New Jersey is in play
Early voting trends, the next wave of redistricting, mapping independents, the enemy is within, social media news rises while social media falls, the great trust reset
No. 376 | October 3rd, 2025
🇺🇲 2025
The New Jersey’s governor’s race is tightening, with Mikie Sherrill now up only 3 points on Jack Ciattarelli.
Recently, I unlocked my paywalled piece from April on how Republicans could pull off an upset in the Garden State, capitalizing on their gains in the 2024 presidential election.
VoteHub has been crushing it lately. Here’s their 2025 early voting tracker.
And there are positive early voting trends for the GOP in Virginia, where they’ve been running further behind. These numbers turned out to be something in 2024.
🇺🇲 2026
Other states on the redistricting radar: Utah, Kansas, and North Carolina.
📊 Public Opinion
We love ourselves some good cluster analysis. CNN surveys independents and finds that they consist of five distinct groups.
A few of these groups bear a striking resemblance to Echelon’s 8 political tribes (especially, The Upbeat Outsiders → Middle American Optimists).
Republicans are seen as having a better plan on most issues — at the same time as Trump’s approval is underwater on all of these issues. Disapproval of Trump is not equating to trust in the Democratic Party. Democracy, the entire basis of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign, only comes in at a narrow D+2 advantage.
Where do Trump cabinet appointees stand in the court of public opinion? All have better net approval than Trump himself, while RFK, Jr. is the most polarizing. Jay Powell (does he still count as a Trump official?), Sean Duffy, Scott Bessent, and Marco Rubio with the strongest net ratings.
The Liberal Patriot covers our recent survey on America’s political divides, revealing that three quarters of Americans feel our gravest threats come from within, over from external threats from China, Russia, or Iran.
We also found that 55% of Americans believe political debates are existential.
Terrific rundown from the folks at The Argument outlining how their polling works.
💻 Artificial Intelligence
AI wrote nearly a quarter of corporate press releases in 2024.
📰 Media Habits
News consumption on most social media sites is on the upswing, with TikTok the strongest gainer.
At the same time, overall time spent on social media appears to be declining, especially among younger audiences.
Check out our media landscape survey with our friends at Foretell, covered in Axios.
👫 Demographics
American exceptionalism visualized: The U.S. is the only high-income nation that hasn’t abandoned religion.
Religious people are happier than non-believers.
😂 Humor
A new map of the South just dropped: Google search volume for “sweet tea.”
Two comments about those data charts:
(a) The polling question about "the enemy within" defines that phrase _very_ differently than how Trump/MAGA uses it, and so broadly as to approach being meaningless. Gives that particular polling result a bit of a "are you against violent crime" vibe.
(b) The Pew polling data shows self-reported happiness levels not between religious and secular Americans, but rather between secular Americans and Christians specifically. I guess the assumption is that Christian belief can stand in for religious faith generally; not sure what the basis for that is? There are enough millions of Americans now who practice other faiths that this assumption's validity seems material to the overall polling at least in some age groups.