“The younger generation doesn’t seem interested in hearing any opinions that differ from their own,” researcher Ben Treanor told The Post.
“So if you don’t 100% agree with their agenda, they’ll cut you out of their lives completely — and that goes for family too.”
Nearly half of those surveyed from all age groups — 46.4% — said they blocked a family member who “posted hateful, toxic, or problematic things.”
Slightly less — 43.5% — from all age groups said they blocked a family member for sharing “fake news” while 41.4% of everyone surveyed said their relatives were blocked because “they post too much political content.”
Family members who posted “problematic” content including the sharing of “fake news” were likely to be blocked, according to the survey.Getty Images/iStockphoto
Nearly two in five people from all age groups — 37.6% — said they blocked family members who were estranged while 28.6% said that they blocked loved ones because of “annoying comments on my posts.”
About one in five of everyone polled — 22.7% — said they blocked loved ones in order to “hide my personal life” while 14.1% complained that their relatives “post too much religious content.”
Just over one in 10 from all age groups — 11.3% — said family members were “tagging me in posts too often,” resulting in a block.
The survey was conducted of 2,040 US residents who use both Facebook and its sister social media network, Instagram — both of which are owned by Meta Platforms Inc.
The study found that just 25.8% of Instagram users from all age groups admitted to blocking a family member.
Most who did block a loved one on Instagram said the reason for doing so was to hide their own content rather than avoid seeing what the other family member was posting.
Nearly two-thirds of all Instagram users who were surveyed — 62.1% — said they blocked a family member in order to conceal aspects of their personal lives.
Others cited estrangement and posting annoying comments as other main reasons.
"politic" - Google News
May 30, 2022 at 11:13PM
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Millennials block family members on Facebook for politics, study shows - New York Post
"politic" - Google News
https://ift.tt/WUpLKvG
https://ift.tt/LeP68vW
(CNN)Even some of the most pro-gun politicians in Texas are realizing the devastating political optics of appearing at a major gun lobby forum just days after a horrific school massacre.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, both Republicans, canceled expected in-person appearances at the National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action's annual leadership forum on Friday. Abbott however is still expected to send a pre-recorded video. Former President Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who this week sparked controversy by accusing Democrats of politicizing the deaths of 19 children and two teachers in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are still expected to attend.
Plans to go ahead with the forum were heavily criticized by gun reform activists and local Democratic political leaders as disrespectful to the victims of the tragedy. Pulling out of the meeting is one thing. There is no suggestion so far that the GOP's drive in Texas to loosen gun laws -- a core platform of Republican Party policy, is likely to change.
Republicans habitually criticize Democrats for calling for gun control after America's regular mass killings but many support the NRA -- itself a highly politicized body that spent decades radicalizing the GOP on guns and tearing down moderate firearm laws. There are now many high-powered weapons in private hands -- like the kind an 18-year-old gunman bought legally and used for his rampage in Uvalde on Tuesday. The group's annual meetings are taking place in Houston only three days after and about 275 miles to the east of the spot where innocent children were gunned down in their classroom. The assault was both shocking in its barbarism but not at all surprising as it was just the latest mass shooting in America's endless cycle of gun violence.
The NRA says it's primarily an educational organization with a mission to promote responsible and safe gun ownership and to advocate for the constitutional right to own a firearm under the Second Amendment. Yet its lobbying arm has for years been extraordinarily influential, while its affiliated political arms pour millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and target candidates that advocate for tightening gun laws. Therefore, the charge by some of the politicians attending the forum that only Democrats play politics in the wake of tragedy is disingenuous at best.
Friday's speakers, for instance, include Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who quickly did what he was accusing Democrats of doing -- politicize the killings in his home state earlier this week -- when he criticized them for calling for more gun safety measures. NRA members were also expecting to hear from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made loosening gun laws a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, in a state that has seen a volley of recent mass shootings. But Abbott canceled his in-person appearance to instead attend a news conference in Uvalde, with his spokesperson telling the Dallas Morning News Thursday evening that the governor will address the convention "through prerecorded video."
Patrick said in a statement he was canceling his appearance, "after prayerful consideration and discussion with NRA officials."
"While a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and an NRA member, I would not want my appearance today to bring any additional pain or grief to the families and all those suffering in Uvalde," Patrick said Friday.
Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn's office also cited a scheduling conflict to explain why he would not attend, and several high-profile musicians have also pulled out.
Other billed speakers include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
The NRA's controversial leader, Wayne LaPierre, is also due to speak. LaPierre sparked outrage after a hauntingly similar shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 with a deeply political news conference. He had argued that more guns to guard schools should be the answer to mass shootings, rather than any restrictions on the assault weapons that killed multiple kids in a matter of minutes.
Notably, the manufacturer of a firearm used in Tuesday's shooting said it will not attend the convention.
"Daniel Defense is not attending the NRA meeting due to the horrifying tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where one of our products was criminally misused," said Steve Reed, vice president of marketing for Daniel Defense, in a statement. "We believe this week is not the appropriate time to be promoting our products in Texas at the NRA meeting."
Critics demand cancellation of NRA meetings out of respect for victims
Gun safety advocates have criticized this year's NRA meetings as being in deeply poor taste. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, said on CNN's "Don Lemon Tonight" on Wednesday that political leaders should stay away.
"It would be respectful for the families who are planning funerals for their children for them not to come," he said. "You can't say two days ago, yesterday, that you offer prayers and condolences to these families, and then three or four days later, appear at the NRA promoting the use of guns and assault weapons."
The NRA did cancel its convention for the last two years -- because of concerns over Covid-19. But in a statement this week, it said it would go ahead while praying for the victims of the Uvalde shooting and while redoubling its efforts to make schools safer. But in an ironic twist, considering the NRA's lobbying arm argues that more guns at public events make everyone safer, the Secret Service has mandated that no firearms will be allowed in the conference hall when the former President is speaking.
The NRA may not be the force it once was after a series of financial scandals and the rise of gun safety political groups on the left. But its lobbying and campaign groups long ago succeeded in making opposition to any form of gun control tantamount in the minds of many Republican voters to the destruction of the Second Amendment. It's a false charge, but it is hugely consequential politically and is one reason why so many GOP lawmakers are cowed at voting for any gun safety measures in Washington, even comparatively minor adjustments to background checks. And that reluctance also explains why majority support in the country for modest gun law changes almost always hits a brick wall in Washington.
Small signs of hope in Congress
The NRA-ILA leadership forum is taking place amid one of the periodic political altercations that always follow gun massacres but then fade into the background as attempts at small-scale change inevitably fail.
President Joe Biden, who will travel to Uvalde with first lady Jill Biden on Sunday, demanded to know this week, "When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" Yet like the previous Democratic President, Barack Obama, Biden has found that the existential nature of the Second Amendment to GOP politicians -- plus the Senate filibuster, which some members of his own party refuse to change -- means that any serious overhaul of gun laws is impossible.
In another outburst of Democratic frustration this week, Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke confronted Abbott at a news conference at which the governor was giving an update on the tragedy in Uvalde. Republicans accused O'Rourke, who's trying to unseat Abbott in November, of politicizing the issue at a moment of grief -- a reasonable charge in the circumstances.
Most American gun owners behave lawfully and safely. But many Republican lawmakers cannot resist the political potency of the gun issue, which often riles up their base. And many, who still deny any correlation among the availability of high-powered weapons, lax guns laws and mass killings, are never ready to discuss safety measures. The horror just grinds on.
In Washington, Republicans attempted to portray the massacre in Texas as the isolated act of a mentally ill gunman -- a random act of evil that could not have been stopped. Such arguments ignore the fact that other countries not saturated in guns have similar levels of mental illness as the United States but do not have their hearts ripped apart by regular mass shootings.
While experience suggests that even a tentative openness to change from Republicans is a short-term tactic designed to deflect political pressure, there was at least a tiny sign of movement on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Earlier this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell branded the Texas killings the act of a lone "maniac." But on Thursday, the Kentucky Republican encouraged GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to work with Democrats to see if there's any common ground for legislation in response to the Texas elementary school shooting.
Cornyn, whose office said earlier this week that an "unexpected change in his schedule" was keeping him from speaking at the NRA meeting, said that he wasn't sure if the effort could forge a compromise on expanding background checks but hoped for a "new, greater sense of urgency" in the wake of the carnage that unfolded in his home state. Still, Cornyn warned that any new laws could not be used "as an excuse to infringe the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens" that he said "will do nothing to fix tragedies like this."
This is where the tortured politics of gun control come in. The gun lobby and like-minded voters in the GOP base often insist that any measure to regulate the sale of guns or any restrictions on the kind of weapons that can be purchased represent an infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms. While the Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms, it does not specify that people have unlimited rights to use fearsome battlefield weapons the founders could never have envisaged. But the resulting pressure on Republicans from the gun lobby, which often insists that it does, almost always scuppers meaningful reform.
Such tactics, a testament to the political skill and influence of groups like the NRA over the years, has even in the past forced Trump -- a leader with an almost mystical connection to Republican base voters -- to back down.
Under fierce pressure following a 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump hosted a remarkable televised event at which he accused fellow Republicans of being "afraid" of the NRA and vowed to work with Democrats on legislative overhauls -- perhaps even raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic weapons. Such a law, had it been in place, might have stopped the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter from buying a gun.
Trump, however, soon backed down when the furor over the Florida massacre faded, dimming the political incentives for him to take such a risk. The episode was just one small blip in the ex-President's often cynical use of the gun control issue for his own political gain -- a trend often evident in other areas of his time in office.
Now, Trump appears to be girding for a 2024 White House bid and seems unlikely to stick his neck out after yet another gun tragedy. That's why his pledge, in a statement on his social media platform, to offer "real leadership" at the forum on Friday seems like a long shot.
This story has been updated with additional developments Friday.
(CNN)Even some of the most pro-gun politicians in Texas are realizing the devastating political optics of appearing at a major gun lobby forum just days after a horrific school massacre.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, both Republicans, canceled expected in-person appearances at the National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action's annual leadership forum on Friday. Abbott however is still expected to send a pre-recorded video. Former President Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who this week sparked controversy by accusing Democrats of politicizing the deaths of 19 children and two teachers in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are still expected to attend.
Plans to go ahead with the forum were heavily criticized by gun reform activists and local Democratic political leaders as disrespectful to the victims of the tragedy. Pulling out of the meeting is one thing. There is no suggestion so far that the GOP's drive in Texas to loosen gun laws -- a core platform of Republican Party policy, is likely to change.
Republicans habitually criticize Democrats for calling for gun control after America's regular mass killings but many support the NRA -- itself a highly politicized body that spent decades radicalizing the GOP on guns and tearing down moderate firearm laws. There are now many high-powered weapons in private hands -- like the kind an 18-year-old gunman bought legally and used for his rampage in Uvalde on Tuesday. The group's annual meetings are taking place in Houston only three days after and about 275 miles to the east of the spot where innocent children were gunned down in their classroom. The assault was both shocking in its barbarism but not at all surprising as it was just the latest mass shooting in America's endless cycle of gun violence.
The NRA says it's primarily an educational organization with a mission to promote responsible and safe gun ownership and to advocate for the constitutional right to own a firearm under the Second Amendment. Yet its lobbying arm has for years been extraordinarily influential, while its affiliated political arms pour millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and target candidates that advocate for tightening gun laws. Therefore, the charge by some of the politicians attending the forum that only Democrats play politics in the wake of tragedy is disingenuous at best.
Friday's speakers, for instance, include Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who quickly did what he was accusing Democrats of doing -- politicize the killings in his home state earlier this week -- when he criticized them for calling for more gun safety measures. NRA members were also expecting to hear from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made loosening gun laws a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, in a state that has seen a volley of recent mass shootings. But Abbott canceled his in-person appearance to instead attend a news conference in Uvalde, with his spokesperson telling the Dallas Morning News Thursday evening that the governor will address the convention "through prerecorded video."
Patrick said in a statement he was canceling his appearance, "after prayerful consideration and discussion with NRA officials."
"While a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and an NRA member, I would not want my appearance today to bring any additional pain or grief to the families and all those suffering in Uvalde," Patrick said Friday.
Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn's office also cited a scheduling conflict to explain why he would not attend, and several high-profile musicians have also pulled out.
Other billed speakers include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
The NRA's controversial leader, Wayne LaPierre, is also due to speak. LaPierre sparked outrage after a hauntingly similar shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 with a deeply political news conference. He had argued that more guns to guard schools should be the answer to mass shootings, rather than any restrictions on the assault weapons that killed multiple kids in a matter of minutes.
Notably, the manufacturer of a firearm used in Tuesday's shooting said it will not attend the convention.
"Daniel Defense is not attending the NRA meeting due to the horrifying tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where one of our products was criminally misused," said Steve Reed, vice president of marketing for Daniel Defense, in a statement. "We believe this week is not the appropriate time to be promoting our products in Texas at the NRA meeting."
Critics demand cancellation of NRA meetings out of respect for victims
Gun safety advocates have criticized this year's NRA meetings as being in deeply poor taste. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, said on CNN's "Don Lemon Tonight" on Wednesday that political leaders should stay away.
"It would be respectful for the families who are planning funerals for their children for them not to come," he said. "You can't say two days ago, yesterday, that you offer prayers and condolences to these families, and then three or four days later, appear at the NRA promoting the use of guns and assault weapons."
The NRA did cancel its convention for the last two years -- because of concerns over Covid-19. But in a statement this week, it said it would go ahead while praying for the victims of the Uvalde shooting and while redoubling its efforts to make schools safer. But in an ironic twist, considering the NRA's lobbying arm argues that more guns at public events make everyone safer, the Secret Service has mandated that no firearms will be allowed in the conference hall when the former President is speaking.
The NRA may not be the force it once was after a series of financial scandals and the rise of gun safety political groups on the left. But its lobbying and campaign groups long ago succeeded in making opposition to any form of gun control tantamount in the minds of many Republican voters to the destruction of the Second Amendment. It's a false charge, but it is hugely consequential politically and is one reason why so many GOP lawmakers are cowed at voting for any gun safety measures in Washington, even comparatively minor adjustments to background checks. And that reluctance also explains why majority support in the country for modest gun law changes almost always hits a brick wall in Washington.
Small signs of hope in Congress
The NRA-ILA leadership forum is taking place amid one of the periodic political altercations that always follow gun massacres but then fade into the background as attempts at small-scale change inevitably fail.
President Joe Biden, who will travel to Uvalde with first lady Jill Biden on Sunday, demanded to know this week, "When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" Yet like the previous Democratic President, Barack Obama, Biden has found that the existential nature of the Second Amendment to GOP politicians -- plus the Senate filibuster, which some members of his own party refuse to change -- means that any serious overhaul of gun laws is impossible.
In another outburst of Democratic frustration this week, Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke confronted Abbott at a news conference at which the governor was giving an update on the tragedy in Uvalde. Republicans accused O'Rourke, who's trying to unseat Abbott in November, of politicizing the issue at a moment of grief -- a reasonable charge in the circumstances.
Most American gun owners behave lawfully and safely. But many Republican lawmakers cannot resist the political potency of the gun issue, which often riles up their base. And many, who still deny any correlation among the availability of high-powered weapons, lax guns laws and mass killings, are never ready to discuss safety measures. The horror just grinds on.
In Washington, Republicans attempted to portray the massacre in Texas as the isolated act of a mentally ill gunman -- a random act of evil that could not have been stopped. Such arguments ignore the fact that other countries not saturated in guns have similar levels of mental illness as the United States but do not have their hearts ripped apart by regular mass shootings.
While experience suggests that even a tentative openness to change from Republicans is a short-term tactic designed to deflect political pressure, there was at least a tiny sign of movement on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Earlier this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell branded the Texas killings the act of a lone "maniac." But on Thursday, the Kentucky Republican encouraged GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to work with Democrats to see if there's any common ground for legislation in response to the Texas elementary school shooting.
Cornyn, whose office said earlier this week that an "unexpected change in his schedule" was keeping him from speaking at the NRA meeting, said that he wasn't sure if the effort could forge a compromise on expanding background checks but hoped for a "new, greater sense of urgency" in the wake of the carnage that unfolded in his home state. Still, Cornyn warned that any new laws could not be used "as an excuse to infringe the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens" that he said "will do nothing to fix tragedies like this."
This is where the tortured politics of gun control come in. The gun lobby and like-minded voters in the GOP base often insist that any measure to regulate the sale of guns or any restrictions on the kind of weapons that can be purchased represent an infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms. While the Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms, it does not specify that people have unlimited rights to use fearsome battlefield weapons the founders could never have envisaged. But the resulting pressure on Republicans from the gun lobby, which often insists that it does, almost always scuppers meaningful reform.
Such tactics, a testament to the political skill and influence of groups like the NRA over the years, has even in the past forced Trump -- a leader with an almost mystical connection to Republican base voters -- to back down.
Under fierce pressure following a 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump hosted a remarkable televised event at which he accused fellow Republicans of being "afraid" of the NRA and vowed to work with Democrats on legislative overhauls -- perhaps even raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic weapons. Such a law, had it been in place, might have stopped the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter from buying a gun.
Trump, however, soon backed down when the furor over the Florida massacre faded, dimming the political incentives for him to take such a risk. The episode was just one small blip in the ex-President's often cynical use of the gun control issue for his own political gain -- a trend often evident in other areas of his time in office.
Now, Trump appears to be girding for a 2024 White House bid and seems unlikely to stick his neck out after yet another gun tragedy. That's why his pledge, in a statement on his social media platform, to offer "real leadership" at the forum on Friday seems like a long shot.
This story has been updated with additional developments Friday.
In the past two decades, female medical graduates outnumber males by almost two to one.
They work in specialties linked to lengthier, care-based consultations such as paediatrics or psychiatry.
They are less likely to run their own practice and are over-represented in the public sector.
For conservative parties, lancing the rage lies in ridding right-wing politics from an association with male harshness and antipathy.
Even in private sector medicine, there has been a steady shift away from being self-employed to being a wage earner. This has been driven by the desire for flexible employment, as well as the corporatisation of medical practices.
The cost of new technology and consolidation complicated ownership of small practices. Older, usually male, physicians sold up.
The new ones didn’t want to run their own shop, so they became employees of health systems.
It is now private equity overseeing pathology or radiology providers. Large chains such as Healius employ general practitioners as employees or contractors.
Previously an economic bloc of small businessmen, a group much more likely to lean conservative, female doctors are more likely to be part-time wage earners. They earn, on average, a little over half the income of their male colleagues.
Granted those wages may be relatively high, but both American and British studies show self-employed doctors who undertake procedures are twice as likely to vote Republican or Tory.
While at a primitive level, women may spark an association with the maternal, caring archetype, these economic trends are also linked to driving the profession to the left.
They clearly embody the notion of the Brahmin left, a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty to describe the intelligentsia as the new base of left-wing parties.
Even the language of medical accreditation bodies, known as colleges, has shifted to the language of social justice.
In the United States, a recent document promoted by the American Medical Association, titled Advancing Health Equity, encourages physicians to move away from using words like “vulnerable” to describe their patients.
Instead, they are directed to use terminology referred to as more “equity focused”, such as oppressed. By this logic, people are only ever made vulnerable by existing power structures, an extension of left-wing, social justice ideology.
This may be a legitimate world view, but it is one based in ideology, and not science.
Yet, it is being thrust upon doctors across its governing bodies, a trend played out locally. My own College of Psychiatrists has an entire working group dedicated to the growing problem of climate anxiety.
You can guess there is no equivalent committee working to highlight the anxiety arising from unemployment, or high energy costs from decarbonisation.
For all the talk of climate or integrity, the undercurrent of political movements is usually one of status, in this case resentment among professional women about not receiving due acknowledgement within their work and homes.
There has been much commentary about the frustrations of the pandemic being especially borne by women, be it reducing their work hours, doing more housework or being the hard lifters in overseeing children’s education from home.
ABC journalist Annabel Crabb writes: “Unknown to modern political science was the group most consistently ignored and talked-down to by Scott Morrison: professional women.”
But much like other trends, such as digitisation and youth mental health, the pandemic may have sped up pre-existing historical shifts.
Germaine Greer wrote in 1999 that “prestige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rock-bottom; medicine is sliding fast”.
What has happened in my profession of medicine is a marker of a dominant cultural current, one given a sharp exclamation mark during this election.
It is of educated, female professionals, still largely earning wages, doing the bulk of housework and raising children, not feeling they have been given their due by male colleagues, husbands and authorities.
Morrison and climate anxiety may merely be the receptacle absorbing the mass projection.
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May 25, 2022 at 09:40AM
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How female doctors injected change into Australia's body politic - The Australian Financial Review
"politic" - Google News
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When George P. Bush burst onto the scene at the Republican National Convention in 2000, the handsome, 24-year-old nephew of presidential nominee George W. Bush had all of the makings of a future leader of the GOP.
He was already political royalty — heir to a dynasty that included his father, then-Florida governor Jeb Bush, and his grandfather, former President George H.W. Bush. The son of a Mexican mother, and a fluent Spanish speaker, he seemed poised to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party to a younger and increasingly diverse electorate in the 21st century.
“Que viva Bush!” he told the convention to roaring applause. “Y que vivan los Estados Unidos!”
On Tuesday, the 46-year-old badly lost his runoff primary challenge to two-term Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch conservative who was seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent on the ballot due to his mounting scandals, including a felony indictment and an FBI investigation into his office for allegations of malfeasance.
First: George P. Bush gives a speech at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia on August 3, 2000. His uncle, George W. Bush, was set to accept the Republican nomination for president later in the evening. Last: Republican U.S. presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush looks toward his son George P. Bush and wife Columba before addressing a town hall during a campaign stop in Salem, New Hampshire on Feb. 7, 2016.Credit: Gary Hershorn/Adrees Latif/REUTERS
Bush’s loss marks what will soon be the end of an eight-year stint as a statewide elected official, after serving back-to-back terms as land commissioner. He continues to serve until the end of the year. But more significantly, it heralds a shift in the Texas Republican politics away from the pro-business establishment and toward a more populist, combative and harsh style of politics. Bush’s defeat also notches another victory for former president Donald Trump, who has clashed with the Bush family for years and who repeatedly expressed his support for Paxton in the attorney general race.
This defeat could mark the end of a four-generation political dynasty, and the end of an era of Texas politics that began when the first George Bush moved to Odessa in 1948.
“The Bush family name is essentially what the Romanov family name is in Russia,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “There’s still somebody out there claiming to be czar but nobody’s listening.”
Twenty two years after George P. Bush’s debut at the RNC, the factors that once made him appealing to GOP voters have turned against him — the party has moved to the hard right, making opposition to immigration (both legal and illegal) a pillar of its agenda and eschewing the more genteel bipartisan consensus that the Bushes once seemed to embody.
Bush’s inability to get past such a troubled candidate as Paxton shows how much the Texas electorate, and the American electorate, has changed since his uncle, George W. Bush, was elected Texas governor in 1994 and then president in 2000.
An April poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that 40% of Republican primary voters said they would never vote for George P. Bush. Two-thirds of those voters said that’s because he’s a member of the Bush family.
“Texas politics have shifted so much in the last 20 to 30 years that the family that was Republican royalty have gone from that to basically being vilified for essentially being mainline doctrinaire conservatives,” said Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The Bush family helped to build the modern Republican Party of Texas.”
Bush history
The Bush family got its start in politics more than 1,000 miles away from Texas in Connecticut with the family’s patriarch, Prescott Bush, an investment banker who served as that state’s U.S. Senator from 1952 to 1963.
In 1948, his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, moved to Odessa to enter the oil business. He became involved in Republican political circles in a state dominated by conservative white Democrats since the end of Reconstruction.
President George H.W. Bush at the White House after he addressed U.S. troops defending Saudi Arabia, on August 29, 1990.Credit: REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo
George H.W. Bush would run in multiple races for the state’s U.S. Senate seats and lose, but he made inroads by winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. He was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and served as chairman of the Republican National Committee and director of the Central Intelligence Agency before being elected as Ronald Reagan’s vice president in 1980 in a landslide that swept Texas. (Texas has not voted for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976.)
Bush’s two terms as vice president coincided with the rise of the GOP in the state, which in 1978 elected Bill Clements, its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction. In 1988, George H.W. Bush was elected president and his expertise in foreign relations stood out in his navigation of the final years of the Cold War, the first Persian Gulf War, and the negotiation of what became the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In hindsight, his view of America as a global beacon, his appeal for a “kinder, gentler” nation and his distaste for budget deficits were the last years of a more consensus-driven politics that had begun to erode in the 1980s and all but vanished by the end of the 1990s. And his aspirational view of the country as a force for good was epitomized in his frequently used “thousand points of light” metaphor to encourage civic engagement by community organizations.
But after famously reneging on a promise not to increase taxes, George H.W. Bush was defeated in the 1992 presidential election by Bill Clinton.
His son, George W. Bush, picked up the Bush dynasty mantle in 1994 and swept into the Texas governor’s office by defeating Democrat Ann Richards. The election marked a turning point for Texas politics. Four years later, during Bush’s reelection run, Republicans would sweep all the major statewide offices and have not relinquished them in the 24 years since.
As governor, George W. Bush proved popular and focused on issues like cutting taxes, tort reform and public education. In the statehouse, he bred a reputation for working across the aisle with Democrats and the “compassionate conservatism” that would fuel his presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004.
“I felt compelled to phrase it this way because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless,” George W. Bush later reminisced. “And my belief then and now is that the right conservative philosophies are compassionate and help people.”
That conservatism focused on improving education, reducing barriers for business and helping people of color achieve economic and social success. He courted Latino voters and, as president, appointed Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, as the nation’s first (and so far only) Hispanic attorney general. Mexican ranchera legend Vicente Fernandez sang at the 2000 Republican National Convention at which Bush was nominated (and his nephew, George P., fêted).
George W. Bush won more than 40% of the Latino vote in his 2004 presidential race and brought to the White House a desire for immigration reform, including the creation of a guest worker program (opposed by many Democrats) and an eventual path to citizenship (opposed by many Republicans).
“Family values don’t end at the Rio Grande Valley,” George W. Bush often said.
While popular during his initial years in the White House, those goals were stymied by an increasingly anti-immigrant faction of the Republican Party. A Bush-backed, bipartisan immigration bill was defeated in the Senate in 2007. A similar measure, backed by then-President Barack Obama, died in 2014 at the hands of House Republicans.
Former President George W. Bush speaks at the 2016 NASCO Continental Reunion at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016.Credit: Laura Buckman for The Texas Tribune
George W. Bush’s final years in the presidency were soured by the public’s opposition to the Iraq War, the government’s increasing surveillance during the War on Terror following the Sept. 11 attacks, his handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Great Recession.
Those dissatisfactions would continue to fester within the GOP during Obama’s eight-year tenure in office, with Republicans repudiating George W. Bush’s policies and blaming him for not being more aggressive on socially conservative issues and for tanking the economy.
“Once Bush is out of office, immediately the Republican party is in a position of the wilderness,” said Taylor, the UT-San Antonio political scientist. “The Republican party didn’t know where it was going. They knew where they were going only in opposition to Obama, and that morphed into the Tea Party movement.”
George P.’s rise coincides with the Tea Party
In Texas, the Tea Party movement rocked the statehouse hard when Republicans won 99 seats in the 150-member House in 2010, ousting several moderate Republicans and Democrats. In the same election, Republicans took control of the U.S. House.
Two years later, a relatively unknown former Texas solicitor general named Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite then endorsed by George P. Bush, beat out Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a moderate Republican, in the 2012 U.S. Senate race. Dewhurst was a member of the GOP establishment who’d been first elected statewide as land commissioner the same year George W. Bush won a second term as governor. Dewhurst lost his bid for another term as lieutenant governor in 2014 to a conservative senator named Dan Patrick who’d been a pariah to most Republicans during his first years in office.
That same year, George P. Bush, whose middle name is that of the family’s patriarch, won election as land commissioner with 61% of the vote. Back then, the younger Bush pushed a “big tent” version of the Republican Party, appealing to disillusioned Democrats and independents and expressed support for the Texas Dream Act, which provided in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants who came to the state as children.
At his swearing in ceremony, then-Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett said George P. Bush’s election kicked off a new era for “one of the most revered families in American history.”
Bush’s style was wonky and in the weeds, reminiscent of his grandfather. He focused on the state’s water rights, creating the first online auction for oil leases, and making sure protecting endangered species didn’t get in the way of business interests. In 2016, he said his top legislative priority would be protecting the state’s coasts.
But he also borrowed from his uncle’s compassionate conservatism, which espoused that there is enough room in politics for tougher border security and helping undocumented immigrants who came to the country looking for a better life.
George P. Bush with his mother, Columba, father, Jeb, and wife, Amanda, during Bush's swearing in as Texas Land Commissioner on Jan. 2, 2015.Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune
As a Latino, George P. Bush also worked hard to court candidates and voters of color to the GOP, which at times required him to denounce members of the party who made racist comments.
In 2019, he denounced a Republican state legislator who said his opponents in a highly diverse state house district in Fort Bend County were only running because they were Asian and had decided “that my district might need an Asian to win.” George P. Bush also called for the resignation of a GOP county chairwoman who used a racial slur in a text message about a Black party organizer.
At the beginning of the younger Bush’s first term as land commissioner, an intraparty war within the Texas GOP was already raging, and despite being more socially conservative than his predecessors, Bush still found himself aligned with the center-right, pro-business faction.
The 2016 presidential election defined the party’s rightward shift. George P. Bush’s father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, announced his candidacy in June 2015 and received millions of dollars from donors and strong support from the party establishment.
But he collided in the primary with the eventual winner of the race, Trump, who used his campaign announcement to denigrate Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.”
The younger Bush, like much of the party establishment at the time, dismissed Trump as a trivial candidate and said his comments “have no place in our party.” George P. Bush’s mother is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mexico.
But Republican voters gravitated toward Trump’s nationalist vision to “Make America Great Again” and his penchant for making outlandish, frequently insulting, comments about women, people of color and political opponents. In fact, it was Jeb Bush whom voters bounced early in that race, largely based on Trump’s frequent characterization of him as “low energy.”
When Trump became the party’s nominee, most of the Bush family declined to publicly support him. George P. Bush, the only member of the family still in office, was the sole member of the clan to endorse him.
He initially stumped for his dad, Jeb Bush, but ultimately threw his support behind Trump, saying it was a “bitter pill to swallow” for Team Bush, but Republican voters had to stop Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Later, George P. Bush characterized his relationship with Trump as “professional” but remained concerned that the Republican Party was viewed as unwelcoming for people of color. Still, he supported Trump in his reelection effort in 2020.
When George P. Bush launched his campaign for attorney general last June, he lobbied hard for Trump’s endorsement, handing out campaign koozies with a cartoon picture of Trump that quoted the former president saying: “This is the only Bush that likes me. This is the Bush that got it right. I like him.”
Bush’s problem: Paxton was far closer to the president. Paxton had filed a last ditch lawsuit in federal court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in four states where Trump lost. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed that lawsuit because Texas had no standing, but it appeared enough to curry Trump’s favor. The former president endorsed Paxton early in the race.
Still, George P. Bush shifted to the right to win over Republican primary voters. He pledged to help the state secure the border and build Trump’s unfinished wall, while supporting state investigations into families of transgender children and denouncing Democrats as a “woke” mob. He went back on his previous support for the Texas Dream Act, now saying that he supports the Republican Party of Texas’ platform to repeal the law.
But despite his best efforts to stay in step with the party, he was trampled by its rightward shift.
“The party shifted, Republican voters shifted and the conservatism that may have been popular during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor just doesn’t fit Texas anymore,” said Renee Cross, a political scientist at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.
George P. Bush’s gaffes as land commissioner also came back to haunt him. His handling of federal hurricane recovery relief funds, which gave far more money per person to inland areas than to coastal ones that had been more seriously impacted by storms, is still hounding him. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found his agency's distribution of the funds discriminated against people of color.
Perhaps his most consequential mistake was wading into a redesign of the Alamo grounds that considered relocating a monument to the revolutionaries who died at the 1836 battle.
The Alamo Cenotaph in San Antonio commemorates the Battle of the Alamo.Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Bush argued that the cenotaph, as the monument is called, needed to be moved 500 feet to the south near the historic Menger Hotel to be preserved. But opponents of the move said the relocation would dishonor the sacrifice of the revolutionaries who died there. Major Republican officials, like Patrick, sided with those who wanted the cenotaph to stay in place. During the attorney general race, Paxton characterized Bush as a “liberal” who had backed a “woke plan” to remove historic monuments.
“It was pretty much a debacle,” said Rick Range, a member of a group created to fight Bush’s redesign of the Alamo who ran against him in the GOP primary for land commissioner in 2018. “His mishandling of the Alamo was what got me in opposition.”
The ‘D word’
As a fourth-generation politician, who grew up attending political conventions for his elders, George P. Bush has always been aware of the weight his name carries and the assumptions that come with it.
“What a lot of people get wrong about my family is that we covet title and it's about continuing some sort of tradition, when it's all about public service,” he said in March as he prepared for a runoff with Paxton.
“This has never been about titles, let alone the ‘D word’ as we call it in our family,” he added, nodding to the use of the word “dynasty” to describe his family, “This is about serving.”
Bush is serving his second term as Texas land commissioner and though his race became tighter in 2018 because of a strong showing by Democrats, he was still one of the top statewide vote getters with 4.4 million votes in his favor. That was more than senatorial candidates Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke received and more than any other statewide candidate except for Gov. Greg Abbott.
That counts for something despite his more recent loss, said longtime lobbyist Bill Miller.
“If you think about the arc of politics, the Kennedys have not always been successful. They’ve won and lost. Political dynasties have ups and downs,” Miller said. “There’s unpredictability to it. There’s a season for it. Right now, he’s running against a guy who’s really popular with the Republican primary electorate. It’s not about George P. losing, it’s about Paxton winning.”
Tuesday’s loss marks the second time in two years that a member of the family failed to get out of the primaries in a Texas election. In 2020, George P. Bush’s cousin, Pierce Bush, came a distant third in the GOP primary for Congressional District 22 near their grandfather’s old stomping ground of Houston and failed to even make a runoff.
Taylor said the two losses indicate voters’ fatigue with political dynasties.
“We’ve seen and heard their names so many times, it’s like, ‘Oh gosh, another one?’” he said. “There comes a point where the electorate just gets tired of it.”
Pierce and George P. are the last Bushes — for now — to express any interest in politics. Jenna Bush Hager, one of George W. Bush’s twin daughters, is a journalist who works on the Today Show on NBC. Her sister, Barbara Pierce Bush, is the co-founder of a public health nonprofit.
Miller said the family name is going through a rough patch with the electorate, but he doesn’t expect that to last. He thinks George P. Bush has enough name recognition and political chops to make a comeback in the future.
“Time heals all wounds,” Miller said. “The political climates always change and everyone knows that. The political climate is not conducive to him or helpful to him at the moment. That may change or that may not, but [the Bush name] won’t be a negative going forward for much longer.”
The recent defeats the family has taken indicate a halt in the family’s run of success, Miller said.
“Now is it permanent?” he asked. “I would argue it’s temporary.”
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George P. Bush's defeat could be the end of the line for a four-generation political dynasty - The Texas Tribune
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In a primary cycle that has been characterized by former President Trump weighing in with endorsements to a much greater degree than his predecessors, the Georgia primary is one of the biggest tests of his sway. He has endorsed seven non-incumbent Republicans in the state, including a challenger to Gov. Brian Kemp. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew previews Tuesday’s primaries in Georgia as well as contests in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas and Minnesota. They also ask whether it’s too early to conclude that the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe has had little impact on the political environment.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or bydownloading it in iTunes, theESPN Appor your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts,learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show byleaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email,on Twitteror in the comments.
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Politics Podcast: Are Trump’s Endorsees About To Lose In Georgia? - FiveThirtyEight
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Almost as soon as some schools reopened for in-person learning in the fall of 2020, research was suggesting a tidy, albeit dark, conclusion about why they did: politics. Early analyses indicated that Covid-19 health factors had virtually nothing to do with reopening decisions, and partisan politics could explain nearly all the variation.
There were early signs that this narrative didn’t explain the full story. If allegiance to former President Donald Trump (in schools that opened) or teacher unions (in those that stayed closed) were all that mattered, why did support for reopening schools also drop among Republican voters over the summer? And what about the conflicting recommendations coming from federal health and education departments at that time? Nevertheless, the idea that Covid-19 was not a real factor was repeated by some of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets, and framed as though the question was generally settled.
This is typical in policy research: Initial waves of data often attract lots of attention, and can quickly ossify into conventional wisdom. When subsequent, often deeper inquiry reveals alternative or more nuanced explanations, it tends to receive far less notice.
That’s what’s been happening with research into school closures. More recent studies have found that, far from being irrelevant, Covid-19 indicators were among central factors predicting whether schools would reopen.
Researchers say they also still haven’t fully understood how other factors — like school governance and parent preferences — influenced Covid-19 school decisions. A new study, published recently by two education researchers from George Mason University, replicates some earlier findings and explores new potential variables. All in all, it continues adding to a picture that’s more complex than the early analyses suggested.
This debate might seem moot: Schools have been back to in-person learning this school year, and parents largely report satisfaction with their child’s progress. But the consequences of these decisions continue to linger. Many educators say things have not yet returned to normal. Empirical research suggests some of the most negative academic effects were experienced disproportionately by low-income students and students of color. Moreover, future pandemics remain a threat, and district leaders may one day again be charged with navigating similar circumstances.
A new study reinforces that school opening decisions were complicated
The narrative that school reopening decisions were all about politics coalesced early. One of the first pieces of evidence came from a Brookings Institution blog post published in July 2020, where senior fellow Jon Valant found “no relationship” between school districts’ reopening plans and their per-capita Covid-19 cases, but a strong one between districts’ plans and county-level support for Trump in the 2016 election. The implication was that communities that take their cues from then-President Trump were more willing to resume in-person instruction.
Additional research emerged in the following months reiterating that health concerns were not a significant factor. “We find evidence that politics, far more than science, shaped school district decision-making,” concluded political scientists Michael Hartney and Leslie Finger in an October 2020 analysis.
But as time passed, and more schools reopened, the picture grew more complicated. A July 2021 analysis compared fall 2020 reopening factors to those in spring 2021. Tulane economists Douglas Harris and Daniel Oliver found Covid-19 rates were one significant predictor of fall school reopening. Over time, the role of both politics and health factors declined, Harris and Oliver observed, while the demographics of a given community remained a strong predictor throughout the year. (This was knotty, they note, given the “close interplay between demographics, parental work situations, and COVID health risks.”)
The latest addition to the research literature was published this month by two George Mason professors, Matthew Steinberg and David Houston. Their working paper — which has not yet been peer-reviewed — affirmed some of the core findings of earlier studies: Higher rates of in-person instruction during fall 2020 occurred in areas with weaker unions and that leaned Republican, and rates of Covid-19 were correlated with reopening decisions.
The new paper looks at how factors predicting in-person schooling changed over the course of the 2021-21 academic year. Covid-19 case and death rates, political partisanship, and teacher union strength became “less potent predictors” over time. As the year stretched on, Steinberg and Houston also observed that communities with a history of higher standardized test scores grew significantly more likely to reopen school buildings than their lower-achieving counterparts.
“This pattern may help us understand the widening test score gaps that have emerged in the wake of the pandemic,” they write.
Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist at Michigan State University who was involved in a study that found local school district decisions were heavily tied to political partisanship and union strength, called Houston and Steinberg’s study “great” — and noted the importance of replication in policy research.
While her own research found school reopening to be less tied to Covid-19 severity, she said there was still a relationship to Covid-19 rates observed in some aspects of their model.
Harris told Vox he agreed with the new working paper’s conclusions — that reopening was about more than just politics — which largely mirrored his prior research. He also praised the new study for tracking how factors that seemed to drive in-person instruction changed over time. “That was novel and interesting and important,” Harris said.
Steinberg and Houston’s study leveraged county-level data from a private firm, Burbio, which tracked in-person and virtual learning for nearly half of all public school students during the pandemic. Covid-19 case and death rates, and partisanship measured by presidential vote share, are also all reported at the county level. Most counties, however, contain multiple school districts, which is why other researchers have preferred a school district-level analysis.
“There are a lot of analytic choices that go into descriptive analyses of imperfect data, and we do not have a strong bone to pick with the other studies,” Steinberg told Vox, but emphasized that many of these minor choices can have “nontrivial implications” for interpreting results.
Brad Marianno, an education policy researcher at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told Vox he is skeptical of Burbio’s ability to accurately capture in-person instruction rates, and thought a school district-level analysis (like one he published earlier this year) would have been better than a county-level approach. Still, he praised the new paper, including for performing its analysis over time. “We need multiple efforts at the question, especially efforts that employ similar and different datasets and measures, to really triangulate a data-driven answer,” he said.
Sarah Cohodes, a Columbia University economist who has studied pandemic differences between charter schools and traditional public schools, said there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to measuring by county or school-district levels. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” she told me, though she reiterated that it depends on the research question.
Local support for teachers may have made it easier to reopen schools
One of the most novel elements of Steinberg and Houston’s study is their suggestion of a previously unexplored factor predicting in-person instruction: local support for teachers. Using multiple surveys with different sampling strategies and question wordings, the George Mason professors found that pre-pandemic support for increases in educator pay was consistently associated with higher rates of in-person instruction during the pandemic. In other words, areas where the public was more supportive of raises for teachers were also more likely to have in-person learning.
Other education policy scholars told Vox they’d need more time to consider that connection. Reckhow called it “a really intriguing result” but one that left her with “many questions” about the underlying mechanisms that might explain the finding. “Without more information, it’s hard for me to develop a fully satisfactory explanation,” she said.
Steinberg stressed that what he sees as so “revelatory” about this finding, which was based on data from two different nationally representative surveys, is that it suggests to him there was something about communities that valued their teachers more highly that potentially made it easier for schools to open for in-person learning.
“Some of these little p-politics in communities matter, and whether or not there is preexisting trust could make the logistical complexity of reopening manageable for leaders or unmanageable,” he said.
As time marches on, it can be easy to forget just how acute the uncertainty was for school administrators during the 2020-21 school year, particularly before vaccines were available. Everything looks crisper in hindsight. But given the tremendous implications for students, schools, and families — and that administrators may one day again find themselves in similar positions — researchers will likely study those decisions for years to come.
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