Who are the swing voters in America?

economist.com DURING HIS two previous presidential campaigns, Donald Trump never led general-election polling averages for a single day. In 2016 he pulled within a percentage point of…

Do undocumented immigrants have the right to own guns?

economist.com The night of June 1st 2020 was a chaotic one in Chicago. A week earlier, George Floyd had been murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, and protests against police…

Chicago wants to stop Glock pistols being turned into machineguns

economist.com “THAT PUNK pulled a Glock,” says Bruce Willis’s character in the action-packed 1990s Christmas classic “Die Hard 2”. “You know what that is?” You may well do. That gun on…

The impact of the Baltimore bridge disaster

economist.com Editor’s note (March 27th): Police in Maryland said that the six people who remain missing following the Key Bridge’s collapse are now presumed dead. THE VIDEO footage of…

Is the most powerful teachers union in America overreaching?

economist.com As election-night parties go, the mood was bleak. On March 19th primary-election voters in Chicago were asked to vote on a ballot measure that would have raised the transfer…

A private company will send your ashes to the moon

economist.com Have you ever thought about what you want done with your body when you die? Many Americans opt for the traditional graveyard burial, others donate themselves to science. But…

Why Nikki Haley, crushed in her home state, vows to fight on

economist.com WHEN DOES the act of hoping against hope go from admirable to absurd? Not yet apparently for Nikki Haley, the last woman left standing against Donald Trump and his seizure…

How might Donald Trump’s trials sway voters?

economist.com Polling suggests that most Republicans think the trials against Donald Trump have been conducted unfairly. Though 62% of Democrats say being a criminal is one of the worst…

These American cities are obsessed with dogs

economist.com ONE OF THE caricatures of millennials (along with eating too much avocado toast, as if that’s possible) is that they treat their pets like children. Precious pups are carted…

The Supreme Court hints it will keep Donald Trump on the ballot

economist.com WHEN THE SUPREME COURT decided Bush v Gore a generation ago, five justices in effect handed George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore. The implications of Trump v Anderson,…

Congress might just pass an astonishingly sensible tax deal

economist.com THE “SECRET CONGRESS” theory holds that bills which attract public attention are born to partisan rancour, endure a life of torture and usually die a miserable death. For a…

Florida too may have an abortion referendum in November

economist.com AS A PROTEST slogan, “Stop Political Interference” does not trip lightly off the tongue. But to abortion-rights activists brandishing signs with the phrase on the steps of…

This is not a story about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl

economist.com This is not a column about Taylor Swift. It is possibly something more ridiculous, a column about all the columns about Taylor Swift. And yet attention must be paid, because…

A court rejects Donald Trump’s claim to absolute immunity

economist.com ON THE campaign trail, Donald Trump has been saying he would be a “dictator” on the first day of his second presidency. Mr Trump may be half-joking when he announces this…

What the death of America’s border bill says about toxic congressional politics

economist.com THE LIFE of the Senate’s bill to increase border security in exchange for sending aid to Ukraine was wretched and short. Its three main negotiators released the text on…

Trump’s lead over Biden may be smaller than it looks

economist.com IF AMERICA were to hold its presidential election tomorrow, Donald Trump would be picking out curtains for the Oval Office. The Economist’s polling average puts him up by…

Donald Trump is ordered to pay for his bullying

economist.com If ordered to pay millions of dollars for defaming someone, most people would learn their lesson and zip it. Not so Donald Trump. Last May a jury in Manhattan determined…

The rise of the TikTok news anchor

economist.com “BREAKING NEWS: it looks like there is some weird stuff going on in America.” Welcome to the news on TikTok. Before we dwell on how and when it is appropriate to start a…

Why America’s political parties are so bad at winning elections

economist.com Every four years the American presidential primaries roll around to remind Americans how weak, clumsy and negative their major political parties have become. The news…

Checks and Balance newsletter: Thanks for the hope, Mike Johnson

economist.com This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America. Sign up for Checks and…

The rise of the remote husband

economist.com In costa mesa, a city in California’s wealthy, beachy Orange County, she is working her way up to becoming a partner in the local office of a major law firm; he is an…

Lots of state legislators believe any contact with fentanyl is fatal

economist.com In an episode of the cop drama “Blue Bloods”, Detective Maria Baez touches a dish covered in fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. Moments later she is rushed to the…

The White House unveils a pair of bad policies to woo voters

economist.com It is a Washington truism that little gets done in Congress during an election year. This means that pandering politicians, and particularly the president, need to get…

Is ticketing homeless people a cruel and unusual punishment?

economist.com IN 2013 local leaders in Grants Pass, Oregon, held a meeting to brainstorm ideas for how to tackle the city’s growing “vagrancy problem”. A record of that meeting states…

Donald Trump’s first criminal trial will be both momentous and tawdry

economist.com Manhattanites once rolled their eyes at Donald Trump. Then they came to revile him. Soon 12 will decide if he is a felon. Jury selection in his first criminal trial,…

An abortion ruling has Democrats hoping Florida is in play

economist.com Two decisions by Florida’s Supreme Court shook up the Sunshine State this week. The first, which paves the way for a six-week abortion ban to start on May 1st, will have…

Joe Biden’s assault on the $900 child-eczema cream

economist.com BUYING PRESCRIPTION drugs in America can feel a bit like being a tourist haggling at a street market. First, a ludicrous “retail price” is mentioned (for your correspondent…

Checks and Balance newsletter: Trump’s erstwhile allies

economist.com This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America. Sign up for Checks and…

Checks and Balance newsletter: What is Trumpism, actually?

economist.com This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America. Sign up for Checks and…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are staging a sex-strike

economist.com In Aristophanes’s play “Lysistrata”, a young Athenian woman persuades the women of warring Greek states to deny their lovers sex in protest at an ongoing war. Together they…

Amtrak’s ridership is touching record highs

economist.com At 7pm on a Friday night, the Illini service, a train that runs from southern Illinois to Chicago, ought to be pulling into the college city of Champaign. When your…

Time is called on Oregon’s decriminalisation experiment

economist.com Florists are usually cheerful places. But Gifford’s Flowers, in downtown Portland, has been going through it of late. It’s been broken into three times and employees have…

Is deploying soldiers on New York’s subway as mad as it seems?

economist.com NEW YORKERS have seen it all in the subway. They watch in appreciation as a rat carries a slice of pizza down a staircase. They feel powerless when someone in the throes of…

The best dataset on American health care will be harder to access

economist.com Prachi Sanghavi, a health-policy researcher at the University of Chicago, studies whether ambulances that provide medical care at the site of the emergency are better than…

Leaked discussions reveal uncertainty about transgender care

economist.com FEW AREAS of medicine arouse as strong emotions in America as transgender care. The publication this week of hundreds of posts from an internal messaging forum will add fuel…

Checks and Balance newsletter: Mitch McConnell’s legacy

economist.com Sign up for Checks and Balance. Mitch McConnell has been overrun, writes James Bennet, our Lexington columnist Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was right a few years back…

A millennial is building America’s first nickel-cobalt refinery

economist.com Kaleigh Long believed there had to be an American fix. As an Oklahoman working on political campaigns in the Democratic Republic of Congo she saw all too closely the…

IVF is a slam-dunk issue for Democrats. Abortion may not be

economist.com SPARE A THOUGHT for Republican staffers who had to explain the female reproductive system to their bosses this week. Following a decision by Alabama’s Supreme Court, which…

Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design?

economist.com IT ALL STARTED with black Vikings and Asian Nazis. Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images…

The economics of skiing in America

economist.com WHITE POWDER can drive many people mad. At the bottom of the Imperial chairlift in Breckenridge, a mountain resort in Colorado, at 10 o’clock in the morning on a sunny…

Cousin marriage is probably fine in most cases

economist.com IT JUST SEEMED so wrong. In January Nick Wilson, a Kentucky state legislator who achieved reality-TV fame for winning “Survivor” in 2018, created a frenzy on social media…

The far-right’s favoured social-media platform plots a comeback

economist.com AH, TWITTER IN 2020. X was just a letter in the alphabet. Elon Musk was preoccupied with implanting computer chips into pigs. Donald Trump wasn’t yet banned, though his…

The search for justice in America is not a nine-to-five job

economist.com “I APPRECIATE everything that you’ve done,” Judge Jonathan Svetkey told a team of defence lawyers at a recent Night Court arraignment in Manhattan. The lawyers had asked for…

House Republicans fear Trump too much to aid Ukraine

economist.com America’s Congress does not have a reputation for productivity, but its failure to authorise more aid for Ukraine is unusual even for the underachievers on Capitol Hill. And…

Black workers are enjoying a jobs boom in America

economist.com It is a grim fact of American life that black people have long lagged well behind white folk in the world of work, with higher unemployment, lower wages and a larger share…

Dunkin’ faces a moo-ving class-action suit from the lactose intolerant

economist.com DUNKIN’ sells about 60 cups of coffee every second. That works out to be about 2bn cups a year. The coffee-and-doughnut chain brags there are 25,000 ways to order coffee in…

Why not impeach everyone?

economist.com WILLIAM BELKNAP is the only cabinet official in American history to have suffered the indignity of a congressional impeachment. In the case of Belknap, the secretary of war…

How to overcome the biggest obstacle to electric vehicles

economist.com Packing ever more ions into ever smaller batteries, spangling the landscape with charging stations, lowering the cost to make electric cars and trucks: these are complex,…

Why car insurance in America is actually too cheap

economist.com In 2010, Eric DuBarry and his two-year-old son Seamus were crossing a street in Portland, Oregon, when an elderly driver mistook the accelerator for the brake, and ploughed…

The election in Georgia could be as pivotal as it was four years ago

economist.com In 2020 no other state produced as much election drama as Georgia. In the end it gave Democrats slender victories that helped them win both the White House and a majority in…

California is gripped by economic problems, with no easy fix

economist.com HOME TO MANY of America’s most progressive policies, from criminal justice to vehicle emissions, California serves a unique role as a punchbag for right-wing politicians.…

New Jersey’s electoral process just got upended

economist.com THE DAY after Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s senior senator, was indicted for corruption, Andy Kim, a congressman, announced he would take on his powerful fellow Democrat in the…

A challenge to leftist bias moves into America’s public universities

economist.com In 1951 a 25-year-old Yale graduate published a 240-page polemic inveighing against his alma mater’s left-leaning bias. The book launched the career of William F. Buckley,…

Mike Johnson may have to choose between Ukraine aid and his job

economist.com SPARE SOME pity for Mike Johnson, the stuck speaker of the House of Representatives. A relatively obscure congressman thrust into leadership six months ago when the…

Mike Johnson struggles with his own rasputitsa

economist.com SPARE SOME pity for Mike Johnson, the stuck speaker of the House of Representatives. A relatively obscure congressman thrust into leadership six months ago when the…