Ben Domenech's daily newsletter features commentary on politics, culture, and foreign policy, plus important articles you shouldn't miss from around the web.
In 2004, just 12% of evangelicals were in favor of same-sex marriage. It was 22% of younger evangelicals. By 2021, 35% of evangelicals were in favor, including a majority (56%) of those between the ages of 18 and 35. It seems inevitable that a majority of evangelicals will support same sex marriage in the next two decades.
Mainline support has risen even more quickly. It doubled between 2004 and 2021 (from 33% to 68%). There has also been an increase among Black Protestants from 15% in 2004 to 56% today. Catholic support started higher at 38% and has now ended up at about the same spot as mainline Protestants at 66%.
It’s hard to look at these numbers and not be astonished at how fast opinion has moved on this topic, even among religious groups like evangelicals and Catholics where the church’s teachings haven’t moved at all.
There’s also been a stunning rise in the percentage of religious groups who favor the legalization of marijuana.
In 1973, just nine percent of evangelicals favored legalizing marijuana. It was 16% of young evangelicals. In 2018 that share had jumped to 59% of all evangelicals and 70% of younger evangelicals. Today, a majority of every major Christian tradition is in favor of legalized weed including over three quarters of Mainline and Black Protestants. In each case, younger people are slightly more likely to be supportive than the overall sample…
However, I wanted to take a look at one more issue that seems to buck the conventional trend lines just a bit: abortion. I think that abortion stands alone in the culture war. It’s definitely in a different class than pornography, or same sex marriage, or marijuana. Here’s what I mean:
There hasn’t been a clear and dramatic rise in support for abortion. That’s coming through in these trend lines for sure. For instance, the overall evangelical sample is in basically the same spot today as it was in the 1970s - between 25% and 30% in favor. The younger evangelicals do seem to be trending leftward, though. From a low of 20% in the mid-2000s to nearly 45% in the most recent data.
I know folks are going to freak out about the young mainline line. Please don’t. There are almost no mainline Protestants in the sample under the age of 35 now. For instance, it was 33 in the 2018 wave and 39 in the 2021 version. They can safely be disregarded. But note how the overall line is basically flat since the 1990s? Yeah, no movement overall.
For Black Protestants and Catholics, there has been some peaks and troughs, but it does look like the overall trend line is up in the last couple of years. Now, a majority of Black Protestants favor abortion for any reason. That hasn’t been the case in prior years. For Catholics, support is just below fifty percent, which is the highest it’s ever been.
Here’s my overall read of this data. There’s not a group that is less supportive of abortion today than they were at recent points in the past. That doesn’t mean that support has gone up across the board. But for many groups it hasn’t gone down, either. That’s the upshot here: some groups stayed level, some groups are up slightly. But because the overall composition of the United States is shifting toward non-religion, that’s why we are seeing the numbers shift at the top level.
Mexican cartels are behind the spike in organized retail crime and are deeply entrenched in every level of the process, according to the federal government's chief investigative agency.
Retailers nationwide sustained nearly $100 billion worth of losses in 2021, the highest year on record, according to the National Retail Federation report published in September 2022. The growing number of cartel-run theft rings around the country drove that figure up from $70 billion in 2019.
"Organized retail crime is leading to more brazen and more violent attacks in retail stores throughout the country. Many of the criminal rings orchestrating these thefts are also involved in other serious criminal activity such as human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, weapon trafficking, and more," said Steve Francis, acting executive associate director for Homeland Security Investigations, in a statement. HSI is part of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Retail Industry Leaders Association described the acceleration of organized retail crime in recent years as having "exploded."
In fact, 80% of retailers polled nationwide reported an increase in merchandise stolen in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation.
No subindustry of retail is exempt. A spokeswoman for the home improvement corporation said Home Depot's most targeted items have been wire and wiring devices, power tools, and home automation products. When stores lock up those items, it only prompts thieves to focus on stealing other high-ticket items.
What does this mean for Republicans? It means that G.O.P. voters see Mr. Biden as eminently beatable, and they think most Americans see him as they do. Given that, most Republicans aren’t looking to be rescued from Donald Trump. The fact is, they really do like him, and at this point they think he’s their best shot.
Despite losing the 2020 elections and then experiencing a disappointing 2022 midterm, most Republicans seem confident that their candidate — even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump — would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024. They have watched as Mr. Biden has increasingly stumbled, as gas prices have remained high and as Americans have continued to doubt the value of “Bidenomics.” Many of them believe the pernicious fantasy pushed by Trump — and indulged by too many Republican leaders who should know better — that the 2020 election was not actually a loss.
Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison. And they remember that many of those same voices told them in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House. In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense.
It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterms, which were disappointing for many Republicans, there was a brief moment where it seemed like the party might take a step back, reflect and decide to pursue a new approach — with new leadership. In my own polling immediately following the election, I found the Florida governor Ron DeSantis running even with Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup among likely Republican primary voters, a finding that held throughout the winter. Even voters who consider themselves “very conservative” gravitated away from Mr. Trump and toward the prospect of an alternative for a time.
But by the end of the spring 2023, following the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis’s rocky entrance into the presidential race, not only had Mr. Trump regained his lead, he had expanded upon it. Quinnipiac’s polling of Republican primary voters showed that Mr. Trump held only a six-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in February, but that lead had grown to a whopping 31 points by May.
Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated. And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them.
Mr. Putin’s original plans in Ukraine may have failed and left him in a difficult war of attrition, but the Ukrainians have problems of their own. U.S. and Ukrainian military officials are squabbling about who is to blame for the counteroffensive’s slow progress. With American officials warning that they are unlikely to provide Ukraine with equal or greater supplies for a second offensive next year, Mr. Putin may think he has passed “peak Ukraine” in terms of the country’s ability to resist.
Farther afield, Mr. Putin also has much to be happy about. The coup in Niger underlines the massive success that the Wagner Group has had in disrupting the Western position across Africa. This is partially about Russia gaining control over such resources as gold and uranium, and partially about creating chaotic threats to Western interests. Western policy makers are left to wrestle with migrant flows as refugees stream north, and the threat of terrorism rises as jihadist groups gain ground across the Sahel. The collapse of French and European power across Africa does more than highlight the geopolitical impotence of the European Union. It diverts American attention and resources from both Asia and Ukraine.
Mr. Putin has also put points on the board in the Middle East. Thanks to Russian support, Bashar al-Assad scoffs at American threats in Syria. Longtime American allies continue to intensify their cooperation with Russia. The United Arab Emirates defied American pressure to deepen commercial ties with Moscow. Iran is becoming thoroughly integrated into Russia’s armaments pipeline.
And China’s relationship with Russia, despite Western hopes that Xi Jinping would wash his hands of an ally turned rogue, remains strong. China is buying all the Russian oil and gas it can get its hands on, and it’s supplying significant quantities of dual-use equipment that helps Mr. Putin keep both his economy and military campaign sputtering and grinding along. China is feeding Mr. Putin’s war machine, and will likely continue to do so, regardless of what President Biden says or does.
“The concept of “selling out”—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”
