Thursday Edition

Republican donors have spent millions this cycle trying to stop Trump-y candidates from getting elected, but as Nikki Haley’s presidential bid showed, they’re at best delaying what appears to be the inevitable. (NBC News)

Ahead of Super Tuesday, two well-funded Republican super PACs spent over $6 million targeting five candidates tied to the House Freedom Caucus and one endorsed by former President Trump. Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action spent millions boosting Haley’s campaign before pulling funding last month.

On Tuesday, only one of the candidates opposed by the two super PACs lost (and another candidate, Texas’ John O’Shea, is headed for a runoff). Haley lost almost every state, and suspended her campaign the next day. Trump-y candidates won in a number of states, including North Carolina, Arkansas and Texas.

How news website Semafor summed up Super Tuesday: “MAGA candidates make downballot gains”

Research by FiveThirtyEight has shown relatively moderate GOP politicians are being replaced by more conservative lawmakers - “59% of congressional Republicans that hold seats vacated by fellow Republicans are more conservative than their predecessor.” Voters are also becoming more conservative. Mark Robinson, who won the Republican gubernatorial primary in North Carolina on Tuesday, embodies this Trump-y, hardline conservative shift.

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What we’re seeing here is a continuation of Trump’s earth-shattering 2016 win. Republican politicians are starting to look and sound more like the new Republican base. But it’s taken time for holdovers from the pre-Trump GOP to get phased out. For instance, it was just this month that long-serving Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, one of the most iconic representatives of the old GOP, announced he’s stepping down. Of course, there’s a faction of traditional Republican voters, donors and politicians that are holding out against the MAGA wave (and they’ve even scored some wins recently), but it’s clear things aren’t trending in their direction.

A new University of Michigan study shows a huge spike in antidepressant prescriptions from 2016-2022 for adolescents and young adults (ages 12-25). (CNN)

Antidepressant use had been trending up, but increased dramatically during the pandemic. The monthly rate of antidepressant prescriptions increased from 2575.9 to 4284.8 per 100,000 people over six years.

Young girls were the most severely affected. After March 2020, prescription rates for girls aged 12-17 increased 130% faster, and for those aged 18-25, 60% faster. Adolescent boys’ prescription rates actually went down after March 2020. And the rates remained mostly the same for male young adults.

There’s other evidence showing a youth mental health crisis is hitting girls particularly hard. CDC data last month showed girls reported seriously considering suicide at double the rate of boys (30% vs. 15%) and a nearly 60% increase from ten years ago. Nearly 60% of U.S. teen girls reported feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness.

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Social media has been proven to have devastating effects on kids, and pandemic only made things worse. Can the problem be prescribed away? We’re not doctors, so we can’t tell you. But we can point you to a recent meta-analysis that looked at 218 studies of more than 14,000 people. Researchers found dancing was a more effective treatment for depression than SSRIs…

A rare thing has happened in America as conservatives and liberals finally seem to agree on something: you can’t trust Big Tech. (Axios)

In five years, U.S. trust in AI companies has fallen 15% (from 50% to 35%), according to new Edelman data. In the rest of the world, trust in AI companies has fallen, but only by 8%. And it’s part of a bigger trend. From 2019 to 2022, American trust in tech companies to do the right thing hit a new low, falling from 73% to 54%.

Big tech companies have ticked off conservatives by censoring them on social platforms (in many cases unfairly) and adopting “woke” values.

They’ve upset liberals by not cracking down on “disinformation” (aka not censoring conservatives enough) and paying lip service to progressive ideals while pretty ruthlessly chasing profits.

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In some ways, tech companies are victims of their own success. People are unhappy with how companies are handling AI, but the challenges artificial intelligence presents are complicated and novel. Censorship/disinformation is another tough one, as companies have to balance free speech with not letting their platforms turn into complete cesspools.

But the tech industry’s also brought a lot of the problems on themselves. Take Google’s disastrously funny rollout of new features for its Gemini chatbot (in a misguided attempt at inclusivity, Gemini’s programming led it to generate images of racially diverse Nazis). Not so funny has been the industry’s handling of child safety, which led Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to apologize last month to families of kids exploited or abused on Instagram.

Arlington County in Virginia is considering lifting restrictions that bar undocumented immigrants from qualifying for low-income housing grants. (Arlington Now)

A county study estimated that adding 50 undocumented households to the program would cost about $421,800 annually, with another $143,920 a year for homes where only some of the inhabitants are undocumented immigrants. A survey found only 40% of Arlington residents agree with removing the restrictions.

Arlington joins a trend. As of 2022, Colorado no longer requires people to show proof of legal U.S. residency to qualify for state and local government benefits.

In 2023, undocumented immigration cost the U.S. government about $66.5 billion for services like education and healthcare, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Undocumented immigrants paid back $24.6 billion in taxes, making the government's net loss around $50.2 billion. State and local governments faced an even higher cost of $115.6 billion.

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Progressives already claim there aren’t enough benefits coming to American residents — providing them to undocumented immigrants will only make this worse.

It’s long been conventional political wisdom that black and Hispanic voters are locked-in votes for Democrats, but that’s changing in a big way. (WSJ)

A number of polls have shown President Biden’s support with blacks and Latinos is slipping. The latest New York Times/Siena poll actually shows former President Trump winning Latino voters over Biden. Black support for Trump has risen almost 20 points in four years (from 4% to 23%). Of the roughly 20% of Latino voters who are considering switching parties, more than 60% say they’re open to leaving the Democrats.

This cuts against major narratives from conservatives and liberals. It wasn’t that long ago Democrats believed America’s increasingly nonwhite makeup (the U.S. Census predicted by 2050 whites in America would be a minority) meant they’d never lose another election.

Popular conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson came to pretty much the same conclusion, and used it to argue against letting immigrants into the country. Both sides just assumed these immigrants would be automatic votes for Democrats.

Here’s a pretty mind-blowing sign of how things have changed: A new Pew Research Center poll found 75% of Latinos view the situation at the border as a “major problem” or “crisis.” That’s more than the 70% of Republicans who described it as a crisis in Pew’s survey from last month. It’s way more than the 22% of Democrats who called the border situation a crisis.