Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Trump's approval has collapsed among the voters who were most open to him — and that could decide the midterms

pew

• Pew's 2026 political typology finds Trump's job approval has dropped sharply among right-leaning but ideologically mixed groups: the 'Unconventional Right' went from 78% approval at the start of his term to 51% now, while 'Pragmatic and Polite Right' fell from 50% to just 34%.
• These same groups show unusually low engagement with the 2026 midterms — particularly the Unconventional Right, where only 11% say they've given the elections much thought.
• The most partisan groups on both left and right remain highly engaged and locked in, meaning the midterms may turn on whether these disaffected right-leaning voters show up or tune out entirely.

Populists Who 'Drain the Swamp' Actually Hurt Their Own Economies — Unless Career Civil Servants Stop Them

voxeu

• New research finds that populist governors are associated with 3.8% lower per-capita income compared to similar states — but only where political patronage dominates hiring; states with merit-based civil service protections see no such economic penalty.
• The key mechanism is institutional insulation: professional bureaucracies slow down erratic or damaging policy moves, force them through legal scrutiny, and make wholesale politicization harder — acting as a economic buffer even when elected leaders try to dismantle them.
• The findings carry a direct warning for the Trump era: dismantling civil service protections doesn't just weaken government — it amplifies the economic damage that populist governance already tends to cause.

The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket Has More Dissents Than Ever — But Half of Them Say Almost Nothing

scotusblog

• When justices "dissent" on the Supreme Court's emergency docket, that label covers everything from a 17-page written opinion to a single notation like "Justice Thomas would deny" — and half of all recorded objections are just bare votes with no explanation.
• The 2024-25 term shattered records with 23 written dissenting opinions, driven largely by challenges to Trump executive orders — exactly the kind of separation-of-powers cases that historically prompt justices to actually explain themselves.
• The ideological divide in dissenting style is striking: Democratic-appointed justices write together far more often, while Republican-appointed justices like Thomas and Gorsuch mostly just log their votes, leaving lower courts and litigants with little to go on.

In the News

The US-Saudi nuclear deal signals a risky new American strategy for stopping weapons proliferation in the Middle East

atlantic_council

• The US has quietly shifted to a 'Plan C' on nuclear nonproliferation: instead of blocking partners from enriching uranium, it's deepening commercial and political ties with their nuclear programs, starting with a new deal giving Saudi Arabia a path toward domestic enrichment.
• This marks a sharp break from decades of US policy — the Biden administration had refused a Saudi nuclear deal unless Riyadh normalized relations with Israel, and previous US agreements required countries to fully forswear enrichment.
• The shift is largely a consequence of Trump's failed Iran strategy: by withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal and then launching strikes that didn't eliminate Iran's program, the US created conditions where Saudi Arabia and other regional powers are now seeking nuclear deterrents of their own.

Analysis

Europe's banks barely lend across borders, and fixing that could boost the EU economy by 1.6%

voxeu

• Despite a decade of banking union reforms, cross-border loans make up just 1% of all euro area lending — and the barrier isn't loan pricing but the near-impossibility of forming relationships across borders in the first place.
• The culprit is regulatory fragmentation: a typical pair of EU countries still differs on roughly one in four regulatory variables, with gaps in deposit insurance, bankruptcy rules, and macroprudential frameworks doing the most damage.
• A new model estimates that even a 10% reduction in cross-border relationship barriers would raise eurozone GDP by 1.6%, mostly by lowering firms' cost of capital and spurring investment — not by reshuffling credit to more productive uses.

Also Worth a Look

• Mexico's Booming Server Exports Have a Hidden Weakness: Almost Nothing in Them Is Made in North America (atlantic_council)
• The Iran War Is Causing an Energy Crisis — But Countries That Invested in Clean Energy Are Weathering It Better (wri)
• The Iran War's Unlikely Winner: Syria Is Cashing In on Rerouted Flight Traffic (csis)
• Turkey Builds the Drones Europe Desperately Needs, But Politics Are Keeping It at Arm's Length (atlantic_council)
• India and China Keep Talking Past Each Other — and History Explains Why (noema)
• Exercise helps hip arthritis pain, but perhaps less than we thought (cochrane)
• Republican confidence in Trump's economy is cracking, new polling shows (pew)