1. The likely 2024 presidential election campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begins with no clear leader, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS after President Joe Biden ended his bid for reelection. Trump holds 49% support among registered voters nationwide to Harris’ 46%, a finding within the poll’s margin of sampling error. That’s a closer contest than earlier CNN polling this year had found on the matchup between Biden and Trump. The survey finds voters widely supportive of both Biden’s decision to step aside and his choice to remain in office through the end of his term. Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are broadly enthusiastic about Harris and willing to coalesce around her as the new presumptive nominee, even as they remain deeply divided on whether Biden’s Democratic successor should seek to continue his policies or chart a new course. (Source: cnn.com)
2. Charles Homans:
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Read the rest. (Source: nytimes.com)
3. Many Americans regularly worry they won’t be able to make ends meet. Nearly four in ten (39%) of US adults say they worry most or all of the time that their family’s income won’t be enough to meet expenses, according to a new CNN poll. That’s up from 28% who expressed those concerns in December 2021, and it’s similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%). To cope, significant shares of Americans said they are adding side jobs, cutting down on driving and putting more expenses on credit cards. Even higher percentages of Latino (52%) and Black (46%) Americans said they’re worried most or all of the time about making ends meet, according to the poll. The findings underscore how, despite national statistics that show unemployment is low and inflation is cooling, millions of Americans are hurting from years of rising prices. Two-thirds of Americans (65%) say in an open-ended question that expenses and the cost of living are the biggest economic problem facing their family today. That’s down from 75% in the summer of 2022 but well ahead of the 43% who mentioned an issue related to expenses in the summer of 2021. The typical household is spending $925 more a month to purchase the same goods and services as three years ago, according to Moody’s Analytics. (Source: cnn.com, italics mine)
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