Heading into the 2024 elections, in which so much will again be at stake, recent polling from the firm Navigator Research has shown Americans trust Democrats more than they trust Republicans to handle key issues in policy, like health care, abortion, and democracy. Among overall respondents, the portions going with Democrats over Republicans were 49 percent, 48 percent, and 46 percent, respectively.
And the rest weren’t all going towards the Republicans, because respondents saying they didn’t know ranged from 16 to 19 percent of the total on these specific inquiries. Democrats, meanwhile, also led on the handling of other key issues, like climate change and Medicare.
Republicans led on issues like immigration, crime, and inflation — though members of the party sometimes seem, some might say, to spend more time trying to turn complaints in these areas into a political boost than actually proposing and following through on potential fixes that benefit all those who are involved. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), a first-term member of the House, adeptly summed up the dispute in a recent reply on X (formerly Twitter) to familiar anti-immigration rhetoric from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). “Our nation is being invaded at our Southern border,” she claimed, misrepresenting the basic facts.
“So, @repmtg, I assume you therefore support the $4bn for border security in the White House supplemental? And that you’d be interested in funding more immigration judges to reduce the asylum backlog and more money to stop American guns from going to Mexican cartels? Call me!” Goldman replied. In truth, Greene has promoted extremist ideas like using U.S. military force to target foreign criminal organizations operating in Mexico — which, because of the basics of how geography works, would necessarily mean implicating Mexican territory in armed conflict initiated by the United States. Their ostensibly brilliant idea is a military campaign impacting a United States neighbor. What a farce.
