A postal carrier walks by One World Trade Center in New York City on April 30. (Noam Galai/Getty Images)
The U.S. Postal Service consistently tops the favorability list in Pew Research Center’s periodic surveys of public views of government agencies. This year, 91% of Americans – and equal 91% shares of Democrats and Republicans – had a favorable view of the agency.
But the Postal Service, already in a deep financial hole, now finds itself caught in a political firestorm. President Donald Trump has long claimed that package shippers, particularly online retailers such as Amazon, aren’t paying enough. He has blocked a $10 billion congressionally approved emergency loan to the cash-strapped agency; threatened to veto any future emergency funds unless the Postal Service quadruples its package shipping prices; and named one of his major donors as the new postmaster general.
Democrats, many outside analysts, Postal Service advocates and the agency itself dispute Trump’s contention that low package rates are the main driver of its money woes. They say that without relief, the Postal Service could run out of operating cash as soon as this fall. A coalition of retailers plans a $2 million lobbying and ad campaign to oppose Trump’s plans and support a massive rescue package.
How has the Postal Service, which turns 50 next year, wound up in such a predicament? We crunched the numbers to find out.
Women talk in New York City’s Bryant Park while wearing protective masks on May 7. (Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Most Americans say they need to take breaks from COVID-19 news. But that doesn’t mean they are avoiding the topic completely. In fact, 44% of U.S. adults say they are discussing the coronavirus outbreak with other people most or almost all of the time, whether online, in person or over the phone, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 20 to 26.
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Overall, 31% of adults say they are discussing the outbreak with other people most of the time, while another 13% say they are talking about it almost all the time, according to the late April survey, which was conducted as part of the Center’s American News Pathways project. The largest share of Americans (45%) say they sometimes discuss the coronavirus outbreak with other people, while 11% say they hardly ever or never discuss it with others.
Religious leaders pray with President Donald Trump during a January rally in Florida. (Scott McIntyre/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump has described himself as a defender of religious liberty. But how do Americans perceive the Trump administration’s effect on various religious groups?
On balance, Americans are most likely to say the administration has helped evangelical Christians and that it has hurt Muslims, according to a February Pew Research Center survey. Opinions about the Trump administration’s impact on Jews are more mixed.
More than four-in-ten U.S. adults (43%) say the Trump administration has helped evangelical Christians, though a similar share (44%) say the administration has had no effect on this group. Just 11% of Americans say the Trump administration has hurt evangelical Christians.
A World War II veteran participates in a Veterans Day Parade on Nov. 11, 2019, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
May 8 marks the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, when World War II came to an end in Europe. In the United States, V-E Day commemorations will honor the 16 million Americans who served during the war, even as only a small share of those veterans are alive today.
About 300,000 U.S. World War II veterans are alive in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has published projections of the number of living veterans from 2015 to 2045. WWII service members’ numbers have dwindled from around 939,000 in 2015. Most living veterans from the war are in their 90s, though some are considerably older.
Of the 350,000 women who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the war, about 14,500 are alive today. Read More →
An employee cleans an outdoor table at Benny’s Cafe in Colleyville, Texas, on April 27 to prepare for the restaurant’s scheduled reopening. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
A sizable majority of Americans (68%) continue to say their greater concern is that state governments will lift coronavirus-related restrictions on public activity too quickly. Fewer than half as many (31%) say their greater concern is that states will not lift restrictions quickly enough, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that comes as some states begin to ease the restrictions they put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Overall, the public’s views on this question are little changed since early April, though they are somewhat more divided along partisan and ideological lines. Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, have become more concerned that the state restrictions will not be lifted quickly enough, while a growing share of Democrats worry more that they will be lifted too quickly.
Meanwhile, when Americans are asked about the restrictions on public activity in their area, about half (48%) say that the current number of restrictions is about right. The remainder are split between those who believe there should be more restrictions than there are right now (27%) and those who believe there should be fewer (24%), according to the survey, conducted April 29 to May 5 among 10,957 U.S. adults on the Center’s American Trends Panel. Read More →
A health care worker outside Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York in early April. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
One-third of Americans (33%) have experienced high levels of psychological distress at some point during the extended period of social distancing undertaken to slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. More than half (55%) of adults who describe their financial situation as poor have experienced high levels of distress, as have half of those who report having a disability or handicap that keeps them from fully participating in work, school or other activities.
To help track and assess the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak, Pew Research Center asked members of its American Trends Panel in both March and April how often in the past seven days they had experienced five different types of psychological distress (such as anxiety, sleeplessness or depression). Based on responses to these questions, panelists were placed into three categories of psychological distress: high, medium or low. Because the questions were administered to the same individuals twice (once between March 19-24 and again between April 20-26) it is possible to see who changed and by how much. (See this analysis for more details about the questions and the index.)
Voters cast their ballots on Election Day in November 2018 in New York City. (Joana Toro/VIEWPress/Corbis via Getty Images)
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing segment of eligible voters out of the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States. More than 11 million will be able to vote this year, making up nearly 5% of the nation’s eligible voters (for this analysis, U.S. citizens ages 18 and older). They are also the only major racial or ethnic group in which naturalized citizens – rather than the U.S. born – make up a majority of eligible voters, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.
From 2000 to 2020, the number of Asian American eligible voters more than doubled, growing by 139%. The Hispanic electorate grew at a similar rate (121%), but the black and white electorates grew far more slowly (33% and 7%).
Naturalized immigrants have driven the Asian electorate’s rapid growth. (When an immigrant naturalizes and becomes a U.S. citizen, they are eligible to vote in federal elections.) Between 2000 and 2018 – the most recent year available – the number of Asian immigrant eligible voters doubled from 3.3 million to 6.9 million. As of 2018, naturalized citizens accounted for about two-thirds of all U.S. Asian eligible voters. Read More →
Parents in Boston work at home on April 14 during the coronavirus stay-at-home advisory as their son, 5, entertains himself. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The option to perform a job remotely – to telework – may prove to be a financial lifeline for many workers during the COVID-19 downturn, which has shut down large segments of the U.S. economy and caused about 30 million American workers to file unemployment insurance claims since the middle of March 2020.
During the early stages of the outbreak’s economic fallout, 90% of the decrease in employment – or 2.6 million of the total loss of 2.9 million between February and March – arose from positions that could not be teleworked, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of federal government data.
While many workers could no longer wait tables or give haircuts, others – especially those with college degrees – could go online and continue to teach, deliver sermons or trade stocks.
This pattern in jobs lost may change as the economic crisis deepens and spreads across broader swaths of the economy. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the number of employed workers will decrease by nearly 27 million in the coming months, nine times the loss from February to March. Also, signs have emerged that the jobs of many white-collar workers are increasingly at risk. It is possible that being able to work remotely will offer less protection as the COVID-19 downturn nears its trough. Read More →
The nation’s imprisonment rate is at its lowest level in more than two decades. The greatest decline has come among black Americans, whose imprisonment rate has decreased 34% since 2006.
There were 1,501 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults at the end of 2018, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the statistical agency of the U.S. Justice Department. That was down sharply from 2,261 black inmates per 100,000 black adults at the end of 2006, according to an earlier BJS study. These statistics only count inmates sentenced to more than a year in state or federal prison. They exclude inmates held in local jails and those sentenced to shorter periods of imprisonment.
Imprisonment rates have also declined for the two other major racial or ethnic groups tracked by BJS – Hispanic and white Americans – though not as much as among blacks. Between 2006 and 2018, the imprisonment rate fell 26% among Hispanics and 17% among whites. Read More →
The coronavirus outbreak has altered life in the United States in many ways, but in key respects it has affected black and Hispanic Americans more than others.
As the coronavirus sweeps through the country, Pew Research Center has been surveying Americans to explore its impact on their lives. The surveys have revealed notable racial and ethnic differences in experiences with the illness or death of loved ones, as well as job losses and pay cuts. There is also new evidence of long-standing differences among racial and ethnic groups, in some cases tied to underlying economic, geographic and health circumstances.
Here are some key findings about race, ethnicity and the COVID-19 outbreak, drawn from surveys conducted during the first months of the crisis. Read More →
On balance, Americans are most likely to say the administration has helped evangelical Christians and that it has hurt Muslims, according to a 
