Friday, June 26, 2026
53% of Adults Think There Is Likely Grounds To Impeach Donald Trump
The chart above is from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done between June 17th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,087 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
New Poll Has The U.S. Seante Race In Texas A Virtual Tie
The chart above is from the University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Poll -- done between June 5th and 12th of 1,200 registered Texas voters, with a 2.83 point margin of error.
Why Does The U.S. Public Hate AI?
Why does the United States public hate AI? Economist Paul Krugman gives us five reasons why that is true. He writes:
First, we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.
More recently Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have tried to walk back their predictions of a “jobs apocalypse”. But why were they so willing to promote apocalyptic visions in the first place? The answer is money. They pushed the idea that they had a technology that would quickly and utterly transform the economy partly to dazzle Wall Street and secure financing, and partly to scare businesses into rushing into AI adoption for fear of being left behind.
Second, many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.
It’s true that many people are voluntarily using large language models for personal convenience or as a business productivity tool. But a significant part of AI use isn’t voluntary.
Why are companies doing this? Presumably they believe that AI will raise productivity. But just as importantly, they’re responding to pressure from financial markets, which are rewarding companies for quickly adopting AI, apparently without regard to demonstrated results.
And while Americans workers are being dragooned into using AI, American consumers are being force-fed AI whether they want it or not. Most dramatically, Google has replaced its search engine with AI, without offering the option to opt out.
Third, datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood.
Only 14 percent would support one.
Fourth, even before the advent of AI, tech companies had lost the public’s trust. Over the years Pew has regularly surveyed the public for its views on technology companies, asking whether they have a positive or a negative effect “on the way things are going.” In 2015 public opinion of tech companies was overwhelmingly positive. By 2022, the year ChatGPT was released, that goodwill had evaporated.
Finally, AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality.
And AI is widely perceived, for good reason, as a technology that will increase the concentration of wealth at the top. Indeed, as I said, the AI companies themselves have already told us that the technology will have extremely negative effects on workers.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Most Voters Think The Economy Is Bad And Getting Worse
The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between June 19th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 1,517 registered voters, with a 3.1 point of error.
Support For Abortion (And Contraception) Remains Strong Among Voters
The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
New Strength In Numbers Poll Is Bad For Trump - Good For Democrats
The charts above are from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done between June 17th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,087 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
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