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As the losses for Democrats mounted during the course of election night, any number of pundits questioned the Democratic Party’s Obama Avoidance Syndrome. That philosophy failed to aid Democrats in Kentucky and Georgia hoping for upset victories. The party’s reluctance to embrace the Obama administration’s successes in providing health care, lowering unemployment and saving the nation from a great recession proved to be their undoing.
In addition to North Carolina, states where the youth vote could affect the outcome in November’s competitive political races include Alaska, Colorado, and Louisiana, according to an analysis CIRCLE released in August. CIRCLE’s data on African American, Asian American, and Hispanic youth show the complexities at play in ways that may challenge common assumptions about what motivates youth to become civically engaged or affiliate with a political party.
Making sense of high-profile House, Senate and gubernatorial races this tight will mean breaking down every voting bloc into the microscopic bits of data to parse through in the postmortem. And of all the big mysteries that will be closely watched and dissected on Nov. 4, few will be as anxiously anticipated as the exit polling for women voters—since they were 53 percent of the electorate in 2012.
PIPH is one of several religious organizations in the Bay Area that have spearheaded a burgeoning Sanctuary Movement that began last summer in Arizona. So far 24 congregations offering sanctuary in 12 cities across the country have joined. Inspired by the Sanctuary Movement of the early 1980s, when at least 500 churches offered safe-havens for migrants escaping conflict in Central America, faith leaders today are looking to renew that commitment by providing shelter, food and even legal advice to this latest wave of child refugees.
As Millennials make their move out of college and into the workforce, their drinking habits also change. They opt for the sophistication often associated with wine—as well as cocktails and craft brews—over the party favors of liquor and mass-produced beers. In addition, Millennials apparently do not need a special occasion to drink wine; rather, they find drinking wine to be a social activity as well as a relaxing one, such as when cooking or watching television. The reverberation of this is that while Millennials are paying less for wine than their Boomers counterpart because of socioeconomic reasons.
The study, based on new Census Bureau data, found that the country’s immigrant population — including both legal and illegal immigrants — grew by 1.4 million from July 2010 to July 2013 to a record 41.3 million. “The new data makes clear that while Latin America and the Caribbean are still a significant source of immigration, the growth is being driven in large part by immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa."
Thus far, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, each side has been able to stop the other one cold. Nearly everything that passes in the House is dead on arrival in the Senate. And just about anything that attracts enough votes to get out of the Senate is dead as a mackerel in the House. As a result, the Congress of the United States has accomplished absolutely nothing of substance.
In May of 2014, Slate.com published a story with maps that got policy wonks talking. Entitled “Tagalog in California, Cherokee in Arkansas,” it showed how counterintuitive it might be for Americans to guess who’s where in America. Under the section of “Most common Language Spoken Other Than English and Spanish,” (in other words, the 3rd most popular language spoken) one is surprised to find that it’s Vietnamese in states like Washington, Texas, Nebraska and Oklahoma. In Virginia and Georgia? It’s Korean. And in Hawaii, Nevada and California? It’s Tagalog.