Adam Freelander | Vox

How Trump’s second term will be different

2024-11-06T09:03:20-05:00

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, will also be its 47th president. After voting him out of office in 2020, American voters changed their minds, opting for a return to his policies and his politics.

But the second Trump presidency will look very little like the first. His policies have evolved, his circumstances have changed, and he will be returning to office with a much more focused plan than the one he entered with eight years ago.

In this video, we ask six Vox reporters what we should expect from Trump’s second term, from foreign policy to abortion.

Exactly how Trump could ban abortion

2024-09-09T15:16:26-04:00

For decades, the anti-abortion movement in the United States worked toward one major goal: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a federal right to abortion. In 2022, it finally succeeded, and states across the country began banning abortion immediately. Today about half the states either ban or severely restrict abortion. But now the anti-abortion movement is regrouping around a new goal: using the federal government to ban abortion in the rest of the country.

If Republicans take control of Congress in the 2024 election, it’s possible they could pass a national abortion ban law. But experts don’t consider that the most likely way a national abortion ban could come about, for two reasons: polling shows it would be extremely unpopular, and it would require the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Instead, they point to a different branch of the federal government — the president’s office and all the federal agencies it oversees.

In the federal agencies, opponents of abortion could fashion a de facto abortion ban by chipping away at abortion access in numerous ways; for example, limiting access to medication abortion, which now constitutes nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. The biggest way that the president’s office could limit abortion is by deciding to enforce something called the Comstock Act: a 150-year-old abortion ban made obsolete by Roe v. Wade but possibly revived by its repeal.

The final way the next president could determine the future of abortion rights is through federal court appointments. The anti-abortion movement’s “next Roe v. Wade” is the national legal recognition of fetal personhood, an idea that would by definition outlaw all abortion. The current Supreme Court isn’t yet right-wing enough to endorse this idea. But after another Trump term, that could change.

Watch the video above for the details of how this all could happen.

Most Americans are wrong about crime

2024-06-19T10:02:19-04:00

In 2020 and 2021, amid a pandemic that wreaked general havoc on the social fabric of the United States, violent crime rose. Today, most Americans believe that crime in the US has come roaring back — maybe even to the levels of the 1980s and ’90s.

But a look at the data tells a very different story. Nevertheless, the feeling that our cities are less safe is at least partly coming from something real. Something has changed in American cities, particularly since the pandemic. So what’s different, and what is the truth about crime in America right now?

This video is presented by BetterHelp. BetterHelp doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but it makes videos like this possible.

Why US elections only give you two choices

2024-11-08T13:10:07-05:00

America’s two-party system is widely hated. Very few Americans think the two major parties do an adequate job representing them, and most say more parties are needed. But when it comes time to vote, very few people vote for third-party candidates. Often, this is explained as either a failure of will (the country would have third parties if more people would just vote for them) or as a conspiracy (the political and media establishments suppress third-party candidates and ideas).

And it’s not that those things aren’t true. But there’s a much simpler explanation, and it’s the very basic rule governing almost every election in the US: Only one person can win. If you’re American, that probably sounds utterly reasonable: What the hell other kinds of elections are there? But the answer is: There are lots. Winner-take-all elections (also called plurality voting, or “first past the post”) are a practice that most advanced democracies left behind long ago — and they’re what keep the US from having more political options.

Even if you’re not sold on the need for more parties in the US, though, scratch the surface of “only one person can win” a little and you start to see how it produces perverse results, even within the two-party system. It’s a big part of why the political parties have moved farther apart from each other, and it leaves about half of the country without any political representation at all.

An alternative to winner-take-all elections would be some kind of “proportional representation,” in which a share of votes would simply result in a share of seats. Fortunately, we can look to many, many other advanced democracies for functional examples. Watch the video above to see a few.

How Michigan explains American politics

2024-05-21T09:39:59-04:00

The “blue wall” once referred to a group of Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast states that, conventional wisdom said, “always vote for Democrats.” Unfortunately for Democrats, that was wrong, and in 2016 Donald Trump shockingly won three “blue wall” states — including, narrowly, the state of Michigan.

It maybe shouldn’t have been such a shock, though. All three of the “blue” states Trump won had a history of electing Republicans at the state level. Michigan in particular had been fully taken over since 2010 by Republicans, who then spent years gutting unions, restricting abortion, loosening environmental protections, and generally just turning a Republican policy wish list into law. So Trump winning Michigan was, in a way, the culmination of a years-long drift to the right there.

But by 2022, something had changed dramatically. In a midterm election where Republicans were favored, Democrats won every branch of elected government in Michigan — governor, state House, and state Senate. The state Senate in particular had not been under Democratic control since 1984. And Democrats got busy using their new power immediately: repealing much of the right-wing legislation of the previous years, passing strong LGBTQ protections, quadrupling a tax credit for the poor, and allocating a billion dollars for the auto industry to transition to electric cars. Suddenly Michigan was cranking out more progressive legislation than almost any other state in the US.

So to recap: Michigan was once a blue state, except it wasn’t actually, and in fact over time it got pretty red, but then it became an actual blue state. (Again?) Or something like that. Obviously, the truth is that Michigan is a swing state. But the story of each of those swings is key to understanding how US politics has worked in the 2010s and 2020s. And it can tell us a lot about our next election, too. Watch the video above for the full story.

This video draws on a lot of publicly available data. For Michigan election data, we used two useful websites from the Michigan Department of State: election results down to the county level going back to the late ’90s, and a tool that produces election results down to the city/township level. To show national and statewide exit polls over time, we used NBC News’s data — they’re among the only organizations whose granular exit poll results both nationally and statewide going back a decade are still easily accessible. These are their Michigan exit polls from 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022; and these are their national exit polls from 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022.

The average per capita personal income of each Michigan county came from the US’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The question about whether the 2020 election should be overturned came from a May 2022 poll by Detroit’s chamber of commerce. And the data on Middle Eastern and North African Americans came from the 2020 US Census — which was the first one ever to ask about the US’s MENA population.

Why buying a house in the US is so hard right now

2023-12-13T13:52:55-05:00

Homeownership in the US is basically synonymous with the idea of the American Dream. Owning your own home, the story goes, confers both self-determination and security — instead of paying a landlord, you own a growing asset that will form the base of your wealth. Homeownership is ingrained in US society; the majority of American adults are homeowners.

But somewhere along the line, something changed. Homeownership has been way less accessible to millennials and Gen Z than it was to their parents, in part because of dwindling housing supply. But even within that generational disparity, 2023 was a uniquely bad year to try to become a new homeowner. Watch the video above to see exactly how bad, and why.

The US Federal Reserve’s economic data was the basis for a lot of the charts in this video. Here are median home prices, the homeowner vacancy rate, and mortgage rates. The US Census provided historical median income data. The Urban Institute publishes a monthly housing chartbook, which is where we got some of the data on “price tiers” in active housing listings. (That data originally came from realtor.com.) And Zillow’s “affordability index” comes from this dashboard. (In the time since we finished this video, the affordability index has gotten even higher.)

This video is presented by Secret. Secret doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this possible.

Why the Supreme Court made this map illegal

2023-06-15T09:02:45-04:00

In 2013, a divided Supreme Court gutted one of the major pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the 10 years since then, the court has moved even farther to the right. So when the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court again in 2022, it didn’t look good. But then something completely unexpected happened: in a 5-4 decision, two of the conservative justices voted with the three liberal justices to preserve the Voting Rights Act. And the effects could be huge.

At stake in the case was the way that Alabama divides up its congressional districts. Alabama has seven districts, one of which is a “majority-minority district” in which Black Americans are the majority of the population. In 2022, a group of Black voters sued the state, saying that under the law, Alabama should actually have two majority-minority districts. And the Supreme Court agreed.

The reason this matters to the rest of the country is that Alabama’s not alone — several other states in the south are now vulnerable to similar challenges that would increase the number of majority-minority districts. And especially in a region of the country where voting is racially polarized — where white people overwhelmingly vote Republican and Black people vote Democrat — this decision has the potential to flip multiple congressional seats in the next election. In a US House of Representatives where Republicans hold control by a margin of 10 votes or so, that’s a big deal. For the full story, watch the video above.

Why Texas judges have so much power right now

2024-05-21T09:39:57-04:00

In April 2021, Texas sued the US government over immigration policy. But they didn’t sue in Texas’s state capital, or in Washington, DC, or in any of the along federal courthouses along Texas’s border with Mexico. They filed the suit in a small Texas city called Victoria, far from any important government officials or immigration centers. And they did it there because they knew that if they did, a judge named Drew Tipton would be assigned to their case.

In the time since Joe Biden has become president, Texas has sued the federal government 31 times. That’s a lot, but what’s more striking is that eight of those lawsuits have been heard by Judge Tipton. The reason that’s weird is that normally, judges are supposed to be assigned to cases randomly. But in Texas, you can choose your judge. It’s called “judge shopping,” and it has made Texas judges some of the most powerful in the country.

It’s also not just the state of Texas getting in on the act. In 2022, a private group called the Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine filed a suit demanding that the FDA take mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication approved in 2000, off the market. And they filed the suit in Amarillo, Texas, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk hears 100 percent of the cases. Kacsmaryk had previously been a lawyer for right-wing causes before he was a judge, and he ruled accordingly, ordering that the FDA ban mifepristone throughout the US.

In the mifepristone case, the Supreme Court stepped in and paused the decision, but the fact that it got so close to being banned shows how empowered Texas federal judges are by the rules of Texas district courts. These judges, most of whom were appointed by Trump, are playing a huge role in shaping national policy, and they’ve turned Texas into a powerful weapon against the federal government.

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Video: The 3 possible outcomes of the 2022 election

2022-11-03T16:15:59-04:00

On January 6, 2021 (yes, during the Capitol riot), the final Senate race of the 2020 election was called for a Democrat. All of a sudden Democrats had achieved something improbable: trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives. It transformed the possibilities for President Joe Biden’s first two years, giving his party the ability to legislate on their own — which they did.

The trillion-dollar stimulus, the infrastructure bill, the climate investments of the Inflation Reduction Act — all of that was only possible because of unified Democratic control. But even under divided government, both houses of Congress will still wield an enormous amount of power over national affairs and policy. That’s why the 2022 election isn’t just a referendum on whether Democrats should keep Congress — it’s a question of who gets that power, and how they’ll use it. Watch this video to understand the three ways it could all play out.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

What Joe Biden won — and what he didn’t

2020-11-17T18:26:23-05:00

Former Vice President Joe Biden will be the 46th US president. He’s the first to defeat an incumbent president in 28 years, and he did it in part by unifying the Democratic Party against Donald Trump, bringing members of the party’s left wing into his campaign after beating Bernie Sanders in the primary, and crafting an aggressive policy platform.

But Biden’s agenda will most likely be met by a Republican-controlled Senate, whose leader, Mitch McConnell, presided over the stonewalling of the previous Democratic president’s agenda and likely intends to do so again. This despite the fact that many of Biden’s policies enjoy the support of most Americans, and McConnell’s Senate caucus represents a minority of them.

In other words, Biden’s decisive victory margin of several million votes was basically good enough for a stalemate. In this video, Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein explains what makes that possible — a Republican Party dedicated to making sure a minority controls the country — and how Joe Biden’s first priority should be moving the country from minoritarian rule to democracy.

Read more about the Biden presidency from Vox:

Ezra Klein on how Biden won
Dylan Matthews on what President Biden will be up against
Ian Millhiser on who the US Senate actually represents

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