|
Bend and SNAP.
This week, Senator Gillibrand joined the DFP blog to talk about the importance of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Republicans’ efforts to slash federal spending for the program. Hey, they’re nothing if not consistent!
SNAP is incredibly crucial to more than 40 million low-income Americans who rely on SNAP to feed themselves or their families. Logically, you would assume that lawmakers want to make sure that people can reliably feed their children, but that doesn’t seem to be a priority for Republicans.
While Republicans in Congress want to cut funding for SNAP, Data for Progress finds that both Democrat and Republican voters support the program. Sixty-six percent say they have a favorable view of SNAP, including 83 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Independents, and 52 percent of Republicans. In fact, a majority of voters in both parties actually support increasing, rather than decreasing, funding for SNAP.
So Republicans, we know you’re all very stressed about protecting billionaires from tax cuts, but maybe it’s time to realize that voters actually want to make sure children are fed. Just a thought!
Check out the polling here.
Here are some other highlights from DFP this week:
Lock Him Up.
An update for those of you who have kept your sanity and muted Trump-related news: the Florida retiree has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, something that we always assumed was a standard business practice for him anyway.
Trump took a break from guarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago to attend his arraignment in New York, where he of course pleaded “not guilty.” With his track record, that essentially translates to: “I’m absolutely guilty, there has never been a person more guilty, and I’m the greatest at being guilty.”
The falsified records include reimbursements Trump made to Michael Cohen for hush-money payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, an unnamed second woman, and a former Trump doorman. A lesson we can learn from all of this: always go to the doorman first. They know everything.
Despite what Eric Trump’s AI-generated pro-Trump rally may look like, Data for Progress finds 54 percent of voters approve the jury’s decision to indict Trump. This includes 91 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Independents, and 16 percent of Republicans — who we welcome to the resistance with open arms.
The findings are pretty consistent with Georgia tourist Marjorie Taylor Green’s experience in New York, where her speech was drowned out by counter-protestors and attendees were outnumbered by reporters. Considering association with Trump and attendance at his rallies usually leads to jail time, it’s probably best that his supporters stay home and rethink their allegiance to the criminal mastermind behind the disaster that is the entire Trump Organization.
Check out the polling here.
Check on your influencer friends: we’re running out the clock on TikTok.
Watch your favorite GRWMs and clips of Pedro Pascal eating a sandwich while you can: the end of TikTok is nigh. Will banning TikTok give us back hours in our day? Sure. Will we also miss having a go-to place for Taylor Swift easter egg analysis, corgi day-in-a-life voice-overs, and 13-year-olds doing their make-up before Bat Mitzvahs? Absolutely.
Time to bring back Vine.
Despite TikTok’s popularity with everyone from your much cooler 15-year-old sister to your grandma’s mahjong group, Data for Progress finds voters are split on how Congress should deal with the clock app. Thirty-six percent of voters support a full ban, 30 percent prefer that TikTok be sold to U.S. operators, and 22 percent want the situation to be left as is.
A lot of the hullabaloo around TikTok stems from concern that their parent company, ByteDance, is sharing user data with the Chinese government. We’re not exactly sure what Xi Jinping will do with the knowledge that we searched “Taylor Swift's curly hair in Tampa” about twenty times, but yeah, that’s probably information we should take to the grave.
However, we find 70 percent of voters are concerned about all Big Tech companies collecting and profiting off of user information — not just China-based companies. Considering we’re only about 30 percent convinced Mark Zuckerberg is actually a human and not just a science experiment gone wrong, their concerns are pretty valid.
So as TikTok’s future becomes more and more uncertain, take this time to get even more addicted to videos of cats and horses becoming friends. If we’re not seeing 13+ hours of screen time a day, we’re gonna be disappointed.
Read the full blog and polling here.
This barbie is a pollster.
Unfortunately, we don’t have Margot Robbie on staff to explain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but the DFP newsletter writers are a pretty close second, right? Right?!? (Boost our ego.)
Silicon Valley Bank is the biggest bank to collapse since the Great Recession, which isn’t a great omen for the current state of banking. However, critics of Trump-era banking deregulation are probably itching to say “I told you so.” And Bernie Sanders, a man not known for holding back, has absolutely said “I told you so.”
The former President and current indicted criminal rolled back Dodd-Frank rules in 2018. These rules requiring medium-sized banks to undergo annual stress tests and submit plans for financial failure were put in place to prevent a major disaster — yanno, like the one that Silicon Valley Bank just experienced. Data for Progress and Progressive Change Institute find 71 percent of voters support reinstating the bank regulations, including 81 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of both Independents and Republicans.
You’d think that after the 2008 financial crash we might have learned from our past mistakes. Ryan Gosling played Jenga, The Big Short won an Oscar, and we all realized the importance of bank regulation. Data for Progress finds that 82 percent of voters support Congress taking action to strengthen bank rules. This includes 87 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Independents, and 78 percent of Republicans.
As much as we all want to see Selena Gomez explain Roth IRAs at a casino, maybe we should start regulating some banks before Adam McKay has to write another screenplay.
Read the full blog and polling here.
|
