Most People Would Prefer States Have Open Primaries

The chart above reflects the results of the YouGov Poll -- done on August 5th of a nationwide sample of 6,176 adults. 

Trump Tariffs Cost Households Thousands (Even In Red States)

 

From Axios.com

Job Approval For Donald Trump In Each Of The 50 States

The chart above is from the Civiqs Poll -- using information from a continuous poll between January 20th and August 1st of 2026.

Trump's Approval/Disapproval Rating In Each Of The States

 

The chart above is from the latest Civiqs Poll on June 13th.

Approval/Disapproval Of The Job Trump Is Doing In Each State

 

Data is from the Civiqs Poll.

The Safest States In This Country

 

From wallethub.com

The View On Abortion In Each State

 

The charts above are from a survey by the Pew Research Center done between July of 2023 through March of 2024 of a nationwide sample of 36,908 adults, with a margin of error of 0.8 points.

Trump Is Waging War On Blue States

Jennifer Rubin (In The Contrarian) exposes Donald Trump's war on blue states and cities:

A federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois on Friday threw out the government’s lawsuit claiming federal law preempts local laws limiting cooperation with Trump’s mass deportation effort. (The latter are improperly labeled “sanctuary city laws.” Localities are not claiming federal law is inapplicable, but rather, as discussed below, are declining to provide shock troops for Trump’s police state.) It was the latest round, and latest MAGA defeat, in Donald Trump’s war against states that resist his cruel, lawless, and dangerous agenda.

Trump’s war against blue states is central to his dictatorial ambitions. To achieve unlimited control, he must subjugate independent sources of power and information—from TV network news operations to universities to civil servants to Congress itself. Ironically (for a party that once fetishized states’ rights), Trump’s MAGA GOP consistently seeks to obliterate federalism and force states—generally blue ones—to do his bidding.

The scope of Trump’s onslaught against blue states is stunning. His vendetta against them played out in his determination to override California’s emissions regulations. His war continued with the big, ugly bill, which prevents states from filling the $1T hole in federal Medicaid spending by raising their own funds. (The bill originally contained another provision to prevent states from regulating AI, an infringement on state authority that Democrats narrowly defeated.) Most recently, Trump’s homelessness diktat threatens to yank funding from cities and states that do not follow his command to criminalize homelessness.

Moreover, Trump’s assault on federalism is a critical aspect of his militarized mass deportation operation. (Under the executive decree that he first directed against California, Trump deployed Marines—who have since withdrawn because they had nothing to do—and nationalized the California National Guard against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wishes.) On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Lindsay Jenkins for the Northern District of Illinois slapped down Trump’s effort to force Illinois and local jurisdictions to facilitate Trump’s vicious mass deportation plan. The Trump regime sued Illinois, Cook County, the Cook County Board of Commissioners, the City of Chicago, and individual officials including Gov. JB Pritzker, claiming that federal law preempts state and local policies that prohibit state and local government officials from “complying with detainers [administrative warrants], communicating with immigration agents before releasing noncitizens, providing immigration agents access to noncitizens in custody, and giving immigration agents information (such as contact information and release dates) about noncitizens.” In its bogus legal action, the Trump regime misapplied federal immigration law permitting local cooperation with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to argue that states and localities are obligated to do the feds’ bidding.

After dismissing claims against individual officials and local entities on procedural grounds, Jenkins knocked down the government’s attempt to deprive Illinois of the autonomy to set its own law enforcement priorities and direct its own personnel. First, Jenkins rejected the government’s attempt to demand information not even covered in the federal law at issue. “[T]he court is not persuaded that the information the United States seeks—noncitizens’ contact information, custody status, and release dates—is linked to their status such that it is within the scope of even a slightly broader reading of [federal immigration law],” he determined. It is worth noting that courts have consistently rejected the government’s interpretation, yet the Trump team has not stopped using the same discredited interpretation.

As for compelling the defendants to hand over the specific information that is covered by federal law (i.e., immigration status), Jenkins reminded the parties: “Congress may only legislate upon individuals, as is reflected in the Framers’ debates during the Constitutional Convention and their deliberate rejection of a plan that would have allowed Congress to legislate on States.” Jenkins found that the Trump regime was impermissibly attempting to wield federal immigration law against local entities, “prohibiting [local] restrictions on their ability to share certain immigration-related information with DHS.” And that, as stated in the Constitution, the federal government cannot do.

In sum, states have protection under the 10^th Amendment to set their own policies. In demanding that blue cities and states follow the feds’ direction, the Trump regime impedes localities from translating “voter preferences into policy.” And, Jenkins wrote, such action denigrates state autonomy by seizing control over local jurisdictions’ employees (unconstitutionally “commandeering” them)—something at the heart of state sovereignty. (States’ refusal to be dragooned into manning Trump’s police state does not, as the government claimed, amount to impairing federal policy; rather, it constitutes exercising constitutionally protected sovereignty.)

Despite Trump’s executive decrees and legally dubious suits, states have every right to make their own law enforcement priorities and fund the policies they select. As Pritzker put it in a written statement, “Illinois ensures law enforcement time and energy is spent fighting crime—not carrying out the Trump Administration’s unlawful policies or troubling tactics.” Jenkins’ ruling protected its right to do so.

Local and state authorities going forward can cite as much, using Jenkins’s reasoning. (The feds filed a suit similar to the one before Jenkins against New York City.) Blue states will need to defeat more of Trump’s frivolous legal actions and block his impermissible executive edicts that attempt to bully them into carrying out his cruel, ineffective, and often illegal initiatives.

Protection of state and local sovereignty is more than just an arcane constitutional debate; it is one more critical battleground in the fight to block Trump’s quest for dictatorial power. 

The States With The Most People In Financial Distress

 

From wallethub.com

How The States Rank On Women's Health

 

From smile hub.org

Methodology

In order to determine the best states for women’s health, SmileHub compared the 50 states across three key dimensions: 1) Health & Living Standards, 2) Health Care Policies & Support Systems and 3) Safety Risk.

We evaluated those dimensions using 18 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of women’s health. For metrics marked with an asterisk (*), the square root of the population was used to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for population differences across states.

We then determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the states.

Health & Living Standards - Total Points: 45

• Women’s Life Expectancy at Birth: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Female Uninsured Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric accounts for females ages 16 and older.

• Share of Women with Good or Better Health: Double Weight (~9.00 Points)

• Women’s Preventive Health Care: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the share of women who were up-to-date on cervical and breast-cancer screenings.

• Share of Physically Active Women: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Share of Women Who are Obese: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the percent of females aged 18 years and older who have obesity. Obesity is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a body mass index greater than or equal to 30.0.

• Maternal Mortality Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Heart Disease Mortality Rate for Women: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Female Smoker Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

Health Care Policies & Support Systems - Total Points: 35

• Health & Wellness Charities per Total Number of Women*: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

• Quality of Women’s Hospitals: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

• Share of Women Ages 18-44 Who Reported Having One or More People They Think of as Their Personal Doctor or Health Care Provider: Double Weight (~8.75 Points)

Note: Primary care providers are specialized in establishing a long-lasting relationship with their patients, and are their medical point of contact. They diagnose, treat and prevent a wide variety of conditions in a way that is tailored to each individual patient. Having a dedicated health care provider, or a provider considered to be one’s personal doctor, is associated with elements of successful health care, such as:Primary care providers are specialized in establishing a long-lasting relationship with their patients, and are their medical point of contact. They diagnose, treat and prevent a wide variety of conditions in a way that is tailored to each individual patient. Having a dedicated health care provider, or a provider considered to be one’s personal doctor, is associated with elements of successful health care, such as:

• Lower health care costs;
• Greater use of preventive services, such as flu shots or mammograms;
• Fewer emergency department visits for non-urgent or avoidable problems;
• Increased patient satisfaction;
• Improvements in chronic care management for chronic conditions such as hypertension and high cholesterol.

• Abortion Policies & Access: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

Note: This binary metric is based on research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute and takes into account 20 types of abortion restrictions – including gestational age bans, waiting periods, insurance coverage bans and medication abortion restrictions – and approximately 10 protective policies – including state constitutional protections, abortion funding, insurance coverage for abortion, and protections for patients and clinic staff.

• 2 - Most or very protective: the state has most or all of the protective policies;
• 1.5 - Protective: the state has some protective policies;
• 1 - Some restrictions/protections: the state either has few restrictions or protections, or has a combination of restrictive and protective policies;
• 0.5 - Restrictive: the state has multiple restrictions and later gestational age ban;
• 0 - Most or very restrictive: the state either bans abortion completely or has multiple restrictions and early gestational age ban.

• Unaffordability of Doctor’s Visit: Double Weight (~8.75 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the percentage of women who could not afford to see a doctor in the past year due to costs.

• Domestic Violence Support Services per Total Number of Women: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

Safety - Total Points: 20

• Suicide Rate for Women: Full Weight (~5.00 Points)

• Depression Rate for Women: Full Weight (~5.00 Points)

• Prevalence of Rape Victimization Among Females: Double Weight (~10.00 Points)
  Note: This metric measures instances of rape. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 91 percent of rape victims are female, and 9 percent are male.

A Bit Of Humor(?) From Robert Reich

 Robert Reich says there's a better idea than the U.S. making Canada the 51st state:

Trump wants to buy Greenland and annex Canada as the 51st American state. 

When I first heard these ideas I thought he was joking, but as with all things Trump, he’s not … quite.

 

Last week, while naming a new ambassador to Denmark (which controls Greenland’s foreign and defense affairs), Trump made clear that his first-term offer to buy Greenland could, in the coming term, become a deal the Danes cannot refuse.

He seems to want Greenland because of its strategic location at a time when the melting of Arctic ice is opening new commercial and naval competition. He’s also interested in Greenland’s reserves of rare earth minerals needed for advanced technology.

But Trump isn’t stopping there. He also wants to annex Canada. This proposal appears more a public needling of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau than a serious plan. 

Yet Trump has continued to tease the idea of annexing Canada on social media. “I think it’s a great idea,” he wrote in a recent post.

This is all bonkers, of course.

 

But as long as we’re considering changing national borders, why not do it in a more sensible way? 

How about the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California becoming the 11th province of Canada? After all, the politics of these blue states would fit much better with Canada’s than with Trump’s America. 

Meanwhile, the New England states (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) and New York could become the 12th Canadian province, for much the same reason. 

While Trump is toying with the idea of annexing Canada, these blue American states should bid him goodbye and be annexed by Canada. 

Hell, Trump might just go along. He doesn’t like these blue states anyway. They all voted against him in 2016, 2020, and again in 2024. He’s been looking for ways of getting even. Why not simply disown them? 

Letting Canada annex these blue states would also simplify Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants, since many of them reside in these states. 

America First Legal, a nonprofit run by Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, has already written to local elected officials in California and New York warning them not to try to become sanctuaries — threatening that the officials could be personally “criminally liable” if they refuse to support federal government efforts to detain and deport illegal immigrants.

But if California, New York, and other blue states were annexed by Canada, the problem disappears.

 

Of course, this leaves the pesky question of whether Canada would accept America’s West Coast as its 11th province and New York and New England as its 12th? I’ll leave that question to Canadians. 

YouGov's Final Election Poll In All 50 States

 

From the YouGov Poll.

How Each State Ranks On Equality For Women

To determine where women receive the most equal treatment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 17 key indicators of gender equality. Our data set ranges from the gap between female and male executives to the disparity in unemployment rates for women and men.

How Each State Polls On Legal Abortion

From the Civiqs Poll. 

The Most And Least Educated States

MOST EDUCATED STATES

1. Massachusetts

2. Maryland

3. Colorado

4. Vermont

5. Connecticut

6. Virginia

7. Washington

8. New Hampshire

9. New Jersey

10. Minnesota

11. Utah

12. Illinois

13. New York

14. Oregon

15. Hawaii

16. Wyoming

17. Delaware

LEAST EDUCATED STATES

33. Ohio

34. Georgia

35 South Dakota

36. Idaho

37. Indiana

38. Arizona

39. Texas

40. Oklahoma

41. Tennessee

42. New Mexico

43. Nevada

44. South Carolina

45. Kentucky

46. Alabama

47. Arkansas

48. Louisiana

49. West Virginia

50. Mississippi

From drgraduate.com 

It's Not Safe To Be Pregnant In A Red State

The following post is by Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:

It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there have been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies. Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing.

Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement for spooking doctors into not intervening when pregnancies go horribly wrong. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Others have suggested that doctors are deliberately refusing miscarriage treatment, apparently to make anti-abortion laws look bad. “What we’re seeing, I fear, is doctors with an agenda saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do’ when, in fact, they do,” the president of Ohio Right to Life said last year.

A new filing in a Texas lawsuit demolishes these arguments. In March, five women represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights sued Texas after enduring medical nightmares when they were refused abortions for pregnancies that had gone awry. Since then, the Center for Reproductive Rights says it has heard from dozens of women in Texas with similar accounts. And this week, eight more women, each with her own harrowing story, joined the suit, which asks a state district court to clarify the scope of emergency medical exceptions to Texas’ abortion ban.

There’s one woman among the new plaintiffs who recounted terrible mistreatment in a religiously affiliated hospital as she waited to either go into labor or get sick enough to merit an abortion. But in most of these cases, the women described their doctors as struggling to do the right thing. The problem was the law, not the doctors’ misunderstanding of it.

Elizabeth Weller, for example, was hospitalized after her water broke at 19 weeks. She was given antibiotics and, according to the suit, instructed to pray. Her OB/GYN concluded that, without an abortion, she risked an infection and could lose her uterus or even her life. The hospital administration, however, refused to clear the procedure because the antibiotics made such an infection less likely.

“Elizabeth was told that she could either discontinue antibiotics and stay in the hospital to wait to develop an infection and get sicker; or she could go home and look out for signs of infection,” said the filing. She went home. “With every passing day, I felt the state’s intentional cruelty,” Weller said during a news conference on Monday. “My baby would not survive and my life didn’t matter.” Her doctor, she said, called around trying to find another hospital that would treat her. “All of those hospitals told my doctor that they have patients just like me in those situations and they can’t touch them,” she said.

Two of the women in the original suit, Lauren Miller and Ashley Brandt, had been pregnant with twins. Each discovered that one of her twins had severe abnormalities and wouldn’t survive. In both cases, only by aborting the doomed twin could they protect the life of the viable one, as well as their own health.

Texas doctors can do little for women in this excruciating situation. Given a state law that lets people sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, many are fearful even to counsel their patients about out-of-state options. “In every interaction with their medical team in Texas, Lauren M. and her husband felt confused and frustrated and could not get direct answers,” says the lawsuit. Both Miller and her doctors were afraid to even utter the word “abortion.”

Now Miller’s obstetrician, Austin Dennard, has joined the lawsuit, not as a doctor but as a patient. Shortly before Miller’s devastating diagnosis, Dennard had been pregnant with what she hoped would be her third child when she learned that the fetus had anencephaly, giving it no chance of survival. She left the state for an abortion, as Miller would later do. Seeing Miller endure the same ordeal that she had, and then watching her go public about it, inspired Dennard to do so as well, despite fears about what it could mean for her career.

“This is not some isolated incident of one doctor misunderstanding the law,” said Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “This is a widespread, pervasive fear throughout the medical community.”

If the anti-abortion movement were interested in allaying this fear, it might consider joining this suit, or filing one of its own. Perhaps needless to say, that hasn’t happened.

One of the new plaintiffs in the suit, a mother of four named Samantha Casiano, was forced to carry to term a fetus that she knew would not survive after birth, spending months fund-raising for the inevitable funeral. Reporting on Casiano’s case in April, NPR spoke to Amy O’Donnell of Texas Alliance for Life. O’Donnell was at least honest. She doesn’t believe in exemptions for cases like Casiano’s. “I do believe the Texas laws are working as designed,” she said.