Author: TheGuardian

Ben Wikler spent so much time poring over polls ahead of the midterm elections that it eventually became too much to bear. “I was throwing up with anxiety,” said Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic party. It was not merely out of concern, common to Democrats nationwide in the run-up to the early November vote, that voters were set to give their candidates the traditional drubbing of the party in power, powered by Joe Biden’s unpopularity or the wobbly state of the economy. Rather, Wikler feared that in Wisconsin his party was on the brink of something worse: permanent...

The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric. Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind. At the core of the Dobbs decision lies...

Christians in the United States may become a minority group by 2070 if recent trends continue, according to data released by the Pew Research Center. To predict how the American religious landscape will change over the next 50 years, the center posed several questions: “What if Christians keep leaving religion at the same rate observed in recent years? What if the pace of religious switching continues to accelerate? What if switching were to stop, but other demographic trends – such as migration, births and deaths – were to continue at current rates?” The center modeled four hypothetical scenarios, based...

A campaign ad from Mehmet Oz, candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, is vintage Republican strategy: casting a Democratic opponent as soft on crime. The party is zeroing in on fears over public safety ahead of November’s midterm elections in an effort to change the conversation from abortion, climate or democracy. But Republicans’ own claim to be the party of law and order is this time undermined, critics say, by the behavior of its party leaders. Former president Donald Trump, who is under myriad criminal, civil and congressional investigations, is not alone. Many senior Republicans have rallied to...

An independent commission has recommended that the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy. Panel members in September rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names. Retired Army Brig. General Ty...