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Today’s Democrats fancy themselves as the party that trusts the evidence — wherever it might lead. This is why they invest heavily in science and technology and set up arms of government to translate that knowledge into action. But despite claiming to prioritize new ways of improving our society, Democrats don’t always act in ways that are rooted in research. 

In fact, sometimes they actively resist doing what the evidence says — especially when it comes to implementing policies that give financial benefits to people low on America’s societal totem pole. It’s not always said out loud, but the reality is that some Democrats, and American voters in general, do not think very highly of poor people or people of color — there are countless examples of how society is quick to dehumanize them and how politicians struggle to address their needs in a meaningful way. These patterns of thinking and misleading portrayals of marginalized people too often mean that the policies that could help them most are opposed time and time again.

That opposition is, of course, rarely framed in terms of antipathy or animus toward a particular group. Instead, it is often framed as “rationality,” like adherence to “fiscal conservatism,” especially among members of the GOP, who have long abided by small-government views. But some Democrats are really no different. Consider President Biden’s reluctance to cancel student loan debt, or the federal government’s hesitancy to provide free community college, or West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s recent opposition to including the child tax credit in the Build Back Better plan, reportedly on the grounds that low-income people would use the money on drugs. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have found a number of scapegoats to use while arguing against expanding the social safety net, including playing to Americans’ fears about rising inflation rates. As a result, various programs that would help people — namely the poor and people of color — have become taboo.

What’s striking, though, is that if you actually look at most social science research, investing in the social safety net is fiscally responsible — it pays large dividends for both individuals and our collective society. Economists have studied this for decades, finding that anti-poverty and cash-assistance programs executed both in and outside of the U.S. are linked to increased labor participation in the workforce, while investing in childcare benefits not only children, but the broader economy and society they are raised in. Moreover, newer initiatives like canceling student debt could add up to 1.5 million jobs and lift over 5 million Americans out of poverty in addition to freeing many Americans of the debt trap that is contributing to a lagging housing market and widening racial wealth gap. Other research suggests that those saddled with student loan debt would be more likely to get married or have children if their dues were forgiven.

That is the evidence. Yet, rather than acting on it, there has been a tendency to highlight stories and tropes about people who might waste the resources invested in them. And that’s oftentimes enough to undermine public and political support for these policies. So what we’re seeing from some “moderate” Democrats today is likely born out of an inherent distrust of what might happen if you just give people money or help them through an expanded social safety net. 

But if we look in the not-too-distant past — less than a hundred years ago, in fact — we quickly see that Democrats didn’t always oppose distributing money to support Americans’ well-being. In fact, former Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt rolled out safety-net programs like Oprah would give away her favorite things. In response to the Great Depression, Roosevelt oversaw a massive expansion of the social safety net during the 1930s and ’40s, which included giving grants to states that implemented unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children and funding to business and agriculture communities. Recognizing the importance of a safety net to protect people from “the uncertainties brought on by unemployment, illness, disability, death and old age,” the federal government also created Social Security, which it deemed vital at the time for economic security. And in the 1960s, long after the Great Depression was over, the government created the Medicare program for similar reasons under former President Lyndon B. Johnson, another Democrat.

What is clear from these examples is that the federal government once understood the importance of a robust safety net for the health, well-being and the broader functioning of our society. The caveat, however, is that this general understanding does not extend to our thinking about all Americans; the government was supportive of these policies when most beneficiaries were white. But when people of color started actively utilizing and benefitting from these same programs, they became harder to attain and, in some cases, overtly racialized. 

That was particularly true in the 1970s and ’80s when conservative and right-wing political candidates vilified Americans on welfare. During his initial presidential run, Ronald Reagan would tell stories and give numerous stump speeches centered on Linda Taylor, a Black Chicago-area welfare recipient, dubbed a “welfare queen.” To gin up anti-government and anti-poor resentment among his base, the then-future Republican president villainized Taylor, repeating claims that she had used “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare” as a way to signal that certain Americans — namely those of color — were gaming the system in order to attain certain benefits from the federal government. Reagan wasn’t alone, however. In fact, his tough stance on alleged welfare fraud and government spending on social programs encapsulated the conservative critique of big-government liberalism at the time. 

Democrats, however, weren’t that different either. Former Democratic President Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” in the 1990s included stipulations like requiring a certain percentage of welfare recipients to be working or participate in job training. This helped foster, in turn, a belief that there were people who played by the rules and those who didn’t (namely Black Americans). And once politicians started worrying about (Black) people taking advantage of the system, the requirements needed to acquire certain societal and financial benefits became even harder to obtain. 

But all of this implicit rhetoric about reducing government waste by cracking down on marginalized people does not hold up to scrutiny when examining the evidence. The reality is that fraud among social safety net beneficiaries is extremely rare, and much less costly to society than, say, tax evasion among the richest 1 percent. Yet we spend an incredible amount of money trying to catch and penalize the poor instead of helping them.

Moreover, polls show that Americans — particularly Democrats — overwhelmingly want to expand the social safety net. According to a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaners (59 percent) and 17 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners said that the government should provide more assistance to people in need. Even this October, around the time when Democrats were negotiating the size of the omnibus Build Back Better Act, a CNN/SSRS poll found that 75 percent of the party’s voters (and 6 percent of Republicans) preferred that Congress pass a bill that expanded the social safety net and enacted climate-change policies.

However, despite many Americans wanting an expansion of the social safety net, it is still often hard to sell voters on these programs — especially if they’re wrapped up in large policy packages (i.e. Obamacare) or associated with someone voters dislike (i.e. former Democratic President Barack Obama). Consider that a Politico/Morning Consult survey from late last year found that only 39 percent of Americans who received the child tax credit said it had a “major impact” on their lives. Moreover, only 38 percent of respondents credited Biden for the implementation of the program.

The fact that many expansions of the social safety net aren’t initially popular makes it all the easier for Democrats to fall back on the stories people tell themselves about different groups of people and whether they deserve help. And sometimes, those portrayals affect the concerns we have about members of those groups and the explanations we generate for why they experience the outcomes they do in life. As earlier expansions of the social safety net show, the U.S. hasn’t always been allergic to giving people money, but there now seems to be this unspoken idea that poor people and people of color can’t be trusted to spend “free” money or government assistance well.

This thinking, though, poses a problem for Democrats because, for years, they’ve branded themselves as the party that promotes general welfare by advancing racial, economic and social justice. At the same time, they continue to fall short on campaign promises to expand the social safety net despite many poor people, and people of color, having fought long and hard to put them in office. The fact that so many of today’s Democrats are still prisoners to antiquated tropes about who gets — or is deserving of — government benefits is a dangerous one, because it causes people to push members of those groups outside of their “moral circles” — the circle of people that they think they have a moral obligation to help.

Of course, breaking this chain of thought won’t be easy because it would require Democrats to break the long-standing mindset that poor people are in their current situation because of a series of “unfortunate” choices. It would also probably require them to stop worrying about how Republicans might falsely reframe social safety net programs as dangerous, especially given ongoing concerns regarding inflation and the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. But at the end of the day, that shouldn’t matter: While the politics might not be immediately convenient and the effects of these programs not immediately seen, that is not necessarily a reason to defer implementing them. Focusing solely on the short-term effects is not only short-sighted, but dangerous. And Democrats stand to lose more than the support of their base if they refuse to act.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/whats-driving-inflation-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-82889923

Americans are pessimistic about one of the weirdest economies in recent memory, and their negativity is largely due to inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that prices increased 7.5 percent year-over-year in January 2022, the highest figure since 1982, and as such, more expensive milk, furniture and cars — and the fear that their prices will continue to skyrocket — are likely to remain top of mind for Americans.

This, of course, has led to a lot of finger-pointing as to who — or what — is to blame for the price increases we’re seeing. Democrats have blamed supply chain deficiencies due to COVID-19, as well as large corporations and monopolies. Republicans, meanwhile, have attacked President Biden’s legislative agenda, claiming that his signature pieces of legislation — most notably the American Rescue Plan featuring $1,400 stimulus checks paid directly to many Americans — are to blame. And to be sure, whether fair or not, most Americans do blame Biden.

But what is responsible for inflation in the U.S.? Is it all about the pandemic supply chain, as many Democrats claim, or corporate greed? Or does it have more to do with Biden’s policies, as Republicans have posited? 

Inflation isn’t just a supply-chain issue, and the stimulus likely made it worse

One of the Democrats’ most consistent talking points has been that the COVID-19-afflicted supply chain is to blame for our current levels of inflation. Biden has even gone as far as to say that supply chain issues have “everything to do” with it, while House Democrats work to craft legislation targeted at ameliorating supply chain issues. And many economists say that the foundering supply chain has played a heavy hand in driving up prices, too. 

The thinking goes as follows: Americans stopped using their gym, nail salons and other services as their spending patterns rapidly changed in 2020, and the global supply chain — which already had issues —  was not equipped to deal with the surge in demand for consumer durables (e.g., home workout equipment, office furniture) after the initial global economic shutdown. Combine that rapid demand increase with a shortage in supply, and you get higher prices. 

But at the same time, this Democratic talking point has its limits, as it’s become clear to many economists that American inflation isn’t just a supply chain issue: Our economic response — namely, the trillions of dollars of COVID-19 stimulus paid out over the last 24 months — appears to be a meaningful differentiator. 

A good way to tease this out is to look at Europe, which has faced similar supply chain issues and an even worse oil shock, as it is more dependent on foreign oil than the U.S. And yet, European countries have experienced lower inflation, perhaps due in part to their smaller government response. 

“Global supply chain problems affect every country in the world, but the United States has had more inflation than other countries,” said Jason Furman, a professor of economics at Harvard University and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama. “If you look compared to Europe, in the United States goods consumption is higher, and services consumption is higher than what it is [in Europe].”

One reason for that higher consumption is government spending. In 2020, a divided Congress under former President Donald Trump passed two separate pieces of legislation — first the $2 trillion CARES Act in March, which doled out $1,200 checks to most single adults and even more to families, then a $900 billion package in December that, among other aid, issued $600 targeted checks. But then in March 2021, Democrats passed another round of government stimulus in a $1.9 trillion relief package — including $1,400 direct payments to individual Americans — which some experts warned at the time might cause inflation. 

And it does appear that this most recent round of government spending is at least partially responsible for our current levels of inflation. An October 2021 paper found, for example, that the American Rescue Plan likely made inflation slightly worse, causing significant (but small and fleeting) upward pressure on prices, and many experts have stood by their 2021 assertions that the extra stimulus would lead to inflation. Of course, Biden’s additional stimulus was arguably necessary for Americans to participate in the economy at the time, and polling found widespread support among Americans for more relief. But it has also led many Republicans to claim that Biden’s policies are responsible for the historic price increases we’re seeing.

Furman stressed to me that inflation likely would have been high even without a COVID-19 relief bill, however, because of a reopening economy and base effect distortions. Moreover, rising gas prices — one of the most tangible ways in which Americans process inflation — likely have nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan and much more to do with the dynamics of global oil. There is at least some evidence, though, that government spending has caused inflation, beyond the explanation that it’s merely been a supply chain issue.

But not all government spending leads to inflation

Critically, however, despite what many Republicans claim, not all government spending has the same effect on inflation. In fact, historically government spending hasn’t usually led to inflation. A 2015 paper in the European Economic Review found, for example, that the effect of government spending on inflation post-World War II was “not statistically different from zero.” But Bill Dupor, a co-author of that study and vice president of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told me that the size of the intervention matters — and that could help explain why government spending today has spurred inflation but hadn’t in recent memory.

“The big difference, I think, from now relative to that is just the enormity of the government spending,” Dupor said. “That could explain why it wasn’t finding big effects, while there could be big effects now.”

Even still, not all government spending the Biden administration has greenlit has likely contributed to inflation. For example, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law in November is unlikely to have contributed to inflation for a number of reasons. First of all, very little of it has been paid for at this point. Second, it’s targeted at ramping up the productive capacity of the economy — i.e., investing in new technologies and creating jobs — which means it might even tamp down inflation. That’s different from the American Rescue Plan, whose $1,400 stimulus checks don’t build up the economy in the same way, according to the economists I spoke with. 

Americans, however, aren’t necessarily making this kind of distinction when it comes to government spending. According to a January Politico-Harvard survey, 43 percent of Americans think that the bipartisan infrastructure bill will increase inflation, while just 10 percent think it will decrease inflation (although 35 percent did say they think inflation will remain unchanged). 

Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said that his biggest concern with the recent inflation brought about by the stimulus is that it muddies the waters of government spending in the eyes of voters. That, in turn, Philippon said, expends political capital that can’t be used to tackle other key issues, like infrastructure spending or child poverty.

“People then lump together all kinds of government spending, the good and the bad,” Philippon said.

Big corporations aren’t the biggest cause, but …

Finally, some Democrats have singled out big companies and monopolies for their perceived role in driving up prices. Figures across the party’s ideological gamut -— from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Biden — have posited that big businesses, by jacking up their prices in the middle of a pandemic, are to blame for inflation, and that a lack of competition has allowed corporate behemoths to raise their prices unabated.

At first glance, this explanation appears less plausible than other messaging on inflation. Profit-seeking companies didn’t suddenly become more profit-seeking during the pandemic, nor were they more generous before it. Additionally, corporate concentration has grown steadily since the 1990s — an era of historically low inflation. A January survey of economists at the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found most experts in agreement on both questions: Inflation wasn’t explained by big firms deciding to get richer, and antitrust interventions — such as those tossed about by the Biden administration — weren’t likely to curb inflation.

However, there is an element of the prices we’re seeing today — and how Americans are responding to them — that could be explained by big business run amok. Philippon, whose book “The Great Reversal” focuses on how a lack of competition and corporate concentration have defined the modern American economy, told me that one reason why inflation is such a big deal in the U.S. is that prices were already so high to begin with.

“That’s not a statement about rapid inflation, it’s a statement about slowly rising profit margins that slowly choke off the middle class,” Philippon said. “One reason it’s particularly painful in the U.S. is that prices were already high, people’s purchasing power, the real value of their wages was already being eroded by market power before. Then when you add to that a burst of inflation, it’s even more painful.” 

That may explain why recent polling has found that Americans are sympathetic to arguments that attribute inflation to corporate greed, and why Biden is singing a fairly populist tune on inflation. But as with all aspects of messaging on the issue, whether Democrats or Republicans are more right on the facts of inflation has very little to do with its potential electoral impact. Prices have to stabilize for Americans to feel good about the economy — and for Democrats to feel good about their chances in 2022.

“I don’t think there’s any message that would make people feel good about 7 percent inflation,” Furman said.

In 2021, FiveThirtyEight’s visual journalists told stories of the pandemic, political gridlock and the world of sports. We’ve fought to make our work more accessible and to sharpen our storytelling. Through it all, we kept it weird. Now we continue our tradition of celebrating our best — and wackiest — charts of the year. Here are some of our favorites, grouped by topic but in no particular order beyond that. If you want more context for these (weird and wonderful) charts, don’t be shy! You can click any of them to read the stories in which they originally ran.

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And, last but not least, check out this calendar with the results from our debate about when each season begins.

Did you enjoy this long list of weird charts? Then boy, do we have content in the archives for you! Check out our lists from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

It was the summer of 1979, and President Jimmy Carter was up against it. Americans were paying far more for gas and groceries than they were the year before, and Carter was confronted with a choice: He could tell Americans that this was a problem the government could fix, or he could tell them to tighten their belts and persevere. He chose the latter. But prices continued to rise, and in 1980, Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

Things aren’t as bad as they were in 1979, but for many, the comparison is still apt. According to the latest consumer price index1 numbers, prices in November were up 6.9 percent compared with a year ago, the highest increase since 1982. And that comes alongside near-record-low consumer sentiment and a net approval rating for President Biden of -7.6 percentage points.2 Biden has said reversing inflation is a priority for his administration, and he has released strategic reserves of oil and announced plans to “relieve bottlenecks” to address soaring prices, but a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead.

It’s no secret that inflation is politically powerful. You can’t miss rising prices, and research has found that Americans care deeply about inflation. But the politics of handling it is messy, and should prices continue to rise, Biden has a difficult task. He faces a country that views inflation through a highly partisan lens — and that will judge his performance on the issue accordingly. If he ignores inflation, it could spiral as it did with Carter. But at the same time, should Biden react too forcefully, the cure could be worse than the disease. 

Inflation’s unique place in the American psyche is bad for presidents 

Inflation occupies a unique place in American life. That’s in part because price increases can feel far more palpable than something like the government deficit; they’re also front and center for the average consumer. Add to that the power of political memory: The Great Inflation brought along four recessions from 1969 to 1982 and has had an indelible effect on our politics.

Trying to pinpoint what’s causing today’s inflation, though, is challenging. The pandemic transformed the economy, and many experts pointed to the exceptional nature of this economic recovery as the primary driver of inflation. Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, stressed to me that the abnormality of the pandemic-induced downturn is key to understanding the price increases we’re seeing now.

“This was a serious downturn, but it really wasn’t a recession. It didn’t look anything like a recession,” said Goolsbee. “Normally, the thing that drives a recession is long-lived items that get put off, like consumer durables and housing. And those things rose in the downturn.”

But though Goolsbee is on the side of the debate arguing that the current inflation is temporary, he grants that even an economy that’s back to normal by summer would “give heartburn” to the Biden administration. And there’s good reason for that: As the chart below shows, steep inflation has coincided with several sharp downturns in presidential approval since at least 1960. Biden himself is currently in the dumps as far as his approval rating goes.

It’s not entirely clear how much inflation is related to a president’s approval rating, but research does suggest that it can hurt politicians in power. A 1999 study, for instance, found that increases in unexpected inflation hurt incumbent parties’ electoral performance. And a 2010 paper showed that inflation had a significantly negative effect on Americans’ evaluations of the president. Finally, a 2013 paper found that, along with increases in the budget deficit and unemployment, an increase in inflation “cause[d] a deterioration of presidential popularity” in the United States.

But some prices are just more important than others when it comes to inflation. Consider rising gas prices: A 2016 paper found that higher gas prices had a negative effect on presidential approval, in part because Americans are constantly reminded of them. Carola Binder, a professor of economics at Haverford College who researches inflation expectations and monetary policy, told me that high gas prices are particularly likely to affect how Americans evaluate the economy.

“You literally see gas prices and big numbers as you’re driving down the road, and you also purchase it more frequently,” said Binder. “So you’re more likely to remember how much it used to cost if you saw it last week was $2 and now it’s $3.” Binder said the same isn’t true of, say, the price tag of a family vacation.

Americans who lived through the inflation of the 1970s, however, are also more likely to react negatively to steeper gas prices. Per a 2019 paper, Binder and her co-author Christos Makridis found that Americans who lived through the oil crises of the 1970s were more pessimistic about rising gas prices than those who didn’t. That’s because, as Binder put it, “they formed their model of how the economy works based on how it worked back in the late ’70s.”

Recent polling further confirms that Americans are feeling the strain of rising prices. Forty-five percent of households reported facing either “moderate” or “severe” hardship because of rising prices, according to a November Gallup poll, and 56 percent of voters in a November Wall Street Journal survey said inflation was causing a “major” or “minor” financial strain on them. That strain has been particularly hard on poorer Americans, too; according to that Gallup poll, 7 in 10 adults in households earning less than $40,000 a year said the pandemic was causing them hardship.

Though inflation weighs heavily on the American conscience, it’s important not to overstate its influence, especially on presidential approval. The chart above, for instance, shows George W. Bush’s approval falling during the Great Recession, a period of deflation. And even Carter’s reelection was doomed by a number of other key issues, both foreign and domestic. But that doesn’t stop Americans from dwelling on inflation, even when it is low. And, right now, there’s evidence that price hikes are hurting many Americans.

Americans’ views of inflation are strongly shaped by politics

Though inflation affects all Americans, there’s a gulf in perception. In short, whether you share a party affiliation with the president likely looms large for just how bad you think inflation will get. That tracks more broadly with how Americans’ views on the economy increasingly have little to do with the economy itself; rather, they’re about who’s in office.

“When the president of your political party is in power, you tend to be more optimistic about how the economy will be and tend to have lower inflation expectations,” said Binder. “When a president whose politics you disagree with is in power, you tend to be more pessimistic about how the economy will be, and you’re going to have higher inflation expectations.”

Recent research has borne that out, too, finding that Americans expect significantly lower inflation when the party they support is in the White House. According to a 2019 paper, inflation expectations were higher in red states than in blue states when Barack Obama was in office, only for the positions to reverse when Donald Trump arrived. 

This trend has existed for a while, too. In the 1980s, for instance, when inflation had fallen nearly 10 points under Reagan, more than 50 percent of “strong” Democrats said that inflation had gotten somewhat or much worse in a 1988 survey, while fewer than 8 percent said it had gotten much better (13 percent and 47 percent of “strong” Republicans, respectively, said the same). Meanwhile, according to a study conducted near the end of another GOP administration, Bush’s in 2008, Democrats were once again more likely than Republicans to say inflation had increased over the past eight years.

Unsurprisingly, this schism is also evident today: Under Biden, Republicans have consistently reported greater fears about the economy — and inflation — than Democrats, and it doesn’t appear that divide is going away anytime soon.

The cure for inflation may be disastrous

On a surface level, inflation is bad. If you hold all other things constant, it erodes purchasing power and the value of your dollar. And if Biden gives the appearance of doing nothing, then fears of inflation may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Americans, anticipating higher costs, could demand higher wages from employers to offset inflation, which would then lead employers to demand higher prices, resulting in even worse inflation. 

The problem is that the solution — economic and political — isn’t as simple as raising interest rates to bring down inflation: There’s a cost to keeping inflation rates low, and we’ve often been too quick to pump the brakes on a recovering economy.

“We only talk about inflation when it’s higher, and not as much when it’s lower,” said Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of political science at Boston College who studies the politics of inflation. But he stressed that whether inflation is high or low, policies that target it end up picking winners and losers in the economy. “There’s no escaping the politics of inflation policy, even when inflation is at very low levels,” Kirshner added.

Moreover, some of the policies designed to deal with inflation — especially when it’s high — have had devastating effects. Take, for instance, the policies set in motion by the Carter administration that eventually stamped out inflation in the 1980s. For starters, the country went into a deep recession, and millions of workers lost their jobs. Disaffected building contractors and construction workers even mailed chunks of two-by-fours to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, claiming the wood was no longer needed because no one was buying houses anymore. The political fallout from inflation didn’t stop with Carter either. Reagan also saw his approval rating tumble even as inflation got under control. 

But more recent episodes, such as the slow recovery from the Great Recession, have further called into question the merits of being ultra-tough on inflation. Kirshner pointed to the double-dip recession of the 1930s as a consequence of being too quick to fight the inflation bogeyman. Inflation, of course, hasn’t yet approached the runaway levels of the 1970s, but there is a possibility that we course-correct too quickly, as we did in the 1930s and 2010s. 

And that could pose a big problem considering that most other economic indicators that characterized the country’s 1970s “stagflation” aren’t present. In fact, the American economy has recovered strongly according to a number of measures: Unemployment is falling rapidly — though workers continue to quit their jobs en masse — retail spending has increased, and households have saved more than would have been expected in a non-pandemic world (though there’s some evidence that those savings are falling). 

All of this means that Biden is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He has to address very real concerns about an overheating economy while also being careful not to overreact to prices that may stabilize as things get back to normal. Meanwhile, roughly half of the country will appraise the economy relatively critically as long as a Democrat is in office, which complicates Biden’s approach. What’s good for the economy in the long term may not be good for his political and electoral concerns in the nearer term, and vice versa. 

“People like me think that in the short-to-medium run, at least, you have to let this inflationary wave pass through the economy,” said Kirshner. “Is that good politics? I suspect it’s terrible politics. But you’re selecting from a menu of unpalatable choices, and especially in the current political environment, whatever unpalatable choice you make will be vilified by the opposition.”

Back in 2018, a quartet of Democratic women — known commonly as “The Squad” — broke barriers on their way to Congress: They were young women of color with no prior congressional experience who, in some cases, bested a white incumbent to represent their now racially diversifying districts. They were heralded as the “future of the Democratic Party,” and, for the progressive movement, which had long struggled to make inroads with nonwhite voters, they offered a potential path forward: These four women, and others like them, would motivate people of color to vote for left-leaning candidates to help usher in a seismic shift in electoral politics.

But then the 2020 election happened. The Squad did grow by two members, but progressives failed to win the ultimate prize, the Democratic nomination for president, in large part because voters of color threw their support behind now-President Biden. In addition, many Democrats argued after the 2020 general election that progressive messaging might have cost Democrats seats in the House that year. And while a handful of nonwhite progressive candidates have won important elections this year, 2021 also contained a number of high-profile setbacks for the movement. Not only did Eric Adams, a Black moderate, handily defeat a number of progressives in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, but a handful of other progressives of color lost their races to more moderate politicians of color, too. 

As a result, the buzz over the Squad’s initial wins in 2018 has largely been replaced by a narrative that progressives struggle with people of color, and that Black voters especially prefer more moderate candidates. But the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

We looked back at the Squad’s initial primary wins, and found that they’ve often won sizable blocs of nonwhite voters, especially when they have had strong ties to those communities (or at least stronger than their opponent). But at the same time, they haven’t necessarily performed well with all voters of color in their district. In fact, our analysis found that — despite each member’s very different path of Congress — each Squad member’s wins required a multiracial coalition of both white and nonwhite voters. We only found one instance without a clear racial pattern. But even if there is no surefire strategy for progressives to win voters of color, the Squad’s primaries also push back against the idea that progressives consistently struggle with these voters.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The first member of the Squad — and arguably still the most famous — is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few thought the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District on June 26, 2018, would be competitive, but Ocasio-Cortez wound up pulling off an upset, defeating then-Rep. Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, 57 percent to 43 percent. 

In seeking to explain the result, commentators at the time pointed to the district’s changing demographics: Ocasio-Cortez, like 47 percent of the 14th District’s voting-age population, is Hispanic, while Crowley, like only 23 percent of the district’s VAP, is non-Hispanic white.1 However, this explanation doesn’t tell the whole story as Ocasio-Cortez performed well in both white and Hispanic corners of the district. According to Sean McElwee, the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, Ocasio-Cortez “benefited from a situation where very highly engaged liberal people were the big constituency that were turning out.”

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez did best in the whiter, more gentrified areas of the 14th District — like the Queens neighborhoods of Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside. She defeated Crowley 64 percent to 36 percent in precincts with a white VAP of at least 60 percent. She also won heavily (70+ percent) Hispanic precincts, 56 percent to 44 percent. “She had liberals, particularly liberal whites and young whites, and Hispanic voters and that was her successful coalition,” McElwee said. But that isn’t to say that Ocasio-Cortez was able to appeal to all voters of color. The data suggests, and McElwee agreed, that Ocasio-Cortez performed less well with Black voters. Crowley actually won the district’s two Black-majority precincts by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin.

Rashida Tlaib

A few weeks after Ocasio-Cortez, the second member of the Squad eked out a win in her primary. On Aug. 7, 2018, former state Rep. Rashida Tlaib edged out Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, another woman of color, in the regularly scheduled Democratic primary for Michigan’s open 13th District, 31 percent to 30 percent.2 

This was a close, crowded primary — four other candidates were in the running — but to an even greater extent than Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib won thanks to her strength in precincts with large white populations. She received 42 percent of the vote in the district’s 34 precincts with white VAPs greater than 80 percent. However, this doesn’t show a complete picture: 13 of those precincts were in Dearborn Heights, which has a significant Arab American population, and the U.S. Census Bureau considers Arab Americans to be white. (Tlaib herself is Arab American.) Tlaib won 69 percent of the vote in these 13 precincts versus 26 percent of the vote in the other 21 heavily white precincts, so it’s likely that much of Tlaib’s apparent strength with white voters is in fact due to her base of support in the Arab American community.

Tlaib also did not do particularly well in Black neighborhoods; she received 24 percent in precincts with Black VAPs greater than 80 percent. But that probably had more to do with Jones’s deep roots in Detroit’s Black community than Black voters explicitly rejecting Tlaib. Having served on the city council since 2006, Jones had fairly high name recognition in the city, and she won 41 percent in those 80+ percent Black precincts (almost all of which are in Detroit).

Indeed, given the racial composition of the 13th District’s VAP — 53 percent Black, 35 percent white — Tlaib would have likely lost if the Black vote had not been split among Jones and other candidates. “Rashida did get some support among African Americans, but it wasn’t the lion’s share of her vote,” said Tim Bledsoe, a professor of political science at Wayne State University and former Michigan state legislator. Instead, Bledsoe said, Tlaib won thanks to her strong fundraising, which helped her air broadcast TV ads when no other candidates did, and her appeal to younger, more diverse voters. “There was a more progressive element to Rashida’s campaign,” said Bledsoe. “Brenda is certainly no conservative, but Rashida was talking in a more aggressive way about the progressive agenda and I think that helped mobilize young people.” 

Ilhan Omar

The Squad gained its third member on Aug. 14, 2018, when then-state Rep. Ilhan Omar won the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open 5th Congressional District with 48 percent of the vote. A big reason for Omar’s success was that, as the first Somali-American state legislator in the U.S., she was already somewhat of a household name, both in the 5th District and around the country. Not only did she repeatedly speak out against then-President Trump, but a year prior to her 2018 congressional election, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. She was also featured in a music video for Maroon 5, appeared on The Daily Show and was the subject of a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

That national profile proved hard for any of her opponents to cut through. “All of [Omar’s primary opponents] had a hard time making the case against voting for someone who was already an international figure. It was hard to penetrate and no one quite landed on the right message,” said Javier Morillo, a political strategist who works in Democratic politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given her name recognition, Omar performed well in all corners of the 5th District. In fact, there was no correlation between a precinct’s racial composition and its level of support for Omar. In precincts whose Black VAPs exceeded 40 percent, Omar received 47 percent of the vote. In precincts where the non-Hispanic white VAP was at least 80 percent, she received 44 percent. Her best precincts spanned Minneapolis’s white-majority University neighborhood, heavily Somali Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and diverse Powderhorn neighborhood.

Omar was also the only member of the Squad to face a competitive primary in 2020. Antone Melton-Meaux, a moderate attorney, mounted a bid against her, and even though both Melton-Meaux and Omar are Black, that race actually broke down much more closely along racial lines. 

Perhaps contrary to expectations, though, it was the progressive candidate who did better in Black neighborhoods. Omar won the primary overall, 58 percent to 39 percent, but she lost precincts with the highest white VAPs; Melton-Meaux defeated her 55 percent to 43 percent in parts of the district with white VAPs of at least 85 percent. Rather, Omar prevailed thanks to her strong performance in more racially diverse neighborhoods. She did especially well in precincts that were 40 percent Black or more, defeating Melton-Meaux 73 percent to 23 percent.

Why did Omar’s coalition shift between 2018 and 2020? Michael Minta, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, cautioned that it is impossible to say definitively but said that Omar’s support for the protests that rocked the district in the wake of George Floyd’s murder just a few months before the 2020 primary might have turned off moderate white Democrats in places like affluent, suburban Southwest Minneapolis. He also pointed to anti-Israel comments Omar made in 2019 that invoked anti-Semitic tropes as a possible factor. “That was used against her and highlighted in the campaign,” he said. Finally, he noted that media coverage of Omar’s first primary did not focus much on her progressive views, which may have made those moderate voters more willing to vote for her in 2018 than they were in 2020. “​​If she had that reputation she has now … I don’t know how that primary would have played out.”

Ayanna Pressley

Rep. Ayanna Pressley is the fourth original member of the Squad, and she also performed well in all corners of her district, but it was actually Black precincts that gave her, a Black woman, the highest levels of support. 

On Sept. 4, 2018, Pressley defeated then-Rep. Michael Capuano, a white incumbent who had served for nearly 20 years, 59 percent to 41 percent in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts’s 7th District. That 18-point margin is evidence that Pressley held her own everywhere, but she significantly outperformed Capuano, 76 percent to 24 percent, in the district’s 38 majority-Black precincts, mostly located in the Roxbury and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston.

Why was Pressley so successful in those areas? She had represented them for nearly nine years on the Boston City Council. And according to Beth Huang, the executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, Pressley’s deep roots in the community went over well with voters of color in general. “She had many validators in communities of color who had known her for a long time,” Huang said. “She also targeted a wider set of voters, including more young people and more people of color in Boston.”

But on top of that, Pressley was successful at expanding her appeal to whiter sections of the district, which ultimately elevated her candidacy even further. Per our analysis, she actually edged out Capuano, 51 percent to 49 percent, in the district’s 28 precincts with VAPs that are at least 70 percent white, reflecting her strength with young progressives in areas like Somerville and Allston. But as Huang made clear, Pressley’s win was years in the making. “She was — and is — a very well-known quantity,” Huang said. “She put in the work for 10 years to build a lot of credibility with many different types of voters.”

Jamaal Bowman

The Squad originally consisted of just the four congresswomen mentioned above, but on June 23, 2020, it got a new member: Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who defeated former Rep. Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th District, 55 percent to 41 percent. 

But despite the 16th District abutting Ocasio-Cortez’s, Bowman prevailed by following Pressley’s template of running up the score in heavily nonwhite neighborhoods. Engel, a white man who had represented the 16th District since 1989, won 51 percent to 45 percent in precincts with VAPs that are at least 70 percent white. But Bowman, a Black man, won 59 percent to 34 percent in Hispanic-majority precincts and 63 percent to 34 percent in Black-majority precincts.

Bowman didn’t have Pressley’s advantage of already being an elected official in the district, but according to McElwee (who advised Bowman during his campaign), he still had “real ties to civic and other institutions in the Black communities.” As a former school principal, McElwee said, Bowman was able to use his ties to the voters — particularly Black and Hispanic voters — to “upset the normal advantages that incumbents would otherwise have.”

Another thing that likely helped Bowman’s candidacy was a gaffe Engel made after Floyd’s murder and subsequent racial-justice protests, where he essentially said that he only sought press attention on the issue because of his upcoming primary race. Engel’s comment that “if I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care” may have signaled to Black voters especially that he didn’t share their community’s concerns over police brutality.

Cori Bush

Finally, the newest member of the Squad, Rep. Cori Bush, punched her ticket to Congress on Aug. 4, 2020, when she narrowly defeated then-Rep. Lacy Clay, 49 percent to 46 percent, in the Democratic primary for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District.

Bush’s path to victory was unusual among Squad members in that she actually lost the parts of her district with the highest concentration of voters who share her racial identity. Bush, who is Black, lost the district’s Black-majority precincts 54 percent to 43 percent. But there is an easy explanation for this: The Clay family had been an institution in St. Louis’s Black community for over 50 years. Clay’s father represented the district for 32 years, and the younger Clay had served the area in either the state legislature or Congress continuously since 1983.

In fact, one of the big reasons for the closeness of this race was Clay’s existing ties to older Black voters. According to Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state senator who represented a significant portion of the 1st District, Bush struggled a bit when it came to appealing to these voters since they had become accustomed to supporting the Clay name.

That said, it’s not like Bush didn’t attract any Black support: Her 43 percent performance in Black-majority precincts is actually pretty impressive considering the strength of her opponent. Indeed, Smith said, Bush had strong ties to the Black activist community who wanted to elect a more progressive representative following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which is part of the 1st District. “Bush’s district is really the epicenter for the modern civil rights racial justice movement post-Ferguson, so that nurtured a cadre of young activists that powered her campaign,” Smith said.

Where Bush really excelled, though, was in whiter parts of Missouri’s 1st District. In white-majority precincts, she defeated Clay 54 percent to 38 percent, and she turned in some of her strongest performances in the gentrified neighborhoods of St. Louis like those around Tower Grove Park. And it’s possible the Clay name might have also worked in Bush’s favor in conservative, white enclaves of the city. Smith suggested that some white voters might have voted for Bush as a protest vote against the Clay name. “A longstanding distrust of the Clay machine in some of those places probably helped her even though, ideologically, those wards are closer to him than her.” But Bush’s real base in this primary was white progressives, Smith said. 

In sum, the Squad members’ coalitions have been all over the map. While some members (Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Bush) did better in whiter precincts, others (Pressley and Bowman) did better in predominantly nonwhite areas. And in one case (Omar) there was no obvious pattern (at least in her initial election). 

Even with these differences, though, it’s clear that voters of color aren’t an automatic vote for the establishment-aligned candidate (as Capuano, Engel and Melton-Meaux can attest). Instead, in all the Squad’s primaries, it seems that voters of color opted for the candidate who had a deeper connection to their respective communities. And that shouldn’t be surprising. It makes a lot of sense, actually: Voters vote for the representative who they feel best represents them.

Aaron Bycoffe contributed research. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Curtis Yee. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

This article is a collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that affect women.

Sarah Caswell is stressed about her job every day. The science and special-education teacher in Philadelphia sees things going wrong everywhere she looks. Her high school students have been falling behind during the COVID-19 pandemic, the students and even the teachers in her school rarely wear masks, and a shooting just outside her school in October left a bystander dead and a 16-year-old student in the hospital with critical injuries. 

She’s unhappy. But her solution isn’t to quit — it’s to get more involved.

“We need to double down,” Caswell said.

She isn’t the only one who thinks so. Throughout the past year, surveys and polls have pointed to an oncoming crisis in education: a mass exodus of unhappy K-12 teachers. Surveys from unions and education-research groups have warned that anywhere from one-fourth to more than half of U.S. educators were considering a career change. 

Except that doesn’t seem to have happened. The most recent statistics, though still limited, suggest that while some districts are reporting significant faculty shortages, the country overall is not facing a sudden teacher shortage. Any staffing shortages for full-time K-12 teachers appear far less severe and widespread than those for support staff like substitute teachers, bus drivers and paraprofessionals, who are paid less and encounter more job instability.  

In a female-dominated profession, these numbers notably contrast trends showing that women in particular have been leaving their jobs at high rates throughout COVID-19. While labor-force participation for women dropped significantly at the start of the pandemic, and still remains about 2 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels, teachers by and large seem to be staying at their jobs.

So, why have the doomsday scenarios not come true? There are many explanations — and the ways they overlap tell us something about the state of American schools, the inner workings of America’s economy and the way gender shapes the American workforce.

Jon Cherry / Getty Images

By many accounts, teachers have been particularly unhappy and stressed out about their jobs since the pandemic hit, first struggling to adjust to difficult remote-learning requirements and then returning to sometimes unsafe working environments. A nationally representative survey of teachers by RAND Education and Labor in late January and early February found that educators were feeling depressed and burned out from their jobs at higher rates than the general population. These rates were higher for female teachers, with 82 percent reporting frequent job-related stress compared with 66 percent of male teachers. 

In the survey, 1 in 4 teachers — particularly Black teachers — reported that they were considering leaving their jobs at the end of the school year. Only 1 in 6 said the same before the pandemic. 

Yet the data on teacher employment shows a system that is stretched, not shattered. In an EdWeek Research Center report released in October, a significant number of district leaders and principals surveyed — a little less than half — said that their district had struggled to hire a sufficient number of full-time teachers. This number paled in comparison, though, with the nearly 80 percent of school leaders who said they were struggling to find substitute teachers, the nearly 70 percent who said they were struggling to find bus drivers and the 55 percent who said they were struggling to find paraprofessionals. 

Yalonda M. James / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

More concrete jobs data suggests that school employees have largely stayed put. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer public-education professionals quit their jobs between the months of April and August the past two years than did so during that same time immediately before the pandemic. In 2019, around 470,000 public-education employees quit their jobs between April and August compared with around 285,000 in the same period in 2020 and around 300,000 in 2021. Notably, this data includes both full-time teachers, support staff and higher-education employees, though teachers make up a majority of those included, says Chad Aldeman, policy director of Edunomics Lab, an education-policy research center, at Georgetown University.

Experts point to multiple reasons for this trend. While women have been disproportionately affected by mass COVID-related job losses, teachers haven’t faced the types of widespread layoffs experienced by workers in other professions — including other types of public school employees like bus drivers. Moreover, relative to other types of jobs disproportionately held by women, teachers have more job stability and receive more generous benefits. Educators often get into their work for specifically mission-driven purposes, too, making them uniquely positioned to decide to stay at their jobs, even during particularly stressful periods, experts say. 

“The early indicators we have show turnover hasn’t spiked this year as we anticipated,” said Aldeman. 

Instead, he said, data shows that the hiring crunch might be because there are more jobs to hire for. Vacancies have increased, suggesting that districts might be beefing up hiring after a year of uncertainty and an influx in federal aid. In other words, labor shortages are not totally attributable to increased turnover. And while early data on teacher retirements suggests that there might have been increases on the margins in some places, fears of mass retirements have not borne out so far.

Terry Pierson / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images

Still, some local districts are hurting. Sasha Pudelski, the assistant director for policy and advocacy for the School Superintendents Association, has spoken to school leaders around the country who are facing teacher shortages, sometimes at crisis levels. But her sense is that these shortages are uneven depending on a district’s resource level and how well they’re able to pay. Based on what she’s heard from school-district leaders, she suspects shortages are more acute in low-income communities with a lower tax base for teacher salaries, potentially causing a further shortage of educators from underrepresented groups, who disproportionately teach in these areas.

Indeed, a fall 2021 study of school-staffing shortages throughout the state of Washington shows that high-poverty districts are facing significantly more staffing challenges than their more affluent counterparts. In some places, there are significant numbers of unfilled positions.

Study co-author Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington and serves as a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, is cautious about drawing conclusions about such an abnormal year. But he believes that fears of teacher shortages in the past have been overblown, pointing to a study by the Wheelock Education Policy Center at Boston University, which found that teacher-turnover rates in Massachusetts remained largely stable throughout the 2020-21 school year.

“I have seen three different waves of people talking about teacher shortages, and I’ve seen policy briefs come out that suggest there are going to be 100,000 to 200,000 slots that can’t be filled for teachers,” said Goldhaber. “Those kinds of dire predictions have never come to pass.”

Rather than lean out, a significant number of teachers have become more engaged in workplace issues amid the turbulence. Evan Stone, the co-founder and co-CEO of Educators for Excellence, points to recent union elections in multiple cities that have seen unprecedented turnout. In late September and early October, for example, nearly 16,000 United Teachers Los Angeles members participated in a vote over school-reopening issues, while less than 6,000 voted in a 2020 election of union leaders.

Indeed, the American Federation of Teachers saw a slight increase in membership this year. Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, traveled across the country this fall to get a sense of how her members were feeling.

“Every place I went, yes, there’s trepidation, a lot of agita over the effects of COVID, but there’s a real joy of people being back in school with their kids,” said Weingarten. 

Still, this increase in union participation isn’t across the board. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has lost around 47,000 members, or about 1.6 percent of its membership, since this point last year, according to figures the NEA supplied to FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project. The organization attributes most of the losses to a decline in hiring at the higher-education level and decreased employment for public K-12 support staff.

Some teachers unions have rallied for stronger safety protocols to help protect teachers and students.

Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

For teachers like Caswell, the past two years have driven her to get more involved with her union, unhappy as she may be at her job and unsafe as she may feel. (A spokesperson for Philadelphia public schools notes that the district has an indoor mask mandate that all individuals are expected to follow.) For a single mother supporting three kids, quitting isn’t an option. Caswell can’t imagine switching schools within the same district either, even though she describes her work environment as miserable. Her students, some of whom she’s worked with for years, mean too much to her. 

Instead, Caswell has started working to organize members in her school to represent their interests on a larger level and effect change.

“I can’t just walk out, though there’s definitely moments where I would have liked to,” said Caswell. “We’re tired. The demands keep coming, and we can’t do it all.”

She sees her advocacy as directly related to her gender, believing the profession receives less support and resources than it deserves because the composition of the workforce is largely female. Indeed, union representation, and the perks that come along with it, is something that other sectors facing massive shortages of female workers, like service and hospitality industries, don’t necessarily receive. As of 2017, about 70 percent of teachers participated in a union or professional association, according to federal data. By comparison, the same is true for only about 17 percent of nurses, another predominantly female workforce.

“Female professions are undervalued by society, and I think that’s part of the reason teachers are more densely organized than almost any other worker in America right now,” said Weingarten.

Still, plenty of teachers are quitting — and they’re quitting at least in part because of the pandemic. According to a survey by the RAND Corporation, almost half of former public school teachers who left the field since March 2020 cited COVID-19 as the driving factor. The pandemic exacerbated already-stressful working conditions, forcing teachers to work longer hours and navigate a challenging transition to remote learning.

For some teachers, the decision to quit was easy. High school science educator Sara Mielke, who had recently returned to teaching after taking time off to stay home with children, quit her job several weeks into this school year over the lack of COVID-safety protocols in her Pflugerville, Texas, school. 

“I felt like I couldn’t trust these people to prioritize safety in general,” said Mielke, who adds that she was chastised by school administrators for showing her students accurate information about vaccine effectiveness and enforcing the school’s mandatory mask policy. (The district did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Other teachers say that while they wanted to leave, the prospect of saying goodbye to their students was too much. So, they decided to stay and push for changes.

Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

That was part of the calculation for Kiffany Cody, a special-education teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia. She took a stress-related medical leave of absence last year, in part because she felt her district was neglecting worker safety. But Cody returned to the classroom after several months, noting she is “really, really, really passionate about the kids.” 

This year she’s banded together with other educators to speak out about unsafe working conditions and start tracking violations of district safety protocols. They’ve become close friends, a support group who feel determined to hold their district accountable and make schools kinder and safer for students and staff. (A representative from Gwinnett County schools said that the “district follows the CDC recommendations for schools regarding layered mitigation strategies, isolation, and quarantine guidelines to promote a healthy and safe environment for our students, staff, and visitors.”)

Every now and then, Cody looks at LinkedIn and ponders working in another field. But for now, she’s in it for the long haul — for her students. 

“We’re trying to work within the system to do what we can to help the students,” said Cody. “We can leave and find jobs in other districts and industries, but at the end of the day, the kids can’t go anywhere.”

Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Jennifer Mason. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin and Holly Ojalvo.

This article is a collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that affect women.

Sarah Caswell is stressed about her job every day. The science and special-education teacher in Philadelphia sees things going wrong everywhere she looks. Her high school students have been falling behind during the COVID-19 pandemic, the students and even the teachers in her school rarely wear masks, and a shooting just outside her school in October left a bystander dead and a 16-year-old student in the hospital with critical injuries. 

She’s unhappy. But her solution isn’t to quit — it’s to get more involved.

“We need to double down,” Caswell said.

She isn’t the only one who thinks so. Throughout the past year, surveys and polls have pointed to an oncoming crisis in education: a mass exodus of unhappy K-12 teachers. Surveys from unions and education-research groups have warned that anywhere from one-fourth to more than half of U.S. educators were considering a career change. 

Except that doesn’t seem to have happened. The most recent statistics, though still limited, suggest that while some districts are reporting significant faculty shortages, the country overall is not facing a sudden teacher shortage. Any staffing shortages for full-time K-12 teachers appear far less severe and widespread than those for support staff like substitute teachers, bus drivers and paraprofessionals, who are paid less and encounter more job instability.  

In a female-dominated profession, these numbers notably contrast trends showing that women in particular have been leaving their jobs at high rates throughout COVID-19. While labor-force participation for women dropped significantly at the start of the pandemic, and still remains about 2 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels, teachers by and large seem to be staying at their jobs.

So, why have the doomsday scenarios not come true? There are many explanations — and the ways they overlap tell us something about the state of American schools, the inner workings of America’s economy and the way gender shapes the American workforce.

Jon Cherry / Getty Images

By many accounts, teachers have been particularly unhappy and stressed out about their jobs since the pandemic hit, first struggling to adjust to difficult remote-learning requirements and then returning to sometimes unsafe working environments. A nationally representative survey of teachers by RAND Education and Labor in late January and early February found that educators were feeling depressed and burned out from their jobs at higher rates than the general population. These rates were higher for female teachers, with 82 percent reporting frequent job-related stress compared with 66 percent of male teachers. 

In the survey, 1 in 4 teachers — particularly Black teachers — reported that they were considering leaving their jobs at the end of the school year. Only 1 in 6 said the same before the pandemic. 

Yet the data on teacher employment shows a system that is stretched, not shattered. In an EdWeek Research Center report released in October, a significant number of district leaders and principals surveyed — a little less than half — said that their district had struggled to hire a sufficient number of full-time teachers. This number paled in comparison, though, with the nearly 80 percent of school leaders who said they were struggling to find substitute teachers, the nearly 70 percent who said they were struggling to find bus drivers and the 55 percent who said they were struggling to find paraprofessionals. 

Yalonda M. James / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

More concrete jobs data suggests that school employees have largely stayed put. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer public-education professionals quit their jobs between the months of April and August the past two years than did so during that same time immediately before the pandemic. In 2019, around 470,000 public-education employees quit their jobs between April and August compared with around 285,000 in the same period in 2020 and around 300,000 in 2021. Notably, this data includes both full-time teachers, support staff and higher-education employees, though teachers make up a majority of those included, says Chad Aldeman, policy director of Edunomics Lab, an education-policy research center, at Georgetown University.

Experts point to multiple reasons for this trend. While women have been disproportionately affected by mass COVID-related job losses, teachers haven’t faced the types of widespread layoffs experienced by workers in other professions — including other types of public school employees like bus drivers. Moreover, relative to other types of jobs disproportionately held by women, teachers have more job stability and receive more generous benefits. Educators often get into their work for specifically mission-driven purposes, too, making them uniquely positioned to decide to stay at their jobs, even during particularly stressful periods, experts say. 

“The early indicators we have show turnover hasn’t spiked this year as we anticipated,” said Aldeman. 

Instead, he said, data shows that the hiring crunch might be because there are more jobs to hire for. Vacancies have increased, suggesting that districts might be beefing up hiring after a year of uncertainty and an influx in federal aid. In other words, labor shortages are not totally attributable to increased turnover. And while early data on teacher retirements suggests that there might have been increases on the margins in some places, fears of mass retirements have not borne out so far.

Terry Pierson / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images

Still, some local districts are hurting. Sasha Pudelski, the assistant director for policy and advocacy for the School Superintendents Association, has spoken to school leaders around the country who are facing teacher shortages, sometimes at crisis levels. But her sense is that these shortages are uneven depending on a district’s resource level and how well they’re able to pay. Based on what she’s heard from school-district leaders, she suspects shortages are more acute in low-income communities with a lower tax base for teacher salaries, potentially causing a further shortage of educators from underrepresented groups, who disproportionately teach in these areas.

Indeed, a fall 2021 study of school-staffing shortages throughout the state of Washington shows that high-poverty districts are facing significantly more staffing challenges than their more affluent counterparts. In some places, there are significant numbers of unfilled positions.

Study co-author Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington and serves as a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, is cautious about drawing conclusions about such an abnormal year. But he believes that fears of teacher shortages in the past have been overblown, pointing to a study by the Wheelock Education Policy Center at Boston University, which found that teacher-turnover rates in Massachusetts remained largely stable throughout the 2020-21 school year.

“I have seen three different waves of people talking about teacher shortages, and I’ve seen policy briefs come out that suggest there are going to be 100,000 to 200,000 slots that can’t be filled for teachers,” said Goldhaber. “Those kinds of dire predictions have never come to pass.”

Rather than lean out, a significant number of teachers have become more engaged in workplace issues amid the turbulence. Evan Stone, the co-founder and co-CEO of Educators for Excellence, points to recent union elections in multiple cities that have seen unprecedented turnout. In late September and early October, for example, nearly 16,000 United Teachers Los Angeles members participated in a vote over school-reopening issues, while less than 6,000 voted in a 2020 election of union leaders.

Indeed, the American Federation of Teachers saw a slight increase in membership this year. Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, traveled across the country this fall to get a sense of how her members were feeling.

“Every place I went, yes, there’s trepidation, a lot of agita over the effects of COVID, but there’s a real joy of people being back in school with their kids,” said Weingarten. 

Still, this increase in union participation isn’t across the board. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has lost around 47,000 members, or about 1.6 percent of its membership, since this point last year, according to figures the NEA supplied to FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project. The organization attributes most of the losses to a decline in hiring at the higher-education level and decreased employment for public K-12 support staff.

Some teachers unions have rallied for stronger safety protocols to help protect teachers and students.

Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

For teachers like Caswell, the past two years have driven her to get more involved with her union, unhappy as she may be at her job and unsafe as she may feel. (A spokesperson for Philadelphia public schools notes that the district has an indoor mask mandate that all individuals are expected to follow.) For a single mother supporting three kids, quitting isn’t an option. Caswell can’t imagine switching schools within the same district either, even though she describes her work environment as miserable. Her students, some of whom she’s worked with for years, mean too much to her. 

Instead, Caswell has started working to organize members in her school to represent their interests on a larger level and effect change.

“I can’t just walk out, though there’s definitely moments where I would have liked to,” said Caswell. “We’re tired. The demands keep coming, and we can’t do it all.”

She sees her advocacy as directly related to her gender, believing the profession receives less support and resources than it deserves because the composition of the workforce is largely female. Indeed, union representation, and the perks that come along with it, is something that other sectors facing massive shortages of female workers, like service and hospitality industries, don’t necessarily receive. As of 2017, about 70 percent of teachers participated in a union or professional association, according to federal data. By comparison, the same is true for only about 17 percent of nurses, another predominantly female workforce.

“Female professions are undervalued by society, and I think that’s part of the reason teachers are more densely organized than almost any other worker in America right now,” said Weingarten.

Still, plenty of teachers are quitting — and they’re quitting at least in part because of the pandemic. According to a survey by the RAND Corporation, almost half of former public school teachers who left the field since March 2020 cited COVID-19 as the driving factor. The pandemic exacerbated already-stressful working conditions, forcing teachers to work longer hours and navigate a challenging transition to remote learning.

For some teachers, the decision to quit was easy. High school science educator Sara Mielke, who had recently returned to teaching after taking time off to stay home with children, quit her job several weeks into this school year over the lack of COVID-safety protocols in her Pflugerville, Texas, school. 

“I felt like I couldn’t trust these people to prioritize safety in general,” said Mielke, who adds that she was chastised by school administrators for showing her students accurate information about vaccine effectiveness and enforcing the school’s mandatory mask policy. (The district did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Other teachers say that while they wanted to leave, the prospect of saying goodbye to their students was too much. So, they decided to stay and push for changes.

Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

That was part of the calculation for Kiffany Cody, a special-education teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia. She took a stress-related medical leave of absence last year, in part because she felt her district was neglecting worker safety. But Cody returned to the classroom after several months, noting she is “really, really, really passionate about the kids.” 

This year she’s banded together with other educators to speak out about unsafe working conditions and start tracking violations of district safety protocols. They’ve become close friends, a support group who feel determined to hold their district accountable and make schools kinder and safer for students and staff. (A representative from Gwinnett County schools said that the “district follows the CDC recommendations for schools regarding layered mitigation strategies, isolation, and quarantine guidelines to promote a healthy and safe environment for our students, staff, and visitors.”)

Every now and then, Cody looks at LinkedIn and ponders working in another field. But for now, she’s in it for the long haul — for her students. 

“We’re trying to work within the system to do what we can to help the students,” said Cody. “We can leave and find jobs in other districts and industries, but at the end of the day, the kids can’t go anywhere.”

Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Jennifer Mason. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin and Holly Ojalvo.

Welcome to Political Outliers, a column that explores groups of Americans who are often portrayed as all voting the same way. In today’s climate, it’s easy to focus on how a group identifies politically, but that’s never the full story. Blocs of voters are rarely uniform in their beliefs, which is why this column will dive into undercovered parts of the electorate, showing how diverse and atypical most voters are.

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In a normal election year, Richard Leonardon, 60, would be supporting a Republican or independent political candidate. But during at least one race in his lifetime, Leonardon broke his habit. 

It was 1996, when he was living in Pennsylvania’s 14th District, long represented by William Coyne, a Democrat. The Republican candidate, Bill Ravotti, didn’t really stand a chance of defeating Coyne, but Leonardon still couldn’t bring himself to vote for Ravotti. Instead, Leonardon wrote his own name on the ballot.1 That’s because, as a gay man, Leonardon found certain comments Ravotti made about gays and lesbians unsettling. Leonardon stressed that “someone does not have to be very ‘pro-gay’ to get my vote.” He just doesn’t want politicians to espouse openly anti-gay views, adding that his policy when assessing political candidates is generally “I won’t discuss it if you won’t discuss it.”

But the fact that Leonardon voted for a Republican even once — and has continued to support Republican or independent candidates — is notable because most lesbian, gay and bisexual voters tend to identify as Democrats.2 Lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans still represent a small share of the adult population (about 5 percent), but a 2016 Pew Research Center study found that 82 percent of LGB voters identified as or leaned Democratic while only 18 percent identified as or leaned toward the GOP. Moreover, LGB voters were much more likely than the electorate overall to hold broadly liberal political beliefs. 

That said, there’s still a small but growing number of LGB voters who are loyal to the GOP. This is true for many reasons, but one of the biggest threads I stumbled upon in my interviews and research is that many LGB Republicans see their sexuality and politics as separate. They’re also more likely to factor normal GOP dogma — favoring lower taxes, less federal government intervention and some restrictions on abortion — into their identity. On top of that, most believe that the party has changed a lot in its treatment of same-sex couples. During his presidential campaign in 2016, for example, Donald Trump made overt appeals to LGBTQ voters, and ahead of the 2020 election, he announced an LGBTQ coalition, with Richard Grenell, the openly gay U.S. ambassador to Germany at the time, campaigning on Trump’s behalf. 

More generally speaking, Republican voters also seem to have changed their attitude toward issues like same-sex marriage. According to Gallup, which has been tracking Americans’ support for marriage equality since 1996, a record-high 70 percent of all adults now believe that same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law and that same-sex couples should have the same rights as opposite-sex couples who are married. And for the first time ever, a majority of Republicans (55 percent) also say they support same-sex marriage.

Historically, though, many LGB voters have tended to lean Democratic because the Republican Party has actively campaigned against LGB rights and, in some cases, the LGBTQ community itself. In 2003, then-Sen. Rick Santorum, who would go on to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 and 2016, notoriously likened homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, and in his 2004 reelection bid, then-President George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, something he proposed again in 2006. These examples aren’t some relic of how the GOP used to operate either. In October, just before he was elected governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin said he was personally opposed to same-sex marriage. And even Trump, for all his courting of LGBTQ voters, sided with the Colorado baker who argued in a 2018 Supreme Court case that his religious beliefs were justification for not making wedding cakes for same-sex couples. 

Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, a political science professor at the University of Southampton who has done research on how sexual identity affects vote choice, noted that this not-so-distant history is one big reason why there’s a strong correlation between identifying as LGB and voting Democratic. “The Democrats, while being slow on endorsing [same-sex marriage] pre-Obama, have always been the more pro-LGB of the two parties, and LGB voters have rewarded these pro-LGB stances by awarding Democratic candidates with their votes on polling day,” he told me. Turnbull-Dugarte added that even in cases where Democrats are somewhat lukewarm on issues related to LGBTQ rights, they’re still often more open compared with Republicans. “Between a silent Democrat and an anti-gay Republican, LGBs know which candidate is going to improve — or at least not damage — their welfare.”

Still, there are signs that the GOP is making inroads with this bloc: According to Pew, which used exit polling data, 22 percent of LGB voters backed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, while 24 percent backed Republican candidates during the 2014 midterm elections. Some estimates also suggest that Trump won as much as 27 percent of the LGBT vote in 2020 — which, if true, would be the highest share of support any Republican presidential nominee has ever received from this group.

“I think I’m accepted in the Republican Party. A lot of Republicans don’t like gays, but they say, ‘What you do is your own business,’” Leonardon said. “I don’t feel the Republican Party has an anti-gay bias nearly as much as it used to, particularly because the older Republicans have died off and the ones 50 and under just don’t care as much.”

It’s true that younger Republicans are close to their Democratic peers in supporting LGBTQ rights. But there’s still a tension some LGB Republicans must grapple with when navigating their political identity: While the GOP writ large has gradually softened its stance on same-sex marriage, the six people I spoke with still have to square existing within a party where some prominent voting blocs like white evangelical Christians still don’t fully embrace the sexual orientation of LGB Americans — and where party leaders sometimes still espouse homophobic sentiments.

On top of that, a few people told me that it’s hard for them to feel accepted within larger LGBTQ communities due to their political beliefs. But, for the most part, how much they feel the need to address that tension runs in tandem with how central being lesbian, gay or bisexual is in their life.

“Being a gay conservative, you always find yourself hiding one part of yourself from another and switching in between these two communities and never being able to find that balance,” said E.A., a 24-year-old in Washington, D.C., who asked to be identified by his initials out of fear of retribution for his beliefs and sexual orientation. “I can’t speak for other people, but for my friends and I, this is something we commonly run into.”

E.A. isn’t alone on this. Several people I spoke to said it’s easier to be lesbian, gay or bisexual in Republican circles than a Republican in LGBTQ+ circles. That may have to do with one of the biggest differences between LGB Republicans and LGB Democrats: that most LGB Republicans see their sexuality as separate from — or secondary to — their political identity.

According to an October 2020 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, 54 percent of LGB Republicans said their sexual orientation was an insignificant part of who they are compared with 38 percent of LGB Democrats who felt the same. Conversely, 85 percent of LGB Democrats said that being LGB was a “very important” aspect of themselves versus 68 percent of LGB Republicans.

“While most LGBs are strong Democrats, the minority who do ‘break ranks’ with the group tend to have a lower sense of identification with the LGB identity,” said Turnbull-Dugarte. “These are likely to be people who, whilst they may have a same-sex partner, might not necessarily be participants in gay culture or be fans of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’”

Leonardon told me he fell into this bucket. “My sexual orientation being gay is just a tiny part of me and doesn’t really affect where I stand politically,” he said. “I think the Democratic Party tends to pander too much to various groups, and I think we should look at people more as individuals than as part of a group.”

E.A. agreed. “I don’t see someone’s sexuality as a defining factor of one’s character or personality. I see my sexuality as a part of me, as I would see my arm or any other facet that creates who I am. It doesn’t define whether I lean more left or right,” he said. 

Another important distinction, Turnbull-Dugarte noted, is that LGB Republican voters are far less likely to view society as being biased or discriminatory toward the LGBTQ+ population. “In other words, they do not share the claims of the LGBTQ+ ‘collective’ as being a group subjected to systematic marginalization,” he said.

And it’s true that in my interviews, many said they didn’t think Republicans were actively vilifying them anymore. Moreover, some said that the party simply didn’t talk about same-sex marriage as much as it used to. “I feel like gay rights isn’t an issue now since it’s pretty much settled,” said Nestor Moto Jr., a 26-year-old gay Republican living in California. “The court has already decided.” 

But that doesn’t mean being in the GOP still isn’t without difficulties. Some of the people I spoke with felt as if they had to hide or suppress parts of their identity because they worried about being alienated either due to their sexuality or their politics. This is something the Williams Institute study suggested was a common sentiment shared among LGB Republicans versus LGB Democrats. Per its research, 46 percent of LGB Republicans (compared with 72 percent of LGB Democrats) said they felt like a part of the LGBT community. Meanwhile, only 45 percent of LGB Republicans (and 70 percent of LGB Democrats) said they felt a bond with the LGB community. 

I spoke to Alex P., a 32-year-old bisexual man living in California who does not want his last name used due to privacy concerns. He told me he’s happily married to a woman with whom he’s open about his struggles, but beyond that, only a few close friends and family members know about his sexual orientation. He added, however, that due to his religion and political beliefs, he’s never acted as he says “outwardly gay”  — even though he’s been inclined to do so.

“I didn’t really come to terms with my bisexuality until I was in my mid-20s, but I’m also a Christian and I believe the Bible is authoritative,” he said. “My personal preferences are secondary to that.” He added, however, that he thinks some conservatives “are not compassionate” toward people who are not heterosexual. “One of the errors conservatives make is they assume because one is LGBT, that makes one a liberal or someone who doesn’t care about the morality of their sexual behavior. My hope is that society would understand that LGBT people are not a uniform bloc and that some do not view their sexuality as their primary identity.”

E.A., meanwhile, said he’s run into issues explaining his politics and sexuality with people on dating apps, in particular. “There’s been a number of times where I’ve interacted with people and the first question is, ‘Well, you’re not a Republican, right?’” he told me. “On Hinge, if you have ‘moderate’ in your profile, it means you’re conservative. There’s small, nuanced things one always has to navigate as a gay Republican, and I don’t think straight Republicans or gay Democrats have to worry about that.” Moto said he’s run into similar issues: “It’s easier to tell Republicans that I’m gay than to tell gay people I’m a Trump supporter. I lost a couple friends back [in 2016] and people were very hostile; that’s one reason I got out of politics because I didn’t want people to continue to harass me.” 

But of the LGB Republicans I spoke with, none seemed to hold any deep-seated resentment toward the GOP over negative interactions they’ve had regarding their sexuality. In fact, they all seemed to really agree with the party’s message, and many said they also thought that Democrats had gone too far left in recent years. Leonardon, for example, told me he’s been loyal to Republican or independent candidates because he prioritizes other issues — “tax issues, government-regulation issues [and] free-speech issues.” Meanwhile, Barb Hauxwell, a 61-year-old lesbian from Oklahoma, said she’s firmly pro-Trump and would never go back to voting for Democrats (which she did before she and her sister took over her family’s business). “I’m fiscally conservative. I’m still a Christian — it doesn’t matter whether I’m gay or not. I’m against abortion,” she said. “Pretty much everything the conservative party is for, I’m with them.”

To be sure, LGB Republicans make up a small slice of the LGBTQ+ community and an even smaller slice of the electorate, but for now at least, the Republican platform seemed to hold more weight for them than any negativity and vilification they might experience because of their sexuality. 

Hauxwell put it bluntly: “Sex is only a smart part of our lives, and now that I’m older, I don’t even have it, so it doesn’t matter.”

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

You can see it at the grocery store, the gas station and your heating bill (though, mercifully, not at the liquor store): Prices are getting higher. Since October of last year, prices for consumer goods have risen 6.2 percent — the biggest year-over-year increase since 1990 — according to a report released Wednesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices are on the rise in nearly every category, including gas, food and housing, largely as a result of supply chain disruption, labor shortages and lingering effects of the pandemic. 

Despite a mix of coverage in the media, the prevailing message from officials seems to be “don’t panic.” The Federal Reserve predicts this period of rising prices to be “transitory,” and there are signs that price increases are starting to slow. But in the meantime, Americans are worried about inflation, and most blame the Biden administration, according to recent polls. It’s why Biden switched gears this week, going from celebrating the passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill to addressing inflation concerns. 

If you haven’t noticed prices going up, you’re in the minority. Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults said gas prices had gone up “a lot,” and 65 percent said food prices had gone up “a lot,” according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted Nov. 6-9. One in four Americans said they spent more on groceries in October, compared with September, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted Oct. 29 through Nov. 3. And a Scott Rasmussen national survey conducted Oct. 11-13 found that 77 percent of registered voters had “recently experienced sharp increases in the cost of items they would like to buy.” 

Americans are also anticipating prices to continue to rise, especially as we head into the holiday season. In a different Morning Consult poll, which was conducted Oct. 29 through Nov. 1, a majority of Americans anticipated prices for consumer tech, food, travel, toys and jewelry would be higher this year than in previous years, and planned to compensate for the increase by hunting for deals. As the holidays approach, consumers have been most concerned about the cost of meat, produce and dairy, according to the first Morning Consult poll. Forty-eight percent of Americans were “very concerned” about the cost of meat, 37 percent about produce and 33 percent about dairy. A plurality of consumers (46 percent) said they “often” compared prices to reduce their grocery costs.

Americans are not happy about these price increases. In a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll conducted Oct. 30 through Nov. 2, 78 percent of registered voters said they were dissatisfied with the price of gas (only 5 percent said they were satisfied) and 75 percent said they were dissatisfied with the price of consumer goods like food, clothing and household items. This dissatisfaction about the price of consumer goods was highest among Republicans, at 92 percent, compared with 57 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of independents. 

Americans are feeling the price increases in their pocketbooks. That Economist/YouGov poll found 56 percent of Americans said it was at least somewhat difficult to afford gas, with 55 percent saying the same about food and 48 percent saying the same about housing costs. A Fox News poll conducted Oct. 16-19 showed concern about inflation was higher than it’d been for the past four months, with 87 percent of registered voters saying they were “very” or “extremely” concerned about inflation and higher prices.

Increased prices can impact voters’ political views of the economy overall because their effects are felt so immediately, contributing to Biden’s negative approval rating. “There is a psychology to inflation that is different from everything else, and it tends to drive how people view the economy because they experience it every day whether it is at the grocery store, gas pump or buying household goods,” John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster, told the Los Angeles Times. 

Polling captures how voters are thinking about inflation as a political issue. A plurality of registered voters (40 percent) said the Biden administration’s policies were “very responsible” for the inflation, and a majority (62 percent) said the administration’s policies were at least “somewhat responsible,” according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted Oct. 16-18. In a Harvard/Harris poll conducted Oct. 27-28, 56 percent of registered voters said they weren’t confident in the Biden administration’s ability to keep inflation at bay, and 53 percent said the same about the Federal Reserve’s ability. A majority (56 percent) said that Congress passing a $1.5 to $2 trillion social spending bill (such as the one they’re currently trying to pass) would lead to more inflation. 

While the public reaction is out of step with expert forecasts, their fears should not be brushed aside. Some economists theorize that, left unchecked, fears about inflation can make the situation worse by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which employees, afraid of rising prices, demand higher wages, the costs of which employers would then cover through raising prices, leading to higher inflation. This is what happened in the 1970s, and it led to nearly double-digit inflation rates. Regardless of how transitory the Fed thinks these price increases will be, Americans are worried right now.

Other polling bites

The 2022 midterm elections are a little less than a year away, and an endorsement from Biden, whose approval rating is low, may not be an attractive option for all candidates. Most likely voters (51 percent) said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by the president, per a Rasmussen Reports poll. Americans aren’t satisfied with how Biden has handled what they say is the nation’s top issue: the economy. A plurality of Americans (36 percent) said the economy was the most important issue in the U.S., according to a recent CNN/SSRS poll. And a majority (58 percent) said Biden hadn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. COVID-19 cases have stopped declining in the U.S., but many Americans are ready to return to pre-COVID life. Per a recent Axios/Ipsos poll, a small majority of Americans (55 percent) thought returning to their pre-COVID lives now came at a small risk or no risk to their health, and 50 percent of Americans said they felt they were at less risk of contracting COVID-19 now, compared with April 2020. About 900,000 children ages 5 to 11 received their first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine just one week after the vaccine was approved for that age group. Before the vaccine was approved, an October Kaiser Family Foundation poll found just 27 percent of parents with children ages 5 to 11 said they would vaccinate their kids “right away” once eligible. That hesitancy was in large part about the long-term effects of the vaccine in children (76 percent of parents surveyed) and that their child might have serious side effects from the vaccine (71 percent).On Monday, the U.S. lifted a travel ban for vaccinated visitors from 33 countries, including Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom. But some international travelers don’t feel comfortable traveling to the U.S. A Morning Consult poll found that 60 percent of Canadian adults didn’t feel comfortable planning a trip anywhere in the U.S. and 41 percent of Mexican adults are uncomfortable. In Europe, 45 percent of adults in the United Kingdom, 42 percent in Germany and 36 percent in France were uncomfortable planning a trip to the U.S. 

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 42.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 51.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -9.1 points).1 At this time last week, 42.7 percent approved and 50.5 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -7.8 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 44.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 49.2 percent (a net approval rating of -4.6 points).

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1.3 percentage points (42.5 percent to 41.2 percent, respectively).2 A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 2.3 percentage points (43.4 percent to 41.2 percent, respectively). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats over Republicans by 2.9 points (44.4 percent to 41.6 percent).