home.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center had similar findings. Notably, it found that among adults making less than $15 an hour, which included 48 percent of women and 25 percent of men, women were more likely than men to say they’d lost or quit a job during the pandemic — 41 percent of women, 33 percent of men. Low-paid women were also twice as likely as women overall to have changed jobs during the pandemic.

I spoke to 19 women who fell into these categories and volunteered to be interviewed. Among them were women who chose to go into their offices because they felt safe with the precautions their companies had put in place, or because they felt it would be too hard to work from home, or because their duties made them key employees for their offices. But many others were required to report to an office if they wanted to keep their jobs. Some women felt that their safety concerns were respected, while others struggled to keep up with the latest public health guidance despite coworkers and bosses who did not. In general, the women whose experiences were better had workplaces that they felt prioritized their safety and were flexible and responsive to their needs.

Maria Saavedra Karlsson is a pediatrician who’d spent most of her career in children’s hospitals but began working at a nonprofit urgent-care clinic before the pandemic. Because she works with patients, she continued working in person. She told me about the eerie feeling of driving down empty highways that were normally crowded, but she said she knew her patients needed her. 

Many of the clinic’s clientele were low-income Latino residents of Southern California, where Karlsson lives. She said that a lot of the clinic’s adult patients as well as the parents of their child patients had continued to work through the pandemic, and that case counts at the clinic remained high during almost every wave.

Yet Karlsson said the clinic’s management, who did not work on site, were reluctant to expand telemedicine, which almost all the clinic’s doctors agreed was better for everyone. Patients also preferred telemedicine, Karlsson said. When doctors were sick or in quarantine, they’d see clients remotely via telehealth technology, and the doctors found they could easily see 35 to 40 patients a day, comparable with the amount they could see in person. Patients were also safer in their homes. 

Karlsson and her colleagues tried to convince the clinic’s management to do more telemedicine. “We tried to take a day off and actually just volunteer to do telehealth and show them how effective that was,” she said. “It didn’t work.” Instead, their patients had to come into the clinic, which she felt was unnecessary exposure for everyone. The stress of it encouraged Karlsson to leave the clinic and work as a telehealth doctor for an online company while she also started her own practice seeing patients in their homes, but she estimated that the move cost her about 75 percent of her income.

Karlsson made a choice to change careers, but other women’s work hours were reduced because their workplace’s needs shifted, or they lost their jobs and have been unable to return to the workforce. That impacts not only their earnings now but also their futures, as many are struggling to build up retirements or recover income lost over the past two years. According to the Women & Politics Institute/Barbara Lee Family Foundation report, 55 percent of female likely voters making less than $50,000 a year said that their personal financial situation was worse now than before the pandemic, including 27 percent who said it was a lot worse.

Others I spoke with were transitioning to new jobs not just because of the stresses of in-person work during a pandemic, but also because they felt a lack of respect from their bosses. Taylor Anne Barriuso is a 29-year-old white woman and an academic advisor at a state college in Iowa, and she said her administration required advisors like her to return to campus in the fall semester of 2020. “There were very few students on campus, and the meetings with students were almost exclusively virtual at that point,” she said, adding that many professors and other higher-up administrators were able to choose whether they worked or taught remotely.

The fact that she had to return to in-person work early isn’t the only reason she plans to leave her job — she also wants to attend graduate school for speech-language pathology — but it was a factor. “It did contribute to kind of an overall feeling of … micromanagement. … There was a kind of general feeling of distrust that we were still doing our jobs from home,” she said.

Women with people-facing jobs often found themselves with extra duties. Lindsay Ellis, a 35-year-old Black woman who works as a fitness director at a gym in a city in North Carolina and, like many, was furloughed early in the pandemic. When her gym opened back up in November 2020 and she returned to work, she had to enforce mask mandates that were frequently changing and often challenged by her clients. Ellis quickly became aware of how much sweat and heavy breathing filled the cycling room where she teaches classes. 

Ellis thought she’d survive a COVID-19 infection but was worried about long COVID, which could impact her lung health for months and keep her from working. “I’m surrounded by hundreds of people a day, and members who are supposed to wear masks had quit [wearing them],” she said.

Overall, women staff most of the jobs that typically pay less than $10 an hour. One in three jobs held by women were deemed essential during the pandemic. And women, no matter their income level, were often left with the largest share of caregiving duties — whether it was taking care of elderly parents, children whose schools and daycares were shut down or, in many cases, both.

That said, as The New York Times found in a recent analysis, many mothers have remained in the workforce despite the challenges. There was one exception to this, however: mothers living with children under the age of five. Among them, the share who were in the workforce was down 4.2 percent between March 2019 and March 2022, indicating how uneven the burdens of the pandemic have been. 

“The pandemic has been horrible, but there’s a couple of good things in terms of flexibility and women in the workplace. … [Low-paid women] haven’t been able to take advantage of any of that,” said Betsy Fischer Martin, executive director of the Women & Politics Institute. “They have absorbed all of the regular negativity of the pandemic and had none of the upside to it.”

Indeed, those who are still working from home like it. In the beginning of the pandemic, most people who worked from home had to because their offices closed. But now, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 76 percent of American workers whose workplace was open and who were mostly or totally working from home said that a major reason they were teleworking was because they preferred it.

Women’s financial worries haven’t eased up, either. In the Women & Politics Institute/Barbara Lee Family Foundation report, inflation was an important issue for female likely voters who made less than $50,000 a year. “In many cases, they are the primary earners and their home,” Fischer Martin said.

Workers are seeking better circumstances and better pay as well. Ellis, the fitness director, said her workplace was still short-staffed and they’d had trouble hiring more people to fill the positions. Ellis herself is an hourly worker and spent the first part of the pandemic not working, worried that her employer wouldn’t cover her insurance while she wasn’t earning a paycheck. (They covered her.) She said the starting pay for instructors at her facility is $10 an hour.

When the gym reopened in fall 2020, its class offerings were reduced because management couldn’t find enough instructors, and she said it’s gotten even worse as some of the bankers and others who had been working from home for two years have begun to return to their downtown offices. “A lot of my members … want more hours,” she said. “They want more amenities.” They also want to go completely back to the way things were pre-pandemic, she said.

She tells them she wants to offer them more hours and classes, but that the gym is struggling to hire staff. “And then the response is, ‘Yeah, you know, people just don’t want to work nowadays,’” she said. She suspects they expect her to agree with them, but she doesn’t. “People want to work,” she said. “They just want to get paid fairly for the work.”

For others, coming out of the pandemic will remain difficult because many key services haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. For example, the availability of child care remains about 12 percent lower than it was before 2020, according to Alycia Hardy, a senior policy analyst with The Center for Law and Social Policy. That reduction in supply can raise the cost of child care, which was already out of reach for many families in lower income brackets. Additionally, child care itself is often a low-paying profession, so many of the providers may be seeking work elsewhere for the reasons described by Ellis. “We’ve seen this devastation on this already fragile system,” Hardy says. “What that really translates into for families is that half a million families are without child care.”

Many of the women I spoke to had changed jobs or were planning to. Others had changed their relationship to work. But many also felt that people in their circumstances needed more support. In the Women & Politics Institute/Barbara Lee Family Foundation report, a strong majority of women likely to vote in the 2022 midterms thought Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act should be expanded. 

But if Congress’s failure to extend the expanded child tax credit — which may have been keeping 3.7 million children out of poverty — is any indication, we’re unlikely to see broad changes anytime soon.

Veronica, the bank teller, wants to make changes in her own life. Before the pandemic, she began working at the bank part-time so that she could take a course to become a court reporter and move into a better-paying field. But when the course shifted online, she felt she wasn’t able to learn as much as she had in the classroom. The extra burdens of her sick mother and homeschooled son made it untenable to balance her coursework and her job. 

She wants to go back, though. She thinks it’s time for a career change. “It feels like I’m fighting for just $15 an hour,” she said. “It doesn’t feel fair, you know, after giving eight years to this place.”

She said she thinks there are more people in her position — people who’ve had some college but haven’t finished, who know they have skills but feel they’re undervalued in the workplace and want more flexibility in their jobs. “I feel like a lot of people are in my position,” she said. “They want the same thing. They wanted to feel valued.”

Abortion

Better Birth Control Hasn’t Made Abortion Obsolete

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

May 19, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Has modern birth control made abortion a thing of the past? That’s what lawyers for the state of Mississippi want the U.S. Supreme Court to think. In a brief in the the pending case that could overturn abortion rights nationwide, Mississippi’s lawyers wrote, “[E]ven if abortion may once have been thought critical as an alternative to contraception, changed circumstances undermine that view.” Access to birth control has improved, they noted, and some methods’ failure rates are “now approaching zero.” According to Mississippi’s lawyers, effective birth control means people don’t need abortions anymore.

But Sarah, a professional living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., did.¹ She had always wanted four children, but four was it. So after her fourth child was born, she and her husband researched birth-control options and landed on the one that seemed foolproof: a vasectomy. “We’re very thorough people, very by the book,” she said. “We wanted to make very, very sure we didn’t have an accident.”

Then, on Mother’s Day, Sarah found herself in her bathroom looking at two lines on a pregnancy test. She knew almost immediately that she was going to have an abortion.

Statistically, Sarah’s experience was very unlikely. There’s a reason why vasectomies are touted as one of the most reliable forms of birth control: They have a failure rate of less than 1 percent,² as opposed to something like condoms, which has a failure rate closer to 24 percent. But because a 1 percent chance isn’t zero, some vasectomies fail every year, just like every other form of birth control. As a result, thousands of Americans who took steps to avoid getting pregnant will seek an abortion anyway. A report from the Guttmacher Institute found that about half of abortion patients used contraception in the month they became pregnant. Framing abortion as a procedure that can be avoided through personal responsibility doesn’t prevent abortions from happening, experts told us. Instead, it just places more blame on women.

Americans need better access to contraception. In countries where birth control is cheap or free and more easily available to more people, there are much lower rates of unintended pregnancy, said Dr. Emily Godfrey, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. The unintended pregnancy rate in the United States is about 21 percent higher than in the average Western country,³ where national insurance or other universal health care programs are common. Likewise, a large drop in unintended pregnancy rates in the U.S. between 2008 and 2011 was correlated to an increase in the use of long-term, reversible methods of birth control, such as IUDs or implants, which have low failure rates. And that large drop in unintended pregnancy rates has led to fewer abortions.

But that’s not the same as saying that using birth control eliminates the need for abortion, Godfrey said. Yes, Americans can choose from 16 forms of birth control, two types of emergency contraception or “morning-after pills,” and three methods of sterilization. But there are many reasons why she says access to abortion remains necessary.

The simplest and most inescapable reason is that birth control can — and does — fail. That’s true even of the most reliable methods of preventing pregnancy, such as IUDs, implants and sterilization. 

According to the Guttmacher Institute study cited in the chart above, about 51 percent of abortion patients in 2014 reported using some type of birth control in the month they got pregnant. The shares of patients in that study who reported using a long-lasting, high-efficacy birth-control method were low — far more respondents said they had used a condom in the month they got pregnant, which doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that they were using one at the time they got pregnant. But small percentages still represent thousands of individuals. Just 0.8 percent of respondents said they’d been using an IUD in the month they got pregnant, but that 0.8 percent translated to an estimated 7,700 abortion patients that year. Even the 0.2 percent who said they’d used either sterilization or implants represented an estimated 1,600 and 1,800 people, respectively, who ended up needing access to abortion. 

But the political rhetoric of abortion doesn’t reckon with that fact, said Dr. Christine Dehlendorf, a professor of family community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “The mantra of ‘safe, legal and rare’ is stigmatizing,” she said. “It’s saying [abortion is] a bad outcome you should be able to avoid, as opposed to a health care service you should be able to access.”

And as a result, people are getting the message that abortion is a purely preventable problem — something a person can avoid if they are responsible enough. Sarah’s story comes from a collection of experiences with abortion that readers shared with FiveThirtyEight. Our database contains hundreds of entries, and a common, recurring theme is that people reported getting pregnant while using birth control — and then felt like they were the ones who had failed. Contributors said they had done everything right, yet they still felt responsible. 

User error does contribute to unintended pregnancy, Godfrey said. That’s especially relevant when you’re talking about methods like the birth-control pill, which has to be taken correctly every day, or physical methods like condoms, which rely on proper usage in the moment. But user error can’t be dismissed as sexual irresponsibility either, she added. It’s just normal human behavior. “There’s research showing, on average, people miss a pill or two each month. That’s not just birth control, it’s all long-term pills … depression, diabetes, everyone,” she said. “Nobody uses any medication perfectly for 25 years. It’s not possible.” 

Over and over, contributors described struggling with the feeling that abortion should be something they needed only if they were victimized, young and uninformed, too poor to get birth control, or just too irresponsible to take it properly. The stigma wrapped up in that stereotype made Sarah feel uneasy about her decision, even though she knew it was the right choice for her. “Society tells you to feel bad, so therefore I felt bad,” she said. “But, ultimately, I realized that if you can’t control when you have an abortion, then you can’t control when you’re going to have children,” she added. “Because I did literally everything I could not to get pregnant.” 

And any attempt to frame abortion as preventable by birth control has to take into account the many reasons why people might not be able to get contraception — and even reasons why some might not want it. Not all sex is consensual, after all. And even for people who can plan ahead, birth control can be expensive — an IUD can run upward of $2,000 by the time you include both the device and doctor’s fees, Godfrey said. Then there’s the fact that the forms of birth control least likely to fail are also the ones patients have the least control over. Some doctors have refused to give patients IUDs they requested and, in other cases, refused to take out IUDs patients no longer wanted. “Black and Latino women are more likely to be counseled to use IUDs and encouraged to limit family size, and more likely to be encouraged to use a [birth-control] method they don’t want,” Dehlendorf said. 

The reality is, birth control might reduce the need for abortions — but it can’t make abortions go away. That’s because the need for abortion goes beyond the capabilities of birth control, Godfrey said. People can be trying to get pregnant and still end up in situations where they want an abortion. There will always be people who couldn’t get reliable birth control. There will always be people who can’t or don’t want to use specific kinds of birth control. And there will always be people whose birth control simply didn’t work. 

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the results in Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon. The results are mixed in terms of which factions within each party performed well. Plus, the marquee Republican primary race for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat is still too close to call and could remain that way for days.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the results in Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon. The results were — factions of both parties performed well and the marquee Republican Senate primary race in Pennsylvania is still too close to call. At least two Trump endorsees lost on Tuesday: North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn and Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin.

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.

2022 Election

Why The GOP’s Grievance Politics Might Not Turn Off Conservative Latino Voters

By Alex Samuels

May 18, 2022, at 6:00 AM

“Are you a racist?” 

“Do you hate Mexicans?”

These are the two questions J.D. Vance, the GOP’s nominee for Senate in Ohio, posed to voters in a primary election ad in which he accused the media of vilifying Republicans like him for wanting a border wall — and falsely claimed that President Biden had established an “open border” that was “killing Ohioans” because “more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters [were] pouring into this country.” The ad was purposely incendiary, designed to push broader culture-war issues, like immigration and critical race theory, that the GOP has used time and time again to galvanize their primary base, typically older white voters.

Vance is a particularly egregious example of this trend, but he’s hardly alone. Promoting racial grievance politics to appeal to conservative (and often white) voters who perceive a threat to their status at the top of the racial hierarchy is a popular conservative political tactic — one that can have devastating and deadly consequences.

Case in point: the mass shooting at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, on Saturday, which police say was a racially motivated hate crime. According to reports, the suspect also promulgated the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims that non-white people are being brought to the U.S. and other Western countries to “replace” and “disempower” white people to achieve a political agenda. In the attack, 11 of the 13 shooting victims were Black; 10 of them died. And because a sizable minority of Americans believe in certain tenets of the replacement theory, these messages of white victimhood and the idea that “America is not a racist country” aren’t going anywhere; we’re likely to hear these talking points from the GOP in 2022 and beyond.

“[Vance is] trying to give voters a sense of license to have these anxieties, discomforts and sometimes even prejudiced views,” said Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University. “Those are precisely the politics that he’s bristling at, and there are going to be voters who appreciate him giving them the license to believe what they believe.”

But where does this leave the GOP in its efforts to appeal to voters of color, especially the Latinos whom Vance and others have routinely cast as bogeymen despite then-President Donald Trump making sizable gains among them in 2020? At first glance, this messaging may seem at odds with a GOP that has tried to rebrand itself in fits and spurts as the party of the working class for all Americans. Yet, as counterintuitive as it sounds, these messages of racial grievance could also appeal to voters of color, especially Latino voters,¹ who were already open to supporting Republican candidates.

“Republicans know that white voters are upwards of 80 percent of their voters, so everything is targeted toward them,” said Bernard Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University. At the same time, though, he said this kind of message might not turn off minority voters, especially the few who have been receptive to voting for Republicans. “They might be willing to accept that [messaging] because they align with the party on other kinds of policy issues.” 

How Latino voters think of themselves politically varies depending on where they live, how long their family has been in the U.S., and whether they went to college. Those fault lines are true of most voters in the U.S., but on some issues, Latino voters are unique and might be more open to the GOP’s messaging on race. For instance, while Latinos overall lean Democratic, some are open to supporting Republicans or identify as conservative, particularly on certain immigration policies and race-related issues, like support for Black Lives Matter. Some polling and research also suggests that large chunks of conservative Latino adults buy into American nationalism and believe that issues of race get too much attention in the U.S. today, so they could be receptive to the idea that Democrats are out of step with their views.

“I think a lot of Latinos are turned off by the hateful rhetoric toward them, but part of the reason that Latinos are a swing vote and that Trump was able to do so well with them in 2020, is because there are a lot of Latinos who think there is too much identity politics going on, think of themselves more as ‘Americans’ and are receptive to the idea that Democrats are always going around calling people racist,” said Melissa Michelson, a political scientist at Menlo College.

According to a March 2021 poll from the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning Latino adults² agreed with the statement that “too much attention is paid to race and racial issues in our country these days.” Meanwhile, only 28 percent said that discrimination based on race or skin color was a “very big problem” facing the country today.

Support for Black Lives Matter was another big dividing line: In September, Pew found that among all racial and ethnic minority groups polled, Latino adults³ were the least likely to say they supported the movement. While 60 percent of Latino adults said they did support Black Lives Matter, that’s significantly less than the share of Asian adults (68 percent) and Black adults (83 percent) who said the same. (By comparison, only 47 percent of white adults said they supported Black Lives Matter.)

The results of the past two presidential elections also suggest that overtly racist rhetoric about Mexicans and immigrants won’t turn off certain Latino voters. According to Pew’s 2020 validated voter analysis, Biden won Latino voters⁴ by only 21 percentage points — 59 percent to 38 percent — significantly less than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 38-point edge over Trump among Latino voters in 2016, when she won by 66 percent to 28 percent. Immigration was not as important to voters as it was in 2016, but it’s still notable that Republicans managed to win a sizable portion of Latino voters while simultaneously leaning into messages of white nationalism. 

What’s more, plenty of Latino voters are conservative on immigration issues — particularly in swing parts of the country, like South Texas — but pollsters noted that not all Latino voters want the same immigration policies.

“Latinos generally express high levels of support for a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented and a DACA-like program, but support varies around border-security issues,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of race and ethnicity research. “When you start talking about asylum seekers and offering asylum to those coming from Central America, for example, we’ve found that there’s a significant share of Latinos who feel like there’s not an obligation to help those people.”

This may be because many Latinos in the U.S. are not undocumented or immigrants themselves — in fact, their families may have been in the country for several generations — or they don’t know many immigrants personally. According to a March 2021 Pew study, 60 percent of Latino adults said they didn’t worry very much or at all that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. The longer their family had been in the U.S., the less likely they were to worry. A large majority (81 percent) of third- or higher-generation Latino adults in the U.S.⁵ — according to Pew’s 2021 National Survey of Latinos, about one-third of registered Latino voters fall into this category — said they did not worry about deportations.

“The farther you are away from the immigration experience, the more likely you are to be removed from immigration issues and maybe even agree with Republicans’ messaging on race and immigration,” said Sergio Garcia-Rios, a professor of government and Latino studies at Cornell University. “Latinos in Republican states especially are likely to embrace Republican views and remove themselves from the groups being attacked.”

In fact, according to a separate November poll from Pew, close to 3 in 5 Latino adults (58 percent) say that they’re white themselves (although, of course, as I’ve written previously, what it means to identify as “white” is often a limitation of census categorizations). But at the very least, that means it’s possible that certain Latino voters will embrace messages of white grievance, or at least won’t be completely turned off by it.

“If you’re a Latino who identifies as ‘white’ or ‘American,’ it often doesn’t matter what country you’re from or where your ancestors came from,” Michelson told me. “You can still have a strong white, American identity that makes you receptive to these messages because you want to be part of that community that’s ‘protecting’ the United States from these alleged threats. It’s nice to be on the winning team, and white people in America are still the winning team.”

Moreover, once Latino adults start to identify more as white than Latino, it’s easy to appeal to them using the same fear-mongering, us-versus-them language that Republicans use on white voters. Fear — like the threat of an “open border” or “illegal drugs” coming into the U.S., as Vance said in his ad — can be a powerful motivator in getting voters to cast a ballot one way or the other. And by raising the threat of people crossing the border with Mexico, Republicans might be able to successfully win over both racially conservative white and Latino voters.

This is not to say that this messaging necessarily works. As Michelson said, a lot of Latinos are turned off by this rhetoric. But even if grievance politics doesn’t attract Latino voters to the GOP, that doesn’t mean it will drive them away, either. As is the case for Americans as a whole, the No. 1 issue for Latino voters is the economy, and that concern may outweigh concerns about racism in the GOP when they’re casting their vote. 

“Experts were really blindsided by the reduced margins of Democratic victories among Latinos in 2020. So there’s still a scramble to better understand Latino identity, solidarity and what’s driving Latino votes,” Gest, the George Mason University professor, said. “Among some Latinos, we have noticed a clear willingness to overlook some of this rhetoric and anti-immigrant nativism if they feel like their economic prospects will be boosted by Republican candidates.”

That was especially true in 2020, when Trump won over more Latino voters, in part because there was a sharp drop in how they prioritized immigration issues as well as a steep climb in their emphasis on economic issues instead. In fact, economic messaging may even be an extra potent antidote to the GOP’s racism for immigrants in particular. “The evidence is that the children of immigrants buy into this ‘American dream’ rhetoric and might even be more receptive” to it than later generations, said Fraga, the Emory University professor. “It’s the children of immigrants who have had relative economic success who say that the Republican message — economy, religion, jobs — appeals to them.”

There are plenty of reasons, then, why the GOP’s racism may not be the poison pill for Latino voters that it seems. It’s still important to remember that a majority of Latino voters are Democratic and likely don’t appreciate Republican candidates’ racist rhetoric about them. And despite some Latinos being more conversative on issues of race, many are still liberal on these issues. For instance, according to a December Axios/Ipsos/Telemundo survey, 57 percent of Latino adults did not agree with the statement that America is not a racist country. Moreover, 61 percent agreed that Latino or Hispanic people do not have the same opportunities in the U.S. as white people. So, even if grievance politics appeals to some Latino voters — or at least doesn’t turn them away — this tactic could still backfire. 

Nevertheless, this won’t necessarily deter Republicans from using this kind of racist messaging. Remember, grievance messages aren’t crafted with voters of color in mind — they’re intended to galvanize an overwhelmingly white GOP base whom Republicans often prioritize at the cost of losing other voters, said Fraga. That’s why even if the GOP as a whole were to decide it’s bad politics to demonize Latinos, specific candidates like Vance, who is running in a state that is only 4 percent Latino, would still likely lean into this kind of messaging.

“The national party might think, long-term, that it’s better to be more welcoming to Latinos given demographic trends. But it doesn’t matter what the national party wants or envisions as its long-term future since you can’t stop individual candidates from running these types of campaigns and having short-term victories that capitalize on racist stereotypes and economic fears,” Michelson said.

It’s an open question, then, as to whether this messaging will backfire. It’s possible that it will repel more Latino voters than it attracts. It’s possible that it will appeal only to a specific swath of Latino voters. After all, those living along the U.S.-Mexico border have different political priorities than those living in New York.

Then again, it’s possible, too, that this messaging just might work.

2022 Election

12 Democratic Primaries To Watch In Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania And Oregon

By Nathaniel Rakich

May 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Most of the primary action so far this year has been on the Republican side, but Tuesday’s elections in Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania³ will also decide the future of the Democratic Party in those states. The party’s progressive wing, which has been getting more judicious about picking its battles, has a few golden opportunities to gain new members of Congress. There are also several races where Democrats could add to the diversity of their caucus by nominating a woman, a person of color or both. We’ll even get our first big test this year of how much influence the cryptocurrency industry and pro-Israel groups have in the Democratic Party.

Here’s everything you need to know about the 12 Democratic primaries we’re following today. And don’t forget to join us tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern for our live blog of the results.

Kentucky

Races to watch: 3rd Congressional District
Polls close: 6 p.m. Eastern

When Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth announced he was retiring from Kentucky’s solidly blue 3rd Congressional District, it had the potential to set off a scramble to replace him. But instead, Louisville politicos mostly coalesced around state Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey. McGarvey has raised by far the most money in the field (more than $1.5 million) and has also benefited from nearly $1 million in outside spending from Protect Our Future PAC, which is largely funded by 30-year-old billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. (This isn’t the last time Protect Our Future will appear in this primary preview.)

While McGarvey is liberal on most issues (he supports single-payer health care and the Green New Deal), he is still facing a challenge on his left from state Rep. Attica Scott, who entered the race before Yarmuth announced his retirement. Scott, who would be Kentucky’s first Black member of Congress, supports defunding the police and canceling all student-loan debt, which McGarvey opposes. However, she has raised only $236,476, and perhaps in an acknowledgment of her long odds, only two major progressive organizations (the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Our Revolution) have endorsed her.

North Carolina

Races to watch: U.S. Senate; 1st, 4th and 13th congressional districts
Polls close: 7:30 p.m. Eastern

Outside spending is also frustrating progressive bids in a couple North Carolina House primaries. In the state’s 1st Congressional District, Rep. G.K. Butterfield is retiring and has endorsed state Sen. Don Davis to succeed him, arguing that the moderate Davis would be Democrats’ strongest general-election candidate in a seat that will likely be competitive in 2022. (It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean⁴ of just D+5.) 

However, progressive figures like the PCCC and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are backing former state Sen. Erica Smith, who has tried to make the race about Davis’s spotty support for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Smith has outraised Davis $831,937 to $612,266, but Davis has benefited from more than $2.3 million in outside spending from the United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel super PAC funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The primary still looks competitive, though: Despite the Davis campaign recently releasing a survey giving himself a 13-point lead, that isn’t very convincing since internal polls often overstate their sponsors’ positions by several percentage points.

Both Bankman-Fried (the cryptocurrency magnate) and AIPAC are also pouring money into the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. David Price in North Carolina’s safely blue 4th District, around Durham. Protect Our Future has spent more than $1 million and the United Democracy Project nearly $2.1 million to help state Sen. Valerie Foushee defeat Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam and singer Clay Aiken. (Yes, that Clay Aiken.) AIPAC has probably gotten involved here due to Allam’s history of anti-Israel activism, but its investment has rubbed some voters the wrong way given that it also supports Republicans and Allam is Muslim. (Her religion has also made her the target of Islamophobic push polls and death threats.) The Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party even revoked its endorsement of Foushee for accepting AIPAC’s money. 

The three candidates have all embraced progressive policy platforms, but it’s Allam who has gained endorsements from the movement’s big names: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the People’s Alliance, a local progressive group. Foushee’s backers include the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and EMILY’s List, which are closer to the Democratic Party establishment but also reflect her identity as a Black woman. EMILY’s List also commissioned the only poll we’ve seen of the race, which put Foushee at 35 percent, Allam at 16 percent and Aiken at 10 percent. (Remember, though, EMILY’s List is not a neutral observer here.) If no candidate receives more than 30 percent of the vote, the race will go to a runoff on July 26.

The Democratic primary is a little more low-key in the 13th District, an open seat in the Raleigh suburbs. The front-runner seems to be state Sen. Wiley Nickel, who has raised $1.4 million ($900,000 of it from his own pocket). However, former state Sen. Sam Searcy, a moderate with a reputation for bipartisan dealmaking in the legislature, could be Democrats’ best bet to win here in November. With a partisan lean of R+3, this seat could be an uphill climb for Democrats in a Republican-leaning midterm.

Finally, the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat isn’t expected to be competitive, but it’s worth a brief mention considering that Democrats are hoping to make a run at this seat in the fall. Their nominee will almost certainly be former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, who overwhelmingly leads her 10 opponents in primary polling and would be the first Black female senator since Kamala Harris if she wins.⁵

Pennsylvania

Races to watch: U.S. Senate, 12th and 17th congressional districts
Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern

While the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania devolves into chaos, the Democratic one is likely to be a coronation. Despite recent news that he had suffered a stroke, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is the clear front-runner, thanks to being an extremely active lieutenant governor and raising more money than any other candidate ($16.0 million). According to a recent poll from Franklin & Marshall College, Fetterman leads his closest competitor by 39 percentage points.

This is not to say that other candidates haven’t tried to take him down. Centrist Rep. Conor Lamb is running on the argument that he is more electable, but voters don’t seem to be buying it; Fetterman’s tough, outsider image (literally — he is 6′ 8″, is heavily tattooed and wore basketball shorts to meet President Biden) seems tailor-made to win back the white, working-class voters who have made Pennsylvania a slightly Republican-leaning state. 

On the other hand, state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta has been running as the most progressive candidate in the race, but Fetterman has no shortage of progressive cred either, as he was one of Sanders’s earliest supporters. Kenyatta, who would be both Pennsylvania’s first Black and first openly gay senator, has also criticized Fetterman over a 2013 incident in which he chased a Black jogger while armed with a shotgun. Polls show that Fetterman does, indeed, struggle with Black voters, but he still has a wide lead among white Democrats.

Progressives’ biggest test in Pennsylvania will likely be the Democratic primary for Pittsburgh’s 12th Congressional District, a safely Democratic open seat. Virtually every progressive influencer under the sun — Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the PCCC, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Warren — has lined up behind state Rep. Summer Lee. And as of a couple months ago at least, Lee looked like the front-runner: She led attorney Steve Irwin 38 percent to 13 percent in a March poll sponsored by EMILY’s List (which also supports Lee). 

But AIPAC is trying to stop progressives here, too: The United Democracy Project has dropped $2.4 million to help Irwin, who has also outraised Lee $1.2 million to $707,344. (A third candidate, law professor Jerry Dickinson, has also raised a respectable $685,185.) Irwin also has the support of Rep. Mike Doyle, the district’s current congressman, and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who has argued that Lee (who is Black) would join the “Squad” in obstructing Biden’s agenda. Without any more recent public polls, it’s tough to say if the spending has made an impact, but both sides are treating this like a competitive race.

By comparison, the Democratic primary one district over — in the suburban 17th District — has gotten little attention. The race, however, is still important because the district (Lamb’s old seat) has a partisan lean of only D+1, meaning it will likely be very competitive in November. Navy veteran and professor Chris Deluzio, who has the endorsement of the Allegheny County Democratic Party, has raised $501,839, while Sean Meloy, a political operative who works to elect LGBTQ candidates, has reeled in $251,449. Meloy identifies as a progressive but hasn’t gotten endorsements from any of the usual progressive suspects.

Oregon

Races to watch: 4th, 5th and 6th congressional districts; governor
Polls close: 10 p.m. Eastern in the Mountain time zone part of Malheur County, 11 p.m. Eastern in the rest of the state

If you thought outside groups were investing a lot of money in today’s other Democratic primaries, get a load of Oregon’s 6th Congressional District, an open, Democratic-leaning seat. Lawyer Carrick Flynn didn’t seem like much of a threat when he entered the race against multiple other candidates with more political experience, but then Protect Our Future spent a whopping $11.3 million to help elect him. 

The investment caused many people to wonder why a cryptocurrency magnate is so interested in the race; although Flynn’s wife and Bankman-Fried briefly worked for the same organization, Flynn says he and Bankman-Fried have never met. The answer appears to be that Flynn and Bankman-Fried share the same philosophy of “effective altruism” and both believe in investing against long-term threats like future pandemics. (Protect Our Future’s stated goal is to support candidates with a “long term view on policy planning, especially as it relates to pandemic preparedness and prevention”; Flynn conducted research into pandemic prevention at Oxford University in 2015.) However, Protect Our Future’s involvement has also raised questions of Flynn’s independence as Congress considers more regulations on the cryptocurrency industry.

But it’s not just the cryptocurrency industry backing Flynn; the Democratic establishment is behind him too. House Majority PAC, a PAC aligned with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had never taken sides in a Democratic primary before, has spent $939,477 to support Flynn. Other Democratic candidates in the race slammed the move, pointing out that there were multiple better-qualified women of color in the running: state Rep. Teresa Alonso León, state Rep. Andrea Salinas and former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith. 

Salinas appears to be Flynn’s main competition; she sports a couple prominent progressive endorsements (Warren, Rep. Pramila Jayapal), and the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has spent nearly $1.5 million on her behalf. But there are nine Democrats on the ballot in all, two of whom have raised more than $1 million (albeit with the help of self-funding): Army veteran Cody Reynolds ($2.7 million) and Intel engineer Matt West ($1.0 million). The one public poll of the primary we’ve seen, from Salinas’s campaign, shows a free-for-all of a race.

By contrast, the Democratic primary for the 5th District is a head-to-head race between incumbent Rep. Kurt Schrader and attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner. According to DW-NOMINATE, a common way of measuring the ideology of members of Congress, Schrader is one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, and he has infuriated progressives with his vote against Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill and comment that former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment was a “lynching.” McLeod-Skinner is challenging him from the left, hoping to make him the second incumbent to lose renomination this year.

Progressives like Warren and Our Revolution have endorsed McLeod-Skinner — though interestingly, others (Justice Democrats, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez) have kept their powder dry. However, Schrader boasts the support of Biden, who (unlike his predecessor) rarely wades into intraparty fights. (This is just the second Democratic primary in which he has endorsed as president.) Many Democrats fear that nominating McLeod-Skinner would help Republicans flip the seat, which has a partisan lean of just D+3, this fall. However, Schrader may not be a particularly strong candidate himself; he did 1.7 points worse than Biden in his district in 2020.

That said, Schrader has a massive financial advantage in the race (he’s spent nearly $3.5 million, and pro-Schrader outside groups have added another $2.1 million; meanwhile, McLeod-Skinner having spent just $579,044), and he’s turned back progressive primary challenges before. However, his district’s boundaries were drastically changed in redistricting; 53 percent of the district is new to him, so his incumbency may not give him a big advantage this time around. We haven’t seen any recent surveys of the race, but private polling reportedly gives McLeod-Skinner the lead.

Next door in the 4th District, eight Democrats are competing to succeed retiring Rep. Peter DeFazio. State Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle is the front-runner, having earned DeFazio’s endorsement and raised $782,440. By contrast, attorney Andrew Kalloch has taken in just $275,014, and environmental activist Doyle Canning has raised just $232,545. Canning has earned the support of several local progressive groups, but most of the big national players haven’t stuck their necks out for her, perhaps reflecting the size of Hoyle’s lead (16 points, according to a poll sponsored by a group that supports Canning). With a partisan lean of D+9, this district will probably stay in Democratic hands this fall, but it’s not a sure thing — a fact that DeFazio and Hoyle have used to argue Canning would be a risky nominee.

Finally, Oregon Democrats will also pick their nominee for governor. With the retirement of incumbent Gov. Kate Brown, it’s the first open Oregon gubernatorial election since 2010, and an impressive 15 candidates qualified for the Democratic primary. (Not included in that number: former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who tried to run but was ruled ineligible because he did not meet the residency requirement.)

However, the race is probably between just two candidates: former state House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. Kotek, who would make history as the first openly lesbian governor of any state,⁶ has raised $1.6 million for the year, while Read has raised $1.1 million. Read looks like he’s playing catchup in the polls, too: An April poll sponsored by his campaign put Kotek at 25 percent and Read at 20 percent, but we don’t have any more recent data. 

The winner of the primary will be favored to be the next governor of Oregon, but it’ll probably be a competitive campaign. Oregon is a close enough state that it can be flipped in good election years for Republicans (like 2022 is shaping up to be), and there is also an independent candidate, former Democratic state Sen. Betsey Johnson, who could siphon off Democratic votes.

Add in today’s GOP primaries, and there are 28 major elections on the ballot today, making it the biggest primary day of the year so far. And we’ll know who won them in just a few hours. Hope to see you tonight for the live blog! 

2022 Election

We Asked 2,000 Americans About Their Biggest Concern. The Resounding Answer: Inflation.

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

May 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

In 1935, Gallup first asked Americans what they thought was the most important problem facing the United States. In the midst of the Great Depression, about 3 in 5 Americans mentioned concerns related to the economy.

Fast forward nearly 90 years, and countless pollsters regularly ask Americans what’s top of mind for them. But on their own, answers to this question don’t really tell us that much. Issues like “the economy” or “political polarization” are often too broad to define. Moreover, two voters might both say something like “crime” is important to them, but for very different reasons. It’s why understanding how these issues factor into how Americans vote is so challenging.

But understanding how the most important issues facing the country factor into voters’ lives — including what they really know about the issues — is exactly what FiveThirtyEight aims to do. In partnership with Ipsos, FiveThirtyEight will conduct six polls between now and Election Day, interviewing the same group of around 2,000 Americans about the biggest issues facing the country. By interviewing the same people each month, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we’ll get a better sense of whether Americans’ concerns are changing and the extent to which those worries will influence the country’s political environment as we move closer to the 2022 midterm elections. We’ll do deep dives into what Americans name as their most pressing concerns and also conduct one FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll after the election to see where things stand after the country has voted.

At this point, the answer to what Americans are most worried about is pretty straightforward: inflation. In the first FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll,¹ 52 percent of Americans said the most important issue facing the country was inflation. We asked Americans this question in a variety of ways,² but regardless of how we asked it, the top answer was always the same: inflation.

It’s true that a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats or independents in our poll said they were concerned about inflation. But inflation still led the way regardless of party identification: About two-thirds of Republicans selected it as a top issue, as did about half of all independents and slightly more than 40 percent of Democrats. Inflation was the top issue for respondents of all age groups and for both men and women, too. Now, some Americans did find other issues more important, though. For instance, 43 percent of Black Americans listed “race and racism” as a top concern, while 37 percent named inflation.

But inflation in particular is casting a pall over the lives of Americans of all stripes. “At the end of the month, it’s harder to buy food and pay bills and keep the kids with clothes and sneakers on them,” a Hispanic 48-year old Democratic woman from New York told us. “No matter how much they raise wages, costs exceed them,” said a white 60-year old Republican woman from Pennsylvania. And as a 36-year old man of color from Arizona who identified as independent put it: “It is impacting my spending power and the future wealth of myself and generations that come after me, including my own children.” Moreover, with prices continuing to rise — inflation was 8.3 percent in April — these concerns aren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

And most Americans don’t feel like things have improved for them financially, either. Overall, 32 percent said their personal financial circumstances had worsened over the past year, 52 percent said things were about the same, and just 12 percent said they were doing better. Tellingly, 41 percent said they had made a major change to how they live, including a majority (56 percent) of households making less than $50,000 per year. 

Many in our survey said they were driving less, taking fewer vacations or just being more cost-conscious at the grocery store. Put more simply, many Americans are watching what they spend. “I just noticed that I'm really checking my bill a lot more. I actually maintain a spreadsheet just to track how my costs have gone up,” said James Bassett, a 48-year old white man from South Carolina. “It's definitely made me a lot more mindful and taken a little bit more time to process what I need and what I don't need.”

For the most part, though, Americans have a decent understanding of what inflation and the broader economic situation looks like in the U.S. For instance, a plurality of Americans knew that unemployment is currently at its lowest level since the start of the pandemic. Similarly, slightly more Americans knew that wages were increasing faster over the last year than they had at any point over the previous two decades — even though a plurality said they didn’t know. That said, there were a couple points where a majority of Americans were wrong. Most notably, 51 percent said that inflation was higher now than at any time since World War II, even though inflation was actually higher at some points in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Both younger and older Americans, including those who lived through the high inflation periods of the 1970s and ’80s, were likely to say that inflation was higher now. Some recency bias is probably at play here, but older Americans may also feel a greater pinch from inflation today than they did in earlier decades because they are more likely now to live on a fixed income from a pension or social security. “Once you fall behind, there's no catching up until they give you an increase the following year,” said Jarvis White, a 65-year old Black man from Florida. In his view, the situation in the 1970s and ’80s, even during the 1970s oil embargo, “pales in comparison” to today’s circumstances.

Similarly, a plurality of respondents said U.S. gas prices rank among the highest in the world — they don’t. But it’s easy to understand why many Americans think they do. For starters, compared to food, clothing or electricity, gas prices have seen the largest percentage increase over the past year, which a majority of respondents answered correctly in a separate question in our poll. Moreover, a lot of Americans drive and have to visit the pump often, especially compared to other countries, so it’s no wonder many thought gas prices were relatively high by global standards. “I work in sales, so I drive a lot. Gas is killing me right now,” said Jeni Johnson, a 53-year old white woman from Michigan.

There were some differences in how Americans answered these questions based on party. For instance, a much smaller share of Democrats than Republicans (48 percent vs. 86 percent) correctly said inflation wasn’t higher when Donald Trump was president, and a smaller share of Republicans than Democrats (40 percent vs. 57 percent) correctly said that unemployment is at its lowest point since the start of the pandemic, which reflects how partisanship can color economic views. But broadly speaking, Americans were on the same page, including in some cases for what they thought was responsible for driving inflation. A sizable majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents said that supply chain breakdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic and foreign conflicts had all had a “major” or “significant” impact. From there, though, there was much less agreement, as the chart below shows.

Most divides fell along somewhat predictable political lines. For instance, Democrats were more likely to blame businesses, with 70 percent saying that businesses trying to make more profits had made a major or significant impact on price increases and 60 percent saying the same of a lack of competition among businesses, compared with only 45 percent and 39 percent of Republicans, respectively. Conversely, Republicans were more likely to blame government COVID-19 spending programs, with two-thirds saying that it was a major or significant reason for inflation, while only 37 percent of Democrats said the same. Of course, neither side is fully correct in its assessment of what’s causing inflation, but it does underscore once again how partisanship can influence how Americans interpret economic conditions.

Regardless of partisan differences, though, half of the respondents in the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll named inflation as a top concern — both for them personally and for the country. And there’s good reason to think that this issue could be a major boon to Republicans’ hopes of taking control of the House and Senate. That’s because independents, about half of whom named inflation as a major worry, aren’t happy with the status quo — only 30 percent had a favorable view of Biden in the poll, compared with 55 percent who had an unfavorable opinion of the president. Independents are less likely to vote than Republicans or Democrats, and our survey suggests that about half of all likely voters who are independent haven’t yet decided which major party they’ll support or have decided they will not support either in November. Yet given Biden’s poor numbers among independents and that inflation looks like a long-term problem, Republicans appear to have an easy way to appeal to dissatisfied, less partisan voters who will be more open to a message of change come November.

In other words, inflation could very well be the issue that tips the scales this year sharply to the Republicans’ advantage.

Additional reporting by Santul Nerkar and Jean Yi. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Santul Nerkar. Graphics by Ryan Best. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the races to watch in Tuesday’s primaries in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania. They also introduce a new FiveThirtyEight collaboration with Ipsos in which we ask Americans about the issues they care most about in the run-up to the midterm elections. The first poll, coming out this week, is all about inflation.

Five states are holding primary contests on Tuesday May 17th: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon. The most anticipated races are the Republican Senate and gubernatorial primaries in Pennsylvania. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses everything going on in the Key Stone state and shares insights into other races to watch around the country, including the Lieutenant governor of Idaho challenging the sitting governor for the Republican nomination and Representative Madison Cawthorn’s time to face the voters after numerous scandals.

The team also introduces a new FiveThirtyEight collaboration with Ipsos aimed at polling Americans about the issues they care most about in the run up to the midterms. The first poll, coming out this week, is all about inflation.

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.

Voters in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania are heading to the polls this week to vote in their states’ primary elections. Here are the Republican candidates running for Congress, as well as state-level positions like secretary of state, who support former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.”

Transcript

It’s a busy week for primaries, with elections in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania. FiveThirtyEight and ABC News have been tracking candidates running for Congress and state-level positions like governor, secretary of state and attorney general who have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. This is despite the fact that former President Donald Trump’s claims that the election was fraudulent have been repeatedly proven false. Here are some of the candidates in today’s primaries who support Trump’s “Big Lie” — they’ve all said that Trump’s loss or the 2020 election was illegitimate, or took legal action to overturn its results, or both.

Let’s start in North Carolina, where an open Senate seat has attracted 14 candidates in the Republican primary. That includes some ardent Big Lie supporters like Drew Bulecza. He’s a bit of a fringe candidate, but when he was asked whether he believed the 2020 election was legitimate, he replied by posting a meme to his Facebook profile claiming Biden was “installed like a toilet.” The current frontrunner in this race is Rep. Ted Budd, who earned one of Trump’s earliest endorsements. He has said that Biden is the legitimate president and received more votes, but he was also among a group of Republicans in Congress who voted not to certify some of the election results.

Of this week’s primaries, we’ve found Pennsylvania has the greatest share of Big Lie candidates running: We’ve identified 15 of 41 Republican candidates there who have backed Trump’s claims of a stolen election. In particular, the race to become the GOP nominee for governor has attracted multiple election deniers. One of the frontrunners in that race — Doug Mastriano — has repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election, including in Pennsylvania and he supported Trump’s efforts to try to overturn results there. He has said there was “cheating and fraud” in Pennsylvania and “rampant voting problems,” though his evidence relies on anecdotes and misinformation.

Oregon has its fair share of candidates who questioned the 2020 election as well. Among the 19 Republicans running for governor, we’ve found five who endorse the Big Lie. That includes Stan Pulliam, who’s polling in the middle of the pack. He said in a recent debate that the election was “fraudulent, completely fraudulent.” Among some of the trailing candidates in that race, there’s Amber Richardson and Court Boice, who each told Oregon Public Broadcasting they do not believe Biden won. There’s also Marc Thielman, who reportedly made comments in support of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And Reed Christensen, who actually participated in the attack.

We have a long primary season ahead of us and already a number of Republicans who support the Big Lie have become their party’s nominee. In Ohio alone, we counted seven Big Lie endorsers who won, out of 17 races. If you want to learn which candidates from your state support these false claims, follow along with FiveThirtyEight.

2022 Election

16 GOP Primaries To Watch In North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Idaho And Oregon

By Nathaniel Rakich

May 16, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Tuesday is the busiest election day of the year so far, as five states — Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania — hold their 2022 primaries. And for the GOP, it will be another test of whether to move on from former President Donald Trump. Coming off Nebraska last week — his first loss of the year — Trump has endorsed candidates in seven major primaries on Tuesday, which should give us a clearer answer as to his power in the party. And even in races where Trump has no skin in the game, Republicans are considering nominating someone in his incendiary, illiberal mold — which could make it harder for the GOP to pick up seats in November.

All told, it’s the highest-stakes primary day yet. Here are the 16 (!) Republican primaries to keep an eye on:

North Carolina

Races to watch: U.S. Senate; 1st, 11th and 13th congressional districts

Polls close: 7:30 p.m. Eastern

Trump’s first — and easiest — test will come in North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race, which is open this year because Sen. Richard Burr is retiring. Former Gov. Pat McCrory started the race way ahead in the polls, probably due to name recognition, but last June, Trump threw his weight behind Rep. Ted Budd, who at the time was polling in the single digits. That gave Budd a boost, but even Budd’s own polling found he was still trailing McCrory by a few percentage points as recently as the beginning of March. Trump noticed and even reportedly tried to get a third candidate, Rep. Mark Walker, to drop out in order to consolidate the Trumpist vote. (Walker has stayed put.)

Starting in March, though, Budd turned on the jets, and the most recent poll (conducted May 7-9 by Emerson College) showed him at 43 percent, McCrory at 16 percent and Walker at 12 percent. But the Republican kingmaker most responsible for the surge probably wasn’t Trump, but rather the Club for Growth, an anti-government-spending outside group that has spent about $11 million on Budd’s behalf. Many of the group’s ads have also slammed McCrory for being too liberal (though his governorship was anything but) and accepting the results of the 2020 election, explaining why the onetime front-runner has cratered as much as Budd has risen.

Trump and the Club for Growth are also backing the same candidate in the GOP primary for North Carolina’s open 13th District: 26-year-old former college football player Bo Hines. However, Hines has faced criticism for his weak ties to the district and shopping around for a place to launch a long-awaited political career (“[T]he ultimate goal would be president,” Hines said all the way back in 2015). He filed to run in two different districts before choosing this one, about 100 miles east of where he lived at the time.

Together, the Club for Growth and a super PAC aligned with the ideologically similar House Freedom Caucus have spent more than $2 million to help elect Hines. However, through April 27, attorney Kelly Daughtry had spent more than $2.7 million of mostly her own money on the race. Former Rep. Renee Ellmers may also have lingering name recognition from representing part of the district from 2011 to 2017, and Army veteran Kent Keirsey, who has the endorsement of potential 2024 presidential candidate and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, can’t be counted out either. With eight total candidates in the running, this race may very well go to a runoff, which under North Carolina law will occur on July 26 if no candidate receives more than 30 percent of the vote.

Another race that could go to a runoff is the Republican primary in the 11th District, where seven Republicans are seeking to deny incumbent Rep. Madison Cawthorn a second term. The youngest person elected to Congress in more than 50 years, Cawthorn quickly became a darling of MAGA conservatives but also a source of controversy, both encouraging people trying to overturn the 2020 election results to “lightly threaten” members of Congress and calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug.” And in late March, he bizarrely claimed his fellow GOP lawmakers had invited him to an orgy and done cocaine in front of him — which he later admitted to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were exaggerations.

These incidents seem to have earned him the enmity of his fellow Republicans. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis has endorsed primary challenger state Sen. Chuck Edwards. It’s also marked the beginning of an epic parade of bad headlines that appear to have been the result of a coordinated opposition-research dump from his opponents, ranging from the embarrassing (images have emerged of him wearing lingerie, being touched on the crotch by a male staffer and simulating a sex act while naked beside a friend) to the illegal (he appears to have engaged in insider trading and violated House rules on the payment of staffers). This is on top of older scandals like accusations of sexually harassing women, driving with a revoked license and carrying a loaded gun into an airport.

The latest controversies have all happened so quickly that it’s hard to know whether they have put Cawthorn in danger of losing renomination (or getting forced into a runoff). We could find only one public poll of the race since the “orgy” comments, and it showed Cawthorn leading Edwards, 38 percent to 21 percent, with the six other candidates combining for 21 percent — hardly an impressive showing for Cawthorn, but good enough for a win. That said, the same pollster had shown Cawthorn leading Edwards, 49 percent to 14 percent, in mid-March, so the bad press appears to be having some effect — and even the most recent poll was conducted before the release of the sexually explicit videos, so it’s possible he has fallen further since then. 

Then again, it’s also possible that the bad headlines crowd each other out or simply become noise: While outside groups have deployed more than $1 million against Cawthorn, the incumbent has spent more than $3.6 million. And although Trump has reportedly been “weirded out” by Cawthorn’s actions, Cawthorn still has the considerable asset that is the former president’s endorsement.

Cawthorn isn’t the only North Carolina Republican congressional candidate facing a barrage of scandals, though. The GOP primary for North Carolina’s open 1st District was fairly quiet until Rocky Mount Mayor Sandy Roberson’s campaign recently dropped a trove of opposition research against his best-funded opponent, 2020 nominee Sandy Smith. The documents allege that Smith abused her ex-husbands, ran financial scams, changed her identity and more. 

Roberson has argued that the scandals make Smith unelectable in November, and he may have a point: With a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean¹ of D+5, the district is winnable for Republicans, but a scandal-plagued or extreme Republican candidate could ensure it stays in Democratic hands. And Smith is both: In addition to the claims in the opposition research, she also attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and believes the 2020 election was stolen. Perhaps in reaction, the Congressional Leadership Fund — a super PAC close to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — is spending $584,000 on a TV ad attacking Smith. With no public polls of the primary, though, either candidate could still win.

Pennsylvania

Races to watch: U.S. Senate; 7th, 8th and 17th congressional districts; governor

Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern

Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate started off with an embarrassment for Trump; will it end that way too? With the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who voted to convict Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the former president doubtlessly saw an opportunity to replace Toomey with a loyalist, and this past September, he endorsed Army veteran Sean Parnell, his close ally. However, in November, Parnell’s estranged wife testified that Parnell had choked her and hit their children, and he dropped out of the race shortly thereafter, leaving behind a fractured Republican field.

Celebrity physician Mehmet Oz emerged as the next front-runner, thanks in part to his big ad buys. Trump has also endorsed him, but interestingly, that hasn’t sewn up the race. Oz has had trouble persuading Pennsylvania Republicans that he is truly one of them. According to a May 3-7 poll from Fox News, 46 percent of the state’s Republican primary voters viewed him unfavorably, compared with just 45 percent who viewed him favorably.

That could be partially because Oz has previously spoken out against abortion restrictions, called for stricter gun control laws and encouraged masking to stop the spread of COVID-19 (though he now embraces more conservative positions). A longtime resident of New Jersey, he also moved to Pennsylvania only in late 2020. Oz, who would be the first Muslim U.S. senator, has also had his loyalty to the U.S. questioned because of his dual U.S.-Turkey citizenship (he says he would renounce his Turkish citizenship if he were to win).

Another reason Oz has struggled? Honor Pennsylvania — a super PAC set up to support his main opponent, former hedge fund manager David McCormick. Honor Pennsylvania has spent more than $15 million attacking Oz for, among other things, being a “Hollywood liberal.” Ironically, though, McCormick also has a weak claim on being a Pennsylvania Republican. Although he grew up in the commonwealth, he lived in Connecticut until last year. He also championed social-justice initiatives at his hedge fund, has supported Democrats in the past and called the Jan. 6 riot “a dark chapter in American history.” However, he has reinvented himself during the campaign as a faithful follower of Trump.

For months, the race seemed like it was between Oz and McCormick. Through April 27, their campaigns had each spent $14 million (most of it from each candidate’s personal wealth) — and that doesn’t even include outside spending like Honor Pennsylvania’s. But as they went nuclear on each other, a third candidate has caught fire in the race: author Kathy Barnette. Although she has raised just a fraction of their cash (less than $1.8 million), Barnette has turned heads with strong debate performances and an inspiring life story. In particular, Barnette’s statement that she is the “byproduct of a rape” has gained traction in conservative media as the Supreme Court has brought abortion to the forefront.

A May 6-8 poll from the Trafalgar Group essentially showed a three-way tie, with Oz at 25 percent, Barnette at 23 percent and McCormick at 22 percent. It’s possible, too, that Barnette, who would be the first Black Republican woman to serve in the Senate, could still be on the rise: She gained a powerful ally last week when the Club for Growth announced it would spend $2 million on TV ads for her — more than her campaign has spent all year. But her surge has alarmed other, more establishment-minded Republicans, who worry that nominating Barnette would make it more likely that Democrats flip the seat in November. Barnette has made hateful comments about Islam and homosexuality, and she fell deep down the election-fraud rabbit hole after the 2020 election.

Republicans face a similar danger in the governor’s race, where state Sen. Doug Mastriano is a slight front-runner over a weak nine-candidate field. (In the Trafalgar poll, Mastriano had 28 percent support, 10 points ahead of his closest rival.) Like Barnette (with whom he sometimes campaigns), Mastriano is on the far-right fringe of the GOP: He has embraced Christian nationalism — the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation that is now under attack — and shared QAnon conspiracy theories on social media. He has also helped lead the charge to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and was present on the Capitol lawn on Jan. 6.

If Mastriano wins the primary and then the general election, it could have a profound effect on U.S. democracy. In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state, who administers elections in the state, and signs off on the certification of the state’s electors. Given that Mastriano has previously supported the state legislature appointing electors in defiance of the state popular vote, a Gov. Mastriano could very well lead to the overturning of a free and fair election in 2024.

These extreme positions have GOP officials terrified that Mastriano would lose this November to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the presumptive Democratic nominee. (For his part, Shapiro has actually aired ads that could help Mastriano win the GOP nomination, probably for this very reason.) 

Representatives from the other Republican campaigns have reportedly discussed a coordinated effort against Mastriano, but the problem is agreeing on who is the best candidate to stop him. Former Rep. Lou Barletta is second in many polls, but he shares some of Mastriano’s baggage (he was one of Pennsylvania’s “fake electors,” 20 people who signed fake documents saying Trump had won the state and sent them to the National Archives). Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain is the best-funded, but Trump has explicitly anti-endorsed him for not doing enough to overturn the election. And former Delaware County Councilman Dave White looks like a viable contender in some polls but not in others.

Two candidates, state Senate President Jake Corman and former Rep. Melissa Hart, did drop out and endorse Barletta, but they were each polling in the single digits, so their support is unlikely to make much of a dent in Mastriano’s lead. The only thing that probably could have meaningfully shifted the race would have been if Trump endorsed one of the Mastriano alternatives. But on Saturday, as he often does, he went his own way: He endorsed Mastriano, specifically citing how he “revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it.”

Pennsylvania Republicans will also choose their nominees for three congressional districts they hope to flip from blue to red this November. In the 7th District, former Lehigh County Commissioner Lisa Scheller came within 4 points of beating Democratic Rep. Susan Wild in 2020, and the seat got redder in redistricting (it now has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+4). So Scheller is back this year with the support of House Republican leadership, but she’ll first have to get through business owner Kevin Dellicker in the primary. Scheller appears in good shape, though, having outraised Dellicker $2.0 million to $183,321.

In Northeastern Pennsylvania’s 8th District (an R+8 partisan lean), Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright’s 2020 opponent, former Trump administration official Jim Bognet (who also lost by about 4 points), is back for a rematch as well. But Bognet lost in 2020, despite that Trump carried the district, which is probably due mostly to Cartwright’s strength but also suggests the GOP could use a better candidate. Former Hazleton Mayor Mike Marsicano is also running in the primary, and Bognet has only outraised him $719,516 to $525,100. However, Bognet’s support for Trump’s lawsuits over the 2020 election could save his bacon; he recently secured Trump’s endorsement.

Finally, the 17th District has a partisan lean of D+1, but the retirement of Rep. Conor Lamb has given the GOP an opening in this suburban Pittsburgh seat. Former Ross Township Commissioner Jeremy Shaffer looks like the front-runner, having raised $729,063, and he is also likely the candidate with the most general-election appeal (he says he probably would have voted for President Biden’s infrastructure bill). National security consultant Jason Killmeyer has positioned himself as the more conservative option, but he has raised only $135,220. A third candidate, former Bellevue Councilwoman Kathleen Coder, has raised just $9,775.

Idaho

Races to watch: 2nd Congressional District, governor, attorney general, secretary of state

Polls close: 10 p.m. Eastern in most of the state, 11 p.m. Eastern in the Panhandle

In Idaho, governors and lieutenant governors don’t run on the same ticket, which has led to the unusual situation of Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin running for governor against her boss, incumbent Gov. Brad Little. Little has impeccable pro-Trump credentials (he supported Texas’s lawsuit to invalidate the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), but the former president is nevertheless supporting McGeachin, who is even further to the right.

McGeachin supports a 50-state audit of the 2020 election and has delivered a recorded message to a conference hosted by white nationalists. She is probably most famous, though, for her vehement opposition to mask and vaccine mandates: Twice, while serving as acting governor when Little was traveling out of state, she has issued executive orders banning such mandates, only to see Little quickly rescind them, calling McGeachin’s behavior “an irresponsible, self-serving political stunt.”

But if one of Trump’s other endorsees hasn’t already lost by this point in the evening, Idaho will probably snap his winning streak. According to a poll conducted last month by Zoldak Research for the Idaho Dispatch, Little led McGeachin by a whopping 60 percent to 29 percent.

A few other, more moderate Republican incumbents are also facing renomination threats from anti-democratic challengers. In Idaho’s 2nd District, Rep. Mike Simpson is facing a rematch from lawyer Bryan Smith, whom he beat in 2014, 62 percent to 38 percent. While Simpson voted to certify the 2020 election results, Smith believes it was fraudulent. Outside groups have spent more than $1.3 million on Simpson’s behalf, which should help shore up his position but also suggests they see Smith as a serious threat.

Lawrence Wasden, the longest-serving attorney general in Idaho history, is also in danger of losing his bid for a sixth term to former tea-party Republican Rep. Raúl Labrador. Labrador has outraised Wasden, $592,449 to $478,294,² and has translated that financial advantage into a 9-point lead in the latest poll, conducted in early May by Remington Research Group. While Wasden was one of the few Republican attorneys general not to join the Texas lawsuit, Labrador said he would have if he’d held the office.

Finally, with the retirement of pro-democracy incumbent Lawerence Denney, there’s a very real possibility that an election denier will become Idaho’s next secretary of state. Two of the three candidates, state Rep. Dorothy Moon and state Sen. Mary Souza, have said that Biden did not fairly win the 2020 election. However, both have been outraised by Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, who runs elections in Idaho’s most populous county and has accepted Biden’s win, so it’s possible that a pro-democracy Republican still ends up holding this office.

Oregon

Races to watch: 5th and 6th congressional districts, governor

Polls close: 10 p.m. Eastern in the Mountain time zone part of Malheur County, 11 p.m. Eastern in the rest of the state

Oregon is a fairly blue state, but two factors could conspire to give Republicans an opening there in November: the Republican-leaning national environment and outgoing Democratic Gov. Kate Brown’s unpopularity. Perhaps sensing an opening, 19 candidates are running in the GOP primary for governor, but none has exactly taken the state by storm: According to Nelson Research, “undecided” leads with 27 percent, followed by former state House Minority Leader Christine Drazan with 19 percent, former Oregon GOP Chair Bob Tiernan with 14 percent, 2016 GOP gubernatorial nominee Bud Pierce with 10 percent and Sandy Mayor Stan Pulliam with 7 percent. Most of the major candidates are traditional conservatives, but Pulliam has tossed voters more pro-Trump red meat (“I’m the only conservative candidate, especially on this stage, that is willing to say the truth,” he said at an April debate: “The 2020 election was fraudulent, completely fraudulent”).

There are also contested Republican primaries for two congressional seats that the GOP is hoping to flip this year, but perhaps unsurprisingly given both districts’ slightly Democratic lean, these primaries aren’t really shaping up as referendums on Trump, either. For instance, none of the five candidates who responded to a questionnaire by The Oregonian/OregonLive said that the 2020 election was illegitimate. In the 5th District, which has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of D+3, five Republicans are competing to be the nominee. Former Happy Valley Mayor Lori Chavez-DeRemer ($669,145, including almost $300,000 in self-funding) and energy investor Jimmy Crumpacker ($541,208) have raised the most money. If elected in November, Chavez-DeRemer would be the first Hispanic person Oregon sends to the U.S. Congress — she has already earned the support of New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is on a mission to get more female Republicans elected.

With a partisan lean of D+7, the brand-new 6th District is tougher terrain for the GOP, but Republicans could probably flip it if they nominate the right candidate. Logistics executive Mike Erickson leads the seven-candidate Republican field in fundraising with $722,688, and his ability to self-fund could also come in handy in November. However, energy executive Nathan Sandvig (whose hero is former President Dwight Eisenhower) and state Rep. Ron Noble (whose state House district voted for Biden), both of whom are emphasizing how centrist they are, could also be formidable nominees. 

And that’s just the half of it. We’ll be previewing the Democratic primaries in these states tomorrow morning, just in time for you to read up on everything before our live blog that night. We hope you’ll join us then!

John Fetterman is the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. He’s a Democrat, he’s covered in tattoos, he’s running for Senate and he’s polling really well in his party’s primary. But he’s trending these days because of resurfaced reports that he chased an unarmed Black jogger with a shotgun in 2013.

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

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

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

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

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

Responsibilities:

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

Basic Qualifications:

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

Preferred Qualifications:

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

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

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

2022 Election

How Every Senator And Governor Ranks According To 'Popularity Above Replacement'

By Nathaniel Rakich

May 13, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

After about a three-year hiatus, FiveThirtyEight’s Popularity Above Replacement Senator and Popularity Above Replacement Governor ratings are back! Based on Morning Consult’s approval ratings¹ for every senator and governor in the country (now updated for the first quarter of 2022), PARS and PARG attempt to measure how much stronger (or weaker) a politician is than a generic (or, to use a term from baseball, replacement-level) candidate from their party would be. 

The idea behind these stats is that a 70 percent approval rating for a Democrat in Massachusetts isn’t the same as a 70 percent approval rating for a Democrat in Florida. Because Massachusetts is so blue, that’s no big whoop in the Bay State — but in reddish Florida, it denotes a talented politician with a lot of cross-party appeal.

Calculating PARS and PARG is simple: It’s just the difference between each state’s FiveThirtyEight partisan lean² and the senator or governor’s net approval rating (approval rating minus disapproval rating). Doing this for the Senate, we get the following table of senators with the best and worst statewide brands:

Nationally, Sen. Joe Manchin is best known as a thorn in liberals’ side because he has opposed President Biden’s agenda on the social safety net, voting rights, abortion and more. But his moderation has endeared him to voters in his home state of West Virginia: He has a +22 net approval rating in the R+36 state, for a chamber-leading PARS of +58. And he’s not the only Democrat with a lot of cross-party appeal; in fact, the 16 senators with the highest PARS scores all caucus with the Democratic Party. This includes Sens. Jon Tester (+33 PARS) and Sherrod Brown (+20 PARS), who have managed to win multiple elections despite hailing from red states.

This also offers a glimmer of hope to Democrats who face the very real prospect of losing control of the Senate in 2022, as this fall’s midterm elections are shaping up well for Republicans. Their four most vulnerable incumbents this fall — Sens. Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan and Catherine Cortez Masto — all have PARS scores of at least +7, suggesting that they are capable of outperforming the base partisanship of their state. That will be essential in a year when, based solely on partisan lean and generic congressional ballot polling, you’d expect a Republican to win their home states, all else being equal.

On the flip side, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has one of the worst PARS scores (-18); despite his home state of Wisconsin having an R+4 partisan lean, his net approval rating is -14 percentage points. This unpopularity could drag him down in November, allowing Democrats to flip a Senate seat that, on paper, should remain Republican in this environment.

Then again, a senator’s PARS score isn’t everything. Just ask Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who for years has had the worst PARS score in the country (currently -54). Yet, even though his net approval rating has long been underwater, he easily won reelection in 2020 thanks to Kentucky’s overwhelming Republican lean. (That said, he did win by “only” 20 points, several points worse than the state’s partisan lean, suggesting that his unpopularity did have some effect.)

Senators like Manchin and McConnell are exceptions, though. The majority of senators have PARS scores in the single digits, indicating that their approval rating is largely determined by the partisanship of their states. This is less true for governors, however. Although partisanship has been getting more important in gubernatorial races, it is not as dominant of a force in them as it is in federal elections.³

As a result, more governors than senators have PARGs at the extreme ends of the spectrum, as you can see in the table below. Also, a mix of both parties dominates the top of the list — not just Democrats. 

As they have for years, three northeastern, blue-state Republicans lead the way: Govs. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Phil Scott of Vermont and Larry Hogan of Maryland. Each currently enjoys an extraordinary PARG of +75 or higher. A trio of red-state Democrats — Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Kansas’s Laura Kelly and Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards — all have PARGs between +31 and +51 as well. 

Similar to a senator’s PARS score, a governor’s PARG score can also help us get a better sense of which governors running for reelection in 2022 are best equipped to swim against the partisan tide of their states. Scott and Kelly⁴ seem to be in the best position, especially Scott: Not only does he have more cross-party appeal than Kelly (+77 PARG), but he is also a Republican running in a good Republican year. Kelly, on the other hand, does have a brand distinct from the national Democratic Party, but it’s an open question whether she can get enough Kansas Republicans who approve of her to take the extra step and vote for her as well. Early polling indicates a tight race. 

Governors running for reelection in swing states also have some very different PARGs that explain why some of them are vulnerable this year, while others probably don’t have anything to worry about. For instance, New Hampshire is an evenly divided state, but Gov. Chris Sununu’s net approval rating is +30, so he is expected to comfortably win reelection. And you might expect Democratic Gov. Jared Polis to be vulnerable in a Republican-leaning midterm in D+6 Colorado, but his net approval rating is 16 points higher than that, giving him a nice cushion in case the national environment puts his state in play.

With a PARG of +13, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada also has a distinct personal brand that could help him weather a tough reelection campaign in purple Nevada. But Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin may be more at the mercy of the national mood. Evers’s PARG is just +1, suggesting perceptions of him are strongly dependent on partisanship. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is somewhere in the middle, with a PARG of +6. That suggests she has a bit of crossover appeal, but that her fate is still closely tied to partisanship.

Toward the bottom of the list are five governors running for reelection whose approval ratings don’t look as strong as they seem after taking partisan lean into account. That said, they are all in very safe states, so they shouldn’t be in any danger. The governor’s race in Rhode Island could be a sleeper, though, considering Gov. Dan McKee’s mediocre +2 net approval rating, the fact that he is running for the office for the first time (he became governor only because he was the lieutenant governor when the old governor resigned), the pro-Republican national mood and Rhode Island’s elasticity.

Finally, the two governors with the worst PARGs are Democrats Kate Brown of Oregon (-25) and David Ige of Hawaii (-41). Both have negative net approval ratings despite governing fairly blue states. They might have been in real danger of losing their seats in 2022, but thankfully for Democrats, both are retiring.

Other polling bites

• A new Monmouth University poll, conducted May 5-9 after a draft Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade was leaked, found that only 38 percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing, while 52 percent disapproved. This was significantly worse than the court’s ratings in March, when 42 percent approved and 42 percent disapproved. But it is also arguably the continuation of a long-term decline in the court’s popularity; a Monmouth poll from March 2016 gave the court a 49 percent approval and 33 percent disapproval rating.
• With the prospect that abortion could soon be illegal in many states, some people may face difficult decisions about what to do if they have an unwanted pregnancy. According to a May 5-8 poll from the Generation Lab, which researches trends among young people, 56 percent of 18- to 29-year-old women said that they would still seek out an abortion provider even if it were illegal. An additional 10 percent said they would attempt to end the pregnancy at home. Only 34 percent said they would carry the pregnancy to term.
• As hate crimes against Asian Americans have increased amid the coronavirus pandemic, 72 percent of English-speaking Asian Americans told the Pew Research Center that they at least sometimes worry about getting threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity, including 21 percent who said they worry about it every day or almost every day. More than a third — 36 percent — also said they have changed their daily routines because of that worry.
• Billionaire Elon Musk’s quest to buy Twitter isn’t yet official, but if he is successful, he said this week he will reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. But according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll from April 29-May 2, that would be a controversial decision: 45 percent of registered voters thought Trump’s ban from Twitter should be kept permanent, while 41 percent agreed with restoring his account.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁵ 41.4 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.2 points). At this time last week, 42.2 percent approved and 52.5 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -10.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 42.2 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.2 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.0 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁶ Republicans currently lead by 2.6 percentage points (45.5 percent to 42.9 percent). A week ago, Republicans led Democrats by 2.6 points (45.4 percent to 42.8 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 2.2 points (44.7 percent to 42.5 percent).

Since January 2021, 11 states have enacted laws that limit how teachers can talk about race and racism in schools and close to 200 bills have been introduced in 40 states. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke discusses the context of these laws with contributor Theodore Johnson, director of the fellows program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Since January 2021, eleven states have enacted laws that limit how teachers can talk about race and racism in schools and close to 200 bills have been introduced in 40 states. Last fall, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s win was credited in part with a parental backlash that included concerns about Critical Race Theory. But what are these laws actually doing? What is the impact, both in the classroom and at the ballot box, of laws that regulate how teachers can talk about race and racism? And why has this become such a focus in our politics?

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke discusses these questions with Theodore Johnson, the Director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

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.

Education

Why Trans Rights Became The GOP's Latest Classroom Target

By Jean Yi

May 12, 2022, at 6:00 AM

In 2016, North Carolina passed its infamous “bathroom bill”, which prevented transgender people from using public bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity. Today, anti-trans legislation is taking aim at children. Dozens of states have introduced bills limiting transgender students’ participation on school sports teams that match their gender identity. Thirteen states, all Republican-leaning, have passed such bills in the last two years, turning an issue that affects less than 1 percent of the country’s youth into the latest battle in the culture wars.

But the current push to restrict trans rights goes beyond athletics — Republicans are also increasingly pushing to restrict trans rights in the classroom.

Using data from the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom for All Americans and the Human Rights Center,¹, as well as additional bills found in the course of my research — I identified 40 bills introduced since January 2021 that seek to restrict how gender and gender identity are taught at schools. Bills ranged from requiring parental consent or notification before teaching these subjects to limiting these topics for students in certain grades to outright prohibiting learning about gender identity.² Other bills prevent students from using different names and pronouns without parental consent or remove antidiscrimination guidelines.

Moreover, underscoring just how closely this movement is linked to the push around banning critical race theory — an academic legal framework that asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions — in the classroom, 13 of these bills also included language restricting how schools can teach about race and racism. Several bills targeted critical race theory directly, despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools.

Limiting or banning classroom discussions is “going to have just an enormous chilling effect to prohibit teachers from being able to really have any kind of conversation whatsoever… effectively, they’re not going to be able to talk about LGBTQ people at all,” said Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign.

Reading the text of these bills is like a Cliffs Notes summary of all the ways in which education has become a wedge issue. Of the 13 bills that limit both how gender and gender identity and race and racism are talked about in the classroom, three proposed bills — in Rhode Island³, South Carolina⁴ and West Virginia⁵ — explicitly ban schools from teaching The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which has long been a target of right-wing attacks in schools. There is also an Oklahoma bill⁶ that proposes to ban books in public school libraries “that make as their primary subject the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues.”

These fights of what can — and can’t — be taught in schools aren’t new. “Schools have been a site of many political battles and many political interventions,” said Adrienne Dixson, a professor of education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, citing the historical examples of Brown v. Board of Education (a landmark Supreme Court case that banned racial segregation in public schools) and legal battles over providing bilingual education. And as FiveThirtyEight’s Alex Samuels and Kaleigh Rogers explained last year, conservatives have long used schools as a battleground for culture war issues over everything from evolution to sex education to racial equality.

Conservatives’ attacks on schools ratcheted up during the Trump administration. Following the murder of George Floyd and protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to control how the federal government talked about issues of race, banning federal agencies and contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training in an executive order issued in September 2020. The federal government can’t actually dictate what’s taught in public schools, but Trump also threatened to pull funding from some schools that used the 1619 Project in its curriculum.

While Trump ultimately wasn’t able to ban what was taught in schools, the rhetoric in his executive order was significant in that it helped “legitimize the discontent that his base had, and has probably had for a while as it relates to racial equity,” according to Dixson. Moreover, the language in his executive order has cropped up repeatedly in the anti-trans bills I’ve studied.

In fact, many of these bills are part of a coordinated legislative effort. Oakley told me that Promise to America’s Children, an anti-LGBTQ coalition, was the source of many of these anti-trans bills. And one of the organizations behind Promise to America’s Children, the Heritage Foundation, has created model legislation opposing the “tenets” of critical race theory being taught in K-12 classrooms.

As of March 15, 154 anti-trans bills that limit access to health care, sports, bathrooms and education have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to NBC News. This is already more than the 153 such bills introduced in 2021. More broadly, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills has also grown from 41 in 2018 to 238 in just the first few months of 2022. (Some states with Democratic-controlled legislatures have control are fighting back. Connecticut, for instance, became the first state to respond to this sort of legislative action this week with a bill containing a pro-trans provision, proposing a “safe-state law” that would guarantee protections for transgender individuals leaving other states.)

Republicans are using tools beyond legislation to attack trans rights. In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott instructed the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate reports of gender-affirming health care for trans children as child abuse — a move that left many parents of trans children in Texas feeling “frantic,” according to Emma, the mother of an eight-year-old trans girl from Austin. (Emma preferred to use a pseudonym out of privacy concerns.) “I go between feeling a rage and just sheer panic,” she said, adding that she knows six families who are leaving the state over this.

Only one of these bills, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act,⁷ has been signed into law so far. But even if many of these bills aren’t passed, they can still create an atmosphere that is hostile to trans people. Often, too, it falls to trans kids to fight back.

One student who knows this particularly well is 18-year-old Amira Pierotti, a senior at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, who helped rewrite their local health education curricula twice to make it more LGBTQ-inclusive — Pierotti said the original curriculum had “no LGBT+ representation, nothing on safe sex, nothing on consent, very little on sexual assault.” For the last two years, they say they’ve also been involved  in a lawsuit brought on by a local conservative advocacy group over whether staff can call students by different names or pronouns, without parental consent. (Several student clubs at local high schools, including one where Pierotti is a member, intervened as defendants in the lawsuit.)

It’s not just this lawsuit, either — Pierotti also helped organize against a bill introduced by Wisconsin Republicans last September that would have required schools to give parents notice before providing any instruction related to sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. One of Pierotti’s friends, Cameron Craig, a 16-year-old sophomore, stayed up the night before and skipped school the next day to testify against the bill. Craig told me that they were motivated to do this because it was important to them that legislators understand what their experience of being a trans student was like.

The bill ultimately failed, but at that point, a similar bill had already passed both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature. And while that bill was later vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, when trans rights at school are up for debate, “it’s an invitation toward discrimination,” said Stephen Russell, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ adolescents. For some trans kids, the difference between a supportive and an unsupportive school environment can be a matter of life or death. According to my analysis of data from a late 2020 poll from the advocacy group The Trevor Project, trans and nonbinary youth who felt that their school was not a gender-affirming space were almost 30 percent more likely to have attempted suicide in the last year.

For Craig, the loss of school as a potential safe outlet for self-expression especially makes them concerned for friends who are closeted at home because they don’t have a supportive family. “School is their safe space right now, where we can be kind of openly LGBTQ a good amount of the time,” said Craig. “[T]hat being taken away from them would be really, absolutely devastating.”

But with the number of anti-trans bills growing, school might not be a safe space for trans kids anytime soon.