Tag: blue states
What the DeSantis and Newsom Debate Revealed
The best way to understand last week’s unusual debate between Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida is to think of them less as representatives of different political parties than as ambassadors from different countries.
Thursday night’s debate on Fox News probably won’t much change the arc of either man’s career. DeSantis is still losing altitude in the 2024 GOP presidential race, and Newsom still faces years of auditioning before Democratic leaders and voters for a possible
Dobbs’s Confounding Effect on Abortion Rates
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Diana Greene Foster made a painful prediction: She estimated that one in four women who wanted an abortion wouldn’t be able to get one. Foster, a demographer at UC San Francisco, told me that she’d based her expectation on her knowledge of how abortion rates decline when women lose insurance coverage or have to travel long distances after clinics close.
And she was well aware of what this statistic meant. She’d
The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio
Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.
Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights
Why Biden’s Investment Boom Is A Big Political Bet
When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.
Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed
America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we
Biden Is Looking at an Uncertain Electoral Future
The “return to normalcy” in American life is starting to look something like the horizon: It recedes whenever you approach it. For President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats anxious about the November midterm elections, nothing could be more ominous.
Last summer’s Delta wave dashed hopes that the deployment of COVID vaccines would quickly carry the United States back to a pre-pandemic stasis. The persistence of inflation undermined expectations from the Biden administration and Federal Reserve Board that high prices would
Can Anything Stop Republicans From Rolling Back Rights?
The great divergence is rapidly expanding—and President Joe Biden’s window to reverse it is narrowing.
Since the 1960s, Congress and federal courts have acted mostly to strengthen the floor of basic civil rights available to citizens in all 50 states, a pattern visible on issues from the dismantling of Jim Crow racial segregation to the right to abortion to the authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, offensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those