Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

Nebraska lawmakers vote against Trump-fueled push to change electoral vote system
Nebraska is one of only two states that divide electoral votes among statewide and congressional district winners, which allowed Joe Biden to pick off an electoral vote in the red state in 2020 by carrying a swing district in the Omaha area. But Gov. Jim Pillen (R) and Trump on Tuesday endorsed a proposal to return the state to a winner-take-all system, possibly upending the final days of the state’s legislative session, which ends April 18.

The effort was put to an early test Wednesday night when Republican state Sen. Julie Slama tried to add the winner-take-all proposal to an unrelated bill as an amendment. The chair of the legislature ruled that the amendment was not germane to the underlying bill, prompting an effort to overrule the chair.[...]

The vote to override needed 23 yes votes to pass, given the attendance in the chamber at the time of the vote. Only eight voted yes. [...]

The sponsor of the winner-take-all proposal has said he does not have the votes to overcome a filibuster, but Trump’s intervention has raised speculation that Republicans could regroup.
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Grieving Michigan family says Trump lied about their daughter. Of course he did.
Let’s be clear about several things. Trump doesn’t care about the U.S.-Mexico border or immigrants in general. He doesn’t care about Garcia or her family in Michigan. And he definitely doesn’t care about you. (Yes, even you, MAGA fans. You're his marks, not his friends.)

Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and that is all. If claiming he had spoken with a grieving family helps Trump spook voters into thinking he alone can protect them from an imagined wave of criminal immigrants, then that’s good for Trump, and quite literally nothing else matters. [...]

I didn’t hear Trump, between his xenophobic rants, saying he would address the ease with which violent men can obtain firearms. I didn’t hear him mention how, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner each month. Trump was silent on the fact that, according to the Emory University School of Medicine, 5.3 million women are victims of intimate-partner violence each year.

He didn’t mention those things because he doesn’t care about them, and he doesn’t care about them because those issues don’t help him.
Election deniers now have more room to spread conspiracy theories about Wisconsin’s election results
On Tuesday, Wisconsin voters approved two Republican-backed ballot measures that will ban the use of private money in elections, and a second, deliberately vague measure that will limit who can perform election-related tasks in the state.

The initiatives are both rooted in 2020 election conspiracy theories and election denialism, and designed to sow seeds of distrust in the swing state’s election system, election officials and experts told TPM.

Similar to actions made in several other states around the U.S., the private money measure was written as a response to the 2020-era “Zuckerbucks” conspiracy theory involving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan giving out millions of dollars in election administration grants to various election departments to help them run the election during a pandemic.

But the second referendum, which will amend the state constitution to specify that only designated election officials can administer elections, is particularly worrying, experts say. The change will likely exacerbate the ongoing election worker shortage in the state, and also intentionally muddy who is and isn’t allowed to run elections and help out at polling places. This is currently Wisconsin law, but now that voters have approved it as part of the constitution, it’ll be harder to repeal. It was also written in response to a conspiracy theory.
The giant threat lurking behind Florida’s November abortion vote
There’s no doubt that this court is supremely hostile to abortion. In its first decision on Monday, the conservative supermajority overturned decades of precedent protecting access to abortion under the Florida Constitution’s right to privacy. In 1980 voters enshrined this right, the cornerstone of Roe v. Wade, into the state’s founding charter, with an evident understanding that it would safeguard reproductive autonomy. Yet, by a 6–1 vote, the court gutted the amendment by ignoring historical evidence of its broad original meaning. At the same time, by a 4–3 vote, the court upheld a proposed amendment that would restore an expansive right to abortion access throughout the state. It will require 60 percent support to pass in November.

This second ruling might seem to temper the majority’s hostility toward reproductive freedom. Not quite: Piecing together the fractured opinions, it becomes clear that six justices stand ready to institute fetal personhood under existing state law. The disagreement among this far-right supermajority comes down to tactics, timing, and deference to democracy. Three are prepared to now wield fetal personhood as a sword against any expansion of abortion, even by constitutional amendment. Three are waiting to impose personhood if the upcoming amendment fails and will not weaponize the doctrine today to keep the initiative off the ballot. (All but one of these justices were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.) Just a single justice, Jorge Labarga—who dissented from the court’s first decision gutting the right to privacy—declined to board the personhood train.
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The true cost of the churchgoing bust
Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

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