2025-08-19 06:29:45
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: A short-notice meeting at the White House today brought President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and seven other European leaders together to discuss the Russian war in Ukraine — but revealed little about whether a peace deal will be possible.
What happened? Two major topics of discussion were the possibility of a ceasefire and security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump said the US would provide Ukraine with “very good protection” from Russia as part of a potential peace deal; though the specifics of such an arrangement are still unclear, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte described it as a “breakthrough.”
The other big result of the meeting is the promise of another meeting — this time, a trilateral discussion between Trump, Zelenskyy, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which Trump has pushed to arrange, and Zelenskyy today signaled he would be open to.
The meeting also went more smoothly than Trump’s February conversation with Zelenskyy, which devolved into Trump and Vice President JD Vance both haranguing the Ukrainian leader.
Who attended? The meeting featured a remarkable assemblage of European leaders who gathered to show support for Zelenskyy, underscoring the war’s broader significance to the continent. In addition to Trump and Zelenskyy, the leaders of Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK were in the room, as were Rutte and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president.
What’s the context? Today’s meeting follows Trump’s Friday summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, which ended abruptly with little announced progress. Over the weekend, however, Trump indicated his support for a Putin plan that would require Ukraine to cede territory as a condition for ending the war, as well as backed off his previous insistence on an immediate ceasefire.
What’s next? A trilateral meeting between Trump, Putin, and Zelenskyy now seems more likely. Such a meeting could build on discussions over the past two weeks and bring Putin and Zelenskyy face-to-face — but it’s unclear whether Putin is even interested in ending a war when he believes his troops are still winning on the battlefield.
If you haven’t read the latest edition of Vox Book Club, I highly recommend it — my colleague Kelsi Trinidad rounded up a list of excellent book recommendations from the Vox staff, and you can read them all here. And whether it’s a book from the list or something you were already reading, I hope you’re able to spend some time logged off with a good book this evening — we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-08-19 03:40:51
Goodbye MSBNC, and hello “MS NOW.”
In an announcement that has triggered widespread befuddlement and mockery, the progressive cable news network is getting rebranded.
The new name isn’t meant to call to mind Microsoft or the honorific “Ms.” Instead, in the style of congressional bill-naming, MS NOW is purportedly an acronym for the following mouthful: “My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.”
Underneath this seemingly silly story, though, are currents of major change — and fear — in the mainstream media.
Because both MSNBC and its fellow political news network CNN are meeting the same fate; they’re being jettisoned by the big corporate behemoths that currently own them.
Those corporate behemoths — Comcast owns MSNBC, while Warner Bros. owns CNN — have legitimate business reasons for making this change. Each is offloading these political news channels, as well as various other cable networks, to a new separate company, called by some a “SpinCo” (spin-off company) and by others a “ShitCo” (no explanation needed). This is because cable news is viewed as a declining business.
Yet there’s another clear implication. President Donald Trump loathes both MSNBC and CNN, and his administration has been willing and eager to wage personal and political vendettas against their corporate owners.
Take, for instance, how Paramount had to grovel before Trump because he was annoyed at Paramount-owned CBS. The Federal Communications Commission held up Paramount’s merger deal until the company agreed to pay a $16 million settlement in a bogus lawsuit Trump had brought against 60 Minutes.
So now, with these spinoffs, Comcast and Warner Bros. will no longer have to worry about being punished by the federal government for MSNBC and CNN’s coverage.
To be clear: Comcast’s spin-off of MSNBC and other cable properties was already in the works before Trump won his second term. And there’s obviously no political motivation behind Comcast ditching its other cable properties, like the USA Network, SYFY, Oxygen, the Golf Channel, CNBC, and E! (Comcast is keeping NBC News and Universal Studios.)
But since Trump began his second term, the company’s thinking has apparently evolved on one point: whether MSNBC can keep its name.
Back in January, the new CEO of MSNBC’s SpinCo, Mark Lazarus, said that MSNBC would keep its name after the spin-off. So the announcement Monday of the new MS NOW name was a change of plan.
This would, of course, create more obvious distance between whatever “MS NOW” is up to and the existing NBC media empire.
CNBC, in contrast, will get to keep its name despite being spun off. We don’t know whether that’s because they’re less likely to displease Trump, less likely to cause problems for NBC’s brand, or some other reason.
What we do know is that, this year, Trump has normalized the weaponization of the government against corporations who have displeased him with shocking speed. For now, at least, this has to be part of companies’ strategic calculations. Placating the president is the new cost of doing business in the United States of America.
2025-08-19 03:05:00
The Trump administration is worried, it would seem, about eagles — like, the big birds of prey with sharp talons and famously good eyesight.
Earlier this month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees endangered species, wrote on X that wind-energy projects kill eagles, including the iconic bald eagle, and his agency would work to protect them from harm.
He even appended a memo to the post that directs the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which falls under Burgum’s command, to enforce an existing law called the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to make sure that these birds are not “sacrificed” for wind power. The law makes killing or harming eagles without a government permit illegal.
One possible interpretation is that Burgum simply cares about birds. Or the bald eagle, anyway, a national symbol.
A more obvious one is that the Trump administration continues to do everything it can to shutter or stall the build-out of US wind farms — which Trump really seems to abhor. That apparently includes suddenly caring about certain wildlife regulations.
To be clear, wind turbines are, in fact, a serious threat to birds of prey, including eagles, and to bats, especially when they’re not built or operated with wildlife in mind. Accurate estimates are hard to come by, though it’s reasonable to assume that turbine blades kill hundreds of eagles per year nationwide. That number is somewhere around 1 million birds per year if you account for all avian species, according to data scientist Hannah Ritchie.
That being said, a much bigger threat to birds is stray cats, buildings, and cars. Cats, alone, kill as many as 2.4 billion birds per year nationwide. Yes, billion.
And another more serious threat than turbines? Climate change — the very problem that wind energy is helping fix. A landmark 2019 report by the National Audubon Society, a nonprofit bird conservation group, found that rising temperatures put nearly two-thirds of North American bird species at an elevated risk of extinction, including golden eagles.
Finally, there’s this: Although bald eagles were once on the brink of extinction, these birds are doing just fine now. Actually more than fine. Between 2009 and 2019, their population in the lower 48 states quadrupled to more than 300,000 individuals, close to historic population estimates. That doesn’t include Alaska — home to the largest bald eagle population in the US — where some people consider them pests because they’re so abundant.
Bald eagles don’t need saving from Trump officials.
The many species that do, meanwhile, are losing protections because of policy decisions by those very same officials. So far, the Trump administration has moved to limit the scope of laws meant to safeguard migratory birds, including eagles, and all federally endangered species, seemingly to loosen restrictions on the oil and gas industry. Separately, in May, the administration took steps to undo federal protections for the lesser prairie-chicken, an imperiled ground bird in Texas that lives atop oil-rich lands. It’s also planning to open up eagle-filled wilderness in Alaska to drilling, cut funding for a bird-monitoring program, and log more US forests, which are famously where birds live.
Ironically, it’s the policies and programs that Trump officials are now eroding that helped save bald eagles in the first place. So if the administration was serious about helping eagles — or the hundreds of other American bird species, from hummingbirds to owls — it’s pretty clear that its actions would look a lot different.
2025-08-18 20:00:00
Almost every tech platform is designed to grab your attention and never let it go. You give it clicks, and it gives you dopamine. Games, news updates, social media hits — they all run on the same logic. We can add a new activity to the list: gambling. In just a few years, sports betting has gone from a legal gray area to a mainstream multibillion-dollar industry.
And this isn’t just about sports. It’s about how our economy increasingly exploits our cognitive biases and our irrationality, and how institutions — governments, media companies, even the sports leagues — have partnered in this system, because they all want a cut of the action.
Jonathan Cohen is the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. It’s a new book about the financial infrastructures that we’ve built on top of psychological vulnerabilities. I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about how this happened so fast, what online gambling shares with social media and crypto, and how destructive — on a human level — all of this has been.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the 2018 Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates for sports gambling seemingly overnight.
In 1992, the sports leagues went to Congress because of a threat, that was real at the time, of states legalizing sports gambling. And Congress passed a law called the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act that banned states from legalizing sports betting. And then, in 2018, the Supreme Court rendered PASPA, as it was called, unconstitutional on the grounds of basically states’ rights. And so, starting in 2018 with the Supreme Court decision, states are allowed to legalize sports gambling if they so choose.
How many states have chosen to do it? And how quickly?
Delaware did within six weeks. Today, as we’re talking in July of 2025, we have 38 states and Washington, DC, with legal sports gambling; 30 with online legal sports gambling; probably soon to be 39 and 31 later this year with Missouri.
FanDuel and DraftKings are the names almost everyone knows. How much of the pie do they control?
A lot. Those are the major players, almost to the point of a duopoly, defining the industry. And they have, I would say, around 80 percent, maybe 85 percent of market share. And of course it depends on some states. There are lots of other companies out there fighting for third, fourth, fifth place.
What happened to online gambling during the Covid era?
It takes off politically in places like New York because of the fiscal crunch faced by states. And this isn’t a new thing. It goes back to the lottery, and even during the Great Depression, when slot machines were legalized in four states because they needed the revenue.
Lawmakers have this belief that there’s always more money in the gambling cookie jar. Oh, we need money. Let’s just legalize more forms of gambling, and that will make up for our revenue shortfalls. Politically, that’s exactly what happens during Covid in places like New York and in other states.
But to your point about Covid, we have a lot of people sitting on their couches and a lot of professional sports are starting to come back. And lo and behold, there’s a new app on their phone where they can legally, seamlessly, frictionlessly gamble. So you can imagine the way the industry grows its market share and grows its foothold in that time.
The gambling companies promise the states all this easy revenue, and they go all in. How does that bet work out for them?
This is what’s tough about gambling in general and sports betting in particular. In most cases, it actually has met expectations if you were the fiscally responsible person who is reading the budget projections. But the question is at what cost?
Let’s talk about the cost, especially the human cost.
You open the book with this story about a young guy named Kyle whose life was completely ripped apart. Why did you start there? What does his story capture about these gambling apps and how they’re designed?
I thought Kyle was emblematic of what’s happened here. He’s a 26-year-old white guy who ran into trouble gambling on sports, but then even more specifically because he was someone who had gambled before sports betting went live but had never run into trouble until it appeared on his phone. But he was just really excited for sports. He was a sports fan, and he started betting pretty quickly.
At some point, I don’t know when his personal tipping point came, but it came, and gambling went from being something he did as part of his life to being basically his entire life. He wasn’t going out; he wasn’t hanging out with friends. He was just gambling. It was so instantly accessible to him. That was all he was doing. And he was drinking, he was smoking more because he was so stressed out from his gambling. He falls behind on his rent. His dad has to bail him out. Things go very badly very quickly.
To paint a picture: Kyle was making $65,000 a year, and at one point, he wagered close to $93,000 on bets in a single month. Eventually, he gets fired. He goes on unemployment, and then blows all the unemployment money on betting. And then he moves back in with his parents.
Yeah. I picked him because he is a young man, and this is the demographic it’s happening to. It completely interrupted his life. There’s a black hole in his life for two or three years, where he was consumed by gambling and the stress from gambling and the financial and mental health deterioration wrought by gambling.
Why are young men in particular so vulnerable to this?
First of all, young men are not exactly known for being judicious and careful, especially when it comes to money. They don’t have great impulse control. You could already imagine how that would set them up poorly for something like this.
They’re also — and I’ll speak for myself as a formerly young male sports fan — overconfident about their knowledge of sports. Sports gambling companies absolutely take advantage of this. There’s a FanDuel ad saying something like “never waste a hunch,” challenging you to prove that you “know ball” by betting on your hunches.
Young men want to prove to their friends [and] to talk show radio hosts that they know ball, and gambling is presented as a way for them to do so.
And then [there is] “financial nihilism” among young people and young men in particular. Many young men have disposable income, [but it’s] maybe not so much that they’re ever going to realistically buy a house or pay off their student loan or start a business. So they might as well gamble.
Whether it’s on sports betting, whether it’s on crypto, whether it’s on stock markets, whether it’s on video game skins — it’s not worth having $10,000 in their pocket. It’s worth having a chance at $100,000 or a million dollars. And they’re willing, as a result, to gamble and gamble more and gamble in riskier ways than they otherwise would.
What percentage of the industry’s revenue comes from the Kyles of the world? Not the pros or high rollers — regular working people who are addicted to gambling?
Sixty percent of betters account for 1 percent of revenue from NFL bets. If you do the flip side, 82 percent of the money is coming from 3 percent of betters. Some of those people I’ll flag are going to be really rich VIP betters like Phil Mickelson, who gambles a ton. But you can imagine there’s a lot of Kyles caught up in that group or in the interstitial group between them.
What makes online sports betting fundamentally different — and more seductive — than traditional gambling?
What makes it different from everything that we had before 2018 is the seamlessness. It’s the app design that’s just as good and just as seamless and just as frictionless as social media or a shopping app. And there’s an endless, endless, endless menu of betting options.
You can bet on, sure, the LSU Tigers to win the game. You can also bet on whether the first half kickoff is going to be a touchback. And then you can bet on whether the next pitch in a baseball game is going to be 88 miles an hour or faster. You can bet on a tennis serve. And then at 3:00 in the morning when you’re on this bender, you’re in this rabbit hole and you lost all [your] money all day, you can bet on Malaysian women’s doubles badminton.
It’s not a brick-and-mortar casino. They can’t pump oxygen into the room. They can’t pull the clocks off the wall like they can at the casino. But they can, with little behavioral nudges, design into the app some of those tricks of the trade.
When these platforms detect — and they have plenty of data to do it — that someone is trying to wean themselves off betting, or when they spot problematic play, what do they do? Do they leave that person alone and let them wean themselves off? Or do they slam them with promotional credits and deals trying to hook them back in?
The anecdotal evidence suggests that they do the latter. I’ve seen reports suggesting that they even figure out when your payday is, and they’ll send you more promotional credits and offers on those days.
The data that they have on gamblers would make Las Vegas of the 1950s weep. It’s incredible how much data they must have on every single one of us. They claim that this allows them to protect people and to flag users who are betting problematically, who are logging in too many times. But I have seen no indications that that’s how they’re using the data. It seems like they’re instead using it to pair someone who’s betting a lot with a VIP host and offer behavioral nudges and emails, auspiciously timed to re-engage them and to keep them in the cycle.
Do they kick people off when they’re consistently winning? They’re clearly capable of identifying problems and responding to them.
Yes, absolutely. And some professional gamblers I talked to, they make a habit of every once in a while placing a really, really vanilla ice cream–looking bet. They’ll bet on Aaron Judge to hit a home run or the LA Lakers to win the championship, because they want to look as stupid as possible, so that the sportsbook thinks that they’re a normie and not a professional gambler.
Because the second [companies] realize that they’re a professional gambler or that they can win money, they’ll just kick them off the platform. But as long as [the professional gamblers] can make [the companies] think they’re an idiot and that they’re going to lose or that they’re addicted, the platforms want to keep them playing.
The industry loves to use phrases like “responsible gambling.” What is your issue with people being personally responsible, Jonathan?
I don’t have an issue with personal responsibility, and I do think people have agency and should have agency over their own life. Fine. That being said, it’s not simply that it’s Kyle against the sportsbook. It’s Kyle against a multibillion-dollar corporation that is doing everything in its power to hook him and extract every last dollar of his discretionary income.
They say, Oh, if you want to set a deposit limit, if you want to set a time limit, you can do that. But [those tools] are rooted in a user opting in to decide to set a time limit, deciding to set a deposit limit.
Fundamentally, what it’s doing is putting the onus of responsibility of “responsible play” onto the gambler, onto the individual, rather than onto the company to responsibly provision the gambler with a non-addictive product or a product that is not maliciously designed to extract every last dollar that they have in their bank account.
Are there signs that the companies are getting better at this? That policymakers are taking this more seriously in terms of identifying problem gamblers and offering resources to help them get over that problem?
Not on their own. If there’s a reason for hope, I would say it’s coming from outside.
There are advocacy groups that are filing class action lawsuits over some of these companies’ most insidious behaviors, these crazy promotions that offer $25,000 in bonus cash, but you actually need to bet $100,000 to get the $25,000 bonus or whatever it may be. There’s also a lawsuit ongoing in New Jersey over VIP hosts, the company’s employees whose job it is to find big bettors and keep them betting.
Maybe we’re going to have some of the regulation that I wished we had initially had seven years ago. To the degree that there was momentum for it, I don’t think it’s coming yet from the companies themselves, as much as it is from advocates who are waking up to the harms.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
2025-08-18 19:30:00
Whether you like it or not, summer’s not quite over yet. There are still many days of sunshine and miserably hot temps ahead. To round out the rest of your summer reading list, our staffers share their favorite books they read this summer, for you to enjoy on a sandy beach, at a neighborhood cafe, or maybe just anywhere with AC.
As an inveterate gossip, I really enjoyed Griffin Dunne’s memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. Dunne’s dad Dominick is a summer novel staple (maybe you too want to lay on a beach and read about how society ladies were mean to each other), but it turns out his rakish actor son has lived a life of fun fodder. From his childhood attending parties alongside Sean Connery to his best-friendship with Carrie Fisher, the book is full of glamour, family feuds, mistakes, and at least one visit to an orgy.
It also provides a front-row seat to one of the most devastating domestic violence murders in the American public consciousness, as Griffin navigates life after his sister Dominique’s murder. While he leans a little heavily on his father’s past writing for those sections, an anecdote from the set of Johnny Dangerously — the now-mostly forgotten Michael Keaton movie Dunne filmed at night while attending the trial during the day — brought surprise tears to my eyes.
—Meredith Haggerty, senior editor, culture
My great friend Tyler invited me to join his book club. He works at our local high school, which means I now get to be part of literary discussions with the English teacher who I had during my freshman year! I’m excited to learn from everyone in the group, and also from the other teachers I didn’t get the chance to have back then. This past month, we read The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I’ve really enjoyed his poetry collections and other novels, but this has become my favorite book of his by far. It’s about a teen who’s struggling deeply while living in a declining town in Connecticut. He’s literally pulled back from the edge by an elderly widow and he ends up becoming her live-in caretaker. The bond they form is beautiful, and the story also dives into his experiences working at a fast-casual restaurant, which is deeply relatable to anyone who’s worked in a similar environment. His writing is immensely poetic and continues to leave me thinking about dignity, memory, class, and survival.
—Gabby Fernandez, associate director, audience
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, which I recently completed, was one of the best books I’ve ever read, it’s essentially War and Peace for the Eastern Front of World War II. The book follows various Russian characters, including one central family, dealing with the chaos and horrors of the Nazi attacks, while also grappling with the ongoing traumas of Stalin’s purges and continuing repression, and the moral compromises that life under authoritarianism entails. It’s harrowing, moving, and fascinating.
—Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent
The Upcycled Self by Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought, for layered storytelling that reads like a song, is quintessentially Philly, and pairs well with a warm summer evening on the porch.
—Devi Lockwood, editor, policy, politics, and ideas
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar! It’s an enchanting little fable about language and song and sisters, and every sentence was made to be read aloud — I really recommend doing so.
—Kim Slotterback, copy editor
I just finished the new novel from writer Gary Shteyngart, whose last name I definitely spelled right on the first attempt. Called Vera, or Faith, it’s another Shteyngart near-future semi-dystopia comic tour de force, a genre for which I believe he is the one and only writer. Set far enough in the future that there are self-driving cars with grouchy personalities and chess-playing AIs capable of emotional conversations, but close enough to now that upper-middle-class Manhattan parents are still obsessed with getting their kids into the right colleges, Vera tracks a kind of familial awakening for a 9-year-old girl named Vera grappling with a family that’s falling apart and a country that’s outright collapsing over Trumpian nativism gone wild. It’s Shteyngart, so of course it’s funny — he may be the one novelist who is actually amusing on X — but what makes it break through is Vera, who will take her place among the great precocious protagonists of literature. Move over, Holden Caulfield.
—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director, Future Perfect
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! was the kind of read that left me altered. The ending hit with such force that I immediately flipped back and read it again. And again. Wait — did that just happen?? It’s a novel filled with ghosts, grief, conversations between Cyrus, the novel’s narrator, and imagined versions of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Beethoven Shams (a brother who doesn’t even exist) and a fateful plane crash that killed his mother. Akbar’s poetic voice handles sticky subjects like American and Arab politics and Muslim religion with both empathy and force. This book is beautiful. I’m still thinking about it. I might always be.
—Paige Vega, climate editor
After seeing it rec’d repeatedly, I recently picked up Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, a sweetly feminist sci-fi novel originally published in 1996. It follows an elderly but still spry woman, Ofelia, who’s spent decades living with her family and others in a small, experimental human colony on a faraway planet. When the project gets axed and all of the colonists are ordered to return home, Ofelia decides to stay behind, so that she can finally be alone, for once. Solitude all too often gets framed as an awful thing, but here it’s full of joy and replenishment. Ofelia comes into her own once she no longer has to concern herself with the societal strictures placed around women, or with the way other people constantly underestimate her because of her age.
Except then, of course, everything changes — when the cute neighboring aliens show up.
___________
One of the best things about Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger’s 2020 young adult fantasy slash murder mystery, comes when the protagonist tells her family that her dead cousin has just ordered her to solve his murder. Instead of the skepticism you might expect, Ellie, aka Elatsoe, named after her powerful great-six, or sixth-great-grandmother, gets nothing but support and assistance from her family and friends, as they all band together to help Ellie and her ghost dog Kirby solve the mystery.
As Lipan Apache, Ellie and her family move through a world full of magical realism, where mythological, European, and Indigenous folkloric creatures all coexist with modern society; fairy rings, for example, are massive teleportation centers that get treated like airports. Ellie herself draws on her own magical powers, and the stories of the past, to help fight the all-too-human monsters threatening to uproot them all. This is a book full of surprises, delights, and profound humanity. Little Badger won the Locus award for best first novel, and it’s easy to see why.
—Aja Romano, senior culture writer
This summer I enjoyed reading Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, a short satirical novel about a millennial expat couple in Berlin who become increasingly dissatisfied with their lives. They’ve carefully curated their apartment and careers and social circle to reflect their aesthetic taste. But try as they might — from popping pills at art parties, to taking up refugee activism, to becoming digital nomads in Lisbon and Sicily — they can’t shake the feeling that life is passing them by. The book also reminded me of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists in documenting the pursuit of happiness in an age of aimlessness.
—Avishay Artsy, senior producer, Today, Explained
2025-08-18 18:30:00
Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, DC’s police force — which looks like something between an authoritarian power grab and an empty stunt — doesn’t look like a political winner at first glance.
A poll from YouGov last week showed little support for Trump’s move; 34 percent of respondents approved of the idea, and 47 percent disapproved.
Yet the pushback from Democrats — which often focused on pointing out that DC crime was trending downward, or arguing it wasn’t such a serious problem — shows why the larger crime issue remains perilous for them, and advantageous for Trump.
Though Trump is unpopular, crime remains one of his strongest issues, and one of the Democratic Party’s worst.
That sticks in Democrats’ craw. Trump’s recitation of DC crime statistics was filled with blatant misrepresentations. Furthermore, Trump himself was indicted four times, and he notably pardoned even the violent rioters of January 6, 2021. How could they be losing the law and order issue to this guy?
Yet the polling says very clearly that they are.
In May, separate polls from both CNN and YouGov asked respondents about which party they trusted more on over a dozen different issues, and both found that crime was the Democrats’ worst of all. (The GOP had a 13-point advantage in one poll, and a 12-point advantage in the other.)
It hasn’t always been this way. Even as recently as 2021, the two parties were about evenly matched in polling from Langer Research. But in 2022, the GOP’s advantage on crime surged to its highest in decades of the firm’s polling — and it hasn’t gone away since.
That’s for a pretty straightforward reason: A large majority of the public became convinced, due to very real rising crime rates, that crime in cities had become a very serious problem and that tougher policies are necessary — but Democrats often don’t seem like they feel the same way.
The crime rates have since declined, but voter concerns haven’t gone away. In last week’s YouGov poll, a large majority — 67 percent — believed crime was a major problem in US cities, and only 23 percent thought it was a minor problem.
And back in April 2024, the Pew Research Center asked registered voters whether they believed the US criminal justice system was generally too tough on criminals, or not tough enough. It wasn’t even close. A mere 13 percent chose “too tough,” while 61 percent said “not tough enough.”
Notably, even a plurality of Biden supporters (40 percent of them) believed the system was “not tough enough,” while just 21 percent of them thought it was too tough. Among the public, the belief that the criminal justice system is overly harsh on criminals is a fringe view. But among progressive activists, it’s a core belief.
For the past decade, the intellectual and organizing energy among progressive criminal justice activists has been around preventing police violence and making sentencing of criminals more lenient. In these circles, distrust of police and law enforcement and disdain for mass incarceration were widespread, and concern about crime in cities became viewed as racially coded.
Responding to these pressures, Democratic politicians struck an increasingly awkward balance on crime issues. They’ve tried to disavow “defund the police,” and big city mayors who have crime-concerned constituents have tried to get tough. But it hasn’t been enough to change the party’s brand.
Why not? Another YouGov poll — taken in September 2024 — asked respondents about several of then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s criminal justice policy proposals and Trump’s. Harris’s specific proposals were generally more popular.
But on the question of who would do a better job handling crime? Trump had an 8-point advantage.
That’s because voters don’t make up their minds by tallying a policy laundry list. They look for signals about “whose side are you on?” And Trump has signaled in many ways that he’s on the “tough on crime” side. Democrats’ signals have been more mixed.
So when Democrats are tempted to say anyone worried about DC’s crime level is ignorant, a scaredy-cat, or a demagogue, they should be aware they’re going out on a limb.
While voters may think Trump is going too far or mishandling certain cases, the broader crime issue remains favorable to him. It will take some serious work for Democrats to change that perception. Crime remains one of the party’s most glaring political weaknesses.