Vox: Why government agencies should move from DC to the Midwest

Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other former industrial powerhouses in the Midwest are struggling. The industries that have supported those cities have gone away, leaving them overbuilt and underpopulated. Meanwhile, coastal cities like New York and Washington, DC are overcrowded and absurdly expensive. So, why not relocate some well-paying federal jobs from the capitol area to the Midwest? Vox's Matt Yglesias explains how such a plan might work.

Mish Talk: Trump is Trailing Badly in All Recent Florida Polls: Why?

Biden tops Trump by 9 points, 49-40 percent, in a Fox News survey of Florida registered voters. That’s up from a 3-point edge in April (46-43 percent). [...]

The former vice president owes his advantage to the backing of Hispanics (+17 points), women (+18 points), and Millennials born between 1981 and 1996 (+30).

Some groups that are key to a Trump reelection split down the middle, including men (46 Biden vs. 44 Trump) and voters ages 65 and over (47-48 percent) -- Trump’s 8-point edge among white voters (42-50 percent) also trails expectations. [...]

It is by no means impossible for Trump to win. I have Trump's odds at about 30%.

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The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings

Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]

The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.

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Today in Focus: Who is trying to ban abortion in the US?

Janet Porter believes life begins at conception and has spent the last 10 years lobbying on the fringes of the US abortion debate. Many on the left and right despise her, but in Donald Trump’s US, she has just had one of the biggest victories of her life. Porter successfully lobbied Ohio’s legislature to pass one of the strictest abortion bans in the world in April – the “heartbeat bill” would make the procedure illegal about six weeks into pregnancy. Alabama followed in May with an even more restrictive version, outlawing abortion at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for those resulting from rape or incest. Six-week bans have been introduced in 15 states, although none are currently in effect.

Jessica Glenza, the Guardian’s US health reporter, tells Anushka Asthana about her meeting with Porter. With the recent appointment of two Trump-nominated supreme court justices and a growing number of anti-abortion federal judges, the ultimate aim of anti-abortion activists and lawmakers is to mount a challenge to Roe v Wade, the 1973 court decision that legalised abortion in the US.

And: Serena Daniari on why achieving a higher voice can be essential to embracing a female identity, and can provide a cloak of protection from bias and bigotry.

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Associated Press: U.S. Supreme Court blocks redrawing of Ohio, Michigan electoral maps

The Supreme Court on Friday blocked lower court rulings ordering Republican legislators in Michigan and Ohio to redraw U.S. congressional maps ahead of the 2020 elections, dealing a blow to Democrats who had argued that the electoral districts were intended to unlawfully diminish their political clout. [...]

The lower courts found that the electoral maps in the two states had been drawn to entrench Republicans in power by manipulating boundaries in a way that reduced the voting clout of Democrats - a practice known as partisan gerrymandering - in violation of the U.S. Constitution. [...]

But the action by the justices was not unexpected as they weigh two other gerrymandering cases - one from North Carolina and the other from Maryland - that could decide definitively whether federal judges have the power to intervene to curb partisan gerrymandering. The rulings in those cases, due by the end of June, are likely to dictate whether the legal challenges against the Ohio and Michigan electoral maps can move forward.

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Vox: New York’s Orthodox Jewish community is battling measles outbreaks. Vaccine deniers are to blame.

What’s notable here is that the cases are mostly occurring among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated Orthodox Jews, particularly children. When asked why people are opting out of vaccines, the city health department said anti-vaccine propagandists are distributing misinformation in the community.

The fearmongerers include the Brooklyn group called PEACH — or Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health — which spreads misinformation about vaccine safety, citing rabbis as authorities, through a hotline and magazines. Brooklyn Orthodox Rabbi William Handler has also been proclaiming the well-debunked link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Parents who “placate the gods of vaccination” are engaging in “child sacrifice,” he told Vox. [...]

He also explained that some Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn go to school together, worship together, and live and travel together. This means a few unvaccinated people living in close proximity can be dangerous. But it also means making inroads with public health messages requires extra effort. “We see government invest in public health awareness a lot,” Rapaport said. “But it never trickles down to Yiddish speakers or people who don’t own TV sets.”

The story in New York is familiar: Other tight-knit communities — like the Somali-American community in Minnesota and the Amish in Ohio — have recently fallen victim to measles outbreaks as a result of vaccine refusal. This latest outbreak is a reminder of how vulnerable more insular groups can be to anti-vaxxers, and the unique challenges for public health advocates in countering their messages in these communities. [...]

“From a religious point of view, people have to vaccinate,” Rabbi David Niederman, executive director and president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told me. Instead, people have a duty to protect their families and the most vulnerable in their communities. “Anything that causes harm — you have to do whatever you can to [avoid] that.”

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CityLab: With GM Job Cuts, Youngstown Faces a New ‘Black Monday’

But local residents recognize the cruelty of optimism—and they’re tired of trying to adapt to a changing economic landscape. In the late 1970s, economic apologists called deindustrialization “creative destruction” and described plant closings as part of the “natural economic order.”[...]

The fall of Youngstown since the 1970s offers a textbook illustration of what happens when a significant portion of local workers lose their jobs. Businesses across the community suffer—not just suppliers or service providers who directly supported a closed plant, but also restaurants and bars and retailers of all kinds. Stores close, windows get broken, storefronts get boarded up, and downtowns empty out. Cities lose the tax dollars to pay for street repairs, police patrols, fire departments, and more; crime rises, the built environment deteriorates, and populations decline. Between 2001 and 2010, the population of Youngstown dropped from 82,026 to 66,982; the Mahoning Valley had the largest population decline of any of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Since then, the region has lost another 23,000 people, 4.1 percent of its population. In May, the Wall Street Journal listed the area as one of the fastest-shrinking cities in the United States. 

The social costs of deindustrialization may be even worse. Population decline breaks apart families and shatters neighborhoods. You can see this on the streets of Youngstown, in the thousands of abandoned homes and empty lots. While the city has seen a decline in vacant properties over the last decade, much of that comes not from reclaimed homes but from the nearly 600 that have been demolished.

Deindustrialization also hurts individuals. Rates of addiction, suicide, domestic violence, and depression rise, as do rates of heart attacks and strokes. That human harm has social consequences. Residents may blame themselves for the decline of their community, and that undermines their ability to stand up for themselves and pursue new opportunities, and their faith in the institutions that people rely on for support.

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Axios: Marijuana legalization, daylight savings and other notable measures passed in the midterm elections

Marijuana legalization: Michigan became the 10th state to legalize marijuana — including the District of Columbia — and first midwestern state to do so for recreational use. North Dakota rejected a similar measure, but voters in Missouri approved the legalization of medical marijuana.

Abortion: The matter was on the ballot in three states. In Oregon, voters defeated a measure that would have banned the use of public funds to pay for abortion coverage. Alabama and West Virginia approved sweeping anti-abortion language to the states’ constitution, proclaiming that women have no right to perform the procedure.[...]

Daylight saving: Californians decided they no longer want to reset clocks twice a year. A measure they approved would implement a permanent year-round daylight saving time. But, it requires a two-thirds vote from the state legislature and a change in federal law to go into effect.

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FiveThirtyEight: The 2018 Map Looked A Lot Like 2012 … And That Got Me Thinking About 2020

But it does mean that pretty much every political battle is going to be pitched with an eye toward 2020. And 2020 will be a unique year in that the House, Senate and presidency are all potentially in play.1 How the presidency goes is anybody’s guess. But Trump took advantage of the Electoral College last time around, winning the tipping-point state (Wisconsin) by about 1 percentage point even though he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points. If Trump has the same edge in 2020, that could go a long way toward winning him a second term. [...]

With those caveats aside, here’s the map you come up with if you count up the popular vote. It ought to look familiar. In fact, it’s the same exact map by which Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, except with Ohio going to Republicans. It would have equated to 314 electoral votes for Democrats and 224 for the GOP. [...]

The pink states — where Republicans won by fewer than 5 percentage points — are also interesting, mostly because they include Texas, where Democrats lost the popular vote for the House by only 3.6 percentage points and Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost his race for the Senate by just 2.6 points. It’s not as though Texas is exactly at the tipping point yet: Democrats came close to winning it, but they didn’t get over the top, even in a pretty blue year. But it probably deserves to be included in a group of Sun Belt states with North Carolina, Arizona and perhaps Georgia (where Democrats lost the popular vote by 6 points) as places where Democrats can compete in a good year. Among these, Arizona was the best one for Democrats on Tuesday night; they currently trail in the popular vote for the House there by 1.7 points and could make up further ground, as a lot of ballots from Maricopa County are still left to be counted.

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CNN: 7 takeaways from election night 2018

House Democrats placed a MASSIVE bet on women in their plan to retake the majority. Dozens and dozens of Democratic female candidates jumped into races across the country. Democrats tailored much of their messaging on health care, on taxes, on everything to female voters -- especially in the suburbs. That was clearly the right bet. Women made up 52% of the overall electorate, according to preliminary exit polls, and they went for Democratic candidates over Republicans by 20. According to the Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman, there will now be more than 100 women in the House in 2019 for the first time in history. [...]

That, by the way, is not unique to Trump. Midterm elections are almost always referendums on the president and his party. And they are almost always negative referendums. (Americans like divided government.) It's why the president's party has not lost House seats in only three midterms since the Civil War. (What years were those? 1934, 1998 and 2002.) [...]

The Ohio Democratic Senator cruised to a third term on Tuesday night against a credible opponent -- Rep. Jim Renacci (R) -- in a state that Trump won by eight points two years ago. That won't get all that much attention -- no one on either side thought Brown would lose -- but it should, as the party turns to 2020. Remember that Trump is President because of 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Midwest is, literally, where he built his path to the White House -- and where he will look again in 2020. [...]

If you asked Democrats going into Tuesday night which governor race they wanted to win the most, they'd likely name Florida first and then Ohio. They won neither. And there's meaning well beyond simply losing at the gubernatorial level. Both are swing states -- maybe the two swingiest states -- going into the 2020 presidential election, and it's always better to have a governor's political machine working for you rather than against you in a swing state. And Republicans will have the upper hand in redistricting in 2021 in that trio of states -- which matters a whole hell of a lot.

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Politico: How everything became the culture war

The Republicans clamoring for drilling that day in Pennsylvania weren’t reacting to the science of global warming or the economics of petroleum or the geopolitics of energy policy. They loved the idea of drilling now, and drilling everywhere, because their political enemies hated it. They were enjoying the primal experience of owning the libs, lashing out at the smug Democratic hippies who wanted to take away their SUVs and guns and Big Gulps. Oil exploration is a complex issue, but in the arena it was just another blunt-force weapon in a simple culture war.[...]

President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponizing policy to mobilize his base rather than mobilizing his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder.[...]

Politics has always been adversarial. Traditionally, though, we’ve had a fairly robust national consensus about a fairly broad set of goals — a strong defense, a decent safety net, freedom from excessive government interference — even though we’ve squabbled over how to achieve them. What’s different about drill-baby-drill politics is the transformation of even nonpartisan issues into mad-as-hell battles of the bases, which makes it virtually impossible for politicians to solve problems in a two-party system. Cooperation and compromise start to look like capitulation, or even treasonous collusion with the enemy. [...]

It’s probably not a coincidence that this shift is happening at a time when college-educated voters are trending Democratic and noncollege whites have been Trump’s most reliable constituency. Policies that hurt colleges, like policies that hurt cities, are policies that hurt Democrats. To listen to pols talk about college these days is to watch a wedge issue in its embryonic stage, as substantive questions about the cost and relevance of higher ed, the burdens of student debt, the adequacy of worker training and the power of political correctness on campus start to morph into red-meat attacks on pointy-headed elitists who look down on ironworkers and brainwash America’s youth. Republicans are starting to fit the Democratic push for universal free college into their larger critique of the Democratic urge to hand out free stuff to Democratic voters. And they’re portraying a liberal arts education as a culturally liberal thing, like kale or Kwanzaa or reusable shopping bags.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Are Democrats Looking So Strong In The Midwest?

It’s not just the House, either. Democratic incumbents are clear favorites to win their Senate races in Michigan, Minnesota (two races there, actually), Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are modest favorites to hold on to seats in Indiana and Missouri — which were very red in 2016. Democrats are favored to win gubernatorial races in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. The gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Wisconsin are toss-ups, and Democrats even have a chance in two very conservative states, Kansas and South Dakota. A win by Tony Evers in Wisconsin would be particularly significant for Democrats, who have failed in three different attempts to defeat Gov. Scott Walker.[...]

But why are the biggest gains likely to come in the Midwest? First of all, 2018 is confirming what previous election cycles had suggested — this is an area that swings a lot between the two parties. Democrats made major gains in the Midwest in 2006, then faltered in the Obama years and look to be having a revival now. And because Democrats lost in many key races in the Midwest in 2010 and 2014, there was some low-hanging fruit for Democrats to pick off in a year like this. (Like the governor’s mansion in traditionally-Democratic Illinois, for example.) Contrast the Midwest with the South, where Republicans have steadily gained ground for two decades and are likely to lose relatively few seats even in what appears to be a Democratic wave year.

Secondly and relatedly, national polls suggest that white voters without college degrees favor Republicans in 2018, but the margin between the two parties is likely to narrow compared to 2016, when Clinton lost that bloc by more than 30 percentage points. That shift has outsized influence in the Midwest, which has higher populations of white voters without college degrees than many other parts of the country. So the Democrats’ problem with white working-class voters may not be as severe as it looked on Election Day 2016 — which perhaps had more to do with the conditions in that election than the party overall. What we are seeing in 2018 suggests that working-class whites are not a single national bloc, but still vote much differently by state and region. Working-class whites in Southern states like Georgia and Texas are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic candidates in key races this year, but they are less GOP-leaning in Midwest states like Ohio and Wisconsin.

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CityLab: The New Deal Landmark That's Cannibalizing Itself

In all three of the Depression-era greenbelt towns (so called because they were planned to be ringed by a “green belt” of undeveloped land), denser-than-average homes and charming public facilities are infused with utopian intent. Even Greenhills’ undulating streets reveal something of the planners’ social aims, said local preservation consultant Beth Sullebarger. “They were designed to be narrow and to not have four-way intersections, so that they would be safer,” she said. Planners in the Thirties were coming to grips with the automotive revolution and experimenting with ways to tame cars.

Inspired by the Garden City concept of British theorist Ebenezer Howard, Greenhills’ chief planner Justin Hartzog subdivided the village into roughly circular “superblocks.” Duplexes, townhouses, and apartments were built in a mix of Modernist and traditional styles, and many were oriented “backwards,” with living rooms looking out on parks instead of the street. After World War II, single-family houses were added for veterans. The federal government divested itself of the town in 1950.

At its inception, Greenhills was exclusively white. (New Deal progressivism stopped at the color line.) Today, per the 2016 American Community Survey, its population of just under 4,000 is 83 percent white, 14 percent black, and 4 percent Hispanic or Latino, with a median household income of about $57,000. Of the town’s 1,700 units of housing, the majority are owner-occupied, and homes recently on the market ranged from the high $40,000s to $155,000.

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Business Insider: The 2016 electoral map looks very similar to 2012 — but already a few big differences are forming

The 2016 Electoral College map is looking very similar to the map from 2012, but already a few major differences are evident.

As of Monday, four states have flipped from 2012, when President Barack Obama faced off against Republican nominee Mitt Romney: Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio from blue to red, and North Carolina from red to blue. In addition, the 2nd Congressional District in Maine flipped from blue to red, providing an extra electoral vote.

If that map were to hold, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would top Republican nominee Donald Trump by a 312-226 total - a slightly tighter race compared with Obama's 332-206 victory in 2012.

But it's not so safe for Clinton just yet. In Colorado and Pennsylvania, Clinton is polling slightly below where Obama finished in 2012 - with Colorado amounting to a virtual toss-up, and Pennsylvania not too far behind. In North Carolina, where Romney won by 2 points in 2012, Clinton's lead is as slight as can be over Trump. [...]

The best piece of news for Trump is his semisubstantial lead in Ohio. That state has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964; the last time the state voted against the national winner was in 1960, when it went in favor of then Vice President Richard Nixon instead of former President John F. Kennedy.

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