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theliberaltony · 2 years

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Gun Control

We’ve Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years

By Maggie Koerth

Jun. 1, 2022, at 1:24 PM

AP Photo / Ed Andrieski

The following is an updated version of this article, published in 2018.

The horror in Uvalde, Texas, last week was horrifyingly familiar to Mary Ellen O’Toole. Part of a small group of academics, law-enforcement professionals and psychologists who published some of the first research on mass shootings in schools more than 20 years ago, O’Toole knows the patterns these events and perpetrators all follow — and the opportunities for prevention that seem to just keep being missed.

I first spoke to her in 2018, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, but she has been studying school shootings for more than 27 years. In that time, she and other experts say little has changed. The risk factors they identified two decades ago still apply. The recommendations they made are still valid. And every time another batch of Americans die in this way, researchers like O’Toole are forced to watch in horror, thinking about what could have been prevented and why it wasn’t. “Honestly, I … I feel very, very angry,” O’Toole said to me last week. There is always another new example of mass gun violence in America. But mass gun violence in America is no longer new — and neither are efforts to stop it.

“On the news, people are saying we should be concerned about this and that,” O’Toole told me in 2018, “and I thought, ‘We identified that 20 years ago. Did you not read this stuff 20 years ago?’ … It’s fatiguing. I just feel a sense of fatigue.”

It’s difficult to say definitively how many school shootings have happened in this country — different databases count them in different ways and come up with different numbers of incidents. It’s harder still to prove how many would-be shootings were averted, or how many others could have been if additional steps had been taken. But the people who have spent more than two decades trying to understand this phenomenon are still here and are still trying to sell politicians and the public on possible solutions that are complicated, expensive and tough to sum up in a sound bite.

Any research into school shootings is made more difficult by how uncommon such shootings are. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight wrote about the more than 33,000 people killed by guns in America every year. Of those deaths, roughly one-third — about 12,000 — were homicides, but hardly any were due to mass shootings.1 If you define mass shootings as an event where a lone attacker indiscriminately kills four or more people, in a public place, unrelated gang activity or robbery, then mass shootings account for a tiny portion of all gun homicides — probably a fraction of a percent. School shootings are an even smaller subset

In 1995, when O’Toole began to study school shootings, they seemed like even more of an outlier than they are today. “I couldn’t even call it a phenomenon,” she said in 2018. “Prior to Columbine, there was no indication that it was going to become one of those crimes that just becomes part of the culture. It looked like it could have faded away.”

These uncommon but high-profile tragedies had also drawn the attention of Marisa Randazzo. In 1999, she was the chief psychologist for the Secret Service and became a part of a joint effort between the Secret Service and Department of Education to better understand school shooters and how to prevent attacks before they happened. Randazzo had previously worked on the Exceptional Case Study Project — a Secret Service project designed to better understand people who threaten the president and other public figures. Like school shootings, assassinations are extremely rare events that have a huge impact on society. That rarity makes them hard to study — and makes it hard to tell blowhards from real threats. But their impact makes them important to understand.

Randazzo found that the project’s findings echoed what she was learning about school shootings. For instance, the Secret Service had once focused its energy on threats made by people with a history of violent crime or who had a mental illness that caused them to act irrationally. But the Exceptional Case Study Project analysis showed that most people who actually carry out attacks didn’t meet either of those criteria. Instead, a better way to figure out who was really a threat was to talk to friends, family and coworkers — most attackers had discussed their plans with other people.

Randazzo’s and O’Toole’s parallel reports came to remarkably similar conclusions.

First, these studies determined that there wasn’t much point in trying to profile school shooters. Yes, most were (and remain) male and white, but those categories were so broad that they’re essentially useless in identifying potential threats ahead of time, Randazzo said. What’s more, she said, more detailed profiles risked stigmatizing perfectly reasonable behaviors — like wearing black and listening to loud music.

Instead, the reports focused on the behavior and mental state of the young people who chose to kill. While these teens were deeply troubled, that’s not quite the same thing as saying that those who commit school shootings are just irredeemably mentally ill. Nor does it mean those young people suddenly snapped, giving no warning. “School shooters typically do this out of a profound adolescent crisis,” said James Garbarino, a professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in teen violence and began studying school shooters in the late 1990s.

Randazzo described a pattern of young people who were deeply depressed, unable to cope with their lives, who saw no other way out of a bad situation. The stressors they faced wouldn’t necessarily be problems that an adult would see as especially traumatic, but these young people were unable to handle their emotions, sadness and anger, and they started acting in ways that were, essentially, suicidal.

Some of the best data on the mental state of school shooters has come from interviews with those shooters (and would-be shooters) who survived the attack. Randazzo described one such living school shooter,2 currently serving multiple life sentences, who told her that before the attack he spent weeks vacillating between suicide and homicide. Only after he tried and failed to kill himself did he settle on killing others in hopes that someone would kill him. Garbarino, who has interviewed dozens of people who went to prison for life as teenagers, both for school shootings and other violent crimes, heard many similar stories.

“The reason I emphasize this is that we know so much about how to help someone who is suicidal, and those same resources can be used very effectively with someone who is planning to engage in school violence,” Randazzo said. So how do we spot the ones who are planning an attack at a school? The studies she and O’Toole published years ago showed that, like people planning to attack the president, would-be school shooters don’t keep their plans to themselves. They tell friends or even teachers that they want to kill. They talk about their anger and their suicidality. They lash out violently against family and friends. And as more teens have attacked their schoolmates, that pattern has proved to hold true over time. It was true for Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. It was true for Payton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter. It was true for Salvador Ramos, the Robb Elementary shooter.

While all the experts I spoke with said that policies that keep guns out of the hands of teenagers are an important part of preventing mass shootings, they all also said it is crucial to set up systems that spot teens who are struggling and may become dangerous. You can’t predict violent events or who will go from threatening behavior to murder, O’Toole said. But it is possible for us to look around and see the people who are having problems and need intervention. Interventions can prevent violence, even if we can’t predict it, she told me. For example, at least four potential school shootings that were averted in the weeks after Parkland all stopped because the would-be killers spoke or wrote about their plans and someone told law enforcement.

And there’s usually time to spot these things coming. While homicides in general are almost never premeditated, mass shootings — including school shootings — almost always are, said Adam Lankford, a professor of criminology at the University of Alabama. That makes sense, O’Toole said, because it takes time for a person who is drowning in self-pity and anger to decide their misery is someone else’s fault, to dehumanize those other people to the point of being able to kill them and to isolate themselves from any reality checks that could break through these dangerous thought patterns.

But time also erodes the systems that schools have implemented in the past to prevent violence. Randazzo told me that her team had trained numerous school districts in school shooting prevention back in the early 2000s and that, as of 2018, many of those districts no longer had prevention systems in place. Thanks to staff turnover and budget reprioritization, such institutional knowledge simply withered away. And ironically, that happens precisely because school shootings are so rare. “It takes time and effort for a school to create a team and get training,” Randazzo said. “And, fortunately, threatening behavior doesn’t happen often enough” to spur schools to action.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Maggie Koerth

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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For the first time, political polling website FiveThirtyEight shows the Democrats with an edge in the race for the U.S. Senate in November.

The website late on Tuesday showed the Democrats had a 52% chance of keeping the Senate majority, while the Republicans had a 48% chance.

There had been consensus for a long time that the Republicans will win back the Senate this fall, buoyed by high inflation and economic downturn under Democrat Joe Biden's presidency.

FiveThirtyEight believes that the Republicans have selected some "weak candidates" in some key races, meaning that they are less likely to take the upper chamber than previously predicted.

The website's Senate forecast has changed since it began polling in early June. Back then, the Democrats were only predicted to have a 40% chance to keeping the Senate, with the Republicans 60% chance of taking it. Since then, the Democrats have grown in popularity and now for the first time have overtaken the Republicans, and are on course to keep the Senate.

The Senate elections will be held on November 8, with 35 of the Senate seats being contested in regular elections, and the winners will serve six-year terms from January 3, 2023. Of the 35 seats, 21 are Republican-held and 14 are Democratic-held.

The Democrats currently have a wafer-thin majority in the Senate, with 48 seats, two independents, and a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris. The Republicans have 50 seats.

The Democrats won the Senate from the Republicans in January 2021, taking control of the upper chamber for the first time since 2015. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Georgia's runoff elections against GOP incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue respectively.

Warnock, a pastor who spent the past 15 years leading the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, was the first Black senator in Georgia's history.

FiveThirtyEight believes that several states will change party control in November, including Republican-controlled Pennsylvania, where it predicts Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman will win around 49.1% of the vote against Republican Mehmet Oz's 47.8%.

Democrat-controlled New Hampshire is also likely to be a toss-up state, with Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan forecasted to get 51.3% of the vote at the moment against Republican candidate Donald Bolduc's 46.4%.

The race for Republican-held North Carolina is likely to be close, with Republican Ted Budd forecasted 50.2% of the vote against Democrat Cheri Beasley's 46.1%.

Warnock's state of Georgia is predicted to be a knife-edge vote. The incumbent is forecasted to lose with 49.0% of the vote against Republican candidate Herschel Walker with 49.6%.

Democratic-controlled Arizona is also expected to be close with incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Kelly expected to get 49.8%, against Republican Blake Masters with 47.5%.

Newsweek has contacted the Democrats for comment.

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dynamicity-keysmash · 4 months

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This isn't my usual content, but while the election year is still new I figured I'd try out a prediction. It'll be interesting to see how accurate I am this far out. To explain myself a bit, I see most voters being pretty static in a Biden-Trump rematch. Biden has a lot of weaknesses right now, but trump literally has 91 felony charges that will heat up throughout the year. The only change in the map from 2020 that I predict is Biden narrowly not being able to recapture Georgia due to draconian voting restrictions and the effects of changing party coalitions (Biden gaining with college educated whites and losing some ground with non-college-educated people of color). Feel free to ask for the logic behind any part of my prediction!

#politics #trump #us politics #donald trump #joe biden #2024 elections #us elections #2024 election #us 2024 elections #us 2024 election #biden #dark brandon #fuck trump #dear god i really hope I'm right and fascism loses #election prediction #election predictions #538 #fivethirtyeight

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vhstve591 · 1 year

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#house party #fivethirtyeight #politics #us politics #nate silver

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reportwire · 2 years

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Why Politics Has Become So Stressful

No matter which party wins control of the House and Senate next month, the results are virtually certain to reinforce the paradox powering the nation’s steadily mounting political tension. American politics today may be both more rigid and more unstable than at any other time since at least the Civil War. A politics that is rigid and unstable sounds like a contradiction in terms. But the system’s…

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ms-myself · 2 years

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But given that we do have a huge story on our hands, let’s do a direct before-and-after comparison. Six pollsters have released generic ballot polls both before and after the Dobbs decision. All six of those polling firms have shown a shift toward Democrats. On average, Democrats trailed by 1.3 points in the pre-Dobbs version of these polls but led by 1.5 points in the most recent ones, a shift of almost 3 points toward the party.

#american politics #post roe #fivethirtyeight

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star-anise · 2 years

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This is what the fight is like

Sooo, apparently the extremely tenuous and recent nature of the LGBTQ+ community's legal right to exist was not actually super widely known to a lot of people on Tumblr?

Which clarifies some stuff in retrospect. I have so often wanted to grab people by their lapels and shout, "Stop picking on someone for not meeting your entry requirements! We need everyone we can get, you asshole! DON'T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY HATE US OUT THERE?"

Aaaapparently... no, they did not know. Or they knew and were a conservative psyop preparing the ground for our loss of legal rights. Fun times!

So: Look, it is bad. Shit is scary. They really do hate us out there. You're not wrong.

But: This is what we've always fought. This boat we're in with its antique fittings and strange markings on the floor is a battleship. Work has always been going on in the basements, and when shit gets tough, we clear away clutter and roll out the cannons.

I found this chart a couple weeks ago and hung onto it because it felt like the map to my first 25 years on this earth:

[Image description: A graph titled "Same Sex Marriage: Public Polls since 1988." It is from FiveThirtyEight's NYT column. It records the percentage of US Americans polled who would say yes or no to legalizing same-sex marriage, from 1988 to 2011.

The two lines begin with roughly 10% saying yes in 1988, and 70% saying no; the two lines gradually draw closer over the years, until by 2011, the percent saying finally dips under 50%, and the group saying yes makes a tentative reach for the majority. End of image description.]

After some great social change has happened, when everyone has admitted that gay marriage is very cute and Pride is a colourful parade, hooray, people like to pretend that it was just natural and inevitable and happened on its own. People just became less prejudiced! Courts just decided on a case! Governments just passed a law!

In reality, it was a vicious fucking fight, every fucking time. Every fucking where. There are a lot of people who deeply, sincerely believe that a hundred years ago, society had good rules about sex and gender and intercourse and marriage, and that changing those rules has made the world worse. They don't always agree on the specifics, but they can work together far enough to fight anyone with new ideas.

This is why we are a community. Even when we don't have the same experiences of attraction or identity, even when we don't do the same things, even when we have wildly different ideas of a good time. Because when these groups take aim, we're all under fire, and none of us is responsible for why they hate us.

In some ways I think it's a miracle that there seems to be a generation that did not grow up, as I grew up, constantly glued to news reports about What Percentage of Society Hates Us this month. I can't imagine who I'd be if my brain and heart and soul hadn't been tied up, that whole time, in the political question of whether I'd get to dream of a decent future.

I think that it will give us strength to have people who can imagine a world where no one hates us. Who believe in it so strongly they can taste it. That's my prediction: If you didn't know this was coming, you'll be a boon to us, because we have always needed joy so fiercely, in this fight, to keep us going on. We have needed drag queens and punk bands and "her wife" and safe space stickers. Parade floats and wedding days and little dogs with rainbow collars, badges and banners and meetups, because more than anything else we need to fight our own despair, and our fear that the world will never get any better than this.

It will. We know it will. We can taste it.

Look up to the history, organizations, and people who've got us this far for information on what forms of activism will actually advance our political goals. Look to the side to make sure the comrades within reach are keeping their heads above water, and that you're keeping enough joy going to stay alive. Look back to see who's more vulnerable than you are that you might have forgotten or been tempted to leave behind. Look after each other. Look after yourself.

We can do this.

To your battle stations.

#lgbt discourse #staranise original

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trainsinanime · 10 months

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It’s so weird reading FiveThirtyEight these days. The US is heading for what may become its last presidential election ever, but since they have to stick to a format, they’re still reporting it as a horse race.

It’s all stuff like “Which indictment will hurt Trump the most in the polls? Who will win the GDP primary?” Meanwhile Trump has tried to overthrow the last election, has vowed to try and do it again, and everyone who matters in his party has vowed to support him.

And on the other side they track Biden’s approval rating and talk about inflation rates and the economy, as if the most important question wasn’t, “should the US continue to have fair elections, or should we let republicans dictate who wins forever?”. It’s weird stuff.

The Heritage Foundation have announced their 2025 project, a plan to change the entire way the executive branch works to make it beholden only to the president’s whims and make nonpartisan government entities (such as those who administer elections) strictly partisan, if Trump or another republican gets in power. And meanwhile websites are discussing fundraising numbers.

I’m not American, and I’ve spent way too much time arguing about American politics online with Americans in my stupid youth days, and I’m tired of that. So I won’t offer any opinion here. I just think it’s fascinating to see whether the biggest economy in the world will stay controlled by the people (even if in an imperfect way) or go the route of Hungary or worse; and the incredibly boring, seemingly normal way it’s getting there.

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mariacallous · 6 months

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This was a big week in American politics. It began with a devastating poll showing that Donald Trump was beating Joe Biden in a presidential match up in five out of six swing states. Then, on Tuesday, the voters spoke for the last time until the Iowa caucuses happen in mid-January and delivered the Democrats a very good night in multiple states that underscored the continuing power of the abortion issue. And on November 8, the five remaining challengers to former President Donald Trump met in their final debate of the year, an event that revealed the continuing struggle of Republicans opposed to renominating Trump to coalesce around an alternative to him.

What have we learned from these events?

1. Biden’s unpopularity does not mean that voters won’t vote for Democrats.

Our political system is obsessively focused on the President of the United States — his prospects, preferences, personnel, and health. During election years, there is considerable attention to his poll numbers and overall political standing. But as the special elections in 2021, the midterm elections in 2022, and now the off-year elections of 2023 have shown, President Biden’s unpopularity has failed to have the devastating effects on Democratic candidates that were widely predicted by pundits. For example, in September, analysts at FiveThirtyEight looked at 30 special elections that took place before the 2023 November elections, mostly state legislative seats. They calculated the seat’s base partisanship — their historical tendency towards one party or another — and then looked at the vote margin for Democrats running in those seats. On average, Democratic candidates in these races did about 11 points better than their historical average.

On election night 2023, Democrats won control of the Virginia legislature following a campaign in which the incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin spent a lot of money and pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get a legislature which could help him enact a conservative agenda and catapult him into the presidential race. Instead, the opposite happened, and Democrats retained control of the Senate and gained control of the House of Delegates. We looked at the most competitive races (according to ABC News) in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates to see what kind of a swing there was.

Because of redistricting, we can’t compare the 2023 vote precisely to the 2019 vote. But thanks to the Virginia Public Access project, we can compare how Senate and House candidates performed against the vote in their district for governor in 2021. In these 13 close Senate and House districts, the Republican Governor Youngkin won all but one in 2021, but in 2023, Republicans won seven (one remains too close to call), and Democrats won five. Democrats managed to flip a few seats — enough to retain control of the Senate and take control of the House of Delegates.

In the seven districts where Republicans won, their margin shrank compared to Youngkin’s vote in 2021. For instance, in Senate District 27, Republican Tara Durant performed 6.31 percentage points worse than Youngkin did in 2021, winning by only 2.19% of the vote compared to Youngkin’s margin of 8.5%.

A presidential star may have dimmed in Virginia, but one was born in Kentucky, where Democratic Governor Andy Beshear won re-election in a very Republican state, increasing his share of the vote from 49.2% in 2019 to 52.5% and winning several counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2020. But Beshear will remain a lonely man. Every other statewide race in Kentucky went to Republicans. The votes for Attorney General and Agriculture Commissioner were virtually unchanged from four years before. The Republican Secretary of State saw a substantial increase in his vote but the Republican candidate for state treasurer saw a small decrease in his vote. In Mississippi, the statewide races from governor on down saw Republicans winning by almost the exact margins they won in 2019. So don’t put either state in the Democratic column for 2024.

So, why the big difference between polls showing Biden in trouble and elections where Democrats do well? The easiest answer is that there is, perhaps, no relationship between the two; down-ballot Democrats might continue to do well in off-year and midterm elections, and Biden could lose nevertheless. A second possibility is that the polls are just wrong on a systematic basis due to single-digit response rates and their difficulty in measuring voter turnout. A third possibility is that the cost of living is a very powerful motivator and that voters blame the president but not other office holders for this problem. A fourth possibility is that voters just don’t like Biden because of personal characteristics such as his age and the perception that he is not a strong leader.

One thing is clear: The Biden campaign would be ill-advised to over-interpret the significance of these recent Democratic victories for the president’s prospects in 2024.

2. Where the right to choose is in question, the abortion issue is very powerful and helps the Democrats.

In those places where Democrats did well, the explanation was pretty simple: As in previous elections, if voters perceive that a woman’s right to abortion is on the ballot in some fashion, pro-choice candidates do well. In Kentucky, where a six-week ban on abortion and a trigger law was upheld by the State’s Supreme Court, access to abortion is difficult, despite the defeat of a constitutional amendment denying any protections for abortion by a large margin in November 2022.

The abortion issue remains top of mind in Kentucky, and Beshear’s campaign for governor focused heavily on it, hammering his Republican opponent for his opposition to exceptions to an outright ban on the procedure.

In Virginia, abortion is currently legal up until the end of the second trimester. But Gov. Youngkin pushed for an abortion ban after 15 weeks that included exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Democrats ran on this issue in almost all the competitive districts, and voters apparently rejected Youngkin’s proposal, which he termed a sensible compromise around which Republicans and the country could coalesce.

Those who persist in believing that the abortion issue doesn’t have continuing strength should look at another, even more powerful lesson from Tuesday night. The abortion referendum on the Ohio ballot, amending the state’s constitution to establish a right to “carry out one’s own reproductive decisions… including on abortion,” would preserve the right to abortion up to 23 weeks. The Ohio referendum won with 56.6% of the vote, garnering support from one in five Republicans and carrying 18 counties that Trump had won in 2020.

The Ohio referendum was the latest victory of the pro-choice movement in solidly conservative states. In Kansas, the pro-choice referendum garnered 59% of the vote; in Montana and Kentucky, 53%. In Michigan, a swing state, the pro-choice position got 56% of the vote, and in the liberal states of Vermont and California, it got 73% and 68% of the vote.

3. The Republican debate revealed both Republican divisions on abortion and the impact of President Biden’s weak standing in national polls on the Republican race.

Chris Christie argued that abortion should be left to the states while Tim Scott advocated a national ban on the procedure after 15 weeks, a stance that is likely to be more popular in the Republican primary contests than in the general election. Nikki Haley argued that such a ban has no chance of gaining enough support in the Senate and renewed her plea for a consensus-based approach to the issue, a stance that would play better in the general election than among socially conservative Iowa Republicans. For his part, Ron DeSantis ducked, contenting himself with criticizing the weakness of Republican efforts in state referendum contests.

Meanwhile, the man who wasn’t on the stage — former president Trump — has made it clear that he regards abortion as a political loser for Republicans and will do his best to deemphasize it as a national issue in 2024. If he is the Republican nominee, Democrats are unlikely to let him off the hook and will remind voters of his central role in selecting three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

No matter whom the Republicans select as their standard-bearer, the issue will remain important in the national debate, although probably not as central as it has been in the states since the Court ended the Roe era. The presidency is a distinctive office whose occupants are held responsible for the economy and national security, not just their stance on social issues. Reflecting this reality, the moderators of the debate led with the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, waiting to raise abortion until close to the end of the event. No doubt President Biden’s campaign will try to capitalize on the pro-Democratic tilt of this issue, but he will be judged by his performance in other areas as well. Abortion will be helpful to him in 2024, but it is not the silver bullet that will help him defeat his Republican opponent.

As the debate moderators indicated with their opening question, there is a central question that each of the candidates on stage needed to answer: Why would I be a better nominee than the man who isn’t here tonight? President Biden’s current weak standing in the polls is limiting their responses. Back in the spring, they hoped to be able to argue that while Donald Trump was a fine president, he was likely to lose to Biden in 2024 as he did in 2020. But now, with recent polls indicating that Trump leads Biden nationally and in key swing states, his Republican challengers are forced to offer more substantive answers that risk antagonizing Trump’s supporters.

Nikki Haley went the farthest down this road, criticizing him for allowing the national debt to rise by $8 billion during his presidency and for being “weak in the knees” on Ukraine and other foreign policy issues. Ron DeSantis said that Trump is “a lot different guy than he was in 2016” and held him responsible for a string of Republican losses since then. Chris Christie focused on Trump’s legal difficulties, arguing that “anybody who’s going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail . . . cannot lead this party or this country.” It remains to be seen whether any of these arguments will gain traction with a Republican electorate that seems inclined to give Trump a pass on all of them.

Indeed, the big winner of last night’s debate may well have been the man who boycotted it. DeSantis performed better than he had in the two previous debates, and Haley — though strong — was less dominant. If DeSantis’s improved showing slows her effort to emerge in Iowa as the principal alternative to Trump, she may not gain the momentum she would need to defeat Trump in New Hampshire, an outcome that would destroy his aura of invincibility and transform the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. The political landscape has been frozen in time for some months now, with an incumbent president and a former president at the top and everyone else vying for attention.

As international events unfold, the question is: Will anyone or anything change this equation, or will we be looking at the widely anticipated rematch?

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arpov-blog-blog · 4 months

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..."PRESIDENT BIDEN’S JOB APPROVAL RATING has plummeted during his three years in office to historic lows—lower than President Obama’s was at this point before he won re-election in 2012, lower even than President Trump’s was in October 2020 before he lost.

The numbers make clear that Biden is a much weaker candidate than he was when he defeated Trump three years ago. It’s unlikely Biden’s approval will recover significantly before November. But—crucially—that doesn’t mean he will lose the election.

There are multiple theories for why Biden remains underwater, with higher disapproval than approval. Most of the electorate has concluded that Biden is too old. As some commentators have noted, in his long career, Biden has never been popular; his initial honeymoon in the presidency was a temporary deviation from the norm as the country basked in the relief of dumping Trump.

Biden’s peak approval registered at about 54 percent in the spring of 2021, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls. There was one big reason: Americans, coming out of the pandemic, had hope. The Biden administration was competently managing the vaccine rollout and most of us had had one or both shots and celebrated a return to normal life.

Biden’s polling crashed to earth that fall, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the battle over the bloated and ill-fated Build Back Better bill. By the end of his first year in office, 10 percent more Americans disapproved of his job performance than approved. He lost favor with a majority because he lost the support of his own voters. The centrist Biden inspires no zeal from his base the way Obama did, let alone the way a cult leader like Trump does. He has no buffer.

So the spring of 2021 was a rare time of artificially elevated national mood. It’s hard to imagine a scenario other than a major national emergency in which any president reaches 53 percent approval again. We live in an age of extreme polarization and zero-sum politics, in which entrenched partisans despise a president from the opposing party, and the default dourness Americans naturally revert to (see: current economic data vs. polling about the economy) means the in-power coalition is also likely to be disappointed. Biden polls poorly on nearly all the issues that comprise the umbrella of job approval: inflation/economy, foreign policy, immigration, crime, and his fitness/age. But we can’t know how voters prioritize them (or other issues) when making their choice. And even if Biden manages to stabilize the southern border, help end the war in Gaza, and preside over continuing economic improvements and low inflation, his job approval might not budge.

YET APPROVAL RATINGS MAY NO LONGER BE a useful benchmark in future campaigns, especially if Biden overperforms his polling in 2024 the way Democrats did in 2022 and 2023. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that Democrats did so by an average of 10 points in special elections throughout 2023, outperforming the partisan lean of the districts—and the polls—even where they lost.

Before the 2022 midterms, both parties predicted doom for Democrats because Biden’s approval was at 40 percent according to Gallup—lower than previous presidents who had faced massive losses in their first midterms. But Democrats outran Biden’s job approval everywhere, defending Senate seats in swing states like Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, winning Pennsylvania’s open seat, and losing just ten House seats in what was predicted to be a wipeout.

A year later, the same thing: In 2023, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear won re-election, and Democrats took back control of the Virginia state legislature (ending Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hope of a presidential run) and scored a major abortion ballot victory in deep-red Ohio."

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theliberaltony · 2 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Abortion

What The History Of Back-Alley Abortions Can Teach Us About A Future Without Roe

By Maggie Koerth

Jun. 2, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Stefani Reynolds / AFP / Getty Images

A metal coat hanger can’t speak, but it can send a message. Long a symbol of the dangers faced by people seeking to end pregnancies in the years before Roe v. Wade, coat hangers stand in for a whole inventory of physical horrors, most of which never involved coat hangers, specifically. Over the past few weeks, protesters have mailed hangers to the Supreme Court in an effort to evoke that past era — from the so-called back-alley butchers who botched surgical procedures and sexually harassed patients, to the terrible lengths individuals went through to give themselves an abortion at home. The message is simple and brutal: Without safe and legal abortion, the protesters believe, people will die.

In the years since Roe became the law of the land, the medical landscape of abortion has changed drastically. Today, abortion is extremely safe — safer than birth. So safe, in fact, that it’s not always obvious what made illegal abortions unsafe. Or, for that matter, what the coat hangers were for.

And this is why those objects still have important stories to tell us, historians told me. Because while the most physically violent abortion methods of the past have become medically obsolete, the march of scientific progress hasn’t eliminated the shame, fear and hopelessness experienced by people who are pregnant, don’t want to be, and live in a society where there is no simple, legal access to abortion. Coat hangers don’t just tell us about the dangers of bad medicine, practiced shoddily, these historians said. Instead, the hangers also speak volumes about the desperation that can lead people to those dangerous procedures in the first place.

“The whole phrase ‘back-alley butcher’ is an exaggeration because there were lots of good practitioners who were perfectly safe,” said Leslie J. Reagan, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of “When Abortion Was a Crime.”

Even in the past, the dangers of illegal abortion weren’t about the abortion itself. No one knows how many illegal abortions were being performed annually, pre-Roe, but researchers in the early 1990s estimated it was on par with annual numbers of legal abortions at the time, so more than 1 million. People with money and connections could always get safe ones and plenty of people survived, the historians I spoke with said. Illegal abortions were primarily unsafe for the people who were blocked out of better options.

Legal abortions in hospitals, for example, happened with some regularity. These records were kept hospital by hospital, so it’s rare to have even city-wide data, but University of Vermont historian Felicia Kornbluh pointed me towards a 1965 paper that found hospital review boards in New York City had approved 4,703 so-called therapeutic abortions between 1951 and 1962. In those cases, the technique actually being used was something called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. Also often referred to as a “surgical abortion” the D&C is still used today as a treatment for both abortion and miscarriage. Doctors dilate the cervix — making the opening between the vagina and uterus wider — and use a sharp tool to scrape out the contents of the uterus.

Before Roe, in the 1950s and 60s, getting a legal hospital abortion was not easy. A patient could get a D&C if they were already experiencing a natural miscarriage. Otherwise, patients who requested one would have to make a case to their doctors, who would then have to bring the situation before a hospital review board. The patient would likely be examined by other doctors and might have to answer questions — basically, they needed to prove the abortion was medically or psychologically necessary. But necessity wasn’t the only factor at play. “There are studies that show that almost all of them were done on people with private insurance,” Reagan said. Patients without insurance, as well as black and brown patients regardless of insurance status, had a much harder time getting approved. In her upcoming book, “A Woman’s Life is a Human Life,” Kornbluh records that Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem approved five white women’s requests for every one Black woman’s. The hospital was even less likely to approve Puerto Rican women’s requests. And Reagan has documented instances of Black women being denied abortions even though they had rubella infections during pregnancy — something that can kill a fetus, or leave it with lifelong complications, including deafness, heart defects and intellectual disabilities. (Others were lied to and told they didn’t have it.)

People who were denied — or who never had a hope of getting — a hospital abortion were left with only illegal options. Both trained doctors and untrained practitioners offered D&C’s, but that procedure was considerably more dangerous in illegal settings. Without sterilized equipment and ready access to antibiotics and painkillers, doctors used furtive practices that optimized for speed and offered no room for follow-up care, and practitioners sometimes had no idea what they were doing. Carole Joffe, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, interviewed trained doctors who practiced illegal abortion during this time and has written about their experiences. One doctor told her that he used to explain the challenges of performing a D&C by telling his residents that it was like being blindfolded and trying to scrape the inside of a wet paper bag without cutting through the paper. Possible, but not easy. “D&C’s in competent hands are safe, but in incompetent hands it’s very easy to perforate the uterus,” Joffe said.

To avoid trying to perform the tricky D&C under clandestine circumstances, illegal abortionists sometimes opted instead to simply induce enough of a miscarriage that their patient could go to a hospital and get one without a problem. They did this often by inserting a foreign object — like a hollow tube catheter — through the cervix. In some cases, they might use a type of catheter with a balloon on one end. Filled with saline, it would put pressure on the cervix, like a fetus’s head would towards the end of pregnancy, causing it to fully dilate. Just sticking any catheter in could prompt a miscarriage as the body tried to expel the object. These methods didn’t work all the time, though. They could cause hemorrhages and embolisms. And catheters had to be left in for a while, along with gauze packed into the patient’s vagina to staunch the blood. This could cause infection and with patients trying to hide from authorities, they often didn’t seek treatment until near death.

People who couldn’t find or afford an illegal abortion often tried to give one to themselves. It’s impossible to say how many of these happened every year, but there are records showing thousands of people coming into emergency rooms with septic infections of the uterus and reproductive organs in the 1960s, Reagan said. This is where the coat hangers come in, Joffe said, as one of many objects people would try to insert through their own cervical openings. The goal was not necessarily to complete an abortion at home but rather to induce enough bleeding and symptoms of miscarriage that the person could go to a hospital, say they were having a miscarriage naturally, and get a hospital D&C. But perforation, hemorrhage, and infection were all risks.

Even less reliable, and more dangerous, were an array of suppositories, tinctures, herbs and home remedies that plenty of people tried. One doctor told Joffe about treating a patient who had gotten a catheter into her cervix and poured turpentine through it, literally cooking the inside of her uterus, which had to be removed. Others told stories about potassium permanganate tablets, sold over the counter, which people would put in their vaginas to induce bleeding and get their hospital D&C. But the tablets could easily eat through the vaginal lining, causing hemorrhage and destroying the cervix.

It’s very unlikely that anyone will go back to performing back-alley D&Cs or catheter abortions, Reagan and Joffe said. Even if Roe is overturned, doctors and other people who want to defy it are much more likely to offer patients abortion pills. While abortion via pill can be a physically painful and psychologically intense experience for some people, the existence of these pills drastically changes the calculus when it comes to the risks of illegal abortion. They’re much easier to get and conceal, much safer to use, and if a patient is worried about side effects they can seek treatment knowing no one will be able to tell the difference between the effects of a pill and a natural miscarriage.

But both Reagan and Joffe said the existence of abortion pills won’t eliminate risk if abortion becomes illegal. Just as there were some people who could get abortions more easily than others before Roe, there will be those who can do so after, as well. Meanwhile, some of the most vulnerable people — poor people, people living in very rural areas, people who can’t take time off to drive to another state in search of pills — will still end up with only desperate options left. Reagan was particularly worried that websites selling fake abortion pills will deceive people who have no idea they aren’t getting the real thing. And both she and Joffe worried about how illegality and increased stigma could drive more people towards dangerous at-home methods, with social media becoming the new back alley. Even with abortion still legal, there are occasional instances of people — usually young — trying to abort on their own, Reagan said.

The methodology of abortion has improved, Reagan and Joffee told me. But as long as desperation for an abortion exists — and easy access does not — some people will still be in danger.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Maggie Koerth

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nodynasty4us · 1 year

Quote

It’s also not clear whether voters will buy [Tim] Scott’s message of unity and forgiveness at a time of hyper-political polarization. Indeed, his message of optimism could prove to be an impediment in today’s Republican primary environment, where voters have denounced what they view as unjust favoritism toward people of color and seem more interested in being angry. Those issues aside, Scott has the added hurdle of facing off against another candidate from his home state that’s pitching a similar message of unity. That means the two of them might be fishing in the same pond for Republican voters who want a less confrontational standard-bearer.

Alex Samuels in FiveThirtyEight

#tim scott #nikki haley #2024

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maranello · 2 years

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PROFONDO ROSSO | Ferrari-Leclerc, ancora non siamo pronti ma…

Leo Turrini, 24 July 2022

We are not ready yet.

I say this as a Ferrarista in love, thinking about my scuderria. We are not yet ready, even though we are only a short time away now. I think this must be the reflection, necessarily melancholy, after the French Grand Prix.

Let me explain. Yes, the Ferrari of 2022 is a very good car. Unfortunately fragile, but competitive on any kind of circuit. The figures, the numbers say so.

A beautiful American website (Fivethirtyeight) took the trouble to calculate the disproportion, in terms of performance, between what Ferrari manages to achieve up to Saturday night and what it capitalizes on Sunday. Well, historically the data was compiled before France!, historically, I said, only Williams at the turn of the millennium, with Montoya of Schumi two, had a worse balance.

We are not ready yet. I'm crazy about Carletto, even stones know that. I consider him an extraordinary talent. I am sure he will mark an era.

At the same time, this season, Leclerc has made two serious mistakes in races while Verstappen stands at zero.

It hurt me to see the boy's sadness in the post-race, but I greatly appreciated the sincerity. Leclerc is much better than some ultra fans who I hope will soon forget about Formula 1.

His attitude reminded me of Schumi's episode in Monte Carlo in 1996, when after he went off the track on the first lap sprinting from the pole he presented himself to reporters and took all the blame, defending the team from any suspicion.

We are not ready yet. On management errors on the part of the team we have been racking our brains for weeks, and even on Sunday in France, the, moreover inevitable, stop of a magnificent Sainz was anything but exemplary.

Again, it's a matter of getting used to the tension of supremacy.

We are not yet ready, as the instances of unreliability that have strained my liver and yours have shown.

Well, all that said, I remain convinced that we are on the right track. This will not be, I suppose, the right year. But this is simply a matter of putting all the things together, enhancing the best we have, starting with Leclerc, fighting a political battle over the absurd hypotheses of regulatory reforms about 2023. I hope John Elkann will do his.

In the meantime, there would be a race to win immediately, in a few days, in Hungary.

#f1 #french gp 2022 #charles leclerc #scuderia ferrari #2022 #article #info #author: leo turrini #*article #ferrari newsroom #blog: profondo rosso #leo turrini #discussion & analysis

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