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Apply for a paid internship in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Vermont and Washington, D.C. offices.

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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. 

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[theliberaltony]

It's more important to protect babies than CEO compensation packages of an infant formula company.

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Rick Caruso is a billionaire real estate developer running for mayor of Los Angeles. He was a Republican for years, but entered the race as a Democrat. In this episode of Trending, we explore why so many high-profile celebrities are endorsing him.

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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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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The narrative that the Democratic Party is in over its head has been so common in the political media that the refrain “Dems in disarray” has become an online joke. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates whether the Democratic Party really is in disarray. The team also talks about public opinion on gun laws after recent mass shootings in Texas, New York and California. They discuss why seemingly sizable support for stricter gun laws hasn’t produced such laws.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #FiveThirtyEight

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Abortion

There’s A New Age Gap On Abortion Rights

By Daniel Cox

Jun. 1, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

Americans’ views on abortion have been relatively consistent for years despite massive demographic changes, social upheaval and shifting perspectives on sexuality. But that may be about to change. 

A new report from the Pew Research Center found that support for abortion rights is considerably higher among young Americans. Roughly three-quarters of 18- to 29-year-olds say abortion should generally be legal, including 30 percent who say it should be legal in all cases. Meanwhile, Americans 65 and older expressed much more tepid support — only 54 percent said abortion should be legal without exception (14 percent) or with some exceptions (40 percent).

This might not sound all that surprising since younger adults often see issues differently from older adults, but this age gap on attitudes about abortion contradicts past polling on this issue. According to the General Social Survey,1 young Americans’ views on obtaining an abortion have not been appreciably different from the public’s overall for much of the past 40-plus years. That changed fairly recently, though. On the question of whether someone should be able to get an abortion for any reason, 64 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed in 2021, a 20-percentage-point increase from a decade earlier.

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In fact, over the past decade, one of the most confounding trends in public opinion has been why millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996)2 — who are less religious, more educated and more liberal than previous generations — are not stronger supporters of abortion rights. Polls have generally shown that millennials express considerable ambivalence about abortion, views that do not distinguish them from the broader public.

Millennials’ attitudes on abortion rights stand in stark relief to the way they tend to approach other issues of sex and sexuality. For instance, they were among the strongest proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage at the height of debate in the mid-2000s, and they have generally liberal views on contraception, sex education and premarital sex. Abortion has always been the exception.

In a series of focus groups that my colleagues and I conducted in 2011,3 the contrast between millennials’ attitudes on abortion and same-sex marriage was clear. When they were asked to write down the first words that came to mind when they heard the term “same-sex marriage,” millennials’ responses were overwhelmingly positive — even celebratory. “Awesome,” “It’s cool!” and “Go for it!” were some of the phrases they shared, and the ensuing conversation was incredibly upbeat.

The mood was dramatically different when discussing abortion, though. It was often difficult to get participants to maintain eye contact during the conversation, and their responses were largely negative: They said abortion was a sad situation and mentioned death or irresponsible behavior.

Scholars proposed a variety of theories to explain millennials’ curiously conservative views. It was suggested, for example, that the rise in sharing ultrasound images on social media may have led more young adults to think of a fetus as a growing child, thus accounting for their greater reservations about abortions. Another popular explanation was that millennials were influenced by how abortion was portrayed in popular culture at the time, including in movies such as 2007’s “Juno” and “Knocked Up.” Demographic explanations have also featured prominently, as Latinos, who tend to be more conservative on abortion than other racial or ethnic groups, constitute a larger share of millennials compared with older generations. 

Now, though, we’re left to solve another riddle: Why do Generation Z adults (born between 1997 and 2004) not share millennials’ more conservative perspectives on abortion? There are a few possible explanations worth considering.

Perhaps the simplest is that Gen Z adults, particularly women, are more liberal than previous generations when they were young adults — including millennials. While younger adults are typically more liberal than older ones, Gen Z women especially tend to be progressive. An analysis of Gallup surveys over the past decade conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, which I lead, found a critical shift in political identity among young women. In 2021, we found that 44 percent of 18- to 29-year-old women identified as liberal, whereas only 30 percent of 18- to 29-year-old women identified as such a decade earlier. Among men in this age group, the share who identified as liberal was essentially unchanged during the same time period.

Another explanation is that for most Gen Z Americans, abortion is not an issue wound up in ethical, moral and religious concerns, as it more often is for many other Americans. Pew’s March survey suggests that most Gen Z Americans aren’t thinking about abortion with the same moral framing: Only 32 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said abortion was morally wrong in all or most cases compared with 47 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds and 53 percent of Americans age 50 or older.

It’s possible that growing diversity among Gen Zers along lines of race, religion and, most notably, sexuality has also led them to eschew the standards of morality that previous generations embrace. It’s true that millennials are also a fairly diverse group, but Gen Zers are unique in their approach to sexuality and feelings of physical attraction. For instance, a 2021 Ipsos survey found that Gen Zers are significantly less likely than millennials to be attracted exclusively to the opposite sex. And compared with older generations, Gen Zers (as well as millennials) are more likely to agree that greater racial and ethnic diversity is good for society.

The waning influence of organized religion may offer another clue as to why Gen Z supports abortion rights more than other generations. According to the Survey Center on American Life, Gen Zers had somewhat weaker formative attachments to religion than millennials did. Fifteen percent of Gen Zers said they were raised in nonreligious households, and even those raised in a religious tradition reported having less regular involvement with their faith. As a result, it’s likely that compared with older generations, Gen Zers are just less familiar with religiously based objections to abortion.

It’s important to remember, too, that Gen Zers are coming of age at a time when America’s religious identity and moral authority are more contested and its institutions less trusted. Consider, for example, how much confidence in organized religion has plummeted in the past decade. According to Gallup, only 37 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church or organized religion in 2021. But in the mid-2000s, when millennials were roughly the same age as Gen Zers are now, a greater share of Americans expressed confidence in religious institutions. In other words, not only are Gen Zers less rooted in religious communities, but religiously based arguments about abortion may hold less weight for them than they did for millennials because those in Gen Z do not trust the messengers.

Young adults today are also being told that the pathway to happiness and success lies in getting a good education and career. In fact, growing up, Gen Zers were more likely than previous generations to say it was expected that they would go to college. Sixty percent of Gen Zers said their parents expected them to attend a four-year college compared with 48 percent of millennials, 43 percent of Gen Xers and 35 percent of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964). 

Recently, I wrote that Gen Zers are distinct from previous generations in their belief that professional and educational achievements are critical markers of their identity. Given the central importance of education, personal growth and fulfillment for this generation, it’s possible that support for abortion rights is rooted in the idea that an unplanned pregnancy might undermine these aspirations. 

Finally, a crucial difference between Gen Z and millennials on abortion rights may have to do with shifting perceptions of access. Millennials came of age at a time when abortion was perceived as generally available and subject to comparatively few restrictions. In a 2011 survey, a majority (55 percent) of millennials said it was not at all or not too difficult to get an abortion, a significantly higher share compared with other age groups’ responses. After a decade of state-level restrictions, though, and well-publicized efforts to reduce abortion access, views have changed significantly.

Of course, research has long shown that younger Americans are generally less engaged in politics and spend less time talking about political issues than older Americans. But abortion may be an issue they care about more. According to results from Pew’s March survey, younger Americans spend as much time as Americans overall thinking about abortion, and for young women, the share is even higher. If the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973, it is not difficult to believe that the large majority of Gen Zers who support abortion rights will see such a move as an infringement on rights once afforded to them. And if the past few years have shown us anything, it is that anxiety is a powerful political motivator.

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The idea that the Democratic Party is in over its head has been such a common narrative in the political media that the refrain “Dems in disarray” has become something of an online joke. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates whether the Democratic Party really is in disarray as it struggles to pass federal legislation and faces a difficult midterm year, or if its hurdles are usual for any party in power.

The team also discusses public opinion on gun laws after recent mass shootings in Texas, New York and California. They ask why seemingly sizable support for stricter gun laws hasn’t produced such laws.

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.

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Student Debt

Canceling Student Debt Could Help Close The Wealth Gap Between White And Black Americans

By Santul Nerkar

May 31, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Student debt exacerbates the racial wealth gap, starting from the moment that newly christened graduates toss their caps in the air.

Paul Morigi / We, The 45 Million / Getty Images

America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing Black Americans.

But what if I told you that an effective way to start closing this gap was within reach? According to the scholars I talked with who study this issue, canceling student debt is one of the best ways to start to close America’s racial wealth gap, and although it has its risks, it’s something that President Biden can do on his own by executive order.

“Higher education was supposed to be the engine for some to secure financial security and stability,” said Fenaba Addo, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has researched the links between debt and wealth inequality. But she told me that just hasn’t happened. “The realized gains have not been distributed equally, and student debt has contributed to that,” said Addo.

Today, the typical graduating college student owes about $30,000 in student debt, about four times more than they did 50 years ago. But that topline figure masks some real racial disparities. Consider that because Black students tend to come from poorer households than their white counterparts, they are more likely to take out loans — and take out larger loans. Moreover, even white students who end up borrowing money for college have, on average, more preexisting family wealth at their disposal to pay down their debts. 

In other words, student debt exacerbates the racial wealth gap, starting from the moment that newly christened graduates toss their caps in the air.1

Black students borrow — and owe — more than white students

Share of 2015-16 bachelor’s degree recipients who took out federal loans for postsecondary education, including the average amount borrowed and the share of the amount owed versus borrowed 12 months after bachelor’s degree was completed, by race

Race/ethnicity Share who borrowed Amt. borrowed Owed/borrowed Black 86.3% $39,500 103.0% Hispanic 70.1 28,200 94.6 White 67.7 29,900 89.3 Asian 43.9 26,500 81.4

Sources: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

And the further removed from college young Americans become, the more this disparity grows — more than triple, according to a 2016 report from the Brookings Institution — sapping Black Americans’ net worth even more. A 2018 paper from Addo and sociologist Jason Houle found, for example, that if younger Black adults held the same level of debt as their white peers, the racial wealth gap in young adulthood would be reduced by about 10 percent. Addo and Houle also found that student debt’s contribution to the racial wealth gap increased with age, from 13 percent at 25 to 23 percent at 30. 

Crucially, too, the racial gap in student debt levels has only grown in recent years. A 2017 paper found that the average student debt for Black households — and number of Black households holding any student debt — increased significantly from 2001 to 2013. The authors found, further, that this growing divide was not because of more Black Americans attending college, but due to disproportionate exploitation by predatory lenders. 

Louise Seamster, a professor of sociology, criminology and African American studies at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the paper, said the fact that Black students tend to carry far more student debt contradicts the idea that higher education is a means to mobility. “If the racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans is 10-to-1, at the median for all families, when we just look at the racial wealth gap between Black and white borrowers, it’s actually twice as bad,” Seamster said.

This is the context in which canceling student debt has entered the political discourse. Progressive Democrats have made the case that forgiving student loans would ease the burden on millions of families, while Republicans (and some Democrats) have argued that it would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. 

But the scholars I spoke to pushed back against the idea that canceling student debt would be regressive. Charlie Eaton, a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, Merced, said that such analyses often look at income, not wealth, and discount racial disparities in borrowing and the fact that many college students attend college without borrowing money to begin with.

Eaton’s own research has found that canceling $50,000 of student debt — as some Democratic senators have proposed — would not benefit the wealthiest Americans. Such a cancelation, Eaton and his co-authors found, would disproportionately benefit poorer Black households — while giving little relief to those at the top of the wealth distribution:2

The amount of debt canceled matters a lot, though, and it’s unlikely that what experts say is an optimal number will be forgiven. Biden has said, for instance, that he won’t consider canceling $50,000 and has recently indicated that $10,000 will be forgiven. But canceling $10,000 wouldn’t do much to help, according to Alan Aja, a professor of Puerto Rican and Latino studies at Brooklyn College, because of the racialization of student debt.

“Twenty years into repayment, the median black borrowers owe 95 percent of what they borrowed, while the median white person has almost fully repaid their loan,” Aja said. “So if you throw $10,000 cancellation into that figure, it’s a drop in the bucket.”

“We tell Black kids, if you go to college, you work hard, you get a good paying job, you’ll have the American dream,” said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University who researches the racialization of the U.S. tax system. But this just isn’t what’s happened. Instead, Black Americans are disproportionately saddled with crippling student loan debt.

The existing solutions to this problem haven’t worked out for Black Americans, either. Take income-driven repayment, a federal program that allows lower-income borrowers to pay a reduced share of their loans every month — with the promise of the remaining principal being forgiven after a certain number of years. This sounds promising, but because Black Americans have lower levels of wealth than white Americans at the same — and even lower — levels of income, this program is still regressive, not to mention complicated. Moreover, a 2021 report found that just 32 people had ever had their student loan balance canceled through this program.

Add in the fact that Black Americans who graduate from college still face a labor market stacked against them — which also contributes to the racial wealth gap — and it’s clear to see how higher education often leaves Black Americans behind, rather than offering them a true path to mobility.

Interestingly, canceling student debt is at least somewhat politically feasible. Polls generally show Americans support student debt forgiveness much more than they do other programs that would help close the racial wealth gap, like reparations:

Canceling student debt is more popular than paying reparations

Share of respondents who support or disagree with forgiving at least some student debt and paying reparations

Policy Pollster month/year of poll Support Against Diff. Data for Progress Nov. 2020 53% 40% +13 Student debt forgiveness Grinnell College March 2021 66 29 37 Morning Consult Dec. 2021 62 28 34 Survey Monkey Jan. 2022 69 27 42 Morning Consult/Politico April 2022 64 29 35 Reparations ABC News/Ipsos June 2020 26 73 -47 Washington Post/ABC News July 2020 31 63 -32 UMass Dec. 2021 38 61 -23

Each poll used slightly different question wording; respondents were counted in favor if they said they somewhat or strongly supported the policy or said it should be enacted. The Data for Progress question on debt forgiveness asked specifically about a proposal to forgive $50,000 in student debt for every borrower who makes less than $125,000 a year.

It’s possible, too, that given Biden’s lagging support among younger voters and Black voters — both of whom overwhelmingly support at least some student debt forgiveness — he could see a boost in his popularity, especially among Democrats, if he cancels student debt. But then again, the expanded child tax credit was broadly popular among Americans, and it didn’t seem to buy Democrats much support. Furthermore, if Biden does end up canceling student debt by executive order instead of via Congress, given it’ll be next to impossible to get the 60 votes needed to pass it, that carries its own political peril.

And of course, canceling even the “right” amount of debt wouldn’t come close to eliminating the racial wealth gap, which could make this a hard political sell. The experts I spoke to were unanimous in the view that canceling student debt would not eradicate the racial wealth gap by itself. Research has found that enacting a set of policies — including student loan forgiveness — could significantly reduce the racial wealth gap, but canceling student loan debt on its own is just one step in that process.

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Abortion

Overturning Roe v. Wade Could Make Maternal Mortality Even Worse

The U.S. already has a higher rate than other wealthy countries.

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

May 31, 2022, at 6:00 AM

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER / GETTY IMAGES

Giving birth in the U.S. is already far more dangerous than in other wealthy countries. Ending the protections of Roe v. Wade — the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to abortion — could make it even more so.

Multiple studies have found that the states that already have the tightest restrictions on abortion also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality. And that correlation stubbornly persists even after researchers account for some of the other differences between states, like racial demographics and health care policy. Some researchers think that abortion restrictions are part of the reason why pregnancy and childbirth are so much more dangerous in the U.S. — even for people who never wanted an abortion to begin with.

This data could just be a statistical red herring. But there are ways abortion restrictions could kill people, both directly and indirectly. And scientists say these correlations point toward dangerous disparities in health care access in the U.S. — not just in terms of who can get an abortion, but also in terms of who can get preventative care while pregnant, or even before.

The U.S. is a uniquely dangerous place to have a child

Carrying an unplanned pregnancy involves shouldering increased risks of depression, preterm birth, lower birth weight and other complications. That was definitely true for Brittany Mostiller. In the summer of 2006, this Chicago mom of two young children found herself pregnant, and every circumstance in her life felt like it was conspiring to make raising a third child impossible. Mostiller had recently lost her job and was sharing a two-bedroom apartment with her sister and niece. She was overwhelmed and wanted an abortion, but the cost of the procedure put it out of reach. 

So she stayed pregnant. And as the pregnancy progressed, she became more and more unhappy. “I was just severely depressed, and I wasn’t caring for myself,” she said. Her body seemed to rebel against her; she was fending off infection after infection, she said. And then her water broke when she was 32 weeks pregnant — two months before the baby was supposed to be born.

Mostiller’s story illustrates how easily a pregnancy you didn’t plan for can go awry. She and her baby — now a healthy teenager — came out of the experience okay. But not everyone does. Unplanned pregnancies are already more likely to end in the death of the mother. But the truth is that all pregnancies are more dangerous in the U.S. than they are in comparable countries, and those dangers are particularly acute for Black people, like Mostiller. 

Montinique Monroe / Getty Images

Recently released government data shows that 861 women died from causes related to pregnancy and birth in 2020, up from 754 the year before. In population-level terms, the maternal mortality rate in 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in the U.S., compared with 3.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in Germany in 2019 and 7.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in France in 2015. (The maternal mortality rate calculated by the CDC includes deaths from abortion-related complications, but the organization also calculates that subset separately. In 2019, the death rate from abortion in the United States was minuscule: 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions between 2013 and 2018.) Infants are also at higher risk of dying in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. In 2020, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 1.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Finland and 2.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Spain.

Black Americans are nearly three times more likely than their white counterparts to die as a result of maternal complications, and the risk to Black babies is much higher as well. These disparities are so large that the states with the highest maternal mortality rates are also often states with large Black populations, and researchers have concluded that social factors like inequality and structural racism are playing a huge role in why pregnancy complications kill Americans. 

But some researchers think that attempts to restrict abortion access are playing a part too. In a 2021 study, Tulane University researchers categorized states based on the presence or absence of specific types of abortion restrictions and found that total maternal mortality was 51 percent higher in states where only licensed physicians are permitted to perform abortions, and total maternal mortality was 29 percent higher in states with Medicaid restrictions on abortion.

Another set of researchers looked at changes in maternal mortality from 1995 to 2017, and similar to the others, they found that states with abortion restrictions had higher rates of maternal mortality than states that were either neutral toward abortion or protected abortion rights.

Overturning Roe v. Wade will lead to the closure of many abortion clinics across the country. Fewer clinics and less abortion access may, in turn, lead to higher maternal mortality rates in the U.S.

FRANCOIS PICARD / AFP via Getty Images

A third study found that infants living in states with more abortion restrictions were more likely to die — which wasn’t really surprising, given the close link between the health of mothers and infants.

Of course, a pattern is not an explanation. It’s impossible to demonstrate conclusively that tightening abortion restrictions causes an increase in maternal or infant deaths, researchers told us. That’s because the way science establishes causality is through experiments that simply can’t happen in real life. “That would be the gold standard of a randomized, controlled trial,” said Summer Hawkins, a professor of social epidemiology at Boston College. “You’d randomize states to implement certain policies or to close Planned Parenthood clinics … and of course that’s never going to happen.” 

And there are plenty of reasons why maternal mortality might be higher in those states that aren’t specifically connected to abortion policy. For one thing, many states with strong abortion restrictions didn’t expand Medicaid, which experts told us can lead to generally worse health outcomes because many direct causes of maternal mortality begin as long-term chronic health problems that go untreated or undiagnosed for years. Poverty is also high in many of those states, which experts said can have a similar impact. Stacie Geller, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine who studies maternal death, pointed out that health care providers can address only some of the factors that lead to maternal mortality — and their ability to help is often limited to pregnancy. “​​You can’t take a woman with a lifetime of poor health, poor social surroundings, and get her healthy in nine months of pregnancy,” she said. “It’s just not possible.”

The closure of clinics like Planned Parenthood that offer a range of non-abortion-related services can put people at a higher risk for all kinds of illnesses that can later cause pregnancy complications.

But researchers have accounted for some of those differences in their studies — and the associations between abortion restriction and maternal mortality remain. Hawkins’s research, for example, statistically controlled for whether states expanded Medicaid. The study found that reducing Planned Parenthood clinics by 20 percent was associated with a maternal mortality increase of 8 percent, while states that implemented abortion restrictions based on gestational age saw a 38 percent increase in maternal mortality. Likewise, the study that tracked changes in maternal mortality across states between 1995 and 2017 got around the problem of distinguishing correlation from causation by focusing on changes in maternal mortality that happened after restrictive abortion policies were implemented. During that same time period, obesity and poverty rates didn’t change significantly, said Mark Hoofnagle, a surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis and a co-author of the study.

All told, you end up with a collection of evidence that points toward the conclusion that abortion restrictions and maternal mortality are somehow linked. And that makes sense because we already knew that social forces could affect maternal mortality. But what’s behind that link — specifically, how abortion restrictions could cause more women to die — is harder to pin down. 

How could abortion restrictions lead to higher maternal mortality?

Amanda Stevenson, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, estimated late last year that a total ban on abortion would result in a 7 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths in first year of the ban and a 21 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths in the years that followed. Those estimates are probably high, she told us, because overturning Roe wouldn’t result in a nationwide ban — but she thinks more maternal deaths are still likely to occur. 

But supporters of abortion restrictions frame the laws as life-saving measures. Monique Wubbenhorst, a senior researcher and policy fellow at Notre Dame University’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture who is anti-abortion, said she saw no clear mechanism for how diminished access to abortion could cause an increase in deaths. Instead, she suspected that the correlations were statistical ghosts — perhaps hinting at some third factor connected to both. That’s certainly a possibility. Maternal deaths, despite being more common in the U.S. than in other wealthy nations, are still very rare. And that small sample size means that researchers who try to draw broader conclusions using the data can run into problems — it’s hard to look at what’s going on within demographic subgroups, for instance, or examine what’s happening within specific states.

Other researchers do see potential mechanisms, though. The simplest explanation is just that giving birth is statistically more dangerous than having an abortion. If the states with the highest mortality rates are the also the ones banning abortion that means more births — and also more deaths.  

In 2012, doctors in Ireland refused an abortion to Savita Halappanavar, and she developed an infection that killed her. The case ultimately led to the repeal of many abortion restrictions in Ireland.

Julien Behal / PA Images via Getty Images

Deaths could also increase because doctors in states that ban abortion may be unsure about when they can legally end a pregnancy in a person who is miscarrying. For example, in 2012, doctors in Ireland refused an abortion to Savita Halappanavar because the baby she was miscarrying still had a fetal heartbeat. In the time it took for cardiac activity in the fetus to stop — and the doctors to then be confident an abortion would conform with the country’s laws — Halappanavar developed the infection that killed her. The case ultimately led to the repeal of many abortion restrictions in Ireland.  

In a similar way, abortion restrictions could lead to more infants dying in birth or immediately afterward, said Maeve Wallace, a professor of reproductive epidemiology at Tulane University. She is part of a team that found a correlation between the implementation of gestational age restrictions on abortion and an increase in infant mortality due to congenital abnormalities. During a pregnancy, doctors run tests to spot such abnormalities, but some tests can’t be performed until the middle of the second trimester, which is very close to when abortion becomes illegal in some restrictive states. “You’re getting these test results and you’re beyond your gestational age limit to abort this fetus that might not even live an hour outside the womb because of some severe anomaly,” Wallace said. 

But the connection between abortion restrictions and death could also be more complicated than these examples — tied to how additional support for mothers and families isn’t usually addressed in step with the passage of new restrictions. In fact, efforts to reduce abortion access have often resulted in the closure of clinics like Planned Parenthood that offer a range of non-abortion-related services. Losing access to preventative health care puts people at a higher risk for all kinds of illnesses that can later cause pregnancy complications. And this effect means the impacts of abortion restriction can overlap and build on the social inequalities that are already harming Black people and babies.

For example, states like Georgia and Louisiana, which have consistently high rates of maternal mortality, also have disproportionately high numbers of those deaths happening in Black people. The deaths often come from conditions like chronic hypertension, preeclampsia and hemorrhage.

Black Americans have a harder time accessing health care that could prevent or treat those conditions, and they have a harder time getting proper treatment even when they can access it. “​​Just in my own social circles and network, I can throw a rock and hit somebody who also had a traumatic birth experience, who also experienced a loss or a morbidity,” said Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate on the Texas’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee.

Black people, and especially those who have low incomes and live in rural areas, have precious little access to health care before, during or after they become pregnant, said Madeline Sutton, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Morehouse College whose work focuses on health care inequalities for women. When people go without checkups and prenatal care because they can’t afford it, can’t take time off work or live hours from the nearest clinic, their risks go up. 

Black people, and especially those who have low incomes and live in rural areas, have a harder time getting quality health care before, during and after they become pregnant.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Abortion restrictions aren’t the only thing making it hard for pregnant people in states like Georgia to get preventative care — hospital closures in rural areas have been a huge factor, Sutton said — but reducing access to clinics like Planned Parenthood is just pulling one more brick out of an a wall that was already listing. What’s more, while anti-abortion Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has co-sponsored federal bills aimed at studying racial disparities in health care and promoting remote monitoring of pregnant Medicaid patients’ blood pressure and other health metrics, state legislatures that remove the supports offered by abortion clinics have not generally made an effort to shore up the wall in other ways. 

“It’s almost like the abortion hostility is a signal for a general hostility towards interventions on women’s health and prenatal care,” Hoofnagle said. All the states in his study of maternal mortality had similarly low rates of maternal mortality in the 1990s. And all saw an increase in deaths over the next 20 years because the way maternal mortality is measured improved during that time, he said. But some states chose to put a legislative priority on preventing future deaths. California, for example, took steps to standardize blood-transfusion protocols statewide, ensuring that even small hospitals would have skills and tools to deal with hemorrhage in childbirth, and that obstetricians were following the latest, evidence-based guidelines for how transfusions should be done. The efforts reduced severe maternal morbidity in patients with hemorrhages by nearly 29 percent. 

All of the experts we spoke with believe maternal mortality rates are a huge problem, and each stressed the need to improve maternal health care. Part of the challenge, though, is that abortion is such a fraught issue and it’s hard to get people on the same page about what the data is saying. Researchers who are very concerned about threats to abortion rights will probably be more inclined to see a connection between abortion restrictions and maternal deaths than researchers who oppose abortion rights, like Wubbenhorst. She, for instance, questioned whether legislators were best suited to help reduce maternal deaths, as opposed to hospitals. Meanwhile, other experts, like Geller, expressed anger that anti-abortion lawmakers were focusing so much on restrictions and so little on the pregnancies that the restrictions would cause. 

Most experts we spoke with, though, said there needs to be more attention on the health of women who want abortions and won’t be able to get them. Wilson, the maternal-health advocate in Texas, said that she tries to stay out of the abortion debate in general, but she’s worried that, as lawmakers race to ban abortion, those women and their babies are being left out of the conversation. “​​No [woman] should ever have to face death in order to bring life into this world,” Wilson said. “If, in fact, we’ve taken the position as a country, as a state, that we are going to protect the unborn baby, where is the pipeline and the follow-through … to ensure that that child and family unit has the resources that they need in order to not just survive, but to thrive?”

Additional reporting by Katie Kindelan and Mary Kekatos. Additional statistical analysis by Jeffrey Howard, a professor of public health at University of Texas at San Antonio.

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It’s college graduation season, so for this episode of “The United Stats of America,” host Galen Druke quizzes soon-to-be New York University grads on some of the issues facing students today. How comfortable do students feel sharing their opinions on campus? And how many young people think the government should cancel student-loan debt for all Americans?

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Mass Shootings

Support For Gun Control Will Likely Rise After Uvalde. But History Suggests It Will Fade.

By Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejía, Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejía and Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejía

May 26, 2022, at 12:40 PM

Law enforcement outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After a racist shooting earlier this month at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, guns have — yet again — emerged as a political issue that has dominated headlines. Democrats have issued impassioned pleas for the government to more tightly regulate the sale of firearms, and if past shootings are any indication, we will soon get a fresh batch of polling data showing that solid majorities of Americans agree with them. But again, if past shootings are any indication, Congress will not pass any reforms, in large part because many Republicans oppose gun control reform. And as happened so many times before, the strong public support for gun control will fade away with our memories of the shootings.

FiveThirtyEight took a look at polling and media data to show how support for gun laws has increased amid intense media coverage of past school shootings, but then reverted back toward the previous mean as the media spotlight moved on to other issues. We examined the period around two school shootings in 2018 to see how coverage of those events corresponded with changes in support for increased gun control. Specifically, we examined data around the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the May 18, 2018, shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.1 And as you can see in the chart below, there was an abrupt increase in the share of Americans who favored stricter gun laws right after each shooting, most especially Parkland, followed by a decline in support.

Following each shooting, there was a huge surge in media attention and, correspondingly, a sharp rise in favorable views toward stricter gun laws. On the day of the Parkland massacre, about 51 percent of Americans told Civiqs they favored greater gun control, while about 42 percent were opposed. A week and a half later, the share who said they favored stricter gun laws had jumped to 58 percent, a significant increase in such a short period of time. In the wake of the Santa Fe shooting three months later, support rose from a little under 53 percent to a notch above 54 percent.

Bombarded by a high volume of terrible images and tragic stories right after a shooting, a small but meaningful number of Americans who opposed stricter gun control moved toward supporting it. For instance, the share of Republicans who favored increased gun restrictions rose from 12 percent to 22 percent in the 10 days following the Parkland shooting, and the share of independents in support rose from 45 percent to 53 percent. The share of Democrats who supported stricter gun laws also increased, from 88 percent to 92 percent. But as coverage tailed off — in the case of Parkland — or practically evaporated — in the case of Santa Fe — the share of Americans who favored stricter gun laws reverted toward the mean. 

This is not to say that news coverage perfectly explains shifts in support for stricter gun control. After all, partisan views on this issue likely reasserted themselves after the initial shock of the school shooting moved public opinion — for instance, the share of Republicans who favored stricter gun laws had almost returned to pre-Parkland levels before the shooting at Santa Fe caused them to shift slightly up again. However, the media does help determine the salience of certain issues by focusing coverage on particular problems facing the country. Simply put, if the media is covering something, Americans are more likely to think about it. Yet as the issue receives less attention, it moves out of the spotlight and something else takes its place.

Even if support for stricter gun laws in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings is inflated, though, it’s clear that Americans still support more gun control overall. A Gallup poll from October 2021 — a survey that was not inspired by a particular mass shooting — found that 52 percent of Americans wanted stricter laws governing gun sales, while only 11 percent wanted less strict laws; 35 percent felt that gun laws should be kept as they were at the time. 

And stricter gun laws have been Americans’ preference for most of the last 30 years. Back in 1990, when Gallup first asked this question, a whopping 78 percent of Americans wanted stricter gun-control laws. That number gradually fell to 43 percent by 2011, putting it in an approximate tie with the share of Americans who were satisfied with U.S. gun regulations. But the next year, in the immediate aftermath of the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, support for more gun-sales restrictions increased to 58 percent, and it has remained around that high ever since — with some temporary spikes in response to major shootings like Parkland.

The trend in public opinion over the last decade offers both good and bad signs for supporters of gun control. On the one hand, Sandy Hook — which is sometimes considered a tipping point that normalized debating gun policy in response to mass shootings — appears to have had a lasting impact on American public opinion on guns. While pro-gun-control sentiment did fade in the months following Sandy Hook, it did not fall all the way back to its 2011 low — instead, the shooting seems to have fundamentally shifted the debate toward more Americans wanting stricter gun laws. On the other hand, though, support for gun control has markedly decreased since the 2019 spike associated with the shootings that summer in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, to a point even lower than the pre-Parkland (2018), pre-Las Vegas (2017), pre-Orlando (2016) baseline. (Civiqs has also picked up on this trend.)

It’s possible that we’re about to see another large spike in support after what happened in Uvalde, but if history is any guide, it won’t last for long.

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Vermont Diners: The Blue Benn in Bennington

#Bernie Sanders #Politics #Youtube #2016 elections #2016 election #elections 2016 #election 2016 #iftt

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Conspiracy Theories

The Twisted Logic Behind The Right’s ‘Great Replacement’ Arguments

By Kaleigh Rogers

May 26, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Peter Zay / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Days after a white gunman shot 13 people, killing 10, at a grocery store in a majority-Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired a segment about the “great replacement theory.” “We’re still not sure exactly what it is,” Carlson claimed about the racist, white-supremacist conspiracy theory that the population of white Americans is being systematically and intentionally “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants and their children, something the suspected shooter espoused prior to the attack. Yet elements of the theory have been echoed by mainstream figures on the right, including Carlson, as well as GOP members of Congress like Reps. Matt Gaetz and Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House. 

In last week’s segment, Carlson detailed the version of the theory he’s been spreading for years (more than 400 times according to a recent New York Times analysis). “There is a strong political component to the Democratic Party’s immigration policy,” Carlson said before airing a handful of clips of Democrats that don’t actually demonstrate what he claims. “They say out loud, ‘We are doing this because it helps us to win elections.’” 

This more mainstream version of the replacement theory hides behind justifications that the criticism of changing American demographics is about politics and power. It’s a narrative so prevalent on the right that nearly half of Republicans believe that immigrants are being brought to the country for political gains. According to a poll conducted in December by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 47 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” 

But those justifications are built on false assumptions about American demographics and immigration: that white people will soon be a minority in this country, that immigrants and non-white voters are all Democrats, and that no longer being the majority group means a loss of power. When those assumptions are torn down, the true justifications for these fears become transparent.

The theory’s first inaccurate assumption is that white Americans will soon become a minority population. But using any nuanced reading of the data, that’s not true. Yes, in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau published a population projection that by the year 2044, non-Hispanic white Americans would no longer be a numerical majority in the country. But not being the majority is not the same as being a minority: Even in that projection, non-Hispanic white Americans would still make up a plurality of the population compared with any other race. And non-Hispanic white Americans are not the only white Americans. When you include American Latinos who identify as solely white, you wind up with “more than 70 percent of the population identifying at least in part as white in 2044 and over two-thirds in 2060,” according to research published last year in the journal “Perspectives on Politics.” 

That nuance affects how Americans think about the future. The same research showed that presenting the demographic-shifts story as “majority-minority by 2044” prompts white Americans to say they feel more anxious and less hopeful. But when you present the same demographic changes in a more nuanced (and accurate) narrative around a rise in multiculturalism and Americans who identify as more than one race, white Americans’ self-reported anxiety was lower, even compared with a control group presented with basic facts about demographic changes with no narrative framing, according to the same study. 

It’s almost like inaccurately framing demographic shifts as a zero-sum game leads to inaccurate perceptions among Americans that can amplify fear and resentment. (Why the idea of losing their status as a numerical majority is so anxiety-provoking to some white Americans is another question entirely.)

Another plot hole in the mainstream replacement narrative is the assumption that immigrants will solely support the Democratic party. Stefanik’s campaign ran a Facebook ad in September that echoed replacement-theory rhetoric. “Radical Democrats” were planning “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” the ad claimed. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

Carlson, too, has repeatedly warned of a so-called Democratic plot to “import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they will never lose again.” 

But even he concedes that this narrative is flawed, pointing out in his show last week that many non-white and immigrant voters are, in fact, Republican. In the 2020 election, roughly 2 in 5 Latino voters cast a ballot for then-President Donald Trump. And, as my colleague Alex Samuels has written, messaging about racial grievances might, perhaps counterintuitively, attract some Latino voters to the Republican Party. In fact, the GOP attracts voters from every racial group, and while white voters may be its base, not all nonwhite or immigrant voters are Democrats. That’s to say nothing of the fact that not all immigrants are naturalized and able to vote (take it from this immigrant, who has lived and worked in the U.S. for eight years and still can’t vote). 

Another flawed assumption baked into the mainstream presentation of replacement theory is that losing a numerical majority means losing power, but in America, that’s not the case. The reality is that the demographic makeup of the U.S. has been shifting for decades, yet those in positions of power have not fully shifted to match. White men made up about 35 percent of the U.S. population yet held 85.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions in 2020, according to a report from Richard Zweigenhaft, a professor emeritus of psychology who studies diversity at Guilford College in North Carolina. The handful of those seats not occupied by white men are held almost exclusively by white women: Just 1 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs are Black, 2.4 percent are East Asians or South Asians and 3.4 percent are Latino, per Zweigenhaft’s 2021 report. 

Our elected leaders remain out of step with the U.S. population as well. While the current Congress is the most racially diverse we’ve had, it’s still whiter than the general population. People who identify as non-Hispanic white made up 61.6 percent of the U.S. population in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but accounted for 77 percent of the voting members in Congress.

To even engage with these incorrect assumptions feels a bit like legitimizing their baseless premise, but when about a third of Americans believe a conspiracy theory based on misleading presumptions, there’s value in carefully deconstructing the false narrative. And when the toothpick scaffolding that holds up the theory is exposed, it’s clear what’s really supporting this narrative: racism and fear.

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After pursuing a vendetta against statewide Georgia Republican officials for more than a year, all of former President Trump’s endorsees failed to unseat incumbents in the state on Tuesday night. Gov. Brian Kemp bested his Trump-backed challenger by more than 50 points and even Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who wrote a book about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, won outright and avoided a runoff. Trump’s endorsees in open races, such as Herschel Walker in the Senate primary and Burt Jones in the lieutenant governor primary fared better. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew recaps the night’s contests in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas and Minnesota.

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.

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Abortion

For The First Time In Years, Democrats Are More Concerned About Abortion Than Republicans Are

By Michael Tesler

May 25, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Americans have long taken for granted the constitutional right to an abortion, established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.

Throughout most of the fall in 2021, Democrats, and especially Republicans, still thought that Roe would more likely than not remain the law of the land for the foreseeable future — even as the high court refused to block a Texas law from taking effect on Sept. 1 that lawmakers designed to flout Roe by banning abortions once they said cardiac activity was detected, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy.1

Those views started to change in December, though, following oral arguments before the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. More Americans began doubting Roe would survive after the court’s conservative justices raised the prospect of overturning nearly five decades of legal precedent on abortion rights during the hearing.

As the chart below shows, Democrats have consistently been pessimistic about Roe being overturned since those oral arguments in December, but following the leak of an initial draft Supreme Court opinion in May showing that a majority of conservative justices were ready to overturn Roe, there was a sharp spike in the share saying it “will definitely” or “very likely” be overturned. Even Republicans, who have been less likely than Democrats to think Roe would ever be struck down, now generally think it’s going to happen.

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The reality that Roe might be overturned has also shifted how Americans prioritize abortion as an issue. For decades, those who opposed abortion rights (generally speaking, Republicans) rated the issue as more important than those who supported abortion rights (generally speaking, Democrats), but as the chart below shows, the two parties’ priorities swapped after Texas’s abortion ban went into effect, which I first wrote about in October. 

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In fact, the divide between Democrats and Republicans on the importance of abortion as an issue has only gotten wider, especially after the draft Supreme Court opinion was leaked in May. In the two surveys conducted by YouGov/The Economist since then, a record share of voters who backed President Biden in 2020 have rated abortion as a “very important” issue, by 61 percent and 63 percent, up from an average of about 42 percent in August surveys.2 Compare that with 37 percent and 40 percent of 2020 Trump voters who rated abortion as a “very important” issue in May, down from an average of about 45 percent in August polls.

Not only are Democrats more concerned now, but they're also rating abortion as much more important to their midterm vote for Congress now than they did four years ago, according to polling from Monmouth University. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to prioritize abortion as their most important issue in choosing whom to vote for in Congress, but in May, 32 percent of Democrats said abortion was the most important issue in determining their vote, compared with 17 percent of Republicans. The share of Democrats who said abortion was an “extremely important” issue in voting for Congress in 2022 (48 percent) is also up from 2018 (31 percent), while the share of Republicans who said the issue was “extremely important” in 2022 (29 percent) is down from 2018 (36 percent).

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The polling data from both YouGov/The Economist and Monmouth is consistent with a long line of political science research showing how threats and anger often motivate people to take political action. When most Democrats considered abortion rights a given, other issues typically overshadowed it. Yet now that the status quo is on the verge of being upended, Democrats are increasingly prioritizing abortion rights and will likely channel their anger over Roe being struck down into various forms of political participation. Meanwhile, now that Republicans look likely to win their long battle to overturn Roe, the issue is unlikely to have the same potency in GOP politics.

It remains to be seen, though, how these changes in voters’ priorities will affect future elections. Thus far, the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion has had no discernible impact on which party voters would support in a congressional election in FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot polling average. But as FiveThirtyEight editor-and-chief Nate Silver tweeted on Thursday, the electoral effects will likely manifest themselves in more nuanced ways — especially after the policy implications of the final ruling become even more apparent during the summer and fall campaign. Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, concurred, adding that “the effect [of overturning Roe] on individual races may prove to be more important than its effect on the national political environment, if abortion becomes especially salient in places due to extreme candidates or state policy stakes.”

Regardless, the reality that abortion rights can no longer be taken for granted has already sharply shifted many voters’ priorities. Those shifts will likely grow larger, too, if Roe is ultimately overturned this summer — in fact, they may become even more politically powerful moving forward.

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #FiveThirtyEight