DISTRICTS OF THE HEART: No one cares about Social Security!

MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2026

Everyone cares about this: At the start of yesterday's Meet the Press, Steve Kornacki was introduced.

Kornacki is NBC's numbers man. Here's the first number he offered:    

WELKER (6/14/26): With the midterms less than five months away, our Chief Data Analyst Steve Kornacki, joins me now with the results of our latest NBC News poll. 

So we are within five months of the midterms. What are the big headlines?

KORNACKI: Yeah, Kristen. To start, just the bottom line on Trump’s standing with the voters right now. His approval rating sits at 42% in our NBC poll. Now, this is with registered voters. And that is down a tick. You can see the last time we checked in, early in the spring, he was at 44%.

WELKER: Is that a new low, Steve? 42%?

KORNACKI: That is the second term low in our poll for Donald Trump, falling to 42% right now.  

As you know, President Trump won't be on the ballot in the midterm elections. For that reason, we're often struck by our own Blue America's focus on his approval numbers.  

That said: 

As Blue Americans, we're routinely invited to marvel at how low his approval number is. At this site, we tend to have a different reaction:    

Given the persistent lunacy of the sitting president's behavior, we're amazed at how high his approval number is!    

The president won't be on the ballot this fall. Almost a thousand Republican and Democratic candidates will be.   

Will Democrats gain control of the House? Could they take control of the Senate? Kornacki moved to a second set of numbers:  

[continuing from above] 
KORNACKI: And the other thing that this dovetails with of course is the generic congressional battle with the Democrats now. As you said, inside of five months to the midterm, a five-point lead for the Democrats here.

Now obviously, that’s a strong number for them. What the Republicans would say on this is: If you think back to Trump’s first term, that blue wave of 2018, this number was more at, like, eight to ten points. So Republicans hoping to contain the damage at least looking at a number like that.  

On the screen, it was Democrats 49%, Republicans 44%! Just so you'll know, here's the question in the NBC News poll which produced those numbers:   

Q25: What is your preference for the outcome of this year’s congressional elections–(ROTATE) a Congress controlled by Republicans or a Congress controlled by Democrats?   

By a five-point margin, more people said they'd prefer a Congress controlled by Democrats. 

Does a number like that tend to have solid predictive value? Back in 2021, Larry Sabato's Center for Politics offered this assessment:   

MOSKOWITZ (2/11/21): Since 1968, the generic ballot has missed the real House popular vote by an average of 4%, and until 2008, it consistently overestimated Democratic support. Pollsters have mostly fixed both of these problems, and the generic ballot has been more accurate and balanced since the mid-aughts.

You'd rather be five points ahead on the generic ballot! But especially in the face of the mid-census redistricting war which President Trump kicked off, we'd say a five-point advantage in that arena may be less reassuring that it has recently been. 

(Also, there's no way to know what kind of election will be allowed to take place this year, given the "win at all costs" mentality of the strongman / royalist White House.)

That brings us back to our amazement—our amazement at the fact that the sitting president's approvals remain as high as they currently are.   

Given his unrelenting strange behavior, it's striking to us that President Trump can still boast something like 42 percent approval. We often find ourselves gnashing our teeth at the possibility that our own behaviors here in Blue America may help him keep his numbers that high.   

With that, we return to what we regard as the most interesting (and most painful) issue of the day. We refer to the Supreme Court's recent decisions concerning the Voting Rights Act—more precisely, concerning the kinds of congressional districting which are, and are not, permitted according to the Constitution and under terms of that Act.  

People, consider this:

According to the most recent Naep testing, America's younger public school kids may be on the way back! Here's the start of the recent report in the New York Times:   

Younger Students’ Test Scores Bounce Back After the Pandemic

The nation’s 9-year-olds, who were in preschool when the pandemic hit, have made a significant recovery in reading since 2022, and are now caught up to where 9-year-olds were immediately before the pandemic, according to a key federal exam. They are getting closer to being caught up in math.

In theory, that's important news—but it will, of course, produce exactly zero discussion. You'll see it mentioned nowhere else. The truth is, nobody cares.

Then too, consider the recent guest essay by Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama (2013 - 2017). Headline included, his essay started like this:  

I Worked in the White House. We Never Imagined This Problem Would Get This Bad.

The first major public policy issue I worked on in the White House, almost 30 years ago, was President Bill Clinton’s call to “save Social Security first.” Though the fund wasn’t projected to run dry for another three decades, the country seemed gripped by the issue...

This week the Social Security trustees announced that the trust fund for retirees and survivors will be exhausted in just six years. That’s six years before tens of millions of Americans could see their benefits cut by 22 percent. The crisis is closer than anyone in the Clinton or Bush years ever imagined we might let it get. 

Here's the June 9 news report in the New York Times about that announcement. Here too, you're going to see little or no discussion, whether of this matter or of the giant budget deficits the sitting president keeps expanding with his silly but high-profile tax cuts, 

(No tax on tips? Why not?)  

At present, major topics come and go, with barely a single word said. These topics get swallowed up by all The Crazy from the White House—the buildings torn down, the shrines renamed, and the UFC fights out on the lawn, with some ugly name-calling thrown in. (See this afternoon's report.)

That said, the Supreme Court's decisions involving the Voting Rights Act have produced a great deal of reaction within Blue America. That has happened for reasons which are perfectly understandable and perfectly obvious—but are those of us in Blue America possibly responding in an unhelpful way?   

Our nation's brutal racial history lies at the heart of the ongoing discussions this topic. For better or worse, so does this iconic statement by the later Wittgenstein:    

For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.   

Wittgenstein was speaking there about the "problems" which constituted much of 20th century academic philosophy. He thought those "philosophical problems" were largely illusory—were the result of familiar locutions being air-lifted into contexts where no one knows what they mean, with the resulting incomprehension going undetected. 

The history which underlies the debate about the VRA is brutally, painfully real. There's nothing illusory about such matters at all.

That said, language has often gone on holiday in our attempts to discuss this topic, and it seems to us that some of Blue America's reactions are the sorts of reactions which help the current president stay at 42 percent.  

Professor Brabender, the great anthropologist, insightfully had it right. Famously, he described the impulses of us the humans in the manner shown:   

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.   

That tends to be true of us the humans. It can even sometimes be true of us the Blues.

Centuries of brutality underlie this Voting Rights issue. Those endless brutalities really occurred. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're currently getting it right.

Tomorrow: We agree, and we may not agree, with what Terri Sewell said