Data Roundup

In a new video for The New York Times, columnist Ezra Klein says if Democrats want to offer Americans a viable alternative to Donald Trump and populist politics, they need to admit “where the governments they run have gone wrong.”

Klein cites bureaucratic dysfunction (like the ballooning cost of California’s high speed rail project in the chart above), as well as housing affordability problems in blue states and cities, which have lost residents to red areas that offer lower costs of living, cheaper child care and less stressful commutes.

• California lost 268,000 residents in 2023.

• New York lost 179,000 residents in 2023.

• Illinois lost 93,000 residents in 2023.

The ongoing exodus from blue states could also cost Democrats politically, with Kamala Harris’s 2024 strongholds on track to lose House seats and Electoral College votes …

… while many red states won by Trump are set to gain seats and votes.

Klein with a brutal assessment of his fellow libs: “Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or was decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures instead of fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.”

I think Klein is right that progressive sanctimony and a suffocating bureaucracy set the stage for the aggressive deregulatory push we’re seeing with DOGE, Trump and Elon Musk—one that, to some observers, has gone too far.

In a new analysis for the American Enterprise Institute, senior fellow James Pethokoukis connects the dots on U.S. consumer attitudes toward revolutionary new technologies.

The upshot: Americans are getting more comfortable with AI, but seem to be souring on electric vehicles somewhat. According to Deepwater Asset Management’s 2025 Frontier Tech Survey, 25% of Americans use AI daily, up from 15% last year—a 66% increase. Meanwhile, concerns that AI will take over jobs dropped by 4 percentage points.

Per Deepwater, there’s been a 5 percentage point drop in Americans planning to buy an EV. On the other hand, gasoline vehicle preference increased by 6 percentage points.

Pethokoukis: “Amid the customary hand-wringing about technological dystopia that has pervaded our society for a half century, a more nuanced reality seems to be emerging. Americans aren’t so much rejecting as recalibrating their relationship with AI. Job anxieties are subsiding even as daily AI interactions are increasing. So, for now, neither a wholesale embrace nor a fearful recoil that pessimists predicted—but rather something refreshingly human: a measured adaptation that bodes well for our ability and willingness to harness these increasingly clever machines to amplify our human potential.”

If nothing else, this underscores how public enthusiasm for emerging technology ebbs and flows. EVs once seemed poised to dominate the market overnight, but adoption has slowed as practical realities emerge. AI, the latest transformative force, is now riding its own wave of hype and hysteria.

LGBTQ identification in the U.S. has risen to nearly 10%, per the latest Gallup polling. As Survey Center on American Life founder Daniel Cox and his colleagues noted in a recent analysis, much of the increase has been driven by young women, a third of whom now identify as LGBTQ.

In 2015:

• 10% of young women identified as LGBTQ.

• 6% of young men identified as LGBTQ.

In 2024:

• LGBTQ identity among young women increased by 21 percentage points.

• LGBTQ identity among young men increased by only 6 percentage points.

Nearly a 20-point gap now exists between young women and young men in LGBTQ identification. Sociologists aren’t exactly sure what’s behind the divide—although Cox and co. offer up a few possible explanations, including social media, rising societal acceptance and wokeness. Zooming out, I think it’s another data point to add to the list of ways that young men and women are diverging from each other — be it on politics, religion, education or the labor market.

A new analysis from Financial Times data guru John Burn-Murdoch hammers home how MAGA has weakened right-wing Americans’ sense of allegiance toward “the West” and liberal democracy.

The cliff’s notes: World Values Survey data shows Trump’s America is an outlier from Western Europe and the Anglosphere. Unlike U.S. Republicans of 20 years ago, Trump-era Republicans are closer to Russia and Turkey than to the UK, France, or Germany. In fact, Trump and his supporters are “misaligned even with most western conservatives.”

Related: A new YouGov poll underscores just how far Trump’s America has drifted from its traditional Western European allies.

Burn-Murdoch: “The next four years and beyond will be a bumpy ride come what may, but it will be more navigable after accepting that the world has fundamentally changed. For decades, the US was the champion of western values. The America of Trump, Vance and Musk has left them behind.”

I have mixed feelings about MAGA’s attitude toward the West and liberal democracy. But it’s simplistic to claim Trump’s Republicans have strayed from Ronald Reagan’s ideals or aren’t “true conservatives” without acknowledging decades of U.S. foreign policy missteps, rising domestic discontent and the fact that today’s geopolitical landscape is nothing like Reagan’s era.

After briefly surpassing 50% of global market value, the U.S. stock market has since retreated, with the S&P 500 now underperforming relative to international counterparts.

Bloomberg executive editor Simon Kelly: “Having been elected with a ‘pro-growth’ plan, President Donald Trump’s erratic tariff agenda, aggressive posture towards Ukraine and push to slash government payrolls are uniting with an already weakening economy to ignite investor fears of stagflation and perhaps even recession.”

Related: The most telling thing about President Trump’s response to being asked this weekend if he expected a recession in 2025—he didn’t say, “no.” 

OK, but: Trump’s allies, like the venture capitalist hosts of the “All-In Podcast,” believe there’s a method to the apparent madness.

What the argument basically boils down to:

• Trump’s economic focus is shifting away from Wall Street and toward Main Street.

• Policies will deprioritize stock market performance and favor working-class and middle-class Americans, small businesses, and pro-innovation industries.

• Stock market deflation could be an intentional strategy to curb inflation by reducing excess cash flow that fuels consumer spending.

More from “All-In’s” Chamath Palihapitiya:

(Note: Palihapitiya is incorrect when he says Trump is more popular with young people. It’s true that young men swung toward Trump in 2024, but Kamala Harris still won 54% of voters under 30.)