Out-party voters are energized, active and loud. In-power voters are often frustrated that their teams’ promises prove harder to accomplish, take too long or require compromises they don’t like.
Many posts have discussed social media.
About one-in-five U.S. adults (21%) say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media, identical to when we first asked this in 2024.
The term news influencers was defined in the survey as “individuals who have a large following on social media and often post about news or political or social issues.”
Younger adults are especially likely to get news from news influencers, with 38% of those ages 18 to 29 saying they regularly do this – more than four times the share of those 65 and older (8%). There is virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats in the share who say they regularly get news from news influencers (21% and 22%, respectively, including those who lean to each party).
Some of the literature tries to reduce legislative leadership to institutional context. That is, leaders are purportedly just the creatures of procedures, colleagues, and parties in the electorate. Watching Cheney reminded us that there is more to leadership than followership. When Cheney spoke, people listened. What the press now calls his “gravitas” caused other House Republicans to heed him. He was both a creature and creator of his context.
The Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman once explained a source of gravitas: “First, know your stuff. Know your stuff, just that. Know -- know your own branch, know the related arms of the service; you can't know too much if you are going to be a successful leader. And know the yesterdays” (Freeman 1979, 4). Colleagues deferred to Cheney because he knew his stuff. His executive experience gave him a profound understanding of “the related arms of the service.” He knew policy. And from his academic background and research on the speakership, he knew “the yesterdays.” Cheney’s example offers evidence that knowledge is power on Capitol Hill.
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Cheney was no “pander bear.” At different times, we both traveled with him to Wyoming, and heard him tell constituents what they did not want to hear. Pitney watched him explain to people in the small town of Rawlins that he opposed federal subsidies for rail service to southern Wyoming. Connelly saw him take on a bunch of angry ranchers who were losing grazing land to DOD needs. In a conversation with Connelly, Cheney manifested his familiarity with political science, explaining why he was not acting as a single-minded seeker of re-election. He said he did not want the job if it entailed pandering.
He also noted that Wyomingites respect independence, something both of us witnessed. They respected him even when -- and perhaps because -- he did not pander to them. Clearly Congressman Cheney was a “trustee,” not merely an “agent” for constituent interests. He was more than willing to engage in blunt talk with constituents and colleagues alike. Economic theories of legislative behavior fail to capture such leadership. As James Q. Wilson noted, “whereas economics is based on the assumption that preferences are given, politics must take into account the efforts made to change preferences” (Wilson 1980, 363).
The most recent poll analyzing Americans’ hopes for government spending came from The Economist/YouGov, which surveyed 1,623 U.S. adults from Oct. 24-27. When asked about increasing spending across a variety of categories, the only category with more people advocating for less spending than for more was foreign aid, where 21% wanted it to increase while 46% wanted it to decrease. This category was recently highlighted during the Trump administration’s decision to provide $20 billion in financial assistance to Argentina, a move that proved overwhelmingly unpopular, with only 21% approving and 51% disapproving.
On other items, such as national defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, the environment, veterans, and education, many more wanted increased funding than those who wanted decreased funding. The most popular were increased spending on veterans (71%) and Social Security (69%).
While Americans want more spending in almost every category when polled, in another poll from the Cato Institute/YouGov, an overwhelming 76% said the federal government spends too much money, and only 8% said it doesn’t spend enough. Another question found that the average person thinks the federal government should cut spending by 40% across the board, and 64% said cutting spending will mostly help the economy.
These two polls are in conflict. When presented abstractly, Americans want to cut spending. When asked about specific line items, the only popular item to cut is foreign aid. However, foreign aid accounts for only $50-80 billion of the federal budget, depending on the year, or 0.8% to 1.3% of the federal budget.
Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.
Mark Maremont and Paul Overberg at WSJ:
It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.
In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.
While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.
The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.
First came President Trump’s scrapping of a proposed summit in Budapest on the war in Ukraine and his imposition of sanctions on Russia.
Then came the announcements by President Vladimir V. Putin that Russia had successfully tested two menacing nuclear-capable weapons designed for possible doomsday combat against the United States.
The timing may not have been coincidental, analysts say, and Mr. Putin’s point was clear: Given the serious threat of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the United States will ultimately need to respect Moscow’s power and negotiate — like it or not.
It’s a message the Kremlin has relied on in its brinkmanship with the United States dating back to the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union regularly emphasized that for the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, negotiation was a necessity, not an option. More recently, Moscow has underscored that attempts to isolate Russia, including with the recent U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers, were doomed to fail.
President Donald Trump said this week that he wants the Defense Department to begin testing nuclear weapons "immediately," but experts say that's wishful thinking.
The U.S. has only one location where such testing could take place, an underground facility at the former Nevada Nuclear Test Site near Las Vegas. Preparing the site for testing would require hundreds of millions of dollars and at least two years, nuclear experts said. site for testing would require hundreds of millions of dollars and at least two years, nuclear experts
said.
There is no immediacy when it comes to testing," Gregory Jaczko, former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said on "Meet the Press" Thursday.
Trump announced his desire to conduct nuclear tests in a Truth Social post shortly before his meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea.
"Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis," Trump wrote Wednesday. "That process will begin immediately."
Some nuclear weapons experts argue that the U.S. has no technical need to restart nuclear testing and that it could actually wind up benefitting countries like China, because it would in effect give them license to resume testing to advance their less-developed nuclear programs
Trump reportedly determined and notified Congress that the U.S. government is involved in an “armed conflict”—i.e. a legal state of war— with drug cartels, marking the latest in an escalating series of legal moves by the administration. It previously designated some cartels as FTOs, unlocking certain criminal law, immigration, and sanctions authorities. It has invoked a 1798 law authorizing the swift removal from the United States of “enemy aliens,” and applied it to suspected Tren de Aragua members. It has used lethal force against alleged Tren de Aragua drug vessels in the Caribbean, claiming national self-defense.
One of the most significant implications of this declaration is that it purports to justify using lethal force against some unspecified categories of cartel members, essentially treating them as enemy soldiers. Because the Trump administration has provided so little information about the strikes and their legal justifications, however, it’s unclear how far the White House is stretching this theory.
The closest analogy is the ongoing armed conflict against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which is a more legally precise term for the “Global War on Terror.” That’s been the legal basis, across five presidential administrations now, for lethal force and detention of al-Qaeda fighters. The Trump administration seems to be applying that same template, but this time against drug cartels instead of a transnational terrorist group.
But that’s a dangerous stretch. Al-Qaeda had declared war on the United States and attacked U.S. warships, embassies, military headquarters, and financial capital, killing thousands of Americans with the equivalent of missiles. If a state had carried out those attacks, no one would dispute that we were in a war.
Major international cartels are brutally violent and drug trafficking is an enormously destructive problem in the United States, so the Trump administration is right to combat them aggressively. The administration may also believe, with reason, that international drug trafficking is a grave threat to the safety of Americans, and perhaps there are important roles for American military forces in dealing with it. But, to date, the administration hasn’t persuasively made the legal case that drug cartels are waging war against us like al-Qaeda was, nor is it clear whether the White House acknowledges any limits to its theory—one that unlocks the most extreme legal powers a state can wield. Part of the problem is that the Trump administration has been so opaque about its legal basis and about the facts surrounding its recent strikes. That’s a mistake that exacerbates the legal problems.
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So far, the Trump administration has used lethal force against drug vessels at sea, but it has also suggested that it might do so in the territory of other states, like Venezuela or Mexico. That would be a major escalation, and it raises additional legal issues because the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of UN member states. Unless those states consent, which is unlikely, the administration would probably claim that it was justified because they were unwilling or unable to neutralize the threat against the United States. That would be a radical extension of past precedents, and I believe a misguided one.