One is that the principle of equal representation by population is well established in American history. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention required the members of the House of Representatives to be apportioned according to population as determined by a Census to be conducted within three years and every ten years thereafter. 

This was a remarkable provision — the first example, so far as I know, in which representation was directly linked to population, and in which it was to be adjusted by what was the first regularly scheduled national census. 

The Framers were thinking demographically. They were certainly aware of the 1780s controversy in Britain over “rotten boroughs,” in which a wealthy Indian merchant could elect two members of the House of Commons by buying four pieces of property in Old Sarum. Their numbers included Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1750s accurately predicted that the population of the English-speaking colonies would exceed that of Great Britain in a hundred years. 

The second thing to remember is that the Founders were aware of partisan redistricting. Another signer of the Declaration and member of the Constitutional Convention was Elbridge Gerry, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a state senate redistricting bill that combined a grotesquely shaped group of towns in Essex County into one district, drawn by cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale with the wings and claws of a salamander. This was the original gerrymander (pronounced by purists like Gerry’s surname, with a hard G), which clustered Gerry’s Federalist opponents in a single district.

Congress in 1842 required equal-population districts within a state, but that provision was overturned in the 1929 law, which automatically reapportioned House seats among the states by applying an arithmetic formula to the census results. The predictable result was gerrymanders within the states, topped off by plans jamming the disfavored party’s voters in bloated districts signed by Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and Pat Brown (D-CA) in the nation’s two most populous states in the 1960 cycle.

The Supreme Court ended this in 1964, requiring one-person-one-vote congressional and state legislative districts. As a close student of every redistricting cycle since the 1960 Census, I have observed how the equal population standard severely limits the political gains for even the most partisan redistricters. 

You can only jam so many opposition voters into a limited number of districts. And suppose you create too many 53% districts for your own side. In that case, you risk losing the whole bunch when opinion generally or within specific voting segments 5% the other way, which tends to happen at least once every ten-year interval between censuses. 

You should not believe that computers or artificial intelligence have made gerrymandering more sophisticated. In the 1970s and 1980s, I watched California Democrat Phillip Burton redistrict his state and command legislators in other states to do theirs. He operated with pencil, paper, pocket calculator, and, as he said, “my brain.”

This is a useful background for appraising the uproar over Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to redraw the state’s district lines this summer, which is much louder than when New York Democrats tried something similar last year. The Texan Republicans’ stated purpose is to increase their majority of their state’s House delegation from 25-13 to 30-8, a significant gain considering that Republicans control the current House (with vacancies filled) by just 220-215.

But there was a stench of hypocrisy in the air when Texas Democratic legislators fled to Illinois, where Democrat J. B. Pritzker, in 2021, signed a redistricting plan that gave his party a 14-3 edge. The district shapes, bacon strips emanating from Chicago wards into the prairies and fractal spirals connecting Democratic Downstate nodes, are far more grotesque than any of the Texas Republicans’ seats.

Similar protests and promises of retaliation came from Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York, whose delegation is 19-7 Democratic (and would be more so if a state court had not rejected an even more partisan plan), and Gavin Newsom of California, whose districts (drawn by a supposedly nonpartisan but obviously liberal-leaning independent commission) are currently 43-9 Democratic. 

In two of those states, the 2024 popular vote percentage for Republican House candidates was higher than the 2024 popular vote percentage for Democratic House candidates in Texas. It’s unclear how Democrats would create even safer seats in Illinois or New York. And Newsom has to convince voters to abolish the state’s current commission — not a sure thing, polls suggest — to counter Texas in this electoral cycle. 

Various high-minded folks have been calling for redistricting reform. But it’s hard to take politics out of politics. Supposedly independent state commissions are either pro-Democratic (California) or swing unpredictably from Democratic to Republican (New Jersey, Arizona). 

Critics complain about grotesquely shaped districts, but over the years, most of those have resulted from interpretations of the Voting Rights Act requiring maximizing the number of black- or, less often, Hispanic-majority districts. Those interpretations resulted from fears, justified when the Act was first passed in 1965, that whites would vote near-unanimously against blacks, though as long ago as 1972, a white-majority Atlanta district elected civil rights leader Andrew Young. 

Today, with nearly half the black members of Congress elected in non-black-majority districts and in a nation that has elected and reelected a black president, and with growing numbers of blacks voting Republican, that jurisprudence is on the brink of obsolescence. The Supreme Court has announced it will rehear arguments in a Voting Rights Act case next fall.

So what should be done about gerrymandering? Nothing beyond strictly enforcing the equal population rule, which limits but cannot eliminate partisan district-drawing. As for grotesque shapes, if the Supreme Court takes Justice Potter Stewart’s view of pornography (“I know it when I see it”), that would unleash a tide of partisan litigation which the court wishes to avoid. 

As for grotesque shapes, there are multiple formulas for assessing districts’ compactness, but there’s no principled basis for a court to choose one over another. Congress could choose, as it did in 1929, between equally valid formulas translating Census population results into integer numbers of House seats. But it doesn’t seem eager to address an issue that might put in play proposals to increase its seats from the not-constitutionally-required 435. 

COMMON CAUSE CHANGES TUNE IN CALIFORNIA REDISTRICTING FIGHT

There’s a case where gerrymandering doesn’t make much difference. The ten largest states elect a majority of House members and are currently the only venues where partisan redistricting can switch more than one or two seats. 110 Republicans and 125 Democrats currently represent them. The Texas change would switch that to 115-120. That would be 49% of those states’ seats, the same as the 49% of their popular votes won by Donald Trump there in 2024. 

Maybe the Framers got it right when they opted for the equal population principle as the key to fair representation.

Many opponents of Trump’s policies seem to believe the president wants to cut off legal immigration altogether: shut America’s gates. But in recent times, around 800,000 people have taken the oath to become American citizens. In addition, about 1 million people have been granted green cards each year, making them eligible for citizenship. That’s not a closed gate.

You may argue that we should open the gate wider. I’m inclined to take that view, with the proviso that we reduce the number of extended family members eligible and increase the number of skill-based slots.

You may also argue, as some Trump backers do, that we should reduce legal immigration, with some even calling for cutting it down to zero. But I’m not aware that there’s any realistic prospect for drastic reductions even with a Republican-controlled Congress. Current debate revolves around how, or if, to enforce the law against those not legally here.

One error made by critics on both sides is to say that the United States, until the passage of the restrictive immigration act of 1924, had open borders. And that the bulk of immigrants in those years were, in the words of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Lazarus’s poem was published posthumously. It was an earnest attempt by an affluent New Yorker to seek tolerance for her fellow Jews and for other immigrants that accounted for the vast and apparently unanticipated flow of immigration in the years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 and the opening of the Ellis Island screening station in 1892.

But as Vincent Cannato points out in American Passage, his definitive history of Ellis Island, America had never had unrestricted immigration even before the federal government took over the function from inspecting states in the 19th century.

State and then federal authorities inspected arrivals for infectious disease, particularly tuberculosis, and for being unable to be self-supporting — in the language of the day, “likely to become public charges.” After Ellis Island opened in 1892, Cannato writes, Congress’s “list of reasons immigrants could be excluded at the nation’s gates [grew] longer as the years passed.” Policy became marginally more restrictive even before 1924.

Even so, the large majority of those arriving were admitted. The main reason: the steamship companies refused to carry those who couldn’t afford steerage fares and refused to board those who appeared likely to be rejected on arrival, because rejectees would have to be returned to home port free of charge. The same principle obtains today: Airline gate agents demand to see your passport and visa before allowing you on a flight to destinations requiring visas.

How this worked out in practice is depicted vividly in Steven Ujifusa’s recently published The Last Ships From Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I. This tells the story of Albert Ballin, himself Jewish, who rose to become managing director of the Hamburg-American Line and became a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Under Ballin’s leadership, the company set up an inspection station of its own in Brest, on the western border of czarist Russia, even as that regime was sanctioning violent pogroms against Jews. Those who passed Hamburg-American’s standards were sent by rail to the busy port of Hamburg and then to New York.

Jews were just part of the flow of immigrants from the multiethnic Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires in the Ellis Island era from 1892 to 1914. Interestingly, that flow included relatively few ethnic Russians, Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians, but vast numbers of people who, in an era of rising nationalist sentiment, were from minority ethnic groups — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats.

One of the things that attracted these second-class people to America was the civic equality it promised and largely practiced, at least in the North — almost no immigrants settled in the racially segregated South. These were people, it turned out, who were eager to work, ready to learn English, sought not to undermine American culture but adapt to it and to participate in America’s sometimes rough-and-ready civic politics.

NET NEGATIVE MIGRATION IS HARMFUL TO THE ECONOMY, ECONOMISTS SAY

Many immigration restrictionists claim that the 1924 immigration law, which virtually cut off inflow from eastern and southern Europe, provided for a needed pause that enabled the newcomers to assimilate. I think they were assimilating rapidly anyway and that, in any case, the 1930s depression would have cut off immigration anyway, except for refugees of Nazi persecution whom we would have done well to accept. Even if the 1924 act had not been passed, we would still have experienced the profound assimilative effect, described in Thomas Bruscino’s A Nation Forged in War, of a world war which put 16 million men in a country of 131 million into uniform, bringing together immigrant and native, North and South, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.

It’s a fair question whether the bulk of immigrants today have the assimilative impulse of the Ellis Islanders or the adversary impulse of the handful of revolutionaries in their ranks. My own sense is that the poisonous dogma that America’s history is a continuing epic of vicious oppressors inflicting violent on virtuous victims is a product more of our elite colleges and universities rather than of the Latin, Asian and African cultures that supply most current legal immigrants, and that in the future as perhaps in the past we have more to fear from internal rot than from foreign infection.

There are two structural reasons for this. One is that parties in power tend to do things or produce results that some voters dislike. The second reason is that out-party candidates can adapt to local terrain, focusing on issues on which the president’s party’s stands are unpopular. But that depends on the out-party being an acceptable alternative. 

Which leads to the clue referred to above. Politico’s Andrew Howard reports that former Democrats Brian Bengs in South Dakota (Trump +29 in 2024) and Todd Achilles in Idaho (Trump +36) are joining former Democrat Dan Osborn of Nebraska (Trump +20) to run for senator as self-declared independents, with no credible Democrat in the race. 

Osborn did so in 2024, scaring incumbent Republican Rep. Deb Fischer while losing by only 6 points. This was an improvement on Greg Orman’s 2014 independent candidacy in Kansas, where he lost by 11 points in a state that was +22 Republican for president two years before. 

Why are these Democrats, some in states such as South Dakota and Nebraska that have reelected Democratic senators in recent years, shunning the Democratic label? Most likely because, in a country of increased straight-ticket voting, they believe the Democratic label is political poison.  

After four years of the Biden administration, the Pew Research Center said the presidential electorate moved from +6 Democratic in 2020 to +1 Republican in 2024, with Republicans close to equal among under-30 voters. “For months now,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, “We’ve observed a new trend in polling: the Democratic party’s favorability ratings have fallen below the GOP’s. That’s hardly ever happened before.”

The Wall Street Journal’s July 16-20 poll shows that 63% of voters have negative feelings about the Democrats, the highest since 1990. That poll also showed Republicans maintaining their 2024 lead in party identification, in sharp contrast to Trump’s first term. And it showed pluralities of voters favored Republicans even on issues on which majorities disapproved of Donald Trump’s most recent actions, including the economy, tariffs, immigration, foreign policy, and Ukraine.

It looks like the Democrats’ baggage, especially from the Biden years, is heavier than the loads Trump Republicans must juggle. Democrats’ credibility has been damaged as their arguments, one after another, have proven to be based on lies: the Russia collusion hoax, COVID-19 school closings, “transitory” inflation, the Hunter Biden laptop, and open borders immigration. 

All of which suggests that Democrats’ hopes of overturning the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority may rest more on independents running in Trump-heavy states than on purple state Democrats. And, despite conventional wisdom, there’s a cognizable chance that Republicans will not lose the narrow 220-215 majority they won in the House of Representatives in 2020.

Once upon a time, in the split-ticket voting era, Democrats maintained their large House majority in 1972 despite Richard Nixon’s 61% landslide by winning fully half the seats in House districts Nixon carried. Those days are gone. In 2024, voters in only 16 House districts split their ticket between president and congressman.

The Democrats’ problem is that Republicans are defending only three districts carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris, while Democrats are defending 13 seats won by Donald Trump. That’s one of the reasons that Steve Kornacki, to the dismay of his MSNBC audience, says Republicans could hold on to the House. 

Meanwhile, Harry Enten dismays his CNN audience by pointing out that the narrow leads Democrats enjoy in House generic vote polling leave them not nearly as well-positioned for 2026 as they were at this point in 2005 and 2017 for their big gains in 2006 and 2018. 

Core Democratic hatred of and obsession with Donald Trump will certainly have them stomping to the off-year polls, and Trump Republicans’ newly biracial and young male coalition may not be similarly motivated. But Republican gains are widespread while Democratic gains are scarcely visible. As Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen writes, “It’s currently not possible to identify any cohort of potential first-time Dem voters.”

Trump has gained a percentage over three elections, as the New York Times’s brilliant graphics pointed out. In 1,433 counties with 42 million people, while his Democratic opponents gained three times in only 57 counties with 8 million people. “For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side,” Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar tweeted, “Now, the inverse is true.”

The veteran liberal reporter Thomas Edsall portrays in his New York Times online column a “realignment with staying power” and fears. “The real possibility that discontent with the Democratic party—its perceived failure to value work, its political correctness, the extremity of its social and cultural liberalism—might have become deeply embedded in the electorate.”

THE GENDER GAP GROWS WIDER AND WIDER

Meanwhile, the economic numbers are coming in more positively than those who predicted doom in April from Trump’s tariffs (I called them “lunatic”), and as analyst Nate Silver writes, “There remains a strong case that voters are concerned about the economy and the cost of living, but that everything else is priced in.” As for the fuss over the Epstein tapes, Silver writes, “It looks like we’re back to the usual pattern: the overwhelming majority of voters either already hate Trump, or are happy to shrug off his scandals.” 

“The country is moving toward Trump,” says Chris Matthews, onetime staffer for Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill. “They want a president who is a strong figure. And he‘s got it. And half the country buys it.” Nothing’s inevitable in politics, but so far, the Democrats have not gotten up off the floor.

You might expect former presidents to supply elements of personal comity and institutional norms to current politics, and sometimes they do. Certainly, the few periods with no living former presidents have been times of stress when incumbents might have called on seasoned predecessors for advice.

Presidents in those periods faced threatened war with France (1799-1801), violent resistance to Reconstruction (1875-77), the Great Depression (1933), and Watergate (1973-74). During the only quiet ex-president-less period (1908-09), Theodore Roosevelt witnessed the return of the White Fleet’s voyage around the world.

But having a lot of ex-presidents around hasn’t always helped. The only period before the 1990s with five living former presidents was between March 1861 and January 1862, when Abraham Lincoln faced secession of the Confederate states. None were Lincoln voters, and none gave him much support.

One, John Tyler, was elected to the Confederate Congress. Footnote: Tyler was born in 1790. His grandson Harrison Tyler died in May. These two Tylers spanned almost all the 250 years.

Americans did not have five living ex-presidents again until Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, and we’ve had at least four except for 25 months in 2006-09. I remember suggesting to the White House social secretary that he sponsor a six-president event, but that never happened. However, the young incumbent and Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush attended Richard Nixon’s funeral in April 1994.

Clinton, presumably aware of voters’ continued respect for the men he succeeded, seemed to carefully refrain from blaming them for his woes. George W. Bush, aware of his father’s respect for Clinton, behaved similarly. This was a stark contrast of the hostility and noncommunication between the onetime confreres but then rivals — Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

On the surface, that comity has continued. Five presidents, including the incoming and outgoing incumbents, attended the Trump inaugurations in 2017 and 2025.

But none had endorsed him, not entirely surprisingly given his vitriolic attacks, going back to the 1980s, on the immigration and trade policies of both parties. Those attacks continued, but it’s worth noting that the Clinton-Bush comity was past history even before the dramatic escalator descent in June 2015.

Barack Obama, taking office after the financial crisis of 2008 and the successful execution of the still unopposed Iraq conflict he had long opposed, did not leave off his criticism of his immediate predecessor after his victory speech. Nor did he deal with his party’s defeat in the 2010 midterm elections by engaging successfully, as Clinton had with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans after 1994 and Bush with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats after 2006.

Instead, his administration responded, as conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell recalls, with Internal Revenue Service persecution of Tea Party activists. And Obama himself, nettled by repeated charges by Trump and others that he was born in Kenya, after finally releasing his long-form Hawaii birth certificate, days later launched a lengthy attack on Trump, seated in the audience, at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Some reporters believe that attack prompted Trump’s candidacy.

Then there is the fact, underlined by documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week, that in December 2016, after Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, “the [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the president’s request [italics added], that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”

Within days, newspapers printed leaked accounts of the bogus Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign — critical fuel for the Russia collusion hoax. Whether and how much the outgoing president was involved in the project of delegitimizing the incoming president, based on fake documentation, is a question that the press has shown little or no interest in addressing, just as it has shown little interest in why he is the first president since the invalided Woodrow Wilson to stay in Washington, in a house bought for $8 million, after his time in office.

Blaming your party’s election loss on foreign interference or collusion was once known as “red baiting” and “McCarthyism.” The norm in the past, observed by Bill Clinton in 2000, was for a president to accept the result, however disputed, and not to cast a pall of illegitimacy over his successor. Obama, at the least, failed to fulfill what was arguably his duty to prevent that from happening.

One might reply that Trump failed much more grievously to uphold that norm by challenging the result of the 2020 election and inspiring the pro-Trump crowd’s assault on the Capitol. I agreed at the time and agree today. “While Trump’s exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn’t constitute a criminal incitement,” I wrote then, “they were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”

TULSI GABBARD’S BIG MOMENT

Reversing this spiral may turn out to be a task for the next generation. This has happened before. The five ex-presidents in 1993 were among the seven from the GI Generation (born 1908-24) who served over the preceding 32 years. The five presidents elected to serve the 36 years up to 2029 include three leading-edge baby boomers (all born in 1946), one late boomer (1961), and one pre-boomer (1942).

After electing 78-year-old candidates in 2020 and 2024, Americans are surely ready to choose someone from a later generation in 2028. Will that president, with several ex-presidents in their 80s plus one over 65, reverse the negative spiral?

All three conclude that President Donald Trump owed his first popular vote plurality to gains from racial minorities, especially Hispanics, and from the young, especially men. The result, as a Pew chart shows, is a less racially polarized electorate, contrary to the many earlier analyses that Trump’s supposed “racism” would repel minority voters.

This also confounds the optimistic projections of Democrats like pollster Stan Greenberg that Democrats would benefit from an “ascendant majority” of groups — Hispanics, millennials, and college graduates — destined to be a growing share of the electorate. 

The Associated Press, Catalist, and Pew reports also take note of what is now old news: the sharp polarization of white college graduates and white nongraduates. That came as a surprise in 2016: There was so little difference between these groups in previous elections that most pollsters didn’t disaggregate results according to levels of education.  

Now, the contrast is stark. The Associated Press’s Vote Cast showed former Vice President Kamala Harris carrying white college graduates 53-45 and Trump carrying noncollege white people by a whopping 65-34. And while white college graduates moved slightly toward Trump in 2024, the education gap hasn’t narrowed nearly as much as the racial and ethnic gap.

There’s no doubt that Hispanic, millennial, and Generation Z voters will be an increasing proportion of voters in the coming years and that their reduced or vanishing Democratic margins are bad news for that party. But will that be offset by the continuing growth of white college graduates casting relatively steady Democratic margins?

Don’t count on it. Current trends suggest the population of college graduates may be starting to decline, after more or less constant growth since World War II, from 5% of the adult population in 1940 to 38% in 2022.   

Now, the population of future college graduates looks set to decline. Births in the United States peaked in 2007 at 4.32 million, almost identical to the baby boom peak of 4.31 million in 1957.

The number of births then dropped through the Great Recession, down to 3.62 million in 2024, a 16% drop. That means fewer Americans graduating from high school and applying to college in 2025 and 2026, with numbers declining into the 2040s.

That’s not just a projection; it’s a continuation of a dozen-year trend. Higher education (college and university) full-time enrollment peaked in 2012 at 11.6 million, dropped to 10.1 million in COVID-stricken 2020, a 13% drop, and has rebounded only slightly since.

With surveys showing that as many as a third of corporations drop college degree requirements for job applicants, one significant incentive for enrollment may be declining. 

Moreover, the job market for recent graduates has been declining over the last dozen years, as Derek Thompson noted in the Atlantic this spring, and may continue to deteriorate as artificial intelligence becomes more common. As he noted, the lifetime earnings gap between college and high school graduates stopped widening in 2010. 

Young people may be getting the news. An increasing number of teenagers are expressing interest in trade schools and apprenticeships, which can lead to higher-paying work than many college majors. Young men, especially, may be taking this route, avoiding 60-percent-plus female colleges with, as one conservative put it, “campuses patrolled by the feminist thought police.”

There seems little question that the “woke” perspective of both high-paid professors and low-paid adjuncts has had some effect in shaping the political views of college graduates and widening the chasm between those of white graduates and nongraduates. 

There’s also little question that many young people are not wired to benefit from higher education. The G.I. Bill of Rights beginning in the 1940s and the post-Sputnik scholarship school aid beginning in the 1950s enabled many people with the requisite skills and temperament to earn college and professional degrees, to great national benefit.

But such people are never going to be 100% of the population, and if 5% is too low, perhaps 38% is too high. Generous student loans and promised loan forgiveness may have overshot the mark, and today, the Biden loan forgiveness program is gone, and Trump’s limits on student loans have become law. 

For the larger society, subsidizing “woke” colleges and universities, with their speech codes and racial quotas, may have become not a value-added but a value-detracted segment of the economy. Higher education, long a growth industry, is at risk of decline.

‘JEWISH STUDENTS DON’T FEEL SAFE’: GOP SLAMS UNIVERSITY RESPONSE TO ANTISEMITISM

In any case, in electoral politics, the promise of an ever-increasing body of college graduates permanently swelling an ascendant Democratic majority seems uncertain of fulfillment, even as long-standing 9-1 majorities among black people and 2-1 among Hispanic people have been regressing toward the national mean.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans are guaranteed anything like a permanent majority. Far from it. It means that our partisan politics will continue to be sharply divided, with developments that help one party with one group sooner or later helping the other party with another. And election results will continue to be affected, in ways that almost no one anticipates, by developments like those that followed that escalator ride 10 years and one month ago. 

That spurred political journalists to emit multiple articles examining just exactly what was on women’s minds and probing their different and presumably superior opinions. The assumption was that the gender gap was costing Republicans votes. Being of a contrary disposition, in October 1982, I wrote an opinion article entitled (paraphrasing Sigmund Freud), What Do Men Want?

For most of four decades, the gender gap wobbled around three or four points. Now, coinciding and perhaps not accidentally with the era of President Donald Trump, it is bigger. In 2024, according to analyst Daniel Cox, the gender gap was 11 points among black voters, 12 points among white voters, and 13 points among Hispanics.  

And it seems to be getting wider among the young. Democratic pollster David Shor sees a gender gap of around five percent among over-70s and around 10% among those 35 to 70, dwarfed by a gap skyrocketing among the young, up above 20%. 

Polling analyst Nate Silver, probing the sharp differences in partisan preference among young men and young women — men are far more Republican, women far more Democratic — built on long-standing findings that women tend to be more risk-averse than men. “Young men take a more risk-on view of the economy,” he wrote, while Democrats “emphasize security — minimizing downside risk — above the opportunity to compete and maximizing upside outcomes.”

On a related issue, Silver notes the long-standing research on happiness that shows young men are significantly more likely than young women to self-describe as happy, and other research showing that self-described conservatives report themselves much happier than self-described liberals. 

On happiness studies, as Silver notes, age and religiosity matter a lot — religious people are happier, young people are sadder — but the liberal/conservative gap outweighs almost all other characteristics except age.”

“I was honestly surprised by how strong the relationship is,” Silver writes in a passage many of his political analyst readers found stunning. “Among voters who report poor mental health, liberals outnumber conservatives 45 to 19 percent. Among those who report excellent mental health, conservatives outnumber liberals 51-20.”

He concludes that young men being “lower on agreeableness and neuroticism” than women translates into greater support for Trump and for what has become a Trump Republican Party.

More partisan analysts attribute the growing gender gap among the young to young women’s greater neuroticism. Reflecting on results of a survey on whether doctors have ever told respondents they have a mental health problem, Republican staffer Andrew Follett, in a partisan and perhaps hysterical tone, tweets, “Literally half of young left wing woman . . . the cat ladies who are the basis for their party . . . are mentally ill. Young left wing MEN are more mentally ill than conservative WOMEN. . . . “ 

Lest you think this comment is hyperbolic, consider a recent description of America today by Taylor Lorenz, a social media writer who is far enough from the fringe to have been hired and given bylines by both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In one characteristic tweet in 2023, the constant mask-wearing Lorenz presented an ultra-pessimistic view of America and the world. “We’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.” 

A more measured view comes from the Republican pollster and author Patrick Ruffini. “Unhappiness is a feature of being on the left these days. A greater belief in societal ills is internalized, reinforced by being online 24/7. They talk often about right-wingers or Trump policies literally killing people.”

The partisan gender gap is perhaps the least dangerous result of this frenzied and breathtakingly ahistoric mindset. Talk show host Erick Erickson points to the Axios report that a House Democrat says constituents say “what we really need to do is be willing to be shot.” Dangerous speculations in a time of two assassination attempts on the president and armed assaults on ICE facilities in Texas.

LIBBY DROPS CENSURE LAWSUIT IN MAINE

Then there is the evidence of less contact between young men and women, with romances discouraged on campuses and at workplaces, fewer marriages, increasing childlessness, and below-replacement birth rates, which threaten the fundamentals of society. But that’s a bigger subject, for another day.

The partisan gender gap, begun some forty years ago as feminists decried toxic masculinity, has been widening in recent years as bros recoil at toxic femininity. In time, perhaps it will narrow, with a greater appreciation of non-toxic humanity.

You will not encounter much in the way of exhilaration in similar milieus today at Israel’s multifront and even more astonishing victory, capped off by the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, in what is now called the 12-day war of June 2025. In contrast to the success in 1967, when there was minimal American involvement, this success owed much to American collaboration, appropriately kept secret before the fact.

It came also amid a series of significant and largely unexpected policy successes for Donald Trump — China trade concessions, NATO summit agreeing to 5% of GDP defense spending, Supreme Court overturning of single-judge national injunctions, G7 finance ministers climb-down on global corporate tax, negotiation of a Rwanda-Congo peace deal, Canada’s repeal of a digital services tax, S&P stock index all-time high, Senate passage of the “big, beautiful bill.” We are at “Peak Trump,” as Matthew Continetti wrote in the Free Press. 

Democrats’ sour responses to Trump’s domestic successes, based on some mix of principled disagreements and opportunistic politicking, are understandable. Their sour responses to the Israeli and American success against the Iranian regime’s nuclear program are another matter. 

The result of the Six-Day War elated both liberal and conservative Americans. The result so far of the 12-day war was, by many Democrats and many in the press, denounced as the overture to a massive ground war like the 2003 Iraq invasion and deconstructed by leaked memos suggesting the mullahs would have their nuclear weapons program up and running in a few weeks. 

It’s hard to resist the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mead’s conclusion that Trump’s second term is “the most consequential foreign-policy presidency since Richard Nixon left the White House.” His scorn for outworn shibboleths and changed circumstances has produced successes that deserve respect, if not total agreement from his domestic opponents, instead of the knee-jerk opposition and shopworn sloganeering seen so far. 

The aggressive nationalism of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, both rooted in historic tradition, has relegated the hopes of the Clinton and Bush eras that a post-communist Russia and a post-impoverished China would adhere to international rules and foreswear predatory expansion. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has prompted NATO partners, which ignored the Obama administration’s quiet goal of 2% defense spending, to agree to Trump’s louder demand and meet his raise to 5%. Far from destroying NATO, as his critics feared, he has strengthened it.

Similarly, he has ignored demands, like those of 2024 vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, that he pressure Israel to accept the outworn goal of a “two-state solution.” Instead, he is working for a Middle East free from the Iranian nuclear threat and open to mutually beneficial agreements like his first-term Abraham Accords. 

Trump’s adherence to his pre-escalator vows that Iran should not get nuclear weapons, while flummoxing supporters like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, has surely gotten Putin’s and Xi’s attention.

They surely didn’t miss, when Israel began its precision bombing and targeted drone attacks on June 13, that Trump told Reuters that he had given Iran 60 days to reach an agreement, “and today is the 61st day.” 

Democrats were still busy disparaging Trump’s willingness to back down on trade deals with the acronym TACO (“Trump always chickens out”). But Xi may not want to risk a 61st day on Taiwan. And while Democrats dismiss Trump’s boast that Putin didn’t launch an attack on Ukraine while he was president, the fact is that he didn’t. Will he risk a 61st day surprise if Trump, losing confidence as his recent statements suggest he has in his good intentions, sets a time limit on his aggression in Ukraine?

Israel’s strikes on Iran, the historian Niall Ferguson posted, are “a decisive victory for the West.” Just as the Six-Day War largely removed the threat of Israel being overrun, the 12-day war largely removed the threat of Israel being annihilated by an Iranian nuclear attack.  

WHEN WILL THE B-2S RETURN TO IRAN

The Six-Day War was followed in time by Nixon’s resupply of Israel in the October War of 1973 and by his simultaneous maneuver of splitting Russia and China in what had been a stalemated bipolar world. His opening to China, though criticized in both parties’ presidential primaries, was followed by presidents of both parties past well behind what now appears to have been its sell-by date.

What will follow the 12-day war can’t be known for sure. But it looks like Trump’s policies have moved toward a more peaceful Middle East, a Europe more alert to Russian aggression, and perhaps an increasing caution by the leaders of Russia and China. These are consequential achievements, like Nixon’s, that deserve to be taken seriously even by the president’s detractors.

Mamdani, 33, is a three-term state assemblyman who calls himself a Democratic Socialist. He has backed a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses, putting homeless service centers in the subways, a $30 minimum wage, defunding the police, and replacing police with “community safety” officers. 

His tweeting history includes “NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #Defund the NYPD”, “Queer liberation means defund the police” and “Defunding the police is a feminist issue.”

Why did Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo, who, like his father, was elected three times as governor? One reason: he’s a likeable candidate with clever, memorable ads and a vigorous personal campaigner who inspired thousands of volunteers. He undeniably has charm, something hard to define but easy to spot: think former Presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. 

He’s also capable of the seasoned politician’s slippery evasion. Asked by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller if he was troubled by the slogan “global intifada”, he said he considers it “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He doesn’t note the clear meaning: mass murder of Jews, everywhere.

Mamdani was also helped by the weaknesses of Cuomo, 67, who resigned as governor in 2021 in response to 13 charges of sexual harassment and backlash to his ordering of COVID-19-infected patients back to nursing homes. He jumped into the mayor’s race in response to other candidates’ weaknesses, after not having lived in the city for nearly 30 years. His campaign style is abrasive, even by New York standards. 

Cuomo’s defeat is further evidence that the Democratic Party is having trouble producing a new generation of non-radical big-city politicians. Another example is the 2023 election of teacher union honcho Brandon Johnson, 49, to be mayor of Chicago over former school board head Paul Vallas, 72.

As the New York Times’s exquisite graphic maps of the election results show, Cuomo carried the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn, which are full of affluent white college graduates who are an increasingly dominant force in the national Democratic Party.

Cuomo also carried large black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens and Hispanic areas in the Bronx, though not by large margins, and won the city’s scattered white ethnic areas more robustly. When his father, Mario Cuomo, ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor in 1977, carrying those blocs, even narrowly, would have guaranteed victory. There weren’t that many other voters. 

It’s different now. Mamdani won by huge margins from the same constituency that cast the critical votes for Brandon Johnson in Chicago. It’s the same constituency that in 2021 in New York was the base of Maya Wiley, who won slightly more first-choice votes than Kathryn Garcia, whose base was affluent Manhattan, but fewer than the winner, incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose base was blacks in Brooklyn and Queens.  

That constituency is mostly, but by no means totally, white. It tends to have higher levels of education than income, and it skews young — Millennials and Gen Z. If you’re under 30, one Mamdani ad explained that Andrew Cuomo hasn’t lived in New York City since before you were born. 

I have called this constituency the “barista proletariat,” made up of people with temporary jobs in service industries, non-profit organizations or media, perpetual grad students or adjunct lecturers who supplement their incomes often by gaming welfare systems and working off the books. You could see them as economic parasites on Manhattan’s rich finance and media wealth. They prefer to see themselves as cultural rebels against the larger society’s complacency and intolerance. 

Geographically, these voters are concentrated in formerly ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods connected to Manhattan by subway lines, such as Astoria, Queens, where Mamdani won his Assembly seat by beating an incumbent in 2020, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn. The Chicago equivalent is the far North Side, reachable by the L but distant from the Loop and the Lakefront.

Many such New York neighborhoods emptied, especially in the high-crime and civic-bankruptcy 1970s, as white ethnics fled to Long Island, the Jersey Shore, and Florida; the city’s population fell by nearly 1 million people. 

Since then, the hugely effective policing policies of former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg prevented the kind of devastation you see in much of Detroit and St. Louis and, ironically, made these outer borough neighborhoods safe for the barista proletariat, while the state’s rollback of rent controls that incentivized landlords to maintain livable structures. 

But for the barista proletariat, those achievements are part of a past that is not forgotten but which is not known to have ever existed — no more familiar than the hustling entrepreneurs who erected their neighborhoods’ buildings in the early 20th century or the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and black families that lived and raised families in them in the pre-air-conditioned days of what I have called the Midcentury Moment. 

The counting of second, third, fourth, and fifth choices in New York’s ranked choice system will continue into July, although Mamdani’s nomination is certain and already makes nonsense of ranked choice-voting advocates’ claims that it favors centrist candidates. 

Certainly, Mamdani seems the favorite to win in November. Cuomo is obviously a spent force, and Mamdani is clearly a much smarter and more attractive figure than Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, whose job approval is just barely in the double digits. 

REPUBLICANS SEE OPPORTUNITY IN ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S NYC MAYORAL PRIMARY WIN

But Adams is running as an Independent, and despite a now-dismissed and bizarre federal indictment, he might try to cobble together a constituency of Cuomo-voting Democrats and Republicans in a city where President Donald Trump’s percentage of the vote rose from 18% in 2016 to 30% in 2024. One possible tactic is to promise to keep his popular police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

The barista proletariat has established itself as a significant and sometimes decisive constituency in Democratic primaries. But its agenda may prove disqualifying in larger arenas.

In such times, a historian’s perspective may be helpful. Fortunately, the two most eminent English-language historians (pace, Tucker Carlson) have weighed in with analysis. 

“There are some moments in history,” writes Andrew Roberts, author of deeply sourced and bestselling biographies of Winston Churchill, George III, and Napoleon, in The Free Press, “when a sudden act of opportune ruthlessness readjusts the world toward a safer path.” He cites Francis Drake’s fireship attack on the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Winston Churchill’s agonizing decision in July 1940 to destroy the French navy lest it fall into the hands of Hitler’s Nazis.

Roberts salutes Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering Israel’s multipronged and astonishingly sophisticated attacks on the mullah regime in Iran. He contrasts this with Barack Obama’s “adamant and repeated refusal to help the Iranian opposition” and his “cringing, appeasing … neither joint … nor comprehensive” 2015 nuclear agreement. 

Echoing Netanyahu, he writes that “we should believe the threats of dictators.” Donald Trump, he concludes, “should act with Churchillian ruthlessness” and use America’s bunker-buster bombs and destroy Iran’s as yet untouched Fordow nuclear operation. 

Ferguson makes reference to his fellow British historian Niall Ferguson and his “Axis of Ill Will” — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Ferguson elaborates on these at much greater length in The Free Press and in an interview last month with Noema magazine editor Nathan Gardels. 

There, he advances two propositions disregarded by most American analysts. One is that this Axis has been waging a Cold War II against the United States and its allies since around 2018. The other is that Trump “is a pacifist at heart who prefers trade wars to real wars.” That helps account for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s initial insistence that Israel acted on its own last Friday and Trump’s statement that gave them a 60-day warning, “and today is day 61.” 

Ferguson, currently writing the second volume of his authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, puts this in a longer perspective. He rejects Gardel’s view that Trump is dismantling what Gardels calls “a liberal international order of free trade and trusted alliances across a unified West.” 

Instead, America was operating since 1945 as an empire, enlisting Europe as a useful partner on Berlin in 1957-62 and on deploying Pershing missiles in 1979-83 and surviving “a window of great danger” in the Vietnam years by Kissinger’s playing off China against Russia. Then, having won Cold War I in 1989-91, we relaxed, hoping Russia and China would move toward democracy. Alas, that allowed room for Vladimir Putin to revive Russia, Xi Jinping to inflame Chinese nationalism, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to keep pursuing genocide against Israel.  

Now we’re facing Cold War II, with Xi’s China a more formidable competitor than Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia. The Biden administration’s “disastrous failure of deterrence” in the Afghan withdrawal of August 2021 led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Hamas’s assault on Israel in October 2023. 

In Ferguson’s view, Netanyahu “had to act” after the International Atomic Energy Commission censured Iran for expanding its nuclear weapons program and because Iran had been weakened by Israel’s destruction of the attack power of its allies Hamas and Hezbollah. And now Trump, who has proclaimed many times, going back to 2011, that Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, seems poised to act as well. 

Neither Russia, whose maximalist demands on Ukraine Trump has declined to take seriously, nor China, which has emerged as the chief target of Trump’s tariff war, seems to be giving any support to Khamenei and his dwindling regime. As Trump pointed out to CNN’s Dana Bash, “They didn’t die of COVID.”   

While many on the Left like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and some on the right like former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson oppose any U.S. military action against Iran, polling earlier this year showed supermajorities of voters favor the destruction of Iran’s “nuclear weapons facilities.” The upshot is that the final public verdict on any actions will come not in this week’s polling but over the long term.

But the vibes are running against characterizing Israel as an exploitative colonial settlement and Iran’s mullahs as oppressed victims. As Ferguson accurately notes, “the Great Awokening,” a powerful force five years ago, has inspired  “a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.”   

No better reflection of this backlash than Monday’s New York Times editorial, headlined as “advice to voters” on the June 24 Democratic primary for mayor of New York. 

Remember that James Bennet lost his job as the New York Times’s editorial page editor in 2020 for printing Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) call for deploying the National Guard in response to violent rioting following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The same newsroom personnel who demanded Bennet’s scalp a month later also drove out New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who co-founded The Free Press, which published Roberts’s and Ferguson’s articles cited here.

This year, the New York Times editorial declined to endorse a candidate for mayor, but urged New York City Democrats not to give any of their five votes in the ranked choice primary to left-wing Councilman Zohran Mamdani. He has zoomed to second place in polls, behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with a series of charming video ads and what the New York Times characterizes as “an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.”

These include a rent freeze (“could restrict housing supply”), government-run grocery stores (“as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector”), and cuts in the police department (“little concern about the disorder of the past decade”). Mamdani, a Muslim, in a Bulwark interview published Monday, declined to criticize the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which he said meant standing up for Palestinian rights.

Mamdani won his city council seat in a primary in riot-torn June 2020, beating a Greek-surnamed incumbent in formerly ethnic Astoria, Queens, filled up this century with young low-income whites, college grads, and perpetual students within an easy subway commute of Manhattan. Mamdani’s own resume includes rap musician and foreclosure prevention counselor.

As my study of the New York Times’s excellent election graphics shows, that’s the “barista proletariat” constituency that elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023. His lax policies on crime and his hugely generous contract with former teacher union colleagues have left his job approval as low as 14% this year. 

TRUMP ELEVATES STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY TO AN ART FORM

“A neoconservative,” said the late Irving Kristol, “is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” Some angry MAGA figures have been calling Trump a neoconservative for his insistence that Iran not get nuclear weapons, and in their view, Netanyahu is a neoconservative too, and so are the great majority of Israeli voters. 

The New York Times editorial page, which used to excoriate Rudy Giuliani’s and Michael Bloomberg’s policing policies, seems, with perhaps a side glance at what’s happening in Chicago, to have been mugged by reality too, and is perhaps now following Weiss’s lead. Events have been moving fast — and, as Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson suggest, some history is being made, or remade.  

His job approval, which jutted downward after he announced his “liberation day” tariffs on April 2, has recovered and hovers just below 50%. That’s just about the level of Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s approval at this point in their second terms and above his own approval at any point in his first term.

Many continue to regard some top appointments as eccentric. His style of discourse, OFTEN IN ALL CAPS, is eccentric by any past presidential standard. But in a political system that remains democratic and is increasingly demotic, that which sounds coarse to you (and me) is apparently acceptable to most people. 

As for his, um, unusual appointments, they may make sense for a president who is less interested in fine-tuning organizations than in affecting the behaviors of mass publics. 

Candidate Donald Trump in 2024 promised that he would eliminate shortfalls in military recruitment, which he attributed to the Biden Pentagon’s “woke” policies. He pointed out accurately that the Army and Navy fell short of recruitment goals by as much as 25% in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. 

As defense secretary, he named Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth, saying he’d promote a warfighting ethos that would attract un-woke young men and women to join up. The Army raised its recruiting goal from 55,000 to 61,000 and reached it in May, four months early. 

Maybe that’s a coincidence or a response to other factors. But it looks like Trump’s rhetoric made a big difference.

Or look at trade. Trump has made no secret of his love for tariffs and his desire to reduce trade with China. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that China’s exports to the U.S. in May were the lowest since Covid-wracked February 2020. It looks like thousands of American and Chinese market participants have made new decisions in response to Trump’s rhetoric. 

Meanwhile, the May job numbers in the U.S. increased by a more-than-expected 139,000, despite a 60,000 reduction in federal jobs since January. And despite a drop of foreign-born workers in the labor market estimated between 773,000 and 1,000,000 since March. 

Three-quarters of a million to a million — those numbers dwarf the number of annual deportations from the interior of the U.S. as compiled by my Washington Examiner colleague Conn Carroll. 

Those range from 65,000 in the last year of the Obama administration and from 28,000 to 47,000 in the four Biden years. They were higher, 81,000 to 95,000, in the first three years of Trump I and then fell to 62,000 in Covid year 2020. 

These numbers put in perspective the drama that has been playing out in Los Angeles this past week. The Trump administration cannot expect that it can, logistically, remove all the untold millions of illegal immigrants that whoever was running the Biden administration (no one, including the authors of Original Sin, has disclosed just who that was) allowed into the U.S. But splashy raids and deportations can get hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of illegal immigrants thinking about what Mitt Romney in 2012 called “self-deportation.”

Which is probably happening thanks to what has been happening in Los Angeles these past five days. Demonstrations against ICE deportation activity resulted in the arrest of the head of the SEIU, the big government employees’ union. When “sanctuary city” Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) let the rioting go on, Trump nationalized the California National Guard and dispatched Marines. 

He plainly had the authority to do so when federal law enforcement is blocked, and as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York recounts. And the Supreme Court in 2012 made it clear that federal immigration law prevails over countervailing state law. 

There’s no question whose side the public is on. A pre-riot CBS poll showed 54% approving of Trump’s deportation program, and two polls taken this week showed approval, Insider Advantage by 59% to 39%, and the Napolitan News poll by 58% to 36%. 

After eight years of stark contrast between Trump and Democrats’ policies, as CNN poll analyst Harry Enten points out, most voters give Trump high marks and “believe that Democrats don’t have a clue on the issue of immigration.” 

Similarly, voters who remember Democrats’ insistence and journalists’ assurances that Joe Biden was fully functional are skeptical that the L.A. rioters were “overwhelmingly peaceful” (Kamala Harris) or “largely peaceful” (the New York Times).

There’s ample historic precedent for Trump’s action as well. President Eisenhower in 1957 and President Johnson in 1965 sent in federal troops to uphold federal law over the opposition of Democratic governors in Arkansas and Alabama.

Those governors were defying federal law for a cause, preservation of racial segregation, that the vast majority of voters, after a decade of reflection, were determined to reject. Today’s California Democrats are defying federal law for a cause, permanent amnesty for illegal immigrants, which it appears that voters, after a decade of reflection, are bent on rejecting as well. 

GAVIN NEWSOM’S BIG LOS ANGELES RIOT LIE

As for the illegal immigrants themselves, I’m not aware that anyone has conducted a poll of them, or could, since people in their situation are wary of being interviewed. But as the workforce numbers suggest, for many, self-deportation, together perhaps with the Department of Homeland Security’s $1,000 travel stipend, is looking like a good option. One that may be taken up by many more than are legally deported.  

So “how’s he doin”? Better, perhaps, than his critics think.