From “Concrete Local Work Moderates Partisanship Among Rural Residents”  by Rural Urban Bridge Initiative: “In a time of widespread partisan animosity across much of the United States, a just-released study of the Community Works initiative demonstrates that sustained, concrete, non-political work in rural communities reduces the intensity of partisan polarization when compared with similar “control counties.”  The study was designed and overseen by Professor Nick Jacobs, a social scientist at Colby College, and the co-author of The Rural Voter.  The analysis considered four rural counties in Virginia and two in Georgia with Community Works chapters, comparing them to comparable neighboring counties that had no chapters.  Before and after surveys were conducted in these counties, designed by Dr Jacobs, to assess the perceptions and feelings of rural residents about politics and the political parties…The study period included two years of Community Works activities in Virginia and one year in Georgia…Community Works, a program of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, helps liberals and Democrats living in rural areas to work side by side with their neighbors to solve local problems.  The program is growing, with chapters now active in seven states…The study’s findings were clear.  According to Dr Jacobs, “Across six counties within two states and across multiple outcome measures, Community Works consistently reduces the intensity of partisan polarization.”  The clarity of the findings after such a relatively short period of time surprised both the study’s author and the leaders of the Community Works Initiative.  According to Meredith Dean, National Director of Community Works, “We knew from  experience on the ground that CWorks was shifting attitudes and increasing trust.  But honestly, we didn’t expect that this would be statistically validated so soon.”…To learn more about the Community Works program and Dr Jacob’s study, contact Meredith Dean at meredith@ruralurbanbridge.org, Professor Nick Jacobs at jacobsnf@gmail.com or view this recording of a May 6^th briefing about the study.”

Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic that “a Washington Post poll taken before and after the shooting incident found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular. It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans and supported by only 28 percent. Independents oppose it by a whopping 61-18, working class Americans by 54-28, and moderates by 64-16. Importantly, the Post polling done after the incident showed no clear shift toward support for the project, another sign that MAGA propaganda around it fizzled…It’s not clear, of course, whether most ordinary voters oppose the ballroom merely because they want the president to focus on material things or because it represents a massive abuse of power suffused with Nero-level megalomania. It’s probably some of both…After all, to build the ballroom, Trump bulldozed large swaths of the White House—which belongs to the American people—without congressional approval. A judge temporarily halted the project, but Trump used the shooting to try to browbeat him into rubberstamping it. The White House withheld the names of some well-heeled donors to the project, including some with business before the government. Trump’s fundraising for the ballroom has created new avenues for the wealthy to pay tribute to him, as part of his effort to transform the presidency into a massive Bribe Delivery System.”

Sargent continues: “The ballroom should also be viewed alongside other Trumpian projects—the planned Triumphal Arch, the renaming of the Kennedy Center after himself, and the stamping of his face on our passports. As Bill Kristol notes, taken with all those other things, Trump’s plan to transform the People’s House into an “emperor’s palace” symbolizes a “broader effort to replace a republican regime with an imperial one.”…Understood in that context, MAGA efforts to bully Democrats into supporting the ballroom look more like an attempt to strongarm them into capitulating to that bigger imperial project. And when Democratic strategists say the ballroom is a “distraction,” they’re putting their heads in the sand about all these larger implications…But the Post poll suggests that the ballroom has proven to be one of those things that breaks through to lower-information voters in unpredictable ways. If it’s true, as Derek Thompson says, that the smartphone is imperceptibly, indelibly transforming our politics, the ballroom might illustrate the point: With those dramatic and shareable images of Trump’s White House East Wing demolition, this saga has unexpectedly captured something larger than itself…In fact, the deeper subtexts of the ballroom tale—the corruption, the megalomania, the careless Gatsby-esque destructiveness, the Trumpian imperium—are surely a key reason it has broken through. It’s creating the type of meaningful moment in our politics that offers surprising political openings to the opposition.”

Joyce Vance shares a salient critique of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision: “The Supreme Court’s decision in Callais continues to make clear all the reasons we needed, and continue to need, a Voting Rights Act. And it isn’t about protecting white voters. Congress had an entirely different intent when it passed the Act, an intent that DOJ has forgotten to remove mention of from its website: …When the Court gutted Section 5 of the act in Shelby County v. Holder, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accused the majority of shutting the umbrella that was meant to protect voters in the middle of a rainstorm who weren’t getting wet, because the umbrella was working. The case was decided in 2013, but even before the Supreme Court formally gutted Section 5 of the Act, repressive measures were being adopted in states like Alabama, which adopted a stepped-up voter identification requirement that made it more difficult for parts of the population, including Black voters, to exercise their rights, expecting that the Court would do away with Section 5’s preclearance provision…A study at the Brennan Center explained the impact: “The racial turnout gap — the difference between white and nonwhite turnout rates in elections — has been consistently growing since at least 2008, reaching 18 percentage points in the 2022 midterm elections. If the gap did not exist, nearly 14 million additional ballots would have come from voters of color that year.” The analysis was based on nearly 1 billion vote records and controlled for factors like regional differences, income, and education…The kind of behavior the Act was meant to prevent is exactly what’s happening, as Black voting power is diluted with new maps that are being adopted. And the Court seems to have abandoned its allegiance to the Purcell principle, which it has used in the past to prevent changes from being made too close to an election. Some of the new measures adopted by the states are being challenged, or will be challenged in court, and we’ll get a chance to see if the rules are different now that the Court is focused on protecting white voters from discrimination, which was the story behind Callais…To put all of this into context, consider the importance of the right to vote. At bottom, it’s the right that unlocks all of the other rights, the essence of democracy. Efforts by the Trump faction to impede that right—whether it’s by making it more difficult to register, more difficult to vote, or more difficult to have your vote count—is an effort to lock up all of our other rights.”