We live in a society in which civil discourse and political decision-making capacity are deteriorating quickly and uncomfortably. We experience this erosion in obvious ways through hyper-partisan politics, toxic media and social media, and even day-to-day interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. Civic Health Project aims to reduce polarization and foster healthier discourse and decision-making across citizenry, politics and media.
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Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?
Sep 13, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?
Yes.
The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.
Housing costs account for 36.3% of the Consumer Price Index. This represents the largest share of any category.
The Consumer Price Index is an ongoing measure of price changes in a representative "basket" of consumer goods and services.
The only category in the CPI that increased at a greater rate was transportation services at 8.8%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rise in housing costs over this period accounted for over 70% of the total 12-month increase in the core CPI – that is, the CPI excluding food and energy prices, which rose 3.2% in this 12 month period.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index - July 2024
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Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index
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Voters cast ballots based on personal perceptions, not policy stances
Sep 12, 2024
The Fulcrum and the data analytics firm Fidelum Partners have just completed a nationally representative study assessing the voting intentions of U.S adults and their perceptions toward 18 well-known celebrities and politicians.
Fidelum conducted similar celebrity and politician election studies just prior to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Each of these found that perceptions of warmth, competence and admiration regarding the candidates are highly predictive of voting intentions and election outcomes. Given this, The Fulcrum and Fidelum decided to partner on a 2024 celebrity and politician election study to build upon the findings of prior research.
The extensive 2024 study revealed some notable findings:
- While former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are tied at 42 percent among likely voters, the outcome will be heavily dependent on turnout, as 81 percent of Trump supporters definitely or probably will vote versus 80 percent of Harris supporters.
- Overall, Harris is perceived more favorably on warmth, competence and admiration than Trump, especially on warmth perceptions (+21 percent).
- However, overall perceptions of President Joe Biden have declined substantially since 2020 (-9 percent), while those of Trump (+7 percent) and Harris (+5 percent) have improved notably.
- The 2024 presidential election will be decided primarily by voters’ warmth, competence and admiration perceptions of the candidates, not their policies or social issues. Eighty-three percent of willingness to vote for Harris is driven by perceived warmth, competence and admiration for her. A nearly equal 82 percent of willingness to vote for Trump is driven by those sentiments.
- Harris and Trump effectively “campaign” for one another with opposing voters: 50 percent of willingness to vote for Harris is driven by negative perceptions of Trump, and 45 percent of willingness to vote for Trump is driven by negative perceptions of Harris.
- Trump and Harris both draw most of their support from their respective political parties, but nearly 40 percent comes from other voter groups, highlighting the significance of these non-aligned voters in the outcome of presidential elections.
In addition, the report provides penetrating data on where voters stand on 12 key social and political issues, as well as insights on the impact of celebrity endorsements, differences between Democrats, Republicans and independents and much more.
The study was run by Fidelum, a research-based consulting and data analytics firm that specializes in customer loyalty insights, strategies and results. Its proprietary HUMAN Brand insights model was first published in theJournal of Consumer Psychology in 2012 and has since been cited and validated in over 800 peer-reviewed academic publications. It was also detailed in an award-winning book, “The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies.”
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The 1,546 respondents in the study were recruited, weighted and balanced to reflect the demographic and geographic profile of U.S. adults based on the latest census estimates. The resulting study margin of error is 2.4 percent.
In the coming weeks, The Fulcrum will take a deep dive into the key findings of the study, offering our readers valuable insights in voting intentions, drivers of voting behavior, the role of celebrities in the political process and the overall role perceptions of warmth and competence will play in determining who voters will choose in November.
In the meantime, the full report is freely available for review.
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Redefining America's political lingua franca
Sep 12, 2024
Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.
A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.
At the forefront of this lexical revolution are concepts like patriotism, exceptionalism and freedom — terms long co-opted by those seeking to uphold a status quo rooted in inequality. Historically, patriotism has been wielded as a bludgeon against those demanding change, branded as "un-American" for daring to question the nation's shortcomings. Exceptionalism, the idea that America is inherently superior to other countries, has fueled hubris and hindered self-reflection. Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being.
Yet, a linguistic wave made of activists, influencers, former school teachers, politicos and their laity is reclaiming these words, imbuing them with the promised radical potential. You and me, we are not just bystanders but a catalytic current in this wave. Patriotism is being redefined as pursuing a more perfect union — a relentless critique of injustice, liberty and a steadfast demand for equity. Exceptionalism gives way to a global perspective recognizing America's flaws and seeking wisdom beyond its borders. Freedom is being reimagined as the collective liberation of all people.
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This vision invites us all to be part of the change rather than the unfettered liberty of the privileged few.
Alongside this reclamation, new terms' meanings are emerging to capture the shifting zeitgeist. “Weird” has become a badge of honor and dishonor at the same time. In some contexts, weird rings positively for those embracing the beauty of difference in a society long dominated by homogenous norms. In other contexts, weird is the label of dishonor and shame denoting acts, attitudes or articulations that alienate or are very odd. “Declinist” describes pessimists who mourn a bygone era of unquestioned dominance rather than rolling up their sleeves to build a more equitable future. "Vibe" encapsulates the intangible yet undeniable sense of connectedness and shared purpose that fuels movements for change.
The lexical revolution unfolding before us is not merely an exercise in clever wordplay; it represents a fundamental resistance to narratives that have long justified inequality in our society. This linguistic phenomenon is an act of cultural insurgency, where people wrestle away the power to name their reality from systemic forces committed to preserving the existing social order.
Today's electorate attests that language can reflect and shape our worldview. It is about everyday citizens actively envisioning a world in which everyone has the power to define their place. It is a testament to the power of language as a force for change, and it holds the promise of a more inclusive and equitable future.
Furtherance of liberation language requires mindfulness of words' inherent power to inspire and arrest development. Liberationists of every stripe must continue to challenge, question and actively redefine the terms of our discourse, ever pushing toward a lingua franca that genuinely reflects the radical promise of equality and justice for all.
In reclaiming language, one reclaims one's power and inalienable right to be in the world anew.
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Impactful advocacy requires moving past cynicism
Sep 12, 2024
Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
Why does cynicism feel like a reasonable, inevitable, even smart posture these days? I think most of us have been there … ready to write off politics as corrupt or hopeless, ready to identify those on the other side of an issue as heartless or evil, feeling like the savvy thing is to keep our cards close, our hearts protected, our hopes low. But what if that’s all wrong?
In a recent Time article, titled “Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody,” Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki wrote: “Cynicism, the belief that all people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest — is a natural response to a world reeling from social division, rising sea levels, and countless other problems. But that doesn’t mean it helps us. Cynics … experience more depression, earn less money, and even die younger than non-cynics.”
“Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins,” Zaki warned. “Cynicism protects us from predators, but it also shuts down opportunities for collaboration, love, and community, all of which require trust.”
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My decades of work with grassroots volunteers has shown the power of hope that lies just beneath the heavy layers of cynicism so many of us have built up. But it takes work, support and intention; it doesn’t happen by accident. Recently, I interviewed several volunteers who joined organizations that work to deliver transformational advocacy, a form of advocacy that also decreases our cynicism in the process.
Jocelyn Dorgan’s parents were activists and taught her that “we live in a participatory democracy, and it was our responsibility to protect it, have our voices heard and have our leaders respond to the will of the people.”
Dorgan was active in college, but “life took over” and she wasn’t as involved politically until the 2016 election. After that election, “I cast my net wide and tried to do as many things as possible,” she told me. “They all had their value … but I felt like I was spinning my wheels.”
“I found [the anti-poverty lobby] RESULTS in 2023 through my daughter-in-law. I still do political campaigning,” Dorgan said, “but this offered a way to be effective between elections.”
She went to a town hall meeting hosted by Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), prepared to make several requests. She was inspired by how every person got his undivided attention. “Then it was my turn,” she said. “I introduced myself and RESULTS and said I had three things to ask of him.”
She asked him to co-sponsor bills or sign onto letters supporting the child tax credit and tuberculosis funding, which he agreed to do. “After I was done, I felt, ‘Wow, I did it and I did it on my own,’ she said. “It was a huge sense of accomplishment. I’d campaigned but never lobbied like this, so it was stepping out of my comfort zone. It was amazing.”
No cynicism there.
Arnav Dhuri, now a senior at Ridge High School in New Jersey, was looking for a climate-related opportunity to fulfill his school’s volunteer requirement when he was a sophomore. He found Citizens’ Climate Lobby and thought it might involve things like picking up trash.
“[Instead], CCL exposed me to politics,” he said, “and made me more interested than school ever has.”
After three congressional meetings he saw that the volunteers and congressional staff paid more attention to what he had to say than the others. “All the congressional meetings were during school hours,” Arnav said, “and the principal gave me a room to take the meetings. My friends are interested, and some are joining me.”
Arnav made a special commitment to electrifying his school and has already presented to the school board about it.
We need volunteers from more nonprofits who can say, because of the training and coaching they’re receiving, “Wow, I did it! It was a huge sense of accomplishment.” And we need more students presenting to their school boards or their representatives’ offices, and taking on their own projects like electrifying their schools. We need more organizations to stop feeding us a steady diet of email form letters and start intentionally working to put an end to our cynicism.
Now that’s a winning hand.
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Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats
Sep 12, 2024
As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.
Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.
Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”
That reset was really pronounced among Latinas, especially those under the age of 40. I asked Valencia to dive into Equis’s survey with me and explain what it all means fewer than three months from Election Day.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mel Leonor Barclay: Can you talk about the state of the election — and the gender gap between Latinx men and women — in the first half of the year? What has changed?
Stephanie Valencia: We saw at the beginning part of this election cycle, when Biden was still at the top of the ticket, that more women were trending away from Biden than we had seen previously. And so that was a big red flag.
We saw, basically in the last month, that Harris really hit a reset button with Latinos. We were starting to see a set of trends that could have been pointing to a bigger, longer-term shift among Latinos when Biden was still the candidate. But something did reset when Kamala became the candidate. She has come out of the gate ahead of Trump and she still has a lot of work to do to define herself among Hispanic voters.
For example, she's doing 13 points better among Latinas under 40 than Biden did. That's the kind of swing that we saw. Overall, in our seven most competitive states, she's sitting at 59 percent with Latinas and she's just about 60 percent with Latinos. And again, here is where we saw a lot of attrition in the couple of months prior to the change-up — Latinas under 40 in particular. And now she's doing 13 points better than Biden was doing.
Overall, her support among Latino women is up from 50 percent in early June. She's now sitting at 59 percent among all Latinas. And then with Latino men, they were sitting at 41 percent under Biden and 51 percent under Harris.
With Latinas under the age of 40, what do you think is making a difference?
One of the reasons we saw the bottom fall out — and it was among women as much as it was among men in that under-40 group — was really what was happening in the Middle East, and a desire for a more swift, aggressive response for a ceasefire. And so you get to see that really creating some attrition among that age group.
I think you have seen among that group just also a reaction to the cool factor of who she is. She's young. She's vibrant. Her walk-on song is a Beyoncé song. It's a very different world and I think it opened a door to have a conversation about some of those issues that are unresolved in the minds of some of those voters. They still want to see more action, more aggressiveness as it relates to trying to get to a ceasefire. But I think at the end of the day, what you are seeing is a permission structure that is now open because of who she is and the energy around who she is.
I’ve been taking a look at the campaign’s appeals to Hispanic voters and watched an ad in Spanish released by the campaign in recent weeks that leans on her story as the daughter of immigrants. Do you think that has any appeal here?
Absolutely, and it's not the kind of tired argument we see when candidates come to Latinos and only talk to them about immigration. This is slightly different because she is the child of immigrants and she does have an immigrant story. There's something that is kind of a wink and a nod to Latinos to say, ‘I see you. I know you.’ Obviously, not every Latino in this country is an immigrant themselves, but so many people are or have that immigrant lineage in this country, and know what it means to be a first-generation immigrant. So, that wink and a nod to say, ‘Hey, I see you. I understand you. I understand why you came to this country to pursue the American dream.’ I think that is something that we have not really had from any candidate on the Democratic side, ever.
To have a child of immigrants that is a candidate for president, really, I think, speaks to what we have seen in our research is really important to Latinos, which is the ability to achieve the American dream.
I want to dive into some states. Arizona and Nevada are the two battlegrounds with the largest share of Latinx voters. What did your August research say about the state of the presidential election in these two states? What’s the state of play for Latinas in other battlegrounds?
Six weeks ago, there seemed to be only one very narrow path into the White House, because things were slipping in Nevada and Arizona. And now, we're seeing an expansion of the map in every part of the country.
Let's take Arizona. In 2020, Biden got 63 percent of the vote. Right now in Arizona, Harris is sitting at 61 percent. She needs to, at a minimum, get to 63 percent among Latinos in Arizona. In Nevada, she's sitting at 55 percent and needs to get up to 59 percent or exceed that.
Looking elsewhere, there is a huge, huge, huge role that Latinos can play because these elections, even in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Pennsylvania, are all going to be won on the margins, and that's where Latinos can make a difference.
They're kind of like a sleeper candidate in some of these places. Because I don't think people quite understand how rapidly Latinos have been growing in places like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia. You know, 10 percent if not, in some places, over 100 percent growth of the population over time, over the last decade. We’re seeing just rapid, rapid growth in these places and people who are engaging in the political process, many for the first time.
Given this new momentum, what do you expect to see from the Harris-Walz campaign to try to close these gaps in the final sprint to the election?
The mantra that Democrats in the Harris campaign should think about with regard to Latinos is treating Latinos with a persuasion mindset. And even though we're seeing more and more Latinas come over to support Harris, you still have to convince them to go vote, right? These are polls, not prophecies, which means that they're a snapshot of a moment in time and that this momentum you're seeing right now has to be converted into real votes.
With Latinas, it's reaffirming that she is the best candidate and it is convincing them and persuading them that they actually need to go vote, and that they have all they need to go vote, and to not be intimidated by the process or complexity of voting to stay home.
The campaign needs to go in and, you know, speak to Latinos in a way that is resonant to the issues they care about in the places they actually are. They just announced yesterday that they're doing a WhatsApp broadcast channel — and we know the prevalence of WhatsApp in Latino communities.
These broadcast channels are used by people like Bad Bunny, and Rosalia, and the New York Times and CNN en Español. We saw Claudia Scheinbaum, the Mexican president-elect, use WhatsApp in her presidential campaign. We've seen candidates in Brazil and other places in the Americas, in Latin America, use WhatsApp broadcast channels as a mass communication tool.
The information landscape is changing very quickly and while people are using TikTok and Instagram, Latinos are still very much on WhatsApp as a medium to communicate with their friends and family. They have it for, you know, their soccer team that they're on on the weekends. They have it for somebody's quinceañera. People are using it as a tool to communicate broadly with their church group or any number of other groups that they're a part of. It's a very smart move by the Harris campaign.
To check your voter registration status or to get more information about registering to vote, text 19thnews to 26797.
Originally pub.lished by The 19th
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