Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.
While overall House control is highly competitive, most individual House seats are not. Three straight Houses have seen single digit majorities, the first such run since the 1790s — even as the number of genuinely balanced districts has collapsed. (David Wasserman, Cook Political)
The University of Michigan ICS is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment.1 The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But before more bad analysis gets done on the vibecession, people need to know they’re working with dubious data. As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling. There are issues both with partisan nonresponse, with some political groups more likely to respond than others, and partisan expressive response, with survey-takers using questions about the economy to express political sentiment.
So the problems with the ICS are these:
The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,
There are too many Democrats in the sample.
Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods. Here is the partisanship of the sample over time:
And Democrats right now say they hate the economy with Trump in charge.
When adjusted for these issues, the ICS should be substantially higher than the Great Recession lows we have witnessed over the past year. Weighting the survey to Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey — what Nate Cohn called “perhaps the most important poll you’ve never heard of” — would place the ICS at a level more like that in 2013, when the economy was growing after the Great Recession but unemployment remained stubbornly high and wages stubbornly low. This adjustment would bring the survey in line with other measures of consumer confidence, such as those from the Conference Board, Gallup, and YouGov.
Many posts have discussed veterans.
Seven in 10 U.S. adults say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in military veterans, according to new research from With Honor and Gallup. That confidence extends to elected leadership, with 77% saying they would trust a person with military experience a great deal or a fair amount to perform well as an elected official. Trust in leaders with military experience spans party groups, with majorities of Democrats (70%), independents (73%) and Republicans (91%) expressing this view.
The findings come as With Honor Action reports that 752 veterans across the political spectrum have run or are running for Congress in the 2026 cycle — a 47% increase from 2024 and the highest number the organization has tracked since it began monitoring veteran candidates in 2018.
Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality.
Teens’ planned trajectory after graduation varies dramatically between not only boys and girls but also those with college-educated parents and those without. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of teen girls with college-educated parents report that they are planning on going to a four-year college after graduation. About half of teen boys with college-educated parents say they are planning on going to college themselves. Nearly as many teen girls (46 percent) raised in noncollege households plan on attending a four-year college or university. About half as many of their male peers (24 percent) report that they plan on going to college.
American teenagers spend hours online each day, with apps such as YouTube and TikTok dominating their attention. Thirty-five percent spend at least four hours a day on social media or playing video games. The amount of time teens spend engaged in these activities varies across households. The survey finds that teen girls raised by parents without college degrees are on more social media apps, spend more hours using them, and are less inclined to cut back than girls whose parents went to college, while among boys, the same divide emerges in the hours spent gaming.
The class divide in social media use may exacerbate existing inequalities instead of reducing them. Among teen girls, more active social media engagement is associated with negative personal outcomes, including less sleep, lower rates of reading, and lower feelings of personal satisfaction.
The majority of teenagers are spending multiple hours on social media every day. About four in 10 (39 percent) spend three or more hours of their day online. YouTube and TikTok are the most popular social media platforms teens visit. More than seven in 10 (72 percent) spend time on YouTube every week, while six in 10 say the same of TikTok. Gaming also eats up a significant portion of teens’ free time, although less so than social media. More than four in 10 (44 percent) teens spend at least an hour gaming every day.
Teen girls raised in less educated households are more likely to use Instagram (66 percent vs. 57 percent), Snapchat (49 percent vs. 44 percent), Facebook (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and X (12 percent vs. 6 percent). The education gap is largest in TikTok use. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of teen girls raised by parents without college degrees spend time on the app, compared with only about half (53 percent) of teen girls whose parents have college degrees. There is also a significant difference in the number of apps they use.[v] Forty-one percent of teen girls with non-college-educated parents report using at least four different social media apps, compared with 25 percent of teen girls raised by college-educated parents.
This same gap is also evident in the amount of time teen girls spend on social media. About one in five (21 percent) say they spend between one and two hours on social media every day. Thirty-nine percent of teens report they spend less than an hour a day or do not use social media at all. Teen girls whose parents did not go to college, however, log more hours on social media than any of their peers. Nearly half (49 percent) of teen girls raised by parents without a college degree report spending three or more hours a day using social media, compared with 36 percent of teen girls with college-educated parents.
Parental education is also correlated with teens’ efforts to reduce their screen time. Among girls, those raised in households with parents of higher education levels are more likely to report attempting to reduce their time spent online. Nearly six in 10 (58 percent) teen girls raised by college-educated parents say they have tried to reduce their social media activity in the past 12 months. In contrast, only 40 percent of teen girls who have non-college-educated parents report attempts to lessen their social media activity.
There is no evidence of the same divide among teen boys; they report similar social media usage patterns regardless of parental education. More evident education divides show up in boys’ gaming habits. Teen boys raised by parents without college degrees spend substantially more time gaming. Nearly three in 10 (28 percent) teen boys raised by parents without college degrees say they spend an average of four or more hours a day playing video games. Among teen boys with college-educated parents, only 19 percent play video games this often. Among teen girls, it’s only 7 percent.
Many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel
Franklin Foer at The Atlantic:
Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians. But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way. Two years ago, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to Israel; this April, 40 out of 47 did—including most of the presidential aspirants within the caucus. Now, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world is an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on the promise that he would arrest Netanyahu; a Columbia University activist who joined an October 8, 2023, rally celebrating the Hamas attacks will almost certainly be elected to the next Congress. Leading liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their message....Bigots would have found a pretext to hate Israel, no matter what. Anti-Israel extremism was flourishing in the American university before October 7, which is why a succession of suspiciously well-organized protests against Israel erupted the day after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. But Israel will come to regret how much American political support it has sacrificed on Netanyahu’s watch—and not just on the left. Political independents have come to sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis; 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Netanyahu’s country; a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 oppose renewing Obama’s military-aid package; support among young evangelicals, once the pro-Israel bastion of the electorate, is cratering. Netanyahu’s legacy is Israel’s isolation. Perhaps that wasn’t preventable. His failure is that he never tried to avoid this fate.
Pew:
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In addition to age, parental education levels shape how teens engage in extracurricular activities. Teens with college-educated parents tend to participate in a greater range of activities than those whose parents do not have a four-year college degree do. For instance, nearly one in four teens—including 29 percent of teen girls—with college-educated parents report participating in an academic club, compared with 13 percent of teens whose parents did not graduate from college. Teens with college-educated parents are also three times as likely to participate in student government or debate as those with less educated parents (12 percent vs. 4 percent).
With an expanding list of extracurriculars to participate in, teens live more scheduled lives now than ever before. Only 28 percent of teens say that they get at least eight hours of sleep every night. Forty-one percent say they get this much sleep a few times a week. Three in 10 teenagers report getting eight hours of sleep no more than once per week.