“Just the facts ma’am.”

“Dragnet’s" LAPD Detective Joe Friday (played by Jack Webb) tells us what also counts in politics. Here are four facts:

1. Trump's January popularity decline hurt GOP. Gallup reports 49% of adults 18 and older claim Democratic Party affiliation or said they are Democrat-leaning independents. The phone survey covered January-March. Only 40% identified as Republican or Republican-leaning. The 9% gap is the Democrats' largest advantage since late 2012. 

Democrats typically hold a 4-6% edge, but late last year, the gap nearly disappeared. Since then, independents increased by 6%, from 38% to 44%. That's the biggest jump in independents since 2013, when they were at 46%. As in 2013, the rise correlated with a Republican Party decline.

The survey period covered both President Joe Biden's inauguration and Trump supporters’ January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump ended his presidency with a very low 29% job approval rating.

2. McConnell indicates GOP split with “woke” corporations is for real. After Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and other corporations followed Major League Baseball and President Biden in boycotting Georgia’s hosting of the All-Star game because Democrats can’t stand the Peach State’s new voting law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed that corporations are no longer Republicans’ best friend.

McConnell’s career has been dedicated to keeping big business happy with the GOP. So when the Kentucky senator decried “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead,” McConnell was announcing that Republicans as a whole, including even him, understand corporations are now part of the Progressive elite, a force with which the reshaped, Trumpian GOP will of necessity battle.

3. “Political correctness” is unpopular with most. The vast majority (2018 study) of all races reject the political correctness pushed by both the elite and corporate human resource departments. Indeed, the most extreme people on racial issues are not blacks and Hispanics but radicalized whites.

Demographer Joel Kotkin believes we will be saved by “the multiculturalism of the streets” (the sentiment that guides this blog). America simply isn’t some sort of apartheid regime separating white from those “of color.” Right now, one in 10 babies born in the U.S. has one white and one non-white parent; 12% of all African Americans are now immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Interracial marriage has leaped from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six today.

The suburbs now dominate America’s non-white life. In the 50 largest US metropolitan areas, 44% of residents live in racially and ethnically mixed suburbs, ranging from 20% to 60% non-white. These are families who care about security and a better life.

4. Democrats don’t belong to a church; many blacks do. According to a recent Gallup poll, church membership among Republicans fell from 77% in 1998 to 65% in 2020. Among Democrats, it fell from 71% in 1998 to 46%. So church members are now a minority in the Democratic Party. Black voters who are religious — Pew reports religion is “very important” to 73% of blacks with 47% attending church weekly — may feel less and less at home among Democrats.