And a majority of Americans don’t like what they see:
Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Those findings, tallied from Washington Post-ABC News polling, fuel Trump’s overall 67 percent unfavorable rating — making Trump more disliked than any major-party nominee in the 32 years the survey has been tracking candidates.
.. If Sabato’s map comes to pass, 48 of the 50 states will have voted the same way in the past three elections. The only two states that flipped in 2012 were Indiana and North Carolina, shifting from Obama’s column to Mitt Romney’s. In Sabato’s projected map, Hillary wins all of Obama’s 2012 states and wins back North Carolina. This would mean that Republicans will have lost those seven “super-swing states” — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia — three elections in a row, and raise the legitimate question of whether they are still swing states anymore.
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
.. when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news.
.. even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.”
.. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
..Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical.
..But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.
..More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners.
.. if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
.. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
.. “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”
.. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
.. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
.. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.”
.. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
.. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system.
.. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready.
The Heresies of Donald Trump
Donald Trump blamed the Bush administration for failing to heed CIA warnings before 9/11; denounced the Iraq War for destabilizing the Middle East; defended the use of eminent domain; promised to save Social Security without trimming benefits; and credited Planned Parenthood for “wonderful things having to do with women’s health.”
What About Ted Cruz?
One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative.
.. Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.
.. He subscribes to the belief that life begins at fertilization. This position would not only criminalize abortions in the case of rape and incest but would prohibit the use of contraceptive methods that are understood to prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg like the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill.
.. What is really stunning to a longtime observer of Washington is the number of reputable people who have brutally criticized Cruz on the record. The New Republic recently published an extraordinary collection of anti-Cruz quotes that runs from the left through the center to the right. His colleagues are on record as hating him — hate may be too mild a description. First and foremost, he has angered virtually everyone he works with, especially his fellow Republican senators.
.. John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications, and a former top Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, was more outspoken:
Cruz is an army of one, alienating anybody who is in his path. He advocates losing strategies purely to further his own career at the expense of the party.
.. Cruz, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, is ideally suited to mobilize every Democratic constituency, including single women, minorities, young voters and socially liberal professionals
.. Married white Christians have steadily dropped from 80 percent of voters in the late 1950s to fewer than 40 percent now. In 1940, 82 percent of adults were members of the white working class; now that number is well below 30 percent.
.. if Cruz were nominated, party leaders would “sit down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen.” In contrast, “You can coach Donald,” Black said.