A Sociological Eye

    Yesterday, I posted on social media the graph you see here. It shows current levels of support for the presidential candidates according to gender for Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. I asked folks reading the post for their theories about what is going on with Gen X, and got a lot of responses. So here is my report on what people had to say! First, to summarize what this chart shows you: Millennials and Baby Boomers are nearly identical in their views, despite having a generation between them with different political preferences. About 70% of both Millennial and Boomer women support Harris, while only about 38% of men in those generations say they support her. That’s a striking binary gender gap of over 30 points. (The survey does not consider the preferences of nonbinary people.) Generations Z and X show different patterns. Gen Z voters are in the youngest voting age bracket, and for decades voters in that bracket have held more progressiv...

  [Image generated using MidJourney] Here, have a portrait of George Santos, who liked to claim he was the embodiment of the American Dream!  As you have probably heard, Santos is a new Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, recently elected to represent a district in New York at the youthful age of 34. You probably also heard that he lied about some things. Well, most things.  Santos' political biography during his successful run for Congress stated that his maternal grandparents were Jewish Ukrainians who fled the Holocaust to Brazil. Then his parents immigrated to the U.S., making him a proud American Jew. When his political stances were attacked as fascist on Twitter, he snapped back, "You just pulled the Nazi card on the grandson of Holocaust refugees." Not so; his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil and were Catholic, as is his family today. Santos' response to  genealogists  tracking his ancestry and discovering he’d lied about...