Pew has some detailed numbers about partisanship worth looking at in depth.
Overall, 53% of Republicans and Republican leaners say they consider themselves Republicans or lean to the party more because they are for what the GOP represents. Still, about four-in-ten (43%) say it is more because they are against what the Democratic Party represents.
Views among Democrats are similar: 56% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say they consider themselves Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party more because they are for what the party represents, compared with 40% who say it is more because they are against what the Republican Party represents.
However, among both the Republican and Democratic coalitions, those who identify with a party are much more likely than those who lean to a party to say their identity is influenced by support for their own party. By 65% to 31%, Democratic identifiers say they consider themselves Democrats more because they are for what their party represents than against the Republican Party. By contrast, 56% of independents who lean toward the Democratic Party say their affiliation has more to do with being against the Republican Party; 41% say it’s more about being for the Democratic Party. Among those who affiliate with the Republican Party, 59% of identifiers, compared with 45% of leaners, say they affiliate with the GOP more because of what the party represents.
NY Times:
For Republican Leaders in Congress, the Headaches Keep Mounting
Republican leaders in Congress are under attack from all sides of their own party, battered by voters from the right and left, spurned by frustrated donors and even threatened by the Trump White House for ineffective leadership and insufficient loyalty.
Since last week, Senate Republicans lost one of their own when Roy S. Moore, the firebrand former state judge, trounced Senator Luther Strangein a Senate runoff in Alabama. The retirement of Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee kicked off a potentially fratricidal fight for his seat, with the establishment’s preferred successor, Gov. Bill Haslam, declining to run on Thursday.
An audiotape surfaced of Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, lambasting Republican leaders and urging conservative donors to close their wallets to lawmakers who are disloyal to President Trump. And a House Republican, Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, was forced to resign this week after a text from his mistress became public in which she mocked him for trumpeting his staunch opposition to abortion as he pressured her to terminate a pregnancy.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Why Trump is scaling back the contraception mandate and trying to destroy Obamacare
One of the enduring mysteries of the Trump era so far is how the president maintains the steadfast loyalty of many of the Republican Party’s key constituent groups despite the fact that his presidency has been a long series of blunders, bumbles, pratfalls and screw-ups, all against a backdrop of White House chaos and naked corruption.
I have a theory to explain it, one that can be seen in today’s big news that the Trump administration has issued a rule to dramatically cut back the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate and in the administration’s ongoing sabotage of the ACA in general.
The explanation comes down to this: Trump is willing to do things that are politically foolhardy in order to satisfy his base voters, no matter how limited a portion of the electorate they make up. This is certainly not rooted in any principles — instead it likely reflects either a failure to understand how things play with the broader electorate or that he believes a relentless focus on maintaining that base’s loyalty is the key to his political survival, or some combination of both.
Ed Yong/Atlantic:
The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science
They distort the nature of the scientific enterprise, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its most important contributors.
The price of reform is low, and the cost of avoiding it is high. As biologists Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang wrote in 2013, the Nobels promulgate the idea of the lone genius—the idea, summarized by philosopher Thomas Carlyle, that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Not so in science, and yet the Nobels feed this pernicious myth. And in doing so, say Casadavell and Fang, they “reinforce a flawed reward system in science in which the winner takes all, and the contributions of the many are neglected by disproportionate attention to the contributions of a few.” In some ways, the prizes are not about who has made the most important contributions, but who has best survived the hazardous labyrinth of academia.
And in many cases, the prizes are about who has survived, full stop. Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. So Rosalind Franklin was not recognized for her pivotal role in discovering the double-helical structure of DNA because she died four years before the Nobel was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. Astronomer Vera Rubin provided evidence for the existence of dark matter by studying the way in which galaxies rotate—a feat that revolutionized our understanding of the universe. “Vera Rubin deserves a Nobel,” said science writer Rachel Feltman in October 2016. “She probably won't get one in time.” Rubin died two months later.
CJR:
Can the First Amendment save us?
It took a long time for the press to gain freedom and respect in America. Now both are in peril.
The second notable development has been that, over time, the interplay between this free speech ethos and the evolution of our constitutional jurisprudence has stretched our capacity for tolerance in both the public and private realms. Though the First Amendment applies only to state action, it has become a touchstone for broader society, influencing norms far beyond its legal reach. Private universities are among the many American institutions that have voluntarily embraced free-speech protections.
This broad reach is critically important, because the impulse toward intolerance that Holmes identified is not limited to censorship of speech. Rather, it is a problem that cuts across all public decision-making, where we are certain to encounter opinions we disagree with—sometimes fervently. That is the logic behind establishing such extraordinary protections under the First Amendment—it creates an exceptional sphere that stretches our capacity for tolerance beyond what feels normal. The goal is not merely to moderate our impulse to quash speech that we find objectionable, but to help us recognize how such intolerance permeates other spheres of human interaction, and to teach us to control it. Learning how to temper such impulses, Holmes understood, is critical to the success of our experiment in self-government.
Paul Farhi/WaPo:
Four years later, the IRS tea party scandal looks very different. It may not even be a scandal.
Duh. Look, its not like Obama was perfect; he did a lot of goofy things and bad things, like all humans in a very tough job. But compared to the scandal-a-minute guy we have now, along with the scandal-plagued royal family, perspective is absolutely called for.