PRRI Staff, - Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)
Stephan:
As I watched traitor Trump’s performance in the debate Tuesday night I kept thinking: what is it about this incompetent psychopathic criminal that millions of Americans still support him? Here, I think, is the answer. It says something very sade about America, but he was so bad last night that I think Harris is going to win the popular vote. However, there is still the Electoral College, and I am not sure how that will come out. The Electoral College should be eliminated in my opinion. It has become a threat to U.S. democracy.
Executive Summary
Growing concerns about the appeal of an authoritarian leader in the United States led PRRI to conduct a new survey of more than 5,000 Americans that revisits long-established measures of authoritarianism and their relationships to Christian nationalism, examines Americans’ commitment to democratic values and willingness to accept political violence, and explores how authoritarian attitudes are linked to views about immigrants and immigration, cultural change, gender roles, and patriarchy.
Relying on two classic approaches to measure authoritarianism, PRRI finds that most Americans do not hold highly authoritarian views.
Revisiting work first developed in The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and later adapted into the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWAS), PRRI finds that 43% of Americans score high on the RWAS, compared with 37% who score low; two in ten Americans qualify as having mixed opinions (20%).
Around four in ten Americans (41%) score high on an alternative measure of authoritarianism (CRAS) that relies on child-rearing preferences and is less closely associated with conservative political ideology. This is a drop from 57% of Americans who scored high on the CRAS in a previous […]
ROBERT P. JONES, President and Founder of PRRI - Time
Stephan:
Here is the other side of the equation described in the previous article. This is why millions of Americans still support traitor Trump. This is why it is so important that those of us who support racial and gender equality and want us to remain a democracy, and foster wellbeing for all must turn out and vote for the Democrats. They are far from perfect, but if we do not win the United States we have known will disappear.
Courtesy of Robert P. Jones—PRRI/Simon & Schuster
Donald Trump’s ambivalence on abortion is back in the news because of his recent flip-flopping on a November referendum in his home state of Florida. On August 29, Trump said he suggested he would vote for the referendum, which would expand abortion rights and overturn the state’s current six-week abortion ban. After intense blowback from anti-abortion activists, Trump walked back his support the next day.
While Trump’s about face on this referendum shows that the activist class still has some pull, it remains true that Trump has done something unimaginable in modern Republican politics. He has bullied the GOP into abandoning four decades of support for a national ban on abortion. Even more surprising, there’s no evidence that Trump’s renegotiation of the allegedly nonnegotiable has hurt him among the rank and file of the party.
This perplexing outcome is revelatory. Trump’s cavalier treatment of this supposedly sacred issue has exposed the Republican Party’s best kept secret: The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different […]
The CNN fact checkers latest report is that Trump lied 33 times and Harris once. My personal take was that the ABC moderators were not very good. Trump kept speaking out of turn and, I timed it, for longer than he was allocated on almost every occasion. They never cut him off, never muted his mike. He also gave almost no specifics in answer to any question he was asked. I thought Harris should have been more confrontational about his lies. But of the two I don’t see how honorable person can vote for Trump.
A countdown clock over debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis shows how much time former President Donald Trump has left to answer a question during Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are facing off for the first time Tuesday during ABC’s presidential debate.
CNN’s Facts First team is evaluating the candidate’s claims here. This story will be updated throughout the event.
Harris on Trump’s tariff plan
Former Vice President Kamala Harris said during Tuesday night’s debate that former President Donald Trump’s policies would result in a “Trump sales tax” that would raise prices for middle class families by about $4,000 a year.
Facts First:The claim is reasonable enough, but it’s worth explaining that Harris is referring to Trump’s proposal to implement new tariffs if he returns to the White House.
Trump has called for adding a tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports from all countries, as well as another tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports.
Together, a 20% across-the-board tariff with a 60% tariff on Chinese-made goods would amount to […]
This is a story of how dysfunctional the U.S. government has become. You would think that both parties would think that it was in the best interests of the country to get rural Americans online at the highest speed possible, just as earlier governments got them electricity. But we no longer have a government in which both parties have made a commitment to fostering wellbeing. One doesn’t even care about assuring we are a democracy. Last night’s debate made that very clear. It is all going to turn on how this election comes out.
President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law promised to help Virginia expand broadband internet to hard-to-reach corners of the commonwealth — investing nearly $1.5 billion to improve a key service across a swing state crucial to Democrats’ hopes in the November election.
But so far, Virginia, like many states, hasn’t seen a cent of that money put to use. The state got news only in July that it was approved for funding — more than 10 months after completing its application to Washington, and nearly three years after the law was signed.
Virginia’s story is just one thread of the messy, delayed rollout of a $42 billion national program championed by Democrats in particular, but with big potential payoffs in Republican districts as well.
In his speech last month at the Democratic National Convention, Biden trumpeted his broadband program in historic terms, calling it a national build-out “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.” Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris helped create and promote the program as vice president, and on the campaign trail it could offer a way to show how the White […]
This is a very sad story. I once had great respect for Nate Silver because I thought he was a pollster of real integrity. Instead, this is just another story of corruption. 538 I realize now is not to be trusted.
Former President Donald Trump sits at the defense table at his ‘hush money’ trial. (AFP)
Polling expert and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver updated his presidential election forecast Sunday and gave GOP nominee Donald Trump a 63.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College in November, with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris trailing with only a 36 percent chance.
But veteran conservative consultant Stuart Stevens — a Never Trumper conservative who is supporting Harris — is critical of Silver’s forecast, arguing that there is a connection between Silver’s FiveThirtyEight and billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel.
In a Tuesday post on X, Stevens wrote, “Polymarket is Peter Thiel’s creation. @NateSilver538 is being paid by Peter Thiel.”
In May, Forbes reported that “controversial billionaire political donor Peter Thiel and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin” had “raised about $70 million in funding for Polymarket.”
According to Axios’ Sara Fischer, the predictions market platform Polymarket hired Silver as an adviser in July.
Stevens is a veteran of conservative politics and has […]
Abhimanyu Ghoshal, Contributing Writer - New Atlas
Stephan:
Here is some interesting good news about what is happening in developing renewable non-carbon energy technologies. I think it is significant that neither this technology nor the one referenced in Scotland are coming from the United States.
The M4 wave energy converter should enter use later this month Credit: Marine Energy Research Australia
If you find yourself in the Australian port city of Albany and spot a humongous yellow machine bobbing in the waves of King George Sound, don’t be alarmed. It’s just a generator prototype making a case for renewable wave energy.
Developed by the University of Western Australia’s Marine Energy Research Australia knowledge hub, the device is called the Moored MultiMode Multibody (M4) Wave Energy Demonstration Project.
Following the machine’s launch ceremony last week, the plan is to operate it for six months (starting later this month) and gather data on how efficiently it generates energy. An even larger model will subsequently be built and deployed on the high seas.
The M4 demonstrator spans a massive 79 feet (24 m) in length and is nearly 33 feet (10 m) wide – approximating the length of an average wave within King George Sound. It consists of a […]
