A new NBC News/Generation Lab poll of incoming college students across the country finds 92% of the freshmen — attending either two-year or four-year institutions — say they’re optimistic about their personal lives, including 28% who are “super” optimistic.

Nathan Gonzales: “Within hours of 13 American servicemembers being killed in a terrorist attack outside Kabul airport in Afghanistan on Aug. 26, multiple Republicans called for President Joe Biden to resign. That wasn’t terribly surprising considering former President Donald Trump, his son and others were calling on Biden to resign before the deadly attack.”

“But the broader point remains: The idea of a rally ’round the flag effect is functionally over for the undetermined future.”

A new NBC News poll finds 54% of all adults say abortion should be legal in “all or most cases,” while 42% saying it should be illegal.

“One other thing to consider in this debate: Much of the country appears to be in the middle on abortion… It’s just that our present political system — and our political parties — can’t handle the middle anymore, especially on abortion.”

A new Politico-Morning Consult poll finds that 61% of Americans believe the country is on “the wrong track,” compared to just 39% who say the country is “going in the right direction.”

Anne Applebaum: “Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless.”

“The modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.”

Will Wilkinson: “I suspect that battle between North and South lives on both culturally and geographically. The North has drifted out of the countryside and concentrated itself into our cities. At the same time, America’s rural and exurban counties have slowly become more and more homogeneously Southern.”

“The South has risen again…in rural Maine?”

“My hunch is that rural white culture, which was once regionally varied and distinctive, became more uniform by becoming increasingly Southern.”

“White, non-Hispanic Americans now account for less than six in 10 people in the U.S. — a more precipitous drop over the past decade than experts expected — and they’re no longer the racial-ethnic majority in 13% of U.S. counties,” Axios reports.

According to the newly-released U.S. Census data, Washington, D.C. was the only location in America where the white share of the population increased over the last decade.

Washington Post: “For the first time in the history of the country’s census taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.”

“For five years now, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual updates of the 2010 Census have estimated that the nation’s White population is shrinking, and all population growth has been from people of color.”

Said demographer William Frey: “Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you. The country is changing dramatically.”

A new GW Politics poll finds that 47% of Republican voters believe that a time will come when “patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

Just 9% of Democrats agreed with that statement.

Wall Street Journal: “America’s weak population growth, already held back by a decadelong fertility slump, is dropping closer to zero because of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“In half of all states last year, more people died than were born, up from five states in 2019. Early estimates show the total U.S. population grew 0.35% for the year ended July 1, 2020, the lowest ever documented, and growth is expected to remain near flat this year.”

A new Gallup poll finds 2020 officially became the most stressful year in recent history.

A new Gallup poll finds net confidence in big business among Republican voters is down 30 points from last year, steady among independents, and although still negative overall, up 12 points for Democrats.

Geoffrey Skelley: “Incumbent politicians have moved further toward the political extremes in recent elections partly because they are worried about a primary challenge.”

“But studies suggest that the primary electorate itself isn’t any more ideologically extreme than the general electorate. Rather, the bigger problem is the decline in competitive congressional districts.”

“Only about 1 in 6 congressional districts were ‘swingy’ in the 2020 general election, compared with roughly 2 in 5 in 2000.”

Vice News: “A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we’re unfortunately right on schedule.”

A new Bright Line Watch poll finds 66% of southern Republicans say they want the South to secede from the United States and form a smaller, regional country.