Kevin Drum 🕸

Donald Trump must be desperately afraid that abortion is going to lose the election for him. A few years ago he was so anti-abortion he said that women should be jailed for getting an abortion. But now? First he announces that he's in favor of banning abortion only after 15 weeks. Then he writes on ...continue reading "Donald Trump is a woman’s best friend"

This is a Joshua tree lit by the setting sun at Joshua Tree National Park. I have to confess that Joshua trees don't do much for me, and I've never been entirely clear on why a thousand square miles of scrub and Joshua trees became a national park. But I'm sure it has a unique ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I noticed yesterday that the Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum has a new book coming out next year called Stuck. It asks, "How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?" Obviously I haven't read it yet, but it got me curious. Has America ceased being the land of opportunity? My own suspicion is that America ...continue reading "Is America still the land of opportunity?"

Here are the latest swing state results from Emerson College Polling: It's close to a dead heat in the battleground states. Aside from Arizona, Kamala Harris is either ahead or within 1% in every state. Fingers crossed.

The Army has finally released a statement about Donald Trump's vulgar and illegal behavior on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery: New: The Army is now rebuking Trump campaign staff over the Arlington National Cemetery incident. "Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations ...continue reading "Army: Trump knew the rules at Arlington and broke them anyway"

The previous post got me playing again with the Google Ngram viewer, which is a total time suck if you let yourself get dragged into it. But writing about stress got me curious about the use of the word crisis. Here it is: Look at the left edge of the chart. We managed to get ...continue reading "We have a crisis of crises"

Vivek Murthy, fresh off his advisory about the dangers of social media, has a new advisory telling us that parents in America are distraught: Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better. The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness, workplace well-being and the impact of ...continue reading "Stress in America: A deeper look"

This is a snow leopard waking up from a nap at the LA Zoo. It's a very impressive yawn.

This is just a single poll and doesn't show what the trend is, but it's interesting nonetheless: Nearly all Americans believe that financial goals—money, retirement, homeownership—are essential to the American Dream. But only about 60% say the same about marriage and kids. I don't know how that compares to the past, but I'll bet it's ...continue reading "Marriage and kids just aren’t that important anymore"

According to YouGov, Kamala Harris's lead over Donald Trump declined a bit this week: Aside from random fluctuation, my best guess is that Harris got a slight convention bounce but Trump got a bigger bounce from the RFK Jr. endorsement. The YouGov poll no longer includes him on their list of responses, and his three ...continue reading "Harris lead drops to 2 points"

That turned out to be pretty easy. The blog has been migrated to a new host and all the DNS pointers have successfully propagated. Performance should be much better now. If you notice any bugs, let me know.

This kind of wonky analysis seems even more pointless than usual this year, but just for the record here's an estimate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model of how much each candidate's economic proposals will affect the national debt: Trump's proposals blow up the debt by 5x more than Harris's. Here's how they affect income: ...continue reading "Trump plan blows up the debt, gives most money to the rich"

I've finally had enough of my site's sluggish performance, so today I switched hosting services. In theory, the migration should be pain free, but I guess we'll see. I'm just letting everyone know so that in case something goes wrong you know why. Don't worry: we'll be working to fix it. Now cross your fingers.

I know this is a Trump talking point, but honestly, Kamala Harris really needs to sit down for some interviews with the press. It's something we should expect from any presidential candidate. I've cut her some slack because she became a candidate only a few weeks ago. But she's been vice president for more than ...continue reading "Kamala and the press"

A couple of days ago Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republicans saying that health officials had pressured Meta to remove COVID misinformation while the vaccine was being rolled out. He now regrets this, though he didn't really say why. Then there's this: The Zuckerberg letter didn’t stop with details of the well-known crackdown on ...continue reading "Please note: There was no Biden administration in 2020"

This is the famous wheel at the Prater amusement park in Vienna. If you've ever seen The Third Man, you'll recognize it.

According to the International Monetary Fund, per capita GDP in the US is currently $85,000. This figure is adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, so it takes into account differences in living standards throughout the world. Here's how everyone else is doing: The US is the richest large region in the world and the fastest growing ...continue reading "Raw data: Per capita GDP around the world"

This feels like about the millionth time we've seen this recently: A federal judge in Texas has.... Does it even matter what this judge did? He overturned a Biden program, of course, and in this case it happens to be one that provides a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are married to US ...continue reading "Texas judge once again does what Texas judges do"

The new school year has started, and that means it's time for an evergreen story about teachers being burnt out and quitting in record numbers: Teacher exit rates reached new highs in the past two years, according to data from several states. In Texas, thousands more teachers left the classroom in 2022 and 2023 compared ...continue reading "We have a record number of teachers this year"

Pew has a new report out today about the values and policy opinions of Trump and Harris voters. As you'd expect, they disagree widely on everything. Except for Social Security: Nobody—not Democrats, not Republicans, not independents—wants Social Security touched even slightly. It's still the third rail of American politics.