In 1996, Californians voted 55 to 45 for Proposition 209, which, among other things, barred public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity in admissions.

Twenty-four years later, Californians voted on whether to repeal the proposition. The state had become far more liberal since 1996, so the organizations that led this campaign had reason to think they might succeed: Bill Clinton had earned 51% of the California vote when 209 passed; Joe Biden took 63.5% in 2020. It had been more than a decade (it has now been nearly two) since a Republican won statewide office.

But the vote on repealing Proposition 209 was even more decisive than the original one. By a margin of 57 to 43, Californians again voted against permitting public institutions to discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. The proposition wasn’t even overwhelmingly popular with the populations it purported to benefit: while Black Americans did support it in polling, some polling suggests that Latino voters opposed it by sizable margins (30% in favor, 41% against).

I am frequently a critic of the California electorate, but I think that the state’s voters got this right in 1996 and again in 2020.

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America can do better than race-based affirmative action

It is completely reasonable for admissions officers, when evaluating college applications, to take into account the disadvantages that prospective students have encountered.

Sure, it’s both cringe and undesirable to incentivize students from comfortable backgrounds to desperately cast around for a way to frame their lives as tragic. But it’s straightforwardly a good thing to take into account whether a student had to pay their own bills or had a private tutor, whether they were encouraged by teachers or discouraged, and whether their parents knew the rules of the game — and racism is one form of disadvantage students might encounter and overcome.

I think that students learn better on a campus where they are presented with views, perspectives, and experiences that are unfamiliar to them. I think it expands their horizons and makes them wiser, more thoughtful, and more compassionate.

The problem is that, as implemented, affirmative action programs don’t actually do this.

In practice, race is not just treated as one possible way in which a student might be disadvantaged, alongside others like parental education or the stability of their housing situation. Instead, it is consistently treated as more important than any of those.

When the Harvard admissions committee had slightly more “tentative yes” students than they wanted to extend offers to, applicants were discussed from a list with only four pieces of information: “legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race.”

Most measures of experienced, day-to-day racism find there is anti-Asian racism in the United States, often of similar magnitude to anti-Hispanic racism. And yet, because Asian students are often overrepresented at universities relative to the U.S. population as a whole, affirmative action programs make it much harder for an Asian student than a comparably talented white student to be admitted to college. And if you look at more granular research, South Asian students are strongly disadvantaged relative to even East Asian students with the same scores, yet by most metrics, there is more anti-South Asian than anti-East Asian racism in America.

During the discovery process for Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action, the public got a glimpse at how, mechanically, the process actually played out in elite admissions offices.

Reading some of the back and forth between admissions officers is disillusioning for those of us who hoped for a sensitive and thoughtful process that recognized the nuances of student identity and the fact that students can be impacted by prejudice in a wide range of ways.

“Brown?!” one UNC admissions officer wrote in an admissions group chat about a specific applicant. “Heck no. Asian,” another replied.

“If it[’]s brown and above a 1300 [SAT,] put them in for [the] merit/Excel [scholarship],” another admissions official wrote.

These interactions make no sense, of course, if you think of the purpose of affirmative action as being either redress for past wrongs or as being about the perspectives a candidate would bring to campus.

But they make more sense if you understand these programs as an effort to achieve specific percentages of admitted students from the specific target demographics that colleges report publicly. And this effort has now subsumed efforts to systematically help disadvantaged students, and it has done so in a manner that, frankly, seems out of place in a liberal society.

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Quotas are not a good vision of pluralistic liberalism

It’s true that many countries are trying to make a multicultural or a multiracial society work using racial quotas or a race-based affirmative action program. China has historically awarded extra points on university examinations to racial minorities. Singapore mandates quotas for housing, and Brazil has quotas for higher education and the civil service. Canada requires federally regulated large employers to achieve race and sex equity through affirmative action hiring programs. South Africa and India both have affirmative action programs.

But from the perspective of a political liberal, this is obviously challenging.

Our foundational commitment is that every person is an individual, created equal, and deserving of equal treatment under the law and equal opportunity. That means you shouldn’t get judged by the average qualities of your group. You shouldn’t be judged as less impressive because other East Asians have, on average, higher test scores, and you shouldn’t be judged as more impressive because other Hispanics have, on average, lower test scores.

For all its flaws, America is a more racially integrated society than most of the nations I mentioned above. In measures of employment discrimination, America is consistently among the countries where the employment effects of a foreign or racial-minority name are the smallest. Approval of interracial marriage is much higher in the U.S. than in Europe or Asia, and rates of intermarriage are correspondingly higher as well. Ten percent of Americans identified as multiple races on the 2020 Census, and 15% of Americans under 18; the share of the country that can’t fit into neat racial boxes will only continue to grow.

When affirmative action programs largely began in the 1960s, the aim was to try to redress the harm that centuries of discrimination had done to Black Americans by giving them the leg up into American institutions and halls of power, which some white Americans enjoyed because their ancestors had.

I think that was appropriate. I also don’t think it bears much resemblance to how admissions offices actually evaluate candidates today. In practice, affirmative action programs generally amount to picking some cultures of origin and declaring that they should benefit while declaring that others should be ineligible, and the way we pick those groups is increasingly incoherent.

Under our existing system, a student whose family descent is Filipino might be rejected from college admissions because there are too many students from India and China with great scores. Whether a multiracial student is admitted may turn ultimately on which races they disclose, and there are a bunch of low-quality polls suggesting very high rates of lying about race on college applications.

Which brings us back to our admissions officers deciding whether to refer students for a scholarship or not based purely on whether they’re “brown.” In any workplace in America, this would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act, which wisely barred discrimination on the basis of race in employment.

Those text messages aren’t defensible under any of the idealistic accounts sometimes given of affirmative action: that we want a diverse range of students who can learn from each other , or that we want to be mindful of ways a student encountered hardship .

Colleges, of course, have an interest in students from a wide range of backgrounds. But what we see there isn’t an interest in the complicated and varied backgrounds of potential students. It is a reductive obsession over skin color—an assumption that once you know someone’s broad racial category, you know their value.

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The American people love race-blind policy to help the disadvantaged

While my main point here is not about popularity, it’s worth acknowledging that affirmative action is deeply unpopular.

A plurality of Black Americans agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn race-based affirmative action, with 47% saying colleges should not be allowed to consider race and only 36% saying they should. Hispanic Americans agreed with the Supreme Court by even larger margins: Fifty-five percent said colleges should not be allowed to consider race, and only 28% said that they should.

This issue is underwater even in the populations that it purportedly benefits.

By contrast, polls generally find support for affirmative action on the basis of class, benefitting low-income students at the expense of rich ones.

Even about half of rich people said they feel that poor students should be advantaged in admissions over their own kids. Americans are broadly a generous people who admire students who make good from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they are supportive of programs to enable that.

One study argued that Americans support DEI programs when the pitch is that “the goal is to reduce barriers faced by disadvantaged groups, in order to create a better merit-based system.”

The researcher’s takeaway was that DEI programs needed to be pitched differently, but I think that’s mistaken: They need to actually be different.

You can’t convince people that “refer this student for a merit scholarship if they’re brown, but not if they’re Asian” is creating a better merit-based system. But you can absolutely design a real merit-based system, and when you do, you’ll find broad public support for it.

I should acknowledge that income-based programs do not produce the same results as race-based programs.

If you don’t use race at all in evaluating candidates, but instead invest aggressively in the proxies for economic disadvantage — low-income families, underfunded schools, first-generation college students — you do see a decrease in Black and Hispanic attendance at top schools.

Research on the UC system after California banned race-conscious admissions has suggested that schools get about 60% to 70% as many Black and Hispanic students when they don’t explicitly consider race. Work from the UC system also showed that some of those students will be worse off.

These numbers may be a floor rather than a ceiling, though. Recent research on the effects of the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in admissions suggests much smaller drops in Black and Hispanic student enrollment at highly selective colleges than the UC system warned of — just 18%, about half of what was feared.

The difference could be explained by the changes happening across the board rather than in a single state: if a single state bars considering race in admissions, some of its student pool may flow elsewhere, while if the practice is banned nationwide, the “pool” is effectively fixed, and the effect smaller.

The long shadow of Joe Biden

We’re at war, gas prices are through the roof, school test scores keep falling, and a terrifyingly large share of young people openly endorse various forms of religious hatred while a shrinking share value free speech. This is yesterday’s fight, and rendered moot since the Supreme Court already ruled that the use of race in admissions is not allowed. Why am I still talking about this?

Until recently, I thought the issue was settled, but a recent study changed my mind.

Political scientists David Broockman and Josh Kalla examined which issue positions, attributed to a candidate, made them more or less popular with voters. Their big-picture takeaway is that we should stop talking about “moderation” — voters don’t look for candidates whose views are in some sense objectively “moderate.”

But voters do care, intensely, about a candidate’s policy positions, and about whether a candidate shares the voter’s views.

And the single issue that made the biggest difference to voters — the one where a candidate adopting the “elite middle” position, rather than the progressive one, dramatically increased participants’ willingness to vote for them — was affirmative action.

When a Democratic candidate moved from the party’s standard position on affirmative action (“universities may consider race in admissions to increase diversity”) to the still-fairly progressive position, “universities may not consider race directly, but may consider essays or other materials showing how applicants were affected by racism,” they gained 4.5 points of vote share.

That was, by a significant margin, a bigger deal than any other issue they studied except for one: Replacing racial preferences in small business loans with preferences for low-income applicants produced a boost of the same magnitude.

Why did these two issues—generally not very high-salience ones—carry so much weight in voters’ view of candidates? Certainly, part of the reason is that in this task, voters are given only a little bit of information about a candidate, so low-salience issues can carry the day. These issues are not top of mind for voters in ordinary elections. But still, the effect size is striking.

The study suggested that “colleges can consider a candidate’s experience of racism, but not their race” — still a progressive position! — does more to win cross-pressured voters than restricting asylum-seekers.

I spent a while puzzling this over. I built a copy of the task from the paper and asked a bunch of acquaintances to take it. I looked at a lot more quantitative and qualitative research on voter views. I have a theory of my own now, though it’s speculative:

I think that Democratic candidates benefit enormously when they can credibly signal to voters that they’re not Joe Biden. And while on most issues, breaking with Biden means satisfying some voters and losing others, on this issue, it just straightforwardly grows the tent.

Joe Biden left office deeply unpopular, more unpopular than any president but Donald Trump. Independents in particular are very sour on him, and voters who hated his presidency tend to still be extremely negative on the Democratic party even as they sour on Donald Trump.

They don’t, to be clear, mostly hate Joe Biden over college admissions policies: polls have consistently found that they mostly turned on him over immigration and inflation. But — running in 2020, as the country grappled with George Floyd’s death and the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement — Biden embraced a very directly race-oriented view of Democratic politics. That included promising that he would make key appointments on the basis of race, most famously promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, a promise that was in fact unpopular even with Democrats (76% of Americans said they wanted him to consider all possible nominees). He sharply condemned the Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions.

Moves to moderate on policy, if they’re substantive at all, involve adopting specific positions that many Democrats dislike. Move to the center on immigration, and you anger some voters while satisfying others. This is, Broockman and Kalla found, a crucial effect to understand if you want to argue over moderation: “Candidates moving towards the other party win some voters but lose others who preferred their party’s position.”

That makes “do not directly use racial preferences in public policy” unique among the issues tested — strongly associated with the establishment and with the unpopular Biden administration, yet without any large constituency in favor (again, Black and Latino voters agreed with the Supreme Court!). Opponents also feel much more strongly about it than supporters do, so that there’s almost no one you lose by articulating a vision for race-blind admissions.

The paper can’t settle why voters feel the way they do. And to be clear, it would not in itself constitute good reason to adopt this position. I don’t, in fact, want candidates who campaign with their nose to the polls.

I think that candidates should adopt this position because it is right, not because it is popular: the more liberal, more individualist, position, better on the merits for a modern multiethnic democracy.

But it does seem to be popular, and it may be a way for candidates to carve out a brand distinct from the deeply unpopular Biden one. I think its significance to voters is at least sufficient reason to discuss the issue on its substantive merits.

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Welcome to The Argument, a weekly podcast from yours truly and Matthew Yglesias.

Matt and I have been on many podcasts together, back in the days of The Weeds where we first libbed out about zoning reform, to when I interviewed him at The Atlantic for Good on Paper, and just last year when we talked about liberalism here at The Argument.

We have a lot in common—particularly when it comes to housing and economic policy—but that makes it all the more interesting how much we tend to disagree.

So instead of a Crossfire-style debate show where two people who have no overlapping interests yell at each other and make you feel bad about the world, we’re doing something different.

The Argument is a show where two friends, well, argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds.

It’s a debate show for people who want to get into the weeds and are turned off by screaming matches and softball interviews where everyone just agrees with each other. Each week, one host argues a distinctive point of view — armed with facts and research, not just pundit bluster — and then Matt and I hash it out.

New episodes post every Thursday, starting April 9.

WATCH THE TRAILER ON YOUTUBE HERE

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of work; in part because of the potential for AI to remake the modern economy and in part because running The Argument over the last 8-ish months has given me a very different vantage point on what “having a job” actually involves.

I keep noticing a pattern: Every few years, a totalizing, negative narrative goes viral.

In the 2010s it felt like all anyone could talk about was how Big Tech was ushering in a new era of gig work.

Then, of course in COVID-19 years, there was the quiet quitting narrative and the “nobody wants to work anymore” meme, which are two sides of the same ‘workers are actually lazy’ coin.

And, of course, who could forget the “bullshit jobs” narrative, anthropologist David Graeber’s idea that endemic to capitalism is the proliferation of useless, makework jobs.

Each of these narratives is based on something real—usually qualitative evidence or concerning anecdotes about worker exploitation and harm. But each of them is wrong in ways that matter. Here are a few things that I’ve found as I’ve looked through the data:

Gig workers are happier than employees.

Earlier this week, Gallup released new polling results on the state of work in America. The survey includes responses from more than 18,000 employed U.S. adults and was fielded over a year ago between January 13-February 25, 2025.

Gallup’s headline finding is that self-employed workers are more likely to report having “quality jobs” than employees.

Quality jobs are defined by five metrics: Financial well-being, workplace culture and safety, growth and development opportunities, agency and voice, and work structure and autonomy.

Gallup broke down self-employed workers and employees on each of these metrics.

What jumps out at me first is that 66% of self-employed workers reported high levels of “agency and voice” compared with just 50% of employees. One of the core arguments against gig work has been that it strips employees of their power in the workplace by classifying them as independent contractors.

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He joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the Democratic party’s resurgence among non-college educated voters.

“With non-college whites, this is probably the best that the Democratic Party has looked in, you know, since the Obama years, 2014 maybe,” said Lakshya.

The guys also turned their attention to Florida: “A win for Democrats in Florida is to make Republicans sweat and send some money there,” suggested Zachary.

Notably, many of the Florida Republican nominees are under-performers: “In this one strip across Central Florida, you have two really bad Republicans, two really good Democrats and Anna Paulina Luna… she’s weak.”

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Donald Trump’s 15-point gain with young male voters in 2024 triggered a crisis of confidence among liberals: Maybe Gen Z men just weren’t that into them?

This phenomenon became a fixture of political commentary at the time. “What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?” asked The New Yorker; Politico speculated about “Trump’s push to win over the ‘bro’ vote,” and in the Financial Times, Chief Data Reporter John Burn-Murdoch laid out a grim prognosis for a “global gender divide.”

It seemed that a new, humbling reality of modern politics had been revealed. Anyone trying to win over the American public would now have to account for the fact that men simply did not support the gender-equal world that liberals had built. This looked to be particularly true of the chronically online Gen Z male, resentful of women’s progress and nostalgic for a bygone era when men could be men.

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Data taken from The Argument’s national survey of 3,003 registered voters, fielded between Feb. 4 to 10, 2026, told a more optimistic story. In response to every question we asked about changing gender norms, younger men were more progressive than Gen X or boomer men. Just like with women, men under the age of 45 tended to hold more liberal views than older men.

And contrary to the narrative that young American men and women are uniquely polarized on social issues, our data suggested that Gen Z remains more aligned relative to other age groups.

Aggregated across all of our polls conducted since August 2025 — totaling over 13,000 responses — the difference between female and male conservative identification was comparatively small among the youngest generation. This makes sense given that rates of conservative identification were relatively low for younger voters overall in our survey — men and women alike. Catalist polling from 2024 confirmed this trend, finding that young men gave Harris the highest support share among all male voters.

This pattern aligns with Gallup’s telephone survey data from back in 2024. Even as the narrative that young men were shifting right took hold in the media, Gallup reported that the “gender gap” in ideology was actually driven by increasingly liberal young women, not increasingly conservative young men.

Gen Z men are not “the problem”

Based on our February poll, the most noteworthy gap in ideology fell along generational, not gendered, lines. 48% of 18- to 29-year-olds strongly disagreed with the statement that “society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles,” almost 20 percentage points more than other cohorts.

Even when we remove women from the sample, 52% of men under 45 strongly or somewhat disagreed with returning to traditional gender roles, compared to 43% of older men.

Narrowing that population down further to only the men who voted for Trump, the youngest male cohort, 18 to 29, was again the least likely to support the statement, with 36% of Gen Z male Trump voters at least somewhat disagreeing.

Of course, what precisely respondents mean by “traditional gender roles” is hard to say. The term could plausibly refer to anything from women not occupying leadership positions to men wearing nail polish. Our polling points to the latter: discomfort with gender nonconforming behavior, not views about women’s economic roles, driving support of gender roles.

Only around 18% of both male and female respondents agreed with the statement that “Nowadays, women in America are taking jobs that should go to men. 75% of women and 72% of men at least somewhat disagreed.

This suggests that although many Americans see value in traditional gender norms — a finding backed by a recent 19th News-SurveyMonkey poll — it does not follow that an equally large share view women’s economic gains as zero-sum.

Gender norms are popular. Misogyny isn’t.

Given pervasive pessimism about men’s latent sexism, pointing out that explicitly misogynistic attitudes are not, in fact, widely held by the general male public seems like an increasingly important point of clarification.

In December, Ross Douthat argued that the radicalization of young conservative men mainly had to do with labor market grievances — with, in his words, “feeling like a door has been slammed in your face or closed before you ever reach it.”

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Douthat is undoubtedly correct that there are some men who truly feel this way.But as we survey the political landscape and strategize about how to persuade voters to reject democratic backsliding, we should be able to hold two thoughts in our minds at once. Gen Z is not just the generation of Nick Fuentes and looksmaxxing. Younger men are also more open to therapy, more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and more likely to spend time with their kids than previous generations.

From this ideological fray, a middle-ground position seems to emerge. While overt opposition to women’s economic gains was a fringe position in the sample, preferring gender conformity was relatively popular, even among younger voters. When we asked respondents how they felt about men looking and acting like men, and women looking and acting like women, over half at least somewhat agreed that this was better.

As disappointing as some of us might find the American public’s preference for gender conformity, this should not be conflated with a wholesale return to strict gender roles. Liberals should not capitulate to a vocal minority of sexist young men whose views are better represented in the current White House than they are among their voting peers. Patriarchal restoration is not, yet, the majority politics of the day.

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Correction: An earlier version of the “Broad agreement that women are not taking jobs” graph in this article had incorrect question wording. The graph has been updated.

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Do most Americans read below a sixth-grade level?

In a recent Slow Boring article, Matthew Yglesias argued that, “Half of adults read below a 6th grade level. All questions of snobbery and nepo babies aside, the typical American could not do the job of even a really incompetent journalist. They would, in fact, struggle badly to even read and understand journalism outputs.”

This claim struck several nerves. From worries about the nature of democracy to worries about policy design from wonks, the specter of mass illiteracy clearly haunts the chattering classes.

But what does it mean to read at a sixth-grade level? How would we know?

In reality, the vast majority of Americans are competent readers, and the sixth-grade-level claim comes from a long-running misapplication of a national literacy assessment that doesn’t actually compare its test results to middle school grade levels.

However, while we can’t really say at what grade level typical American adults are reading, there is a significant minority of adults who are either only minimally literate or functionally illiterate, and the trend lines point down.

How well can American adults read?

The “gold standard” assessment of adult literacy is the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Importantly, PIAAC is not like an elementary or middle school English exam. It’s not assessing participants’ ability to decode words or comprehend a passage from Shakespeare: The questions are focused on the ability of adults to decipher practical text they might encounter on a daily basis.

For instance, one sample item has test-takers read a welcome letter from a fictional preschool and determine the latest time they are allowed to drop off their child.

In another, test-takers read a newspaper article and an email about new inventions and must identify what criticism they have in common.

PIAAC results cannot be mapped onto grade-level equivalents. The exam wasn’t designed to measure adult literacy in terms of what we might expect a student to be able to do by a certain grade.

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If you had asked me who was having the worst time in the modern economy, I would have said Gen Z.

COVID-19 disrupted either their education or their first years on the job market, and in some cases both. Now, hiring is drying up, probably for reasons related to AI. The research is clear that it matters a lot what labor market you graduate into; the “scarring” of graduating into a lousy labor market shows up even decades later.

So, until quite recently, I was most worried about the younger generation.

I was wrong.

In The Argument’s most recent poll, we asked respondents about various measures of economic sentiment, and the people who seem to be struggling the most are not Gen Z but millennials. And boy, are millennials struggling.

Nearly 60% of people over 65 said they were happy, as did roughly 50% of people in both the 18 to 29 and 45 to 64 age brackets. But only 42% of people aged 30 to 44 said that they were happy.

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Millennials also reported the highest propensity to put things on credit cards because they can’t afford them, the most doubt that they’ll have a comfortable retirement, and the lowest agreement that “If I work hard, I will get ahead in life.” Nor are things looking up: They are effectively tied with 45- to 64-year-olds for the highest share reporting that their economic situation is much worse than it was a year ago.

Reporting on consumer sentiment is always a little complicated because the way people feel about the economy doesn’t always reflect more concrete measures of the economy. We’re all much richer than we were a century ago, but most people don’t really care about that. People feel poorer if there’s inflation happening, even if their wages are keeping up with (or even outpacing) inflation.

The questions we asked in our poll don’t really tell us whether millennials are in some uniquely poor position economically. But I do think they tell us that adults in the 30 to 44 bracket are experiencing some particular strain.

I was curious whether this was predominantly economic — is this group struggling more than other groups to find jobs? Is this group’s spending mostly in categories that have been harder hit by rising prices? — or whether this was a case where poor economic sentiment mostly reflects poor non-economic sentiment (for example, Republicans and Democrats both rate the economy as worse when they’re out of power).

It looks like a little bit of both.

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Getting more specific about CPIs

We measure inflation by defining a basket of goods that many people buy and then checking how much it costs to buy those goods over time. This measure is called the Consumer Price Index.

In January, the basket was 45% housing, 16% transportation, 15% food and beverages, 8% medical care, 6% “education and communication” (a category that includes both childcare and phones for some reason), and a long tail of rarer stuff (pets, sports events, funeral expenses, tobacco …).

But of course, no household buys exactly the CPI basket of goods. Obviously, households of different ages buy different things, and they can experience different amounts of inflation. Historically, this sort of analysis often shows that inflation hits the elderly hardest, because medical care is a much bigger share of their expenses and is getting much more expensive.

But that’s not always the case: Working-age people are hit hardest when the cost of transportation spikes (which it’s doing right now; gas prices were probably extremely salient to our poll-takers). Housing, another area where costs are rising, is also a larger share of expenses for families with kids at home.

So millennials probably are hit harder by our current surge in gas prices and our ongoing cost-of-living crisis than the generations too young or too old to be commuting or feeding a family.

But I wasn’t satisfied that this was the whole story. After all, Gen Xers are also in the kids-and-a-commute life stage, and they are (hopefully) saving for retirement. Using consumption-basket approaches, they and millennials look pretty similar — lots of spending on transportation and the expenses of having a family. But Gen Xers are not generally as stressed about the economy or their lives as millennials are. Why are 40-year-olds so much unhappier than 50-year-olds?

In general, “generational” divisions are sometimes real and sometimes basically fake, but the Gen X-millennial division is unusually “real” because the 2008 recession created something of an economic discontinuity. So the division is meaningful — but it’s still easy to overstate it.

For instance, you might have heard that millennials are poorer than Gen X was at their age; that appears to have been true when us millennials were in our 20s, but it isn’t anymore. People who had a house before the 2008 crisis are definitely lastingly better off than people who didn’t. On the other hand, Gen X is much likelier to have been foreclosed on in the crisis.

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Libbing out means dooming about the economy

There are clearly real economic factors driving millennial dissatisfaction, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Another factor: Millennials are libs, and libs are sad right now.

Donald Trump’s approval rating in the 30 to 44 bracket is -26 (35% approve, 61% against). In the 45 to 64 bracket, it’s -8 (46% approve, 54% disapprove). Thirty-five percent of millennials call themselves liberal or very liberal, and just 28% conservative or very conservative; for Gen X, nearly the reverse is true, with just 24% liberal or very liberal and 37% conservative or very conservative.

Is it a coincidence that the more liberal age bracket is also more pessimistic about their own economic prospects and their prospects of retirement? I think not.

Breaking down respondents’ optimism about their personal financial situation by their recalled vote in 2024, the same pattern holds. Only 7% of Harris voters expected their situation to get “much better” in the next year, and 44% of them expected it to get worse. Meanwhile, 21% of Trump voters thought their situation will get much better, and less than 16% thought their situation will get worse.

Gen Z, which is also liberal, is nonetheless not as pessimistic as millennials are about their economic conditions improving; there clearly is an age-cohort effect separate from the Trump effect. But the Trump effect is there and it’s large!

So the perfect storm that makes us 30- to 44-year-olds the unhappiest population segment, with the greatest expressed financial strain and the poorest outlooks, contains high exposure to inflation, high costs of living, and the fact that this cohort profoundly dislikes the administration and has zero trust that it is going to do anything to improve our financial situations.

Gen Z shares millennials’ distrust in the government but has less exposure to rising costs of living (and maybe AI upending the workforce is actually less terrifying if you’ve yet to sink any roots into it in the first place). Gen X shares the rising costs of living and the uncertainty about the future but likes the government more.

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Dooming shouldn’t make you dumb

So what’s a gloomy millennial to make of this? I think there’s something to be said, on an individual level, for trying to avoid letting political pessimism cloud your sense of the state of the economy like the polls suggest my cohort is doing.

I feel generally doomy about the state of the world because people opposed to everything I believe in are in power, but it’s kind of embarrassing if this causes me to misunderstand economic matters. A swirling cloud of anxiety over the stampede of red states to restrict the rights of adults to transition is not economic anxiety, and if I get mixed up about the real causes of my anxiety, I’ll probably take the wrong steps in response.

But that’s only part of the story; millennials are also dealing with real difficulties related to cost of living. And costs of living are genuinely a huge barrier to people enjoying the standards of living that should accompany our extremely high incomes.

They’re a barrier to people living near economic opportunity; they’re a barrier to people starting families. And when so many people report that the cost of living is the most important thing to them, it’s political malpractice to not take them seriously.

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Maine’s Senate race is one of the most competitive in the country. Democrats are seeking to unseat long-time Senator Susan Collins in their bid to take back the Senate.

This year, just two Republican-held seats are up for grabs in states that Trump didn’t win by double-digits: Maine and North Carolina. In North Carolina, Democrats are fielding popular former Gov. Roy Cooper as their candidate, but the situation is decidedly less clear in Maine.

Simply put, the race for the Democratic nomination in Maine is between “weak” and “weaker.” One candidate, incumbent Gov. Janet Mills, is 78 years old and not especially popular. The other, oyster farmer Graham Platner, brings with him a litany of scandals, including a series of controversial social media posts and a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

Ordinarily, it would be unthinkable for either party to bypass a sitting governor in favor of a political novice dogged by controversy. And if Mills and Platner were facing off even two years ago, there’s little doubt that Mills would have cruised to victory. Today, however, her position is perilous.

Polling of the Democratic primary is fairly sparse, but every survey done agrees that Platner is leading; the question is simply whether it’s close (as Quantus and Pan Atlantic indicated), or a blowout (as the University of New Hampshire and Emerson both found).

The enthusiasm for Platner is understandable. Many commentators believe that with his background and image, he’s the rare Democratic candidate who can make significant inroads with men and working-class whites. But to fully understand his momentum despite the scandals, we have to understand his opponent.

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Boring doesn’t mean safe

In throwing their weight behind Mills, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the geriatric Democratic establishment are ignoring their base’s dissatisfaction.

Mills, with her long political career, signals continuity rather than change. Given the party’s abysmal favorables with their own voters, support for Platner is best understood as an act of rebellion, an expression of the belief that it’s time to do something different.

While Platner is certainly…different, his primary advantage over Mills may disappear during a general election.

Platner is virtually guaranteed to face tens of millions of dollars of attack ads that remind voters constantly of his Nazi tattoo and his social media comments on rape. These are beginning to feature heavily in primary discourse, and they will almost certainly impact his ability to cut into Collins’ prior support with independents and moderates.

Platner’s self-presentation as the voice of the working class is a big part of his electability argument.

But the data doesn’t back this up.

Despite his reputation as a working-class whisperer, Platner is actually doing far better with upscale Democratic whites than with non-college Democrats. Each primary poll with regional breakdowns has shown a common theme: Mills does far better among the blue-collar Democrats in the rural north of the state, while Platner cleans up with wealthy, coastal liberals who skew college-educated.

In other words, the data suggests Platner is not the candidate of the working class, but rather of upwardly mobile Mainers who have an idealized working-class aesthetic.

Both parties are fighting for control of the working class. Trump has lost significant ground with this once loyal base of supporters and Democrats are furiously debating whether this demographic is yearning for economic populism, cultural moderation, or some other kind of outsider.

Primary voters in Maine are gambling that a rough-talking oysterman is the key, but despite national media narratives, it looks like Democrats will field a candidate whose appeal is strongest with voters they were already going to win, and whose vulnerabilities are greatest with the voters they actually need.

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Imagine if, at 18 years old, your only options were to remain in your parents’ home or to buy a home of your own.

I think most young people would be extremely put off by the idea that the only way to forge your own path in the world would be to both have enough money to purchase your own property and to have enough certainty to commit to a specific location (and therefore job market and dating market).

But, you know, people are different!

Roughly half a million 18- to 23-year-olds are homeowners, and while that’s only 2.3% of all people in that age group, it just goes to show that there are a lot of people in this country living lots of different kinds of lives.1 And that’s okay.

As you can see in that graph, low mortgage rates in 2020 caused a big jump in young homeowners, which indicates that there is unmet demand for homeownership among even very young adults. But still, I think it’s safe to say that the majority of young adults would probably not choose to buy a house even if they had the financial means to do so.

At its best, homeownership is stability, but that stability comes at a price: Freedom.

Fresh out of college earning $48,000 a year, I rented a room for $900 on a month-to-month lease in Prince George’s County, Maryland. There were some problems with the house, but when the campaign I was working on ended and I got a new gig in South Carolina, it was trivially easy to move without incurring a bunch of costs of either breaking the lease or — god forbid — selling a house.

People make pro-homeownership arguments all the time so I won’t repeat them here, but rarely do people hear about the downsides. The costs of moving for homeowners are high, though. Either they have to sell their house or become landlords (or the very wealthy can afford to hold multiple properties).

As Yale Law professor David Schleicher explained in his great paper, “Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation,” homeowners often don’t move even if they’re offered better opportunities elsewhere. Worse, if the economy is doing badly, homeowners who may otherwise have braved the difficulties of a sale have an extra incentive not to sell because they smartly want to hold out for when the market recovers. It’s not exactly clear what the mechanisms are, but, “homeownership rates correlate with unemployment and lower interstate labor mobility.”

All this to say, there are real reasons why someone would prefer the freedom of instability to the freedom of stability.

So far this is one massive subtweet, so I’ll just make the subtext, text:

Last week, the debate in Congress continued over a provision in the ROAD to Housing Act that would significantly hamper institutional investors from building single family homes for the purpose of renting them out.

Putting aside the benefits or costs of such policies, I want to draw out a latent belief held by conservatives on the left and right: That all renters are temporarily embarrassed homeowners.

Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno argued that “it’s absolutely correct that we should be building homes to buy and not to rent. And I urge my colleagues in the House to vote for the bill as is, without modifying it, and get that bill passed.” The quote was hyped on Twitter by a senior Warren staffer, the president of The Century Foundation (a former Elizabeth Warren staffer), and two leaders of the monomaniacally-obsessed-with-corporate-power ideological sect: Matt Stoller and Nidhi Hegde.

This came after Warren’s own remarks that while it was fine for institutional investors to build “as many apartment houses, as many condo complexes, as many triplexes as they want,” that “homes should be for families, not for giant corporations.”

Apparently, the apartments I lived in as a child were not real homes.

Read more

The Verdict

On Friday, The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle helpfully provided discourse bait for the weekend by admitting to using AI to aid her journalism.

McArdle’s professed uses of AI are limited to helping her find things to read and explain parts of academic papers, transcribing interviews, generating pushback on her column thesis, suggesting trims, improving her podcast interview questions, and fact-checking.1

She summed up her professional advice to other journalists as “think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and a fact-checker. Its job is to do grunt work and help you turn in cleaner copy, not to ‘inspire’ you.”

McArdle’s confession became evidence of the growing polarization around AI use in the media — both because we’re still in the early days of journalists admitting they use AI and because of her perch as a center-right opinion columnist at the now-deeply politicized and diminished Post.

A philosopher at Rutgers remarked that “In a healthier media culture, an admission like this would at the very least get [McArdle] fired.”2

A journalist called McArdle’s admission “deeply embarrassing” and several others argued that AI’s limitations (hallucinations in particular) made it useless at fact-checking or assisting with research.

Taking a step back from whether or not it is an abdication of journalistic practice to use AI for parts of your job,3 I think it’s worth noting how bad it feels when your industry goes through a period of technological disruption.

There’s a repetitive discursive cycle about Luddites that comes up whenever a labor-saving productivity measure presents itself. On the one hand, people point out that textile workers had a point and were very much made obsolete by the factory system. On the other, people cast Luddites as mere sands in the gears of progress.

What many struggle with is the truth that being an obstacle to Progress and having a Legitimate Grievance are not mutually exclusive.

Here at The Argument, we spend a lot of time thinking through the economics of AI and what path we expect the technology to take because many of us know intimately from working with these tools just how powerful they are.

I love being a writer. I love that I get to spend my days reading and asking questions of brilliant people. I love that I’m paid to work through what I believe about things, and as an editor, I love helping other people work through all that too.

Part of why I started The Argument is because I think there’s a version of this work that can’t be replicated by a machine — journalism that’s built on judgment, voice, and a willingness to say things that are true but uncomfortable.

Subscribe now

The truth is that journalists who are angry at McArdle are rightly noticing that labor-saving technology could threaten to remake the media industry again; this time, turning it into one where being paid for spending time thinking through hard problems, reporting out difficult stories, and using personal judgment gleaned from years of experience may no longer be possible.

Instead, journalism could become an industry where editors feed a set of facts and arguments into a large language model, which then knits those into an article that is then quickly edited. Even if you’re the type of perennial optimist who believes this will lead to a better world with more and better journalism, it’s not all upside. McArdle didn’t argue for any of this, but the reaction isn’t really about her; it’s about the fear of what will come next, even if everything goes “well.”

In the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians fought against commercial recording, afraid that live performance gigs in dance halls, restaurants, or theaters were going to get wiped out. In a broad sense, musicians were wrong to worry about live performances; live music revenue has exploded, even as recorded music revenue remained modest. Listening to a track on Spotify became a marketing vehicle for live performances — complements not substitutes.

But that doesn’t mean nothing was lost.

Lots of working musicians lost their livelihoods to jukeboxes and radios replacing them in hotels, bars, and restaurants. I love a jukebox as much as the next girl, but it’s not the same as walking into a diner and hearing a live performance.

Industries that are highly exposed to technological disruption are forced to reckon with the core question of what makes their work valuable. Cab drivers learned that their encyclopedic knowledge of back streets and traffic shortcuts were made worthless with the advent of GPS. Handloom weavers learned that consumers don’t actually care about artisanal quality when machine-produced cloth is one-tenth of the price.

Now it’s time for journalists to learn what all our reporting and puzzling and drafting is worth.

It’s possible the answer is much less than we thought.

Share

Note: The footnotes in this article were accidentally left out of the emailed version.

Chart of the week

It’s still somehow underrated how uniquely bad Trump is. He is not a normal Republican, and so much of our current timeline is contingent on his behavior.

Top stories this week

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

Honolulu votes to allow denser apartment development

FDA approves stronger Wegovy dose under its new fast-track program

Virginia sends sweeping YIMBY housing package to the governor’s desk

Idaho bills to approve smaller homes advance

Worth watching...

Every Wednesday, Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, will go live on Substack with leading election nerds to discuss what’s going on in politics that week.

This week, Lakshya joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini to discuss the electoral implications of the war in Iran.

Subscribe to The Mag so you don’t miss future live election breakdowns.

What’s News with The Argument

We’re hiring a Senior Editor to join our team. Are you a liberal? Do you love to argue? Do you read social science research for fun? Apply!

The Argument recommends

Here’s what our staff is watching, reading, and listening to this week:

Books:

• Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe, John Nathan (Translator)

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin

TV/Movies:

• Company Retreat

Audio:

• Yiyun Li reading her story “Calm Sea and Hard Faring”

• Radio Cure by Wilco

• Ghost Town by Lankum

We have merch!

My favorite merch is either the hat or the keychain, but we have stickers and quarter-zips too! Buy them here.

Send us a picture of you with your merch, and we might just feature it in this weekly roundup.

MORE: Derek Thompson’s two-part series on the Smartphone Theory of Everything:

Subscribe now

The Verdict

On Friday, The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle helpfully provided discourse bait for the weekend by admitting to using AI to aid her journalism.

McArdle’s professed uses of AI are limited to helping her find things to read and explain parts of academic papers, transcribing interviews, generating pushback on her column thesis, suggesting trims, improving her podcast interview questions, and fact-checking.1

She summed up her professional advice to other journalists as “think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and a fact-checker. Its job is to do grunt work and help you turn in cleaner copy, not to ‘inspire’ you.”

McArdle’s confession became evidence of the growing polarization around AI use in the media — both because we’re still in the early days of journalists admitting they use AI and because of her perch as a center-right opinion columnist at the now-deeply politicized and diminished Post.

A philosopher at Rutgers remarked that “In a healthier media culture, an admission like this would at the very least get [McArdle] fired.”2

A journalist called McArdle’s admission “deeply embarrassing” and several others argued that AI’s limitations (hallucinations in particular) made it useless at fact-checking or assisting with research.

Taking a step back from whether or not it is an abdication of journalistic practice to use AI for parts of your job,3 I think it’s worth noting how bad it feels when your industry goes through a period of technological disruption.

There’s a repetitive discursive cycle about Luddites that comes up whenever a labor-saving productivity measure presents itself. On the one hand, people point out that textile workers had a point and were very much made obsolete by the factory system. On the other, people cast Luddites as mere sands in the gears of progress.

What many struggle with is the truth that being an obstacle to Progress and having a Legitimate Grievance are not mutually exclusive.

Here at The Argument, we spend a lot of time thinking through the economics of AI and what path we expect the technology to take because many of us know intimately from working with these tools just how powerful they are.

I love being a writer. I love that I get to spend my days reading and asking questions of brilliant people. I love that I’m paid to work through what I believe about things, and as an editor, I love helping other people work through all that too.

Part of why I started The Argument is because I think there’s a version of this work that can’t be replicated by a machine — journalism that’s built on judgment, voice, and a willingness to say things that are true but uncomfortable.

Subscribe now

The truth is that journalists who are angry at McCardle are rightly noticing that labor-saving technology could threaten to remake the media industry again; this time, turning it into one where being paid for spending time thinking through hard problems, reporting out difficult stories, and using personal judgment gleaned from years of experience may no longer be possible.

Instead, journalism could become an industry where editors feed a set of facts and arguments into a large language model, which then knits those into an article that is then quickly edited. Even if you’re the type of perennial optimist who believes this will lead to a better world with more and better journalism, it’s not all upside. McArdle didn’t argue for any of this, but the reaction isn’t really about her; it’s about the fear of what will come next, even if everything goes “well.”

In the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians fought against commercial recording, afraid that live performance gigs in dance halls, restaurants, or theaters were going to get wiped out. In a broad sense, musicians were wrong to worry about live performances; live music revenue has exploded, even as recorded music revenue remained modest. Listening to a track on Spotify became a marketing vehicle for live performances — complements not substitutes.

But that doesn’t mean nothing was lost.

Lots of working musicians lost their livelihoods to jukeboxes and radios replacing them in hotels, bars, and restaurants. I love a jukebox as much as the next girl, but it’s not the same as walking into a diner and hearing a live performance.

Industries that are highly exposed to technological disruption are forced to reckon with the core question of what makes their work valuable. Cab drivers learned that their encyclopedic knowledge of back streets and traffic shortcuts were made worthless with the advent of GPS. Handloom weavers learned that consumers don’t actually care about artisanal quality when machine-produced cloth is one-tenth of the price.

Now it’s time for journalists to learn what all our reporting and puzzling and drafting is worth.

It’s possible the answer is much less than we thought.

Share

Note: The footnotes in this article were accidentally left out of the emailed version.

Chart of the week

It’s still somehow underrated how uniquely bad Trump is. He is not a normal Republican, and so much of our current timeline is contingent on his behavior.

Top stories this week

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

Honolulu votes to allow denser apartment development

FDA approves stronger Wegovy dose under its new fast-track program

Virginia sends sweeping YIMBY housing package to the governor’s desk

Idaho bills to approve smaller homes advance

Worth watching...

Every Wednesday, Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, will go live on Substack with leading election nerds to discuss what’s going on in politics that week.

This week, Lakshya joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini to discuss the electoral implications of the war in Iran.

Subscribe to The Mag so you don’t miss future live election breakdowns.

What’s News with The Argument

We’re hiring a Senior Editor to join our team. Are you a liberal? Do you love to argue? Do you read social science research for fun? Apply!

The Argument recommends

Here’s what our staff is watching, reading, and listening to this week:

Books:

• Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe, John Nathan (Translator)

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin

TV/Movies:

• Company Retreat

Audio:

• Yiyun Li reading her story “Calm Sea and Hard Faring”

• Radio Cure by Wilco

• Ghost Town by Lankum

We have merch!

My favorite merch is either the hat or the keychain, but we have stickers and quarter-zips too! Buy them here.

Send us a picture of you with your merch, and we might just feature it in this weekly roundup.

MORE: Derek Thompson’s two-part series on the Smartphone Theory of Everything:

Subscribe now

In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that the Smartphone Theory of Everything — the idea that phones are uniquely to blame for rising anxiety, polarization, loneliness, conspiracy thinking, and just about every other modern malady — is wrong about “Everything” but isn’t wrong about everything.

The strongest version of the case against smartphones is not that phones are poison but that they are a displacement machine: When you’re staring at your screen, you’re not sleeping, socializing, playing outside, watching TV, or learning. But the countries and demographic groups showing the worst effects are not the heaviest phone users. Instead, phones are revealing structural vulnerabilities that already existed.

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That’s the theory. But I also wanted to create a living document where I go through the most popular claims in the smartphone debate and sort them into three buckets: strong evidence, mixed evidence, and weak evidence.

THE EVIDENCE

STRONG EVIDENCE

1. Smartphones are bad for your sleep.

Read more

He joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the implications.

“Donald Trump, right now, about 17% of his 2024 voters disapprove of him. And just to be clear, that is absolutely bonkers because you do not get that normally,” said Lakshya. “These are numbers that you had to get to, like, Joe Biden post-debate to hit at.”

Crucially, not only are voters (particularly nonwhite and non-college voters) starting to flee Trump’s coalition, but the usual suspects are increasingly no longer standing up for it.

“Whenever you see really lopsided victories, right? Doug Mastriano, Mark Robinson, Roy Moore, whoever it is, right? A lot of that boils down to the fact that, simply, people, the people who should be defending those candidates can’t or will not,” said Thomas. “And from a mechanical campaign perspective, if Trump continues the war, the tougher and tougher it becomes for all of his people to defend that.

Get more from Jerusalem Demsas in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

In 2018, Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow and his colleagues paid about 1,700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the midterm elections. Those who logged off were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized.

Findings like these have trickled through academia into mainstream media and the public discourse, where parents, teachers, depressed youths, and politicians are well-primed to see smartphones and social media as The Problem^TM.

But here’s what nobody talks about: The people who deactivated also knew less in general. They came back measurably more ignorant about what was happening in their own country. And in a second, larger study of more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users, the same thing happened.

The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it’s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what’s going on in the world.

This finding is a Rosetta Stone for the smartphone debate, because it reveals something both sides keep getting wrong: The smartphone is not a cigarette. It isn’t a toxin that we can isolate and test and ban. It is an information-delivery system — a relentless, inescapable IV drip of news, connection, outrage, friendship, conspiracy, solidarity, and garbage — whose effect on any individual depends entirely on what’s in the drip.

Today, billions of people look at their phones and see the whole world. But some theorists look at the whole world and see only phones.

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The debate has calcified into two camps: The Jonathan Haidts of the world, who blame phones for basically every modern malady, and the skeptics who say the evidence is thin and the panic overblown.

NYU Professor Arpit Gupta coined the term “Smartphone Theory of Everything” (STOE), which, in his telling, seems to explain every modern problem there is. The rise of youth anxiety? It’s the phones. The rise of global populism? The phones, again. The surge in attention disorders in the U.S.? The global decline in literacy? The scourge of political polarization? Phones, phones, and more phones.

I have been reporting on this space for several years and my conclusion is that the “Smartphone Theory of Everything” is wrong about “Everything” … but it isn’t wrong about everything.

Throughout my reporting, I’ve relied on several experts across psychology, economics, and political science. Rather than base my analysis on individual correlational studies, I leaned on randomized trials, meta-analyses that evaluated hundreds of studies, and a “consensus” survey that asked over 100 academics what they thought about claims about smartphone and social media use on personal and mental health.

My argument, in short, is this: The smartphone is not a poison, it’s a displacement machine.

When you stare into your phone, you are displacing some other activity — sleeping, socializing, playing outside, paying attention in class, watching TV…

In the countries where the effects are worst — the English-speaking West, especially among vulnerable teenagers — something about the combination of what phones deliver and what they displace is producing uniquely bad outcomes.

I have hypotheses about why, but I want to be honest: This is the part of the argument where the evidence thins out. (My guess is that the information flowing through the IV drip is the most anxious and polarizing and the displaced activities are the most beneficial for these populations.)

The phone is a device that interacts with a society’s preexisting pathologies. In the English-speaking West, they are revealing, not creating, a deeper rot.

The strongest proponents of the STOE often ignore the stubborn fact that phones are practically global, but their worst effects are strangely concentrated in the richest English-speaking countries. But the fiercest critics of the STOE often ignore the findings of randomized trials and real-world experiments, such as phone bans in schools, which have mostly shown that taking phones away from people makes them a little happier and better at focusing.

The puzzles neither side of the STOE debate can explain

Puzzle 1: If phones are global, why is the damage local?

One of the most interesting wrinkles in the Smartphone Theory of Everything is that while phones are everywhere, the problems that they cause are often rising fastest and first in the richest countries — especially in the U.S.

Take, for example, the theory that smartphones make people sad. According to the latest World Happiness Report, happiness among young people has plummeted most severely in Western developed countries that speak English, such as the United States, U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

On the other hand, “happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,” the 2024 report said. In East Asia, happiness is increasing “at every age.”

The same is true for suicide. Emergency room visits for suicide attempts among young women soared across the Anglosphere in the last few years. But, as I’ve reported, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 fell in most European countries in the last decade.

Or take attention deficit disorders. The surge in ADHD cases seems to be another U.S.-heavy phenomenon, with U.S. diagnoses vastly surpassing that of European and OECD countries. To understand rising anxiety and attention disorders in the U.S., we have to recognize the phenomenon of diagnostic inflation — i.e., medical providers expanding the definition of anxiety and ADHD to treat more cases.

In politics, the U.S. also seems to be an outlier in some maladies that are associated with smartphones. A 2020 paper on polarization in the West found that “affective polarization” — the ire that people feel for the party they oppose — rose fastest and first in the U.S., with most of the increase predating the smartphone age. The researchers wrote that polarization took off in the 1990s, right around the introduction of Fox News, which was nearly 20 years before the smartphone revolution took off.

As for smartphones creating populism and distrust, this also appears to be a disproportionately Western phenomenon. A 2022 Nature Human Behaviour review of 496 articles found that digital media is most strongly associated with declining political trust and growing populism in developed democracies, such as the United States. In autocracies and developing democracies, by contrast, the largest effect of digital media on politics seems to be that it increases political participation.

What do we make of all this? If you’re anti-smartphone, this pattern is a real problem for your theory; you can’t explain a localized epidemic with a global cause. But the smartphone defenders aren’t off the hook because the epidemic is real, and phones are clearly implicated in the mechanism. I think the answer is that smartphones are interacting with other phenomena that are distinctly Western or American and creating berserk local effects.

Puzzle 2: Is it really about the screens?

My favorite Jonathan Haidt argument is that phones replace play-based adolescence with phone-based adolescence. That is, the most important thing about phones isn’t what’s on the screen, but rather everything that’s off the screen when you’re lost gazing into your pocket device. I’d broaden the point beyond adolescence: for people of every age, the smartphone’s deepest effect may not be what it delivers but what it displaces.

In 2025, researchers found that randomly removing internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improved mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. More than 90% of the nearly 500 participants experienced at least one benefit. As best as the researchers could tell, the most significant reason for improved mental health and subjective well-being came from participants spending more time “socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature.”

Another randomized trial that paid people to deactivate Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections also found that people spent more time with friends and family. From that paper:

The 60 minutes freed up by not using Facebook … were allocated to both solitary and social activities offline. Solitary television watching increases by 0.17 points on our scale; other solitary offline activities increase by 0.23 points, and time devoted to spending time with friends and family increases by 0.14 points.

It’s very hard for researchers to control what participants are doing with their phones. But it’s not hard for researchers to see what people are doing when they’re not on their phones. They sleep more! They socialize more! They go outside more! (And, yes, they watch TV more.)

And yet, they also learn less about the world. There is a widespread fear that phones and social media are a source of misinformation and conspiracy theories. But the most careful randomized studies have found something close to the opposite.

“When we pay people to stay off of social media, the strongest finding is that they get less information,” said Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist.

Share

Across the two studies that randomized people to deactivate Facebook and Instagram, Gentzkow and his colleagues found that going off social media had minuscule effects on political polarization, but it also left people measurably less informed about current events. The first study paid nearly 1,700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the 2018 midterm elections. People who deactivated were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized. But they also knew less about the news.

In the second study, more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users were paid to go dark for six weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Deactivation had little to no effect on polarization, views about election legitimacy, candidate favorability, or voter turnout. And again, people who left came back knowing less about what was happening in the world.

The story we tell ourselves is that smartphones and social media pump nonsense into the national bloodstream and that logging off would produce a better-informed citizenry. But these studies suggest that while smartphones and social media do spread some misinformation, they also function as a primary news delivery system.

If smartphones are making us depressed, conspiratorial, and anxious, it might be because the news is structurally becoming more depressed, conspiratorial, and anxious. But the STOE focuses our attention, policymaking efforts, and ire only at the accelerant and not the source of the flames.

In 2023, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and London Business School used AI to trace positive vs. negative words across around 1 billion newspaper articles from the 1850s to the 2020s. For more than a century, news positivity hovered around a stable average. But after the 1960s, negativity surged.

“News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially when you adjust for economic recessions,” Wharton economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a coauthor on the paper, told me.

As I wrote in an essay for The Atlantic, I suspect that as the media industry got more competitive in the past few decades, publishers desperate to command reader attention doubled down on the old clichés that “if it bleeds, it leads” and “bad is stronger than good.” In this light, smartphones didn’t independently make the news more depressing; they made it easier to read depressing news.

Smartphones as attention alcohol

People like to compare smartphones and cigarettes. That’s wrong. Honestly — and I say this for research purposes, exclusively — I wish smartphones were cigarettes.

If the phone experience were a mass-manufactured bundle of chemicals that we could test in isolation against a control group, this whole essay could be one sentence long: We did some tests on phones, and they’re giving people cancer.

Unfortunately — again, for research purposes, only — smartphones are not tobacco. Everybody’s online experience is unique, which means that everybody is effectively smoking a slightly different cigarette. No surprise, then, that observational analyses struggle to prove causality, and randomized experiments to prove causality are typically brief and limited.

You can’t assign child participants to heavy social media use for a full year, and you certainly can’t randomly assign kids to use their smartphones in a specific way for a long time. (“Hi Madison, we need you to spend your entire junior year marinating in angry left-wing Reddit posts to measure the impact of online Marxism on the teenage mind” is not a plausible design study.)

If you force participants to deactivate Facebook in a study, they might just download Twitter; in fact, that’s exactly what happened in a 2020 study. If you force them to give up their phones entirely, they’ll still need to maintain desktop web access; in fact, that’s exactly what happened in a 2025 study.

A better metaphor is “alcohol”: fun for many, dangerous for some. Similarly, smartphones might have small effects on the majority population and large effects on a minority population. In 2020, Instagram’s own analysis concluded that its product “made body image issues worse“ for one-third of teenage girls who already experienced body image issues. That’s a lot! But it also implies that for the majority of teenage girls, Instagram had a small or negligible effect. And, of course, most people are not teenage girls.

Cellphone Cassandras can exaggerate the conclusions of careful research, which often show small overall effects. But critics of the STOE often ignore practical conclusions by fixating exclusively on small overall effect sizes, despite the evidence of significant long-tail effects. (Then again, Cassandra was famously cursed to utter true prophecies that would never be believed.)

To summarize everything I’ve just said in one sentence: The smartphone is a displacement machine and an information-delivery system, whose harms are filtered through the structural weaknesses of any given culture.

But what about the specific claims? Are phones really terrible for sleep? How strong is the evidence that they cause anxiety outside of specific populations? Are they turning us into conspiracy theorists?

In Part 2 of this essay, I’ll do my best to place 10 popular claims into three buckets: Strong evidence, mixed evidence, and weak evidence. I’ll go through each of the most common claims and give my sense of what research actually shows.

Recommended reading:

As a Dane living in the U.S., the view from the States can feel naive: Free health care. Polite and conflict-free politics. And tall, blonde people riding bikes.

It doesn’t help that yesterday’s general election was characterized by a reality TV show where the premise is that everyone — from the far-right populists to the socialists — can get along over beers.

Imagine the most powerful members of Congress gathering in the countryside to play games, walk their dogs, and discuss the future of America. All the heavy hitters are there: Bernie Sanders and AOC, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies, but also Mike Johnson and Josh Hawley. Oh, and Donald Trump is there too. Stretch your imagination a little further and throw former president Joe Biden into the mix.

It’s an absurd thought experiment. Yet this is exactly what happened in Højskolen, a Danish reality show that aired on national television in the run-up to the election.1

The show’s four episodes followed the leaders of Denmark’s 12 distinct parties, including Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats and her predecessor Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who has since founded his own centrist offshoot. Over the course of a 24-hour retreat, the leaders participated in mini policy debates and casual social activities, like music trivia, billiards, and recreational karate.

Højskolen held up Denmark as a poster child of democracy — a counterpoint to the political division and dysfunction of other countries.

But although the Danish microcosm offers many lessons in civil discourse and political decorum, consensus is not the antidote to polarization. Yes, it’s good that Danish politicians aren’t calling each other “crazed, crying lowlife[s]“ or referring to elected officials in wheelchairs as “Governor Hot Wheels,” but heralding civility as the ultimate political virtue comes with some costs.

The problem with Højskolen isn’t that politicians are being too nice to each other; it’s that being nice to each other isn’t a substitute for being honest with voters about what they actually plan to do and who they are willing to govern with.

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Yesterday’s results bore this out. Neither the left-leaning nor right-leaning bloc won a majority. The Social Democrats—Frederiksen’s party—took the most seats but recorded their worst result in over a century. The Greenland unity narrative wasn’t enough to paper over the small nation’s policy disputes on immigration, the wealth tax, and the cost of living.

Denmark faces weeks of coalition negotiations, with voters no clearer on what kind of government their ballots will produce than they were before the election.

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The logic of voter ID laws has flipped, but the politics are still stuck in 2012.

There’s a traditional story where Republicans seek to make it harder to vote so that the electorate skews to the highly educated. But that dynamic is odd in a world where Democrats have become the party of the highly educated.

The SAVE America Act is a bill currently under debate in the U.S. Senate that would require proof of United States citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections.

Donald Trump has pushed for the inclusion of unrelated provisions related to transgender issues — specifically, provisions banning trans women from participating in women's sports and restricting gender transition treatments for minors — that have muddied the debate, but at its core, this is an argument about election administration: Republicans say the bill is necessary to prevent immigrants from voting illegally. Democrats say this kind of voting fraud is so rare as to be a non-issue and that it will make it more difficult for American citizens to cast their ballots.

If you think about the party coalitions as they existed circa 2012, this kind of voter suppression measure could have provided Republicans with a meaningful electoral advantage.

But over the course of the Trump era, Democrats have lost their historic advantage with lower-socioeconomic status (SES) voters: If everyone who was eligible had voted in 2020, Biden’s popular vote margin would have been about two points higher, but if everyone had voted in 2024, Harris’ popular vote loss would’ve been about one percentage point worse.1

In The Argument’s aggregated national polling data, we see that richer and more educated voters are more likely to have backed Kamala Harris and more likely to say they will vote for a Democratic candidate in the midterms this fall.

The upshot is that a strict voter ID law designed to suppress turnout among low-SES voters would probably net votes for Democrats. Specifically, higher-income voters are more likely to own a valid passport, which is one document the SAVE America Act could require people to present when registering to vote for federal elections (the alternative is to present a birth certificate and valid driver’s license).

And taking the sports and youth transition issues off the table would also help Democrats, since the party’s stances on both issues are incredibly unpopular.

I do not believe that we should “nationalize elections” or end mail-in voting.2 But I do think there is a case for Democrats to embrace voter ID laws (though not the SAVE Act itself, which is now chock full of poison pills). Not because these laws would suppress Republican votes, but because they might restore trust in the electoral process.

And to the extent that Democrats are resisting voter ID out of concern that it will skew the electorate in a MAGA direction, that’s a fear they should get over.

The not-so-great history of voter ID laws

Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 launched a thousand takes about how Republicans were on track to be locked out of power in an increasingly diverse America. According to the exit polls, Obama ran very poorly with white voters, but still won because of record turnout among young and nonwhite voters.

What actually happened was that the exit polls simply underestimated the number of white voters in the electorate, particularly white voters without a college degree over 45. Compared to previous Democratic candidates, Obama ran worse with southern whites but stronger with northern whites.

But by the time voter file-matched postmortems come out, narratives about election outcomes have often crystallized.

After 2012, the RNC released an autopsy report arguing that the GOP needed to change its messaging on immigration to appeal to the growing Latino electorate: “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Another, ultimately more dominant, reaction among Republicans was to become obsessed with changing voting rules.

Donald Trump, in 2020, worried about turnout scenarios featuring “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

As a young lawyer in Reagan’s Department of Justice, John Roberts wrote dozens of memos arguing that the Voting Rights Act should be weakened. In the oral argument for Shelby County v. Holder, Antonin Scalia described Section 5 of the VRA — which requires jurisdictions deemed to have a history of voter suppression to pre-clear changes to their election laws with the Justice Department — as the “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Voter ID rules, which poll well but tend to make it somewhat more difficult to vote, were part of the same push. In 2012, Mike Turzai, then-Republican majority leader in the Pennsylvania state House, listed among his accomplishments, “[v]oter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

In 2010, the GOP won unified control of the North Carolina legislature. Under the leadership of then-state House Speaker Thom Tillis, they passed a strict voter ID law and drastically cut early voting hours, both of which disproportionately impacted nonwhite voters.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that these laws targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” While drawing up the state’s voter ID law, Republican legislators and their aides asked the state election board:

• “Is there any way to get a breakdown of the 2008 voter turnout, by race (white and black) and type of vote (early and Election Day)?”

• “Is there no category for ‘Hispanic’ voter?”

• For “a breakdown, by race, of those registered voters in your database that do not have a driver’s license number.”

In 2015, Texas enacted a voter ID law that allowed concealed-carry permits as proof of citizenship but not student ID cards — making the intent to engage in differential vote suppression about as clear as it gets.

Voter ID laws don’t actually suppress many votes

All of that is to say that it is true that the intent behind voter ID laws is often to suppress certain people’s votes. But do these laws actually do that? The literature is mixed.

The Brennan Center for Justice has pointed out that in states that enacted voter ID laws, the racial turnout gap has increased, and that in North Carolina, turnout among individuals lacking proper identification went down following the passage of the state’s voter ID law, even after the law was struck down.

But a more comprehensive working paper published in 2019 by Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons looked at data from 2008 to 2018 and found that voter ID laws “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.” The likelihood that nonwhite voters were contacted by a campaign increased by nearly five percentage points following the passage of ID laws, suggesting that mobilization efforts might offset any reductions in voter turnout. The study also found that ID laws had no impact on real or perceived levels of voter fraud.

A 2019 working paper by Mark Hoekstra and Vijetha Koppa looked at data from 2,000 elections in Michigan and Florida. They found that “at most only 0.10% and 0.31% of total votes cast in each state were cast without IDs” and even “under the extreme assumption that all voters without IDs were either fraudulent or would be disenfranchised by a strict law, the enactment of such a law would have only a very small effect on turnout” — and that only the freakishly close 2000 presidential election in Florida could have plausibly flipped due to ID requirements.

Voter ID is really popular

Confession: I used to be a part of the small minority of Americans who opposed voter ID laws. Back in 2020, I wrote my first-ever article3 for my high school newspaper: a somewhat prescient, if a bit overwrought, critique of the anti-democratic strain in the Republican Party. I stand by a lot of what I said in that piece — the Senate is an undemocratic institution; gerrymandering is bad; Congress should renew the Voting Rights Act — but my thinking on voter ID laws has changed.

It’s not that I think voter fraud is a significant problem — it’s extraordinarily rare — but that the last few years have seen a collapse in trust in the electoral process, in large part driven by our beloved president4 lying about the 2020 election.

Do I think that voter ID will magically make Republicans stop believing in conspiracy theories? No. But I do think that it just might help restore some trust in the fairness of elections.

In poll after poll, voter ID laws are really popular. In fact, it’s one of the most popular electoral reform proposals out there: It consistently polls well over two-thirds support, with majorities of all parties and races in favor.

In fact, for a lot of people, it’s surprising that showing a photo ID isn’t already required when you vote. It just seems like common sense to ask someone to show proof of eligibility before they cast a ballot.

The fact that voter ID is so popular and yet Democrats resist it seems to drive further suspicions in the electorate. What possible reason could Democrats have for being so stubborn about this if not a desire to cheat in elections?

Understanding that concern about suppression is overstated — and that with modern coalitions, lower turnout probably helps Democrats — could help the party get to yes. But the view that voting should be easy rather than difficult has a legitimate principled basis.

The good news is that you can do both. Just ask Kentucky.

How a red state made it easier to vote early

Michael Adams is a Republican who was first elected as Kentucky Secretary of State in 2019. In 2020, he pushed the state legislature to pass a voter ID law and a law creating in-person early voting options. I wanted to know how he was able to get that package over the line in one of the country’s reddest states.

“I built a coalition that was literally everybody from the furthest left of our Democrats all the way to Rand Paul,” Adams told me over the phone. “The sponsor of our bill was a former staffer for Rand Paul, and I got ‘em on board.”

Part of how he did it was by selling access measures as security measures. “I said, if you want to make it harder to cheat, make the election several days long instead of just one day. And if you’re trying to commit vote fraud, you’ve got to have a four-day operation, not just one, right? And that actually helped us get some votes,” Adams said.

Other liberal ideas were rebranded as conservative populism.

“For example, I said Democrats want to vote by mail, but Republicans want to vote in person, so let’s expand voting in person, and that got Republicans interested,” he explained.

Crucially, Kentucky Democrats remained supportive of the proposal when it came under fire from national figures. At one point, Adams told me, “various celebrities on social media, and Hillary Clinton also, for that matter, all put out disparaging tweets about our election process because they had read misleading information about how we were doing it. To their great credit, our Democratic governor, the NAACP, all the Kentucky left — all said they’re wrong. We have a fair election. We don’t have suppression.”

If anything, Adams believed that the criticism helped him win support for his package:

“I used that to get Republicans to rally around what we were doing. I’m like, Hey, Hillary Clinton doesn’t like what we’re doing. Maybe you should.”

When I asked him about the prospect of federal legislation making a similar compromise — tighter ID requirements in exchange for expanded voting access — Adams was skeptical. But he did hope that Congress would update the National Voter Registration Act. That law is now over 30 years old and makes it “very hard for us to do our jobs with voter registration and maintenance of the rolls.”

For example, people sometimes move from one state to another. But each state maintains its own voter file, so if someone moves to another state, they might remain on their old state’s voter rolls. There’s no legal requirement that states share their voter rolls, which would make it easier to clean up duplicative registrations.

“When I first ran for this office, there was a lawsuit against my predecessor that alleged that there was, I forget the number, but 103% registration in some of our counties,” Adams told me. “And what’s frustrating about that is, again, it doesn’t mean that there’s fraud, but it lends to conspiracy theories.”

Faith in democracy is worth fighting for

The final point about conspiracies is important. Voters having faith in the system matters, just as making voting broadly accessible matters.

That doesn’t mean Democrats should swallow the existing SAVE America Act as written; among other things, it would make it harder for married women who changed their last names and students who move out of state for college to vote. But it would make sense for Democrats to work with Republicans to enact voter ID laws that are popular with the public, allow all eligible voters to cast a ballot, and bolster faith in elections.

Ideally, such legislation would be paired with Kentucky-style measures to offset other barriers to voting. But whether or not a deal like that is achievable, it’s worth saying that the call for voter ID is defensible, and it’s simply not true that enacting it would give Republicans a daunting advantage — or even any advantage at all — in elections.

Rhetoric from Democrats like Chuck Schumer comparing the legislation to Jim Crow suggests something so abhorrent as to be beyond dealmaking, and it gives a false impression of the stakes — both moral and in terms of electoral outcomes. Democrats should instead give the people what they want on voter ID and start rebuilding faith in the integrity of the democratic process.

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What do you get when you cross a cost-of-living crisis with an unpopular war and tariff policies from the 1930s?

For Donald Trump, the answer is “a disaster.”

The public opinion landscape on the economy resembles an apocalyptic wasteland for the Republican Party. Driven by immense economic dissatisfaction from a public crying out for lower costs, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are plumbing all-time lows in our latest survey of national registered voters at The Argument.

With just 40% of respondents approving and 58% disapproving in our March survey, Trump’s net approval rating is the worst that we have ever seen for him in any of our polls.

I’ll go a step further, though. Donald Trump isn’t just the most unpopular he’s ever been in this current presidential term. He’s more unpopular than any prior president has been at the equivalent point in time — including Trump in his first term.

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Why? To quote a prominent Democratic strategist, it’s the economy, stupid.

Trump’s numbers on the economy are radioactive. Every major demographic group of voters disapproves of his economic stewardship, including supermajorities of young and nonwhite voters. He’s even underwater on this issue with white, non-college voters, a group he won in 2024 by more than 20 percentage points.

Looking through our questions, it’s exceptionally clear why: Voters believe that things are getting more expensive and that their wages aren’t rising to meet the moment. Just 31% of voters agreed that their income is keeping up with the cost of living, while 65% disagreed.

This spills into a larger sense of pessimism, where most Americans believe that their financial situation is simply not improving (or, in many cases, actively deteriorating). Thirty-six percent of voters believe that they are now worse off financially than they were a year ago, while just 24% think they’re better off.

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This is very different from Trump’s first presidency. Back then, his economic numbers were consistently the best for him, even as he took major hits in public opinion on virtually every other issue, ranging from healthcare to immigration.

This gave him a lifeline, because no matter how bad things got elsewhere, he had a booming economy to latch onto as a major success. It also helped buttress his approval and gave him a lane to rebound from the lows of Charlottesville and the failed Obamacare repeal bill.

This time, however, his approval rating has followed a very different trend: It began with high approvals, fueled a buoyant and optimistic public eager for a relief from rising costs, and quickly began to follow a near-linear decline that was mostly correlated with plummeting economic sentiment.

Perhaps the most dangerous warning flag for Trump? A majority of voters expect that the economy will get even worse over the next year.

A big problem for the president here is that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted. Tariffs, which have caused a global supply-chain shock, are one of the most unpopular economic policies in Trump’s arsenal, despite being among his most frequently deployed tools.

The reason that tariffs are so unpopular is astoundingly clear. Voters believe that they are compounding the cost-of-living crisis by making things more expensive.

Trump’s rationale for tariffs has actually been pretty easy to follow, as he sincerely believes that slightly higher prices are a small price to pay in exchange for increased job growth. There are two problems with this rationale, though: First, voters actually believe that the tariffs have hurt job growth, and second, voters want lower prices above everything else — even if it means higher unemployment.

The standard macroeconomics framework argues that there is a trade-off between lower inflation and lower unemployment. This is why the Fed has such a difficult job; it’s trying to balance between moderating the rate of price increases and keeping unemployment low.

Economic research has found that very few Americans (roughly 25%) even agree that there is a trade-off at all. Most don’t think it exists.

But we wanted to see, when forced to pick between these two outcomes, which voters would pick. And they decisively picked higher unemployment.

There are two potential reasons for this: First, people don’t attribute the wage increases they get during inflationary periods to the larger inflationary environment, so rapidly rising prices are experienced entirely as a policy failure.

But second, unemployment is different and directly felt by far fewer people. Even in really bad unemployment spells, the large majority of people don’t lose their jobs — recall that during the peak of the Great Recession, unemployment still only hovered around 10%. So the trade-off for voters is logical, and they’re probably more willing to risk that someone else will lose their job over everyone having to pay higher prices for eggs.

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During the Biden years, economists and policymakers were slow to acknowledge just how much of a political emergency inflation was. Scarred from the Great Recession policy and discourse wars, there was a real effort to avoid long spells of unemployment resulting from the COVID-19 recession. As a result, there was a period of underreaction toward inflation.

Some people called this a manufactured crisis or a “vibecession.” But the sentiment from Americans was grounded in a sobering reality: Even as prices skyrocketed, income didn’t. Ultimately, that simple reality was enough to doom the Biden presidency, and it added rocket fuel to Trump’s reelection campaign.

Given that voters sent Trump back to the White House expecting some relief in prices, the current backlash is entirely rational. Trump is doing the exact opposite of what people asked for.

Tariffs have resulted in global economic upheaval. The war in Iran — which began before the fielding of this survey — resulted in an oil shock that has sent gas prices soaring. And Trump’s actions on immigration have shrunk the labor pool, leading voters to partially blame the administration’s immigration policies for exacerbating the cost of living crisis.

I want to be crystal clear about this last finding, because it reinforces a simple reality: Virtually everything in politics revolves around the economy. Voters certainly don’t like the chaos around enforcement, but a large chunk of the disapproval of Trump’s immigration handling also has to do with the economic effects of the policies themselves, which have exacerbated a spike in grocery prices.

This is part of why swing-seat Republicans like Rep. David Valadao have expressed immense unease with the administration’s approach, citing potential economic downturns as a notable adverse side effect.

One way or another, it all comes back to the same thing: Voters want things to be cheaper.

This data also comes with sharp implications for the midterm elections. By this point, it is difficult to see a way in which an aging Trump can escape the death spiral that has enveloped his presidency.

What’s more, the loss of trust the Republican Party has experienced on the economy has been nothing short of staggering. In fact, in our latest survey, Democrats actually had a slight edge when it came to the economy, which marked a shocking reversal from the 14-point edge Republicans enjoyed during the Biden years.

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The Verdict

After the end of WWII, the Allied powers were figuring out what to do with Italy’s African colonies. Libya and Somalia got independence, but Eritrea was handled very differently.

There’s a quote that can be cited by basically any Eritrean in the world attributed to John Foster Dulles, a U.S. representative to the UN General Assembly who would go on to become Eisenhower’s secretary of state:

“From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.”1

Essentially, the U.S. was preparing for the Cold War — lining up allies, securing military bases, containing Soviet influence — and wanted Eritrea’s Red Sea ports and communications facilities to go to its existing ally, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a landlocked country without Eritrea, which was (and is) a large part of its motivation for continued hostilities with its smaller neighbor.

During Ethiopia’s occupation of what is now an independent country, it imposed its own language, banned political parties and unions, and dissolved the Eritrean parliament at gunpoint. Eritreans did not go quietly; what followed was a long and bloody war of resistance.

In a country of about 3 million, between 60,000 and 80,000 were killed, and 50,000 children were orphaned. Those casualties include many of my parents’ direct relatives. Proportionally, if this happened in the U.S., that would mean about 6.8 million deaths, on the low end. Hilariously,2 Ethiopia switched sides in the Cold War anyways and imposed communism on both its own people and Eritrea as well. This was all depressingly predictable at the time.

The U.S. decision to oppose Eritrean independence ended up being net negative for world peace and national security as well as for its stated aims of the right to self-determination and independence.

I need to underscore how unbelievably infuriating this all is. At this exact moment in time, the U.S. was the chief architect of the UN, whose founding charter enshrined the self-determination of all peoples. In 1941, a joint declaration between Roosevelt and Churchill explicitly stated they “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

So, as an Eritrean-Ethiopian immigrant growing up in the Bush era, anger about U.S. hypocrisy over international “norms” and “human rights” and “democracy” is etched into my heart.

And yet, watching the Trump administration rip up even the pretense of caring about liberal internationalism is a reminder that sometimes virtue signaling and hypocrisy are a preferable equilibrium:

• Trump sent the military into Venezuela to capture a foreign leader and then said he was going to “run” the entire nation himself for the purposes of accessing Venezuelan oil.

• Trump repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland (a NATO ally’s territory!) and refused to rule out military force.

• Trump worked with Israel to attack Iran on a seemingly manufactured pretext of imminent threat to the U.S.

• Now, The Atlantic is reporting that the U.S. may be on the verge of “taking Cuba.”

It would be stupid and ahistorical to claim that the previous order prevented the U.S. from engaging in selfish, destructive acts. But it would also be stupid and ahistorical to forget that it was possible to shame the U.S. and other countries into comporting with their stated values on occasion. Now, we’re really in the world of realpolitik.

Hypocrisy is infuriating when you’re the one being held to a higher standard, but it’s also leverage. Take civil rights: Mary Dudziak’s book Cold War Civil Rights is the definitive account of how Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson became reluctant supporters of desegregation because of international pressure as foreign nations accused us of failing to live up to our democratic principles.

The USSR exploited racial violence against Black Americans as propaganda worldwide, particularly in Africa to turn nations against the West. The gap between the stated values of the U.S. and its actual behavior gave activists a foothold to demand better behavior. When you’re asking someone to live up to what they say they believe, that’s an easier sell than telling them they should both act differently and believe different things.

Shame is an incredibly important social tool for improving behavior. Unfortunately for all of us, Trump’s superpower is his shamelessness.

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🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents

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Every Wednesday, Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, will go live on Substack with leading election nerds to discuss what’s going on in politics that week.

This week, Lakshya joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini to discuss the electoral implications of the war in Iran.

Subscribe to The Mag so you don’t miss future live election breakdowns.

What’s News with The Argument

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The Argument recommends

Here’s what our staff is watching, reading, and listening to this week:

Books:

• The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu

• The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, Peter Straub

• The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

• The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

Watching:

• Marty Supreme

• Dhurandhar The Revenge

Music:

• “Lemon Pound Cake,” by Afroman

• “Don't Wake Me Up,” by The Hush Sound

• “Glow in the Dark,” by Skepta

We have merch!

My favorite merch is either the hat or the keychain, but we have stickers and quarter-zips too! Buy them here.

Send us a picture of you with your merch and we might just feature it in this weekly roundup.

More to read:

The recent showdown between the Department of Defense and Anthropic hinged in part on one of Anthropic’s conditions for contracting with the Pentagon: that the government would not use Claude for the domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. According to reporting in The Atlantic, the Pentagon wanted to use Claude to analyze data that could include everything from Americans’ GPS-tracked movements to credit card transactions and Google search queries.

This rare high-profile blowup over digital privacy left me with two questions: How much do people actually care about surveillance? And how different could LLM-driven surveillance be from what we’re already living with?

On the first question, if you ask people directly, they’ll tell you they don’t like surveillance. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 81% of Americans expressed concern about how companies used their data and 71% said the same about the government. But interestingly, in the same poll, 61% of respondents were skeptical that anything they could try to do about it would make a difference.

While most people dislike surveillance, they seem to accept it because they don’t see any alternative.

In a brilliant essay about the “Find my Friends” fad (where people permanently share their locations with friends and family), former OpenAI researcher Zoe Hitzig diagnosed the phenomenon as a “strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age.”

After all, sharing your location with a friend is a small step once you’ve shared it with a corporation.

I think it’s time to reconsider our Stockholm-like resignation. Because, in answer to the second question, LLM-driven surveillance is going to be radically different from what we’re accustomed to.

AIs don’t just capture information, they take meaning from it

AI can, of course, capture and summarize incredible amounts of information. That alone makes existing mass data collection more useful to the government. However, what’s less well-understood is AI’s capacity to draw incredibly strong inferences from a small amount of data points: There are already studies claiming to diagnose physical and mental health issues from the mere tone of your voice. From just a photo, the latest models can reverse engineer where the photo was taken.

In her essay on mutual location sharing, Hitzig drew a useful distinction between surveillance and spying.

“Surveillance is about tracking actions — what you do, where you go, what you buy,” she wrote. “Spying, on the other hand, is about gleaning intent through a careful study of what you say, what you think, and what you feel.” Surveillance expands the surface area of what’s legible to the state. Spying is the act of successfully interpreting it.

Until now, the surface area of data collection has largely outpaced the ability to take meaning from it. AI is fundamentally different because it can do the analysis. It can actually spy.

In an essay published a few weeks before his showdown with the Trump administration, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, argued that AI would make doing even broader data collection more desirable since, previously, “ it would have been difficult to sort through this volume of information, but with AI it could all be transcribed, interpreted, and triangulated” to create a better picture of each citizen.

Amodei’s point is true even before the government takes up novel methods or broader collections. With AI, the existing post-9/11 dragnet surveillance system is upgraded just because the government can parse it better.

But, of course, AI’s power goes beyond mere summarizing.

Before chatbots ever existed, AI’s main talent was pattern recognition. The opening sally in modern AI progress was a 2012 image recognition technology trained on over 1 million photos. That use case, by 2018, had been improved upon to the point that it was able to find “cardiovascular risk factors not previously thought to be present or quantifiable in retinal images.” That is, it found patterns that no human expert had found before — from an image of an eye alone, it could predict age, gender, smoking status, and adverse cardiac events.

That was 2018. What can it do now?

A recent economics working paper used publicly available LinkedIn and MBA program images to guess the personality traits of almost 100,000 MBA graduates from their headshots alone.

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There’s an interesting tension within the Democratic Party’s coalition: To win national majorities, Democrats depend on nonwhite voters, many of whom have pretty conservative views but vote for Democrats anyway.

In The Argument’s aggregated national polling data, just 6% of white conservatives planned to support the Democratic candidate for Congress this fall. But 15% of Hispanic conservatives and a remarkable 61% of Black conservatives planned to vote blue in the midterms.

The statistic among Black voters is particularly interesting because they are widely considered the backbone of the Democratic Party. Of all racial groups in America, Black voters are by far the most likely to identify as and vote for Democrats. Yet just 34% of them call themselves liberals.

What explains this phenomenon? Do Black voters have a different conception of what ideological labels like “liberal” and “conservative” mean?

Our polling data shows that Black voters aren’t just applying a different label to themselves. On a range of issues, particularly those relating to gender and sexual orientation, Black voters have much more conservative preferences than other Democratic voters. The exceptions are issues connected to race, like policing and affirmative action, where they’re notably more liberal.

For the older generation of Black voters, two things keep them voting for Democrats, despite their policy disagreements: First, peer pressure. Second, what political scientists call “ideological innocence,” which is the fact that many voters neither think about their views in an ideologically consistent way nor do they have stable views on policy at all. That’s why it’s easy to come across a voter who both self-identifies as a conservative and wants the government to do big things like Social Security and Medicare.

But both of these forces are weakening, which helps explain why Democrats are bleeding support among younger Black voters — especially young Black men.

Black voters really are more conservative than most Democrats

Based on Catalist data, 85% of Black voters backed Kamala Harris in 2024. But looking at self-reported ideology, Black voters are only a hair more liberal than the general population and much less liberal than Harris 2024 voters on both economic and social issues.

In The Argument’s aggregated survey data from August 2025 through March 2026, just under two-thirds of Harris 2024 voters called themselves liberal on social issues, compared to just 38% of Black voters. On economic issues, 55% of Harris voters called themselves liberal, while just 35% of Black voters did.

Black voters were 12 percentage points less likely than voters overall to agree that same-sex marriages should have the same legal protections as traditional marriages, and a whopping 33 points less likely than Harris 2024 voters.

Compared to Harris 2024 voters, Black voters were also much more likely to agree that it’s better “when men look and act like men, and women look and act like women,” to support a return to traditional gender roles, and to say that being transgender is morally wrong.

It’s not just these broad values questions either. In our poll’s questions about transgender policy, Black voters were generally aligned with the median voter, which is to say they were much more conservative than Harris voters.

That’s not to say that Black voters are just more conservative than their party across the board, though. On racial issues, they’re much more liberal.

Black voters are much more liberal on race

These days, the conventional wisdom is that “Defund the Police” is and was: (a) a dumb idea, (b) unpopular, and (c) something that Black people didn’t actually want.

Defund was indeed dumb and unpopular, but it’s actually not true that Black people were opposed to it. For example, here’s a Morning Consult/Pollitico poll from June of 2020. Half of Black respondents supported the slogan “defund the police,” and 61% supported the general idea of redirecting police funding.

Another good example is race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In a Pew survey from 2023, just a third of all U.S. adults approved of the practice — but a plurality of Black voters did.

Here’s a Gallup poll from after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case was decided. While 68% of voters said the decision was mostly a good thing, Black voters were evenly split; half of Black respondents thought the ruling would negatively impact higher education, and 52% thought it would make things harder for Black applicants.

Peer pressure or ideological innocence?

So what’s going on here? How is it that large majorities of Black voters identify as conservative or moderate while also voting for the liberal party?

One strand of literature argues that Black voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, despite many of them holding conservative views, for group-interest reasons. A 2022 paper by Julian J. Wamble, Chryl N. Laird, Corrine M. McConnaughy, and Ismail K. White argued that “black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans’ use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support.”

They found that Black voters were more likely to identify as Democrats — and more likely to donate to Obama — when faced with a Black interviewer.

In a 2024 paper, the Stanford political scientist Hakeem Jefferson took a different tack, arguing that “the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are unfamiliar to many Black Americans,” causing respondents who are “unfamiliar with these terms [to] misapply them and choose ideological labels that fail to align with their partisan preferences.”

Jefferson examined American National Election Studies data and created an index of familiarity with the terms “liberal” and “conservative” based on whether survey respondents correctly identified the Republicans (and Republican presidential nominees) as more conservative than the Democrats.

Among Black people who scored lowest on familiarity (those who were least able to identify the Republican Party or Donald Trump as conservatives), self-identifying as conservative had either no relationship with partisanship or a negative relationship with it.

That is, among low-familiarity Black respondents, calling yourself “conservative” tells us essentially nothing about your partisanship.

Blexit is real for the younger generation

Since 2012, Democrats have lost three to four points of support among Black voters each presidential cycle. But that decline is especially large among Black voters under 30, particularly among young Black men. Among Black men aged 18 to 29, Harris got just 75% of the vote, compared to 94% for Obama in 2012.

Here’s how I think you can square the arguments in the two political science papers I cited above:

Historically, it is true that Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic — including Black voters with more conservative views — because the Democratic Party was seen as the party of civil rights. Voting blue was a way of practicing in-group solidarity.

That solidarity was enforced by institutions like the Black church and the memory of the civil rights movement, which helped keep the most conservative Black voters in the Democratic coalition.

But today, that’s changing. The civil rights movement is less salient now, partly because some of the battles it fought are now considered settled issues, and partly because younger Black voters simply weren’t alive for it. Racism is by no means over, but it has abated significantly.

Institutions like the Black church are also weakening, as a growing share of young people of all races become religiously unaffiliated. And voters now have more information than ever before about what each party’s positions are.

The net effect is that young Black people are increasingly ideologically polarized, which means that Black conservatives are beginning to leave the Democratic Party.

I don’t expect this trend to be a straight line. As my colleague Lakshya Jain noted in a recent piece, polling shows that Democrats are gaining the most ground with noncollege and minority voters ahead of the midterms. And I do expect to see a large “bounce back” for Democrats in 2026 with Black and Hispanic voters that shifted away from the party in 2024. But it’s unlikely to be a return to 2012 levels of Democratic support, and over the longer run — that is, the next few decades — I expect to see Democratic support among conservative nonwhites continue to erode.

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