Opinion: Democrats are finger-pointing. Does the evidence support them?
“We are in a spiritual war…the Devil has gotten into some people….
Know this: I AM American, and my pronouns are U-S-A” 
Are Red states doing better than Blue states – Search
RED STATES HAVE LOWER UNEMPLOYMENT RATES
- Out of the top 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, eight are led by Republican governors.
- Of the six states with the highest unemployment rates, five are led by Democrat governors.
- The average unemployment rate for the nation’s 27 states with Republican governors is just 3.2 percent.
- The average unemployment rate for the nation’s 23 states with Democratic governors is more than half a percentage point higher – 3.8 percent.
- 64 percent of the states with unemployment rates lower than when the pandemic began are led by Republican governors, and 76 percent have Republican-controlled legislatures.
- Three states with Republican-controlled legislatures – Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arizona – all reached a new record low unemployment rate in May, and have been the only states to set a new record low in 2024.
REPUBLICAN-LED STATES OUTPERFORM BLUE STATES
- Republican-led states are outperforming blue states on key economic measures, showing the stark difference Republican leadership has made in driving the post-pandemic economic recovery.
- According to a recent ABC News analysis, “an overwhelming majority” of Republican-led states are among the top 18 performers on four key economic measures: job growth, personal income growth, gross domestic product growth, and gas prices.
- Four of the five states experiencing better-than-average performances on all four economic measures are Republican-led states that voted for President Trump in 2020.
- Similarly, nine of the 13 states experiencing better-than-average performances on three of the four economic metrics voted for Trump in 2020.
- In 2023, South Carolina and Florida were the two fastest-growing states in the nation while California, Illinois, and New York all saw their populations decline.
- Moreover, Texas experienced the largest population growth overall, followed by Florida.
- Republican-led states also outperformed blue states on reopening schools for in-person learning, and studies have proven remote learning caused the academic decline during the pandemic.
- 74.5 percent of red state schools were fully reopened by May 2021 versus only 37.6 percent of schools in blue states.
- Furthermore, students in red states received 432 more hours of in-person education than their blue state counterparts.
June 20, 2022 Red state, blue state: Which has higher gas prices? | FOX31 Denver
8 Economic Indicators — Are Red or Blue States Better? | Applied Sentience
Red state economies are surging under Biden. Here’s why.
After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.
Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.
And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.
“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”
With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.
Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.
Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.
“To anyone who intends to take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.
Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.
Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.
Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”
The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.
The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.
This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.
Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.
Related: Democrats suffer a drubbing: 10 key takeaways from Trump’s election win
In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”
Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.
“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.
She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”
State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.
“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”
There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.
Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.
In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.
Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”
Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.
“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.
The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.
Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.
With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.
“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”
Related: Democrats confront fact that Trump’s dark vision prevailed as result sinks in
Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.
Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.
“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.”
Democratic governors vow to protect their states from Trump and his policies
By Adam Edelman
A cadre of blue-state governors is already preparing a litany of political and legal moves to shield their states’ policies and residents from federal actions under Donald Trump’s new administration.
The plans from Democratic governors across the country — including a handful of potential 2028 presidential contenders — offer both a repeat of how leaders of liberal states pushed back against Trump during his first term, as well as a snapshot of what the resistance to him from the left will look like this time around.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he would convene a special session of the Legislature explicitly intended to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
In a news release, he said the session would focus “on bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families.”
Newsom outlined that the session, set to kick off Dec. 2, will take “expedited action” to “best protect California and its values from attacks” on LGBTQ rights and women’s rights. He also said it would “provide additional resources” to the state’s Justice Department and other agencies to “pursue robust affirmative litigation” against future potential unlawful actions by the Trump administration, as well as to defend against any federal lawsuits from the administration that could be filed.
He added that the session would be the “first of several actions” by his administration and the Legislature to begin “shoring up California’s defenses against an incoming federal administration that has threatened the state on multiple fronts.”
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle. California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond,” Newsom said in a statement. “We are prepared, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive.”
Newsom’s office told The Associated Press that the governor was attempting to “Trump-proof” the state’s laws.
Trump hit back at Newsom in a lengthy post on Truth Social on Friday, referring to him as “Governor Gavin Newscum” and saying he was “using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who like Newsom is considered to be among the Democrats in the 2028 mix, echoed many of the same themes during a press conference this week.
“To anyone who intends to come, take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” he said Thursday. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Pritzker, whose Think Big America nonprofit group spent millions of dollars on abortion-rights ballot measures in four states this cycle, called Illinois “a refuge for those whose rights are being denied elsewhere,” including those seeking political asylum, reproductive health care or to avoid persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender.
He nodded to policies his administration has enacted, including codifying abortion rights and a law requiring gender-affirming care to be covered by health insurers in Illinois.
Efforts Trump-proof Illinois have been ongoing for months, if not longer, said Pritzker chief of staff Anne Caprara.
She said the state is looking into other legal protections for women who travel to the state to access reproductive care, including protecting transponder data and medical records from out-of-state attorneys general.
The state also has been working to codify environmental regulations in case a Trump administration tries to roll back clean air and water protections, as well as ensuring labor protections are maintained.
“We’re literally going through Project 2025 to understand every element of what they might touch. Some of this work has been done or in the process for a while,” Caprara said.
She also said collaborative efforts involving other Midwestern states are in the works.
“Midwest governors who governed through Covid with Trump at the helm — it got hairy then — we’ve been through this before and are determined this time to draw in those lessons and make sure that to the degree it makes sense we are collaborating on best practices and how to creatively deal with the more difficult pieces of this,” Caprara sais. “Those relationships the governors at large on the Democratic side of the aisle have been key all along in navigating those years of Trump.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also announced an effort this week — dubbed the “Empire State Freedom Initiative” — she said was designed to address “policy and regulatory” threats that could happen during Trump’s administration.
The effort, being conducted together with the office of New York’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, will address federal legal “threats” to reproductive freedom, immigration issues, civil rights, gun safety, climate change progress, environmental justice and other issues, they said in a joint announcement this week.
“I’m committed to working with anyone on policies that make our state stronger, safer and more livable — but my administration will also be prepared to protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats,” Hochul said in a statement Wednesday.
She said in the statement that officials leading the effort in the state had already developed an initial analysis of “likely” statutory, regulatory and fiscal “vulnerabilities” based on comments and policy proposals from Trump and his team, and had begun developing legislation, rules and appropriations that would serve to counter such federal actions.
In addition, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said on MSNBC on Wednesday that she would use “every tool in the toolbox” to “protect our residents” and to “hold the line on democracy and the rule of law.”
Healey, who as the state’s attorney general during Trump’s first term challenged his administration several times on immigration policies, said she’d exercise her executive and regulatory authority, and make use of legislation in the state to fight various Trump policies.
Specifically asked about Trump’s plan to implement mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, Healey said she would “absolutely not” allow state police to assist in such an effort.
Asked about Democratic governors’ response to Trump’s return to the White House, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another possible 2028 contender, referred to a statement he released Thursday in response to Trump’s victory that focused heavily on unity when asked whether similar efforts were underway in the state.
“Now that this election is over, it is time to govern — to work together, to compromise, and to get stuff done,” Shapiro said in that statement. “I believe there’s more that unites us than divides us — and we must work together to continue to get stuff done for Pennsylvania.
Unlike in the deep-blue states of California, New York and Massachusetts, where Democrats enjoy a trifecta of power across state government, the Legislature in battleground Pennsylvania is split, which would make plans to counter Trump more difficult. Plus, Trump just carried the state at the presidential level.
“Let me also make clear: I will never back down from standing up for the freedoms I was elected to protect. I will continue to defend our democracy, defend our fundamental rights, and ensure we continue the legacy of William Penn by building a Commonwealth that is warm and welcoming for all,” Shapiro added.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy pledged to both push back against Trump when necessary, while also seeking out areas for compromise.
“If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death,” Murphy said at a Wednesday press conference, mentioning issues such as immigration and reproductive rights.
“If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody,” he added.
John Fetterman says Democrats need to quit ‘freaking out’ about Trump
Dr. Kate Calvin, NASA chief scientist and senior climate advisor, outlines recent scientific findings on climate change and its effect on the planet. This video was filmed for the Economist Impact’s program, “The Sustainability Project,” as part of their countdown to COP28, a climate conference to be held by the United Nations in Dubai starting on Nov. 30, 2023. Learn more about how NASA studies Earth and climate: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/ Climate Change – NASA Science Credit: NASA Producer: Eric Galler
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Doug McIntyre highlights alarming findings presented at the ongoing COP29 climate conference that predict a global temperature rise of 3°C by 2100 if emission levels remain unchecked. Such an increase would exacerbate extreme weather, including stronger storms and widespread droughts. Climate refugees, already numbering millions, would grow as conditions in areas like Delhi — a city now enduring 120°F temperatures and severe pollution — become uninhabitable. COP29 Meeting Deemed “No Longer Fit For Purpose” By Experts | Watch S38 Ep2
The Serengeti Rules | Full Episode| Nature | PBS
Premiere: 10/9/2019 | 00:53:13 | TV-PG |
Travel back in time, from the Arctic Ocean to Pacific tide pools, with a pioneering group of scientists who make surprising discoveries that transform human understanding of nature and ecology. Based on a book of the same name, The Serengeti Rules had its theatrical premiere at Tribeca Film Festival and has won awards at the 2018 Wildscreen Panda Awards and Jackson Hole Science Media Awards.
About the Episode:
Academy Award-winning Passion Pictures and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios present one of the most important, but untold, science stories of our time—a tale with profound implications for the fate of life on our planet.
Beginning in the 1960s, a small band of young scientists headed out into the wilderness, driven by an insatiable curiosity about how nature works. Immersed in some of the most remote and spectacular places on Earth—from the majestic Serengeti to the Amazon jungle; from the Arctic Ocean to Pacific tide pools—they discovered a single set of rules that govern all life.
Now in the twilight of their eminent careers, these five unsung heroes of modern ecology—Bob Paine, Jim Estes, Mary Power, Tony Sinclair, and John Terborgh—share the stories of their adventures, and how their pioneering work flipped our view of nature on its head.
Across the globe, they discovered that among the millions of species on our planet, some are far more important than others. They called these species “keystones” because they hold communities of plants and animals together, just like a keystone holds a stone arch in place.
When keystones are removed, ecosystems unravel and collapse—a phenomenon no one had imagined or understood until their revolutionary discoveries. But with new knowledge also comes new hope, and these same visionaries reveal the remarkable resilience of nature—and how the rules they discovered can be used to restore the natural world, from American lakes to war-ravaged African parks. PBS Socialeco collapse restores – Search
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