Wall Street Journal: “Gaining assets and income pushes voters toward conservative fiscal policies, such as lower taxes, that allow them to keep more of their money, researchers say. As Americans move from midlife to retirement, they are more likely to favor stability over change, and less likely to back liberal policies that upset the social order.”

“This rightward shift is likely to affect who wins elections in 2024 and the years beyond. One in six Americans is age 65 or over, up from one in eight a decade prior, according to the most recent decennial census. A slump in births that started in 2008 will eventually give way to a smaller pool of new, young voters.”

“On its face, the shift bodes well for Republicans. Yet its effects have been muted by the size and liberal bent of millennials now approaching middle age, and the more solidly blue partisanship of Gen Z voters just entering the electorate.”

John Judis: “As late as January 1, 2008, the percentage of Democrats exceeded that of independents as well as Republicans, but since then, the percentage of independents has been growing at the expense of both parties.”

“In March 2023, it hit an all-time high (since Gallup has been asking the question in 1988) of 49 percent. Republicans and Democrats were tied at 25 percent. Of course, when these independents are asked what party they lean to, Democrats and Republicans split the vote, but that’s not the point.”

“The point is that growing percentages of the electorate are alienated from both parties. They might ‘lean’ to one rather than the other, but that is not the same as being hardline partisans that are culturally identified with one party rather than the other. If anything, the cultural identification with the parties is diminishing.”

A new Pew Research poll finds 65% of Americans say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry.

By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and just 4% are excited.

Politico: “Step back and look at a map of life expectancy across the country and the geographic patterns are as dramatic as they are obvious. If you live pretty much anywhere in the contiguous U.S., you can expect to live more than 78 years, unless you’re in the Deep South or the sprawling region I call Greater Appalachia, a region that stretches from southwestern Pennsylvania to the Ozarks and the Hill Country of Texas. Those two regions — which include all or parts of 16 deep red states and a majority of the House Republican caucus — have a life expectancy of 77, more than four and a half years lower than on the blue-leaning Pacific coastal plain.”

“In the smaller, redder regional culture of New France (in southern Louisiana) the gap is just short of six years. So large are the regional gaps that the poorest set of counties in predominantly blue Yankee Northeast actually have higher life expectancies than the wealthiest ones in the Deep South. At a population level, a difference of five years is like the gap separating the U.S. from decidedly unwealthy Mongolia, Belarus or Libya, and six years gets you to impoverished El Salvador and Egypt.”

“It’s as if we are living in different countries. Because in a very real historical and political sense, we are.”

“Ahead of his arrest on Thursday in Georgia, Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters about the legal peril he faced from charges of election interference. But the danger wasn’t his alone, he said. ‘In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,’ he told a campaign rally,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“It was the latest example of the Republican former president employing a potent driver of America’s partisan divide: group identity. Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.”

“There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure,” the New York Times reports.

“Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.”

“Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But it’s also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.”

David Brooks: “I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.”

“We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?”

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Just about 150 of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties cast half of the nation’s presidential vote in 2020.”

“Joe Biden won 126 of the 151 top half counties, while Donald Trump won 2,548 of the remaining 2,960 counties in the bottom half.”

“Trump’s wins among the top half counties were concentrated among the smaller pieces of that group — Biden won all but one of the nearly 50 counties that cast 500,000 votes or more.”

Greg Sargent: “New data supplied to me by the Harvard Youth Poll sheds light on the powerful undercurrents driving these developments. Young voters have shifted in a markedly progressive direction on multiple issues that are deeply important to them: Climate change, gun violence, economic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.”

“John Della Volpe, director of the poll, refers to those issues as the ‘big four.’ They all speak to the sense of precarity that young voters feel about their physical safety, their economic future, their basic rights and even the ecological stability of the planet.”

The Economist: “Roughly a third of Americans live in areas where the government has issued warnings about extreme heat in the past week… These hot cities are in the Sunbelt, or the southern part of the country, ranging from Los Angeles to Miami. Tourists flocked sweatily to Death Valley, California, the hottest place on Earth, to see if it would get warmer than the previous record of 56.7°C (it didn’t). Researchers in Florida worry that hot ocean temperatures will bleach coral reefs and worsen hurricane season…”

“Yet extreme heat in the Sunbelt is not convincing Americans to up sticks. Census figures suggest that 12 of the 15 fastest-growing cities in America are in the region.”

“More than one-quarter of young adults are estranged from one or both parents, or have been, a finding that suggests a societal shift away from the traditional bonds of family,” The Hill reports.

Associated Press: “Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.”

“One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature.”

“The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day.”

Gallup: “At 39%, the share of U.S. adults who are “extremely proud” to be American is essentially unchanged from last year’s 38% record low.”

Wall Street Journal: “Roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year, according to the Census Bureau, about 18% more than a decade earlier. Some people have been pressed back into duty by inflation and stock-market volatility, while the fading pandemic made others who took a break feel more comfortable clocking in again. Many cite a simpler reason to keep working—they just want to.”

Wall Street Journal: “The unfolding 2024 campaign is shaping up as one in which each party accuses the other of criminality, with the cumulative effect being the steady erosion of public trust in the U.S. political system.”

“History is littered with examples of presidential candidates calling their opponents crooks, from the days of George McGovern’s campaign against Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal to Trump’s supporters chanting ‘Lock Her Up’ as the Justice Department investigated his rival Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails. But perhaps never has the U.S. electorate been so primed to believe the worst about those it puts in office.”

“Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in the developing world, and it seems to be accelerating,” the Financial Times reports.