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Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the United States has ramped up military, economic and political interventions in Latin America.

Nowhere were those three factors more clear than the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. Since then, the Trump administration has used a mix of carrots and sticks to cajole what remains of Maduro’s government to support U.S. aims, including opening up the country’s oil industry to foreign development and targeted killings of accused criminals in the country. At the same time, the U.S. has found local Venezuelan allies in opposition leaders such as María Corina Machado, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize and a longtime Maduro critic.

As a historian of early U.S. political economy, diplomacy and war, I believe the ongoing U.S. intervention in Venezuela echoes a far earlier intervention in the early 19th century.

It was then, in 1805, that the South American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda visited the U.S. on a charm offensive to meet with leading statesmen, including President Thomas Jefferson. In a similar vein as Machado today, his goal in meeting with U.S. officials was to rally support for his proposed expedition to overthrow an unpopular government at home.

The fight against the Spanish Empire

From almost the beginning, America’s founders wanted to protect and expand the country beyond the 13 original states. In addition to running up against vast tracts of land populated by Native Americans, that meant almost immediate rivalries with the foreign empires – Britain, France and Spain – that had laid claim to large parts of the modern-day U.S.

It was in this age of revolution and expansion in Europe and the Americas that Miranda cut a ubiquitous figure.

He was a veteran of the American Revolution, fighting in a U.S.-allied Spanish army against the British in Florida. He would go on to fight among republican forces during the French Revolution, being imprisoned by the more radical Jacobins.

Yet it was the independence of South America from the Spanish Empire – particularly in his native Venezuela – that could be considered his life’s work.

Miranda had spent over two decades courting allies in the U.S. in support of South American republicanism – and specifically the overthrow of the Spanish colonial government in Caracas and elsewhere. Such was Miranda’s successful cultivation of powerful Americans that Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury secretary, was one of his most influential advocates.

In 1784, Hamilton sent Miranda a long list of notables who would be interested in South American intervention. Then, in 1798, once Hamilton was appointed inspector general, he implied that the recently expanded U.S. Army could be a vehicle for seizing Spanish territory. Although that didn’t come to fruition at the time, the point was clear: Miranda believed American statesmen were receptive to his ideas.

In the early 19th century, anticolonial agitation rocked the Spanish territory that would soon become Venezuela. Increasing Spanish costs for defense, such as building forts and training militia, led to higher taxes and strained local economies. That came after several tax rebellions broke out in the last decades of the 18th century. In general, there was widespread societal discontent over restrictive Spanish trade monopolies, as well as exclusive government posts for Spanish-born judges and officials.

The birth of a revolutionary plot

Soon after their own revolution from colonial rule, many Americans had a general sympathy for South American colonial subjects – if a limited understanding of their political situation.

Additionally, U.S. investors wanted access to the South American silver trade, as well as an end to Spanish royal monopolies on Venezuela’s coffee, cacao and indigo, just like U.S. investors today eye oil and real estate.

Amid this context, Miranda arrived in New York City in the fall of 1805 with plans to find allies for a scheme to foment a war for independence.

He met with William Smith, an old friend and the son-in-law of former President John Adams. Smith, serving as surveyor of the port of New York, connected him with a wealthy merchant named Samuel Ogden, who often sailed armed vessels to Haiti. The two men suggested that Miranda travel to Washington to secure official U.S. government support before proceeding with his plans to overturn the government in what became Venezuela.

When Miranda arrived at the White House, he sat in on a Cabinet meeting and was invited to dine with Jefferson. They chatted about revolution, and Jefferson spoke favorably of Spanish American independence, predicting that it would soon come to pass.

Jefferson would later write to Don Valentín de Foronda, Spanish minister to the U.S., that his administration “had no suspicion that (Miranda) expected to engage men here.” But it would be very surprising if Jefferson had not caught whiff of the expedition – either from Miranda himself or through gossip.

Indeed, the capital’s elites were abuzz with Miranda’s visit and plans. Washington merchant and investor William Mayne Duncanson, for example, called on Jefferson to offer his services in the venture, assuming that Jefferson was amenable to Miranda’s plans.

Whatever Jefferson’s knowledge, he also cared about America’s diplomatic reputation – and, more broadly, the law of nations. So he worked for several years to convince Spain that the U.S. government was not involved in organizing the expedition.

Failure abroad and domestic blowback

Miranda returned to New York from Washington in early January 1806 without official support. He assumed, however, that he had the tacit approval of the Jefferson administration. So he, Smith and Ogden fitted out a merchant vessel called the Leander with military stores and 200 men, who had varying degrees of understanding about what they had signed on to.

They left New York City on Feb. 2, 1806, and the press began speculating about where the ship was going and who was on board.

On Feb. 22, a list of incriminating questions addressed to Secretary of State James Madison appeared in the Philadelphia Gazette. This editorial, assumed by other newspaper editors to be submitted by the Spanish ambassador, accused Madison and Jefferson of condoning Miranda’s actions.

Partly to avoid culpability at home and abroad, Jefferson pressed charges against Ogden and Smith. They were arrested on Feb. 20 and tried in a federal court that summer. A sympathetic jury declared them not guilty.

Meanwhile, members of Miranda’s expedition were captured by Spanish soldiers off the coast of what would soon become Venezuela and tried for their attempted insurrection. The majority were imprisoned; 10 men were hanged.

Miranda escaped to Aruba and later played a major role in the Venezuelan war of independence from Spain that begin in 1810. There, he briefly led the country before being sidelined by his protegé, the great liberator Simón Bolívar, who believed Miranda traitorously reached armistice terms with the Spanish Empire in 1812 and gave him up to Spanish authorities. Miranda died in a prison in Spain in 1816.

In the U.S., the fate of the American prisoners fueled public outrage and an acrimonious political debate about expedition. As Jefferson’s opponents criticized him for sanctioning intervention and neglecting to free the prisoners, his supporters lashed out at the opposing Federalist Party for allegedly orchestrating a rebellion in Spain’s colonies in the first place.

Miranda’s expedition was one of the earliest instances of debates of the U.S. considering intervention in Latin America. At this point in its young history, the U.S. government officially refused to countenance a military expedition.

But it would launch a long history of foreign elites like Miranda believing that American intervention could be a necessary tool for creating a new political reality at home. The goal, as ever, was freedom from unpopular rule.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks strode into the United States Senate chamber and beat Sen. Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, was retaliating for a speech Sumner had given condemning slavery and personally insulting a relative of Brooks.

Though lasting only a minute, the beating had far-reaching consequences. It pushed Americans one step closer to civil war.

And, as I discovered while researching my book “The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War,” it sparked a nationwide debate over free speech, political violence and the relationship between the two.

Speak without reprisal

Northerners denounced the caning as an attack on Sumner’s right to free expression. Even if they thought Sumner’s abolitionism too radical – as most white Northerners did in 1856 – they believed a U.S. senator had the right to say what he wanted without violent reprisal.

Visual images of the caning reflected the Northern take on free speech. In John Magee’s political caricature, “Southern Chivalry – Argument Versus Club’s,” Brooks wields a sturdy stick against a defenseless Sumner, who is clutching a pen in one hand and a rolled-up speech in the other. Winslow Homer’s print “Arguments of the Chivalry” depicts Sumner writing at his desk as Brooks prepares to strike.

Homer’s headline captured the message of both depictions: “The Symbol of the North is the Pen; the Symbol of the South is the Bludgeon,” which is a quote from a speech by antislavery activist Henry Ward Beecher.

Defenders of Brooks insisted any abolitionist speech was too incendiary to deserve protected status. Brooks’ hometown newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, berated Sumner for “licentiously prostituting the principle of freedom of speech,” reflecting the widespread conviction among white Southerners that free speech had limits.

Collapsing the distinction between words and violence

The argument between supporters of Brooks and Sumner was not isolated to the caning incident. Societies throughout history have punished language deemed blasphemous, seditious, inciting or slanderous. In most times and places, authorities have hewed more to slaveholders’ conception of free speech as a limited privilege than to abolitionists’ assertion of an absolute right. In the United States, the idea of free speech as virtually inviolable became mainstream only in the 20th century.

To pro-slavery Americans, abolitionist words warranted violent responses because such words were themselves tantamount to violence.

Alexander Stephens, future Confederate vice president, justified the caning by saying, “I have no objection to the liberty of Speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.”

Another Southern politician wrote to Brooks, “Address your arguments to the Skin, to the physical sensibilities.” And one of the many replacement canes given to Brooks bore the revealing inscription “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

Slaveholders were collapsing the distinction between words and physical violence. Language could constitute violence, and an act of violence could be a counterargument.

This logic has resurfaced in our own time, but instead of slaveholders using it to maintain white supremacy, today it is more often deployed to designate certain types of expression, such as burning crosses or displaying Nazi symbols, as hate speech against marginalized communities. It has also appeared in the increasing moves by the Trump administration to label dissent as terrorism.

Suppressing antislavery language

While most Northerners in the 1850s continued to value freedom of speech over violence, the caning convinced some that they must respond in kind.

One Minnesota newspaper editor hoped that “every Northern member will fully arm himself, and if necessary plant a cannon by the side of his desk to be used as the most effectual argument in favor of Free Speech.”

It was increasingly difficult to keep rhetorical and physical violence separate as the slavery conflict heated up.

This was a new phase in the history of free speech. While abolitionists and increasing numbers of Northerners fought for an expansive idea of free expression, publishing pamphlets and newspapers and submitting petitions to Congress, slaveholders tried to suppress antislavery language.

Terrified that abolitionist words might lead to rebellions by the enslaved, slaveholders feared for their survival. As prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Political reformer Lydia Maria Child described a growing threat: “A slaveholding community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder and, in this age, sparks of free thought are flying in every direction.”

Responding to those sparks of abolitionist free thought with violent repression, including acts such as the Sumner caning, slaveholders’ violence fueled the rise of the new Republican Party. The Republicans articulated their opposition to slavery with their slogan of “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”

Brooks and his kind ultimately brought about their own demise by provoking Northern outrage – outrage that ultimately led to war once the slaveholding South seceded.

Who gets to say what to whom? Are there any words that can justify violence? These questions polarized the country after the caning. In new forms, they continue to confound American politics 170 years on.

Paul Quigley received funding from The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.

But that’s what the Trump administration is doing by changing how one word in the Endangered Species Act is interpreted: harm.

For 50 years, the U.S. government has interpreted the Endangered Species Act as protecting threatened and endangered species from actions that either directly kill them or eliminate their habitat. A new federal rule change, announced July 10, 2026, keeps the first part – protecting against the direct killing of the species – but removes habitat destruction.

That matters, because most species on the brink of extinction are on the Endangered Species list because there is almost no place left for them to live. Their habitats have been paved over, burned or transformed. Habitat protection is essential for their survival.

As an ecologist and a law professor, we have spent our entire careers working to understand the law and science of helping imperiled species thrive. We recognize that the rule change could green-light the destruction of protected species’ habitats, making it nearly impossible to protect those endangered species.

The legal gambit

The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, bans the “take” of “any endangered species of fish or wildlife,” which includes harming protected species.

Since 1975, regulations have defined “harm” to include habitat destruction that kills or injures wildlife. Developers and logging interests challenged that definition in 1995 in a Supreme Court case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. However, the court ruled that the definition was reasonable and allowed federal agencies to continue using it.

In short, the law says “take” includes harm, and under the regulatory definition at the time, harm included indirect harm through habitat destruction.

The Trump administration has now changed the definition of “harm” in a way that leaves out habitat modification.

This narrowed definition unravels the most significant protections granted by the Endangered Species Act.

Why habitat protection matters

Habitat protection is the single most important factor in the recovery of endangered species in the United States – far more consequential than curbing direct killing alone.

A 2019 study examining the reasons species were listed as endangered between 1975 and 2017 found that only 17% were primarily threatened by direct killing, such as hunting or poaching. That 17% includes iconic species such as the red wolf, American crocodile, Florida panther and grizzly bear.

In contrast, a staggering 81% were listed because of habitat loss and degradation. The Chinook salmon, island fox, southwestern willow flycatcher, desert tortoise and likely extinct ivory-billed woodpecker are just a few examples. Globally, a 2022 study found that habitat loss threatened more species than all other causes combined.

As natural landscapes are converted to agriculture or taken over by urban sprawl, logging operations and oil and gas exploration, ecosystems become fragmented and the space that species need to survive and reproduce disappears.

Currently, more than 107 million acres of land in the U.S. are designated as critical habitat for Endangered Species Act-listed species. Industries and developers have called for changes to the rules for years, arguing it has been weaponized to stop development. However, research shows species worldwide are facing an unprecedented threat from human activities that destroy natural habitat.

Under the new change, development could be accelerated in endangered species’ habitats.

Gutting the Endangered Species Act

The definition change is a quiet way to gut the Endangered Species Act.

It is also fundamentally incompatible with the purpose Congress wrote into the act: “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved [and] to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species.” It contradicts the Supreme Court precedent, and it would destroy the act’s habitat protections.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has argued that the recent “de-extinction” of dire wolves by changing 14 genes in the gray wolf genome means that America need not worry about species protection because technology “can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.”

But altering an existing species to look like an extinct one is both wildly expensive and a paltry substitute for protecting existing species.

The administration has also didn’t conduct the usual analysis of the environmental impact that changing the definition could have. That means the American people won’t even know the significance of this change to threatened and endangered species until it’s too late, though wildlife groups are already planning to sue over the change.

The ESA is saving species

Surveys have found the Endangered Species Act is popular with the public, including Republicans. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates that the Endangered Species Act has saved 99% of protected species from extinction since it was created, not just from bullets but also from bulldozers. This regulatory rollback seeks to undermine the law’s greatest strength: protecting the habitats species need to survive.

Congress knew the importance of habitat when it passed the law, and it wrote a definition of “take” that allows the agencies to protect it.

This is an update to an article originally published May 13, 2025.

Mariah Meek has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several state agencies. In addition to being a professor, she is also the Director of Research for The Wilderness Society.

Karrigan Börk receives grant funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and several California state agencies. He is on the Advisory Board of Water Audit California, an organization that works to protect California’s public trust resources.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The 2026 midterms are here, and negative campaign messaging is flooding screens across the U.S. In Texas’ Senate race, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s comments about Democratic Texas Rep. James Talarico have gone viral.

Rather than simply suggesting Talarico is weak on border security or inflation economics, Paxton’s campaign has taken a different rhetorical approach. To quote Fox News host Jesse Watters, “The major factor in this race … is whether Tala-freak-o is a vegan.”

Though Talarico maintains he is not vegan, Paxton has referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico.”

Paxton and Watters aren’t the only ones making these dietary accusations.

Earlier this year, after Talarico ordered a potato, egg and cheese taco from a restaurant in Austin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott posted to his campaign social platform X account: “Homie is not beating the vegetarian allegations.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joked that if a soy latte could speak, “that would be Democrat James Talarico.” Even President Donald Trump has chimed in: “He’s a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”

Again, Talarico denies being a secret vegetarian or vegan. “I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” he has said. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

The accusations likely stem from a 2022 appearance with the Texas Humane Legislation Network when Talarico suggested Americans reduce their meat consumption for climate reasons. His girlfriend follows a plant-based diet. Nonetheless, Talarico says that his campaign “runs on barbecue.”

As communication scholars who study the symbolic roles of meat and meat-eating in political communication, we see the construction of “Tofu Talarico” not as a one-off political jab but as part of a more sophisticated rhetorical strategy by which politicians appeal to voters.

Attacks on Talarico show how, across American politics, what people eat is a metaphoric marker of who they are, from political affiliation to regional belonging and cultural values. Eating meat – or not – plays a huge role in the political process, and accusations of meat avoidance, regardless of whether they’re true, can be a potent rhetorical weapon.

Meat, metaphor and political communication

Communication scholarship shows that metaphors, when a word or phrase denoting one object or idea is used in place of another, are more than literary decoration; they shape the way we perceive reality, acting as part of a “conceptual system” that enables snap judgments and decision-making.

As mental shortcuts, or heuristic devices, metaphors are common in political communication. They’re a means to “see something in terms of something else.”

For example, in the case of Paxton and Talarico, allegations of vegetarianism and veganism are not about Talarico’s nutritional profile or even his environmental ethics. Here, “vegan” and its analogues metaphorically stand in for weakness and nonconformity, whereas “meat” and its affiliates stand in for strength, traditionalism and the stereotypical Texan way.

This usage is consistent with what food politics researchers call the “sexual politics” of meat, wherein meat imagery is often used in displays of traditional masculinity. This is evident in other jabs levied at Talarico. For example, Watters linked Talarico’s diet to his sexual orientation, joking on Fox News that Talarico was a “gay vegan” with a fake girlfriend.

Dietary demographics and election modeling

Dietary preference also links to key political demographics. For example, political scientists have explored whether the concept of a Republican vegan is an oxymoron due to the deep entrenchment of meat-eating and meat production in primarily conservative regions.

Overwhelmingly, vegans tend to be women, young and liberal. Across all political identifications, being male and white correlates with higher meat consumption.

Even the choice of where to purchase meat can be an electoral measure. Political journalist Dave Wasserman has suggested that the 2012 election was a contest between “well-educated, Democratic-trending Whole Foods markets and down-home, Republican-trending Cracker Barrel outposts.”

Meatless political appeals

The “meatless” have long been framed as social and political threats, levied in discussions of whether they should be politically elevated or subordinated. Historically, Western norms during the 19th and 20th centuries held that to not eat meat is odd at best, and suspicious at worst.

In the late 1800s, colonialism in Asia was partially justified on the grounds that Asian men were but “effeminate rice eaters” who, according to 19th-century neurologist James Leonard Corning, lacked “the intellectual vigor of flesh-eating men.”

Negative appeals to veganism again flourished in 2019 after Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” a resolution proposing to combat climate change. Conservative senators like Joni Ernst and Marsha Blackburn attacked the environmentally progressive initiative as a “war on meat,” posing an existential threat to meat eaters and cattle farmers. Notably, the Green New Deal did not contain meat mandates. In the Green New Deal discussion, though, this hypothetical meat ban effectively functioned as metaphorical shortcut for progressive political overreach.

This demarcation is not confined to one political party. In a Democratic primary debate in 2019, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker – a vegan since 2014 – was asked by a debate moderator if, as president, he would demand Americans follow his diet. Booker, surprised by the personal question, said no. He did not win the nomination.

More meat, less elite

Meat, or lack thereof, has gathered more significance in the second Trump presidency via Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. Kennedy, who touts his “carnivore diet,” says he “only (eats) meat or fermented foods.” He has even modified the food pyramid – the Department of Agriculture’s visual nutrition guide – shifting red meat from a food to be consumed sparingly to a high dietary priority.

Meanwhile, multiple Republican-leaning states have banned cell-cultured meat, or meat produced in a lab, for not being “real” and, so, being dangerous. After signing a ban on cultured meat, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared that the bill represented a battle against the global elite and its “authoritarian goals.”

2026 and beyond

While the beef between Paxton and Talarico will likely resolve after the 2026 midterms, appeals to meat, meat eaters and meat-eating in U.S. political communication will not.

As available meat substitutes increase, economic burdens on ranchers rise and debates over the meat industry’s impact on climate change intensify, we expect meat’s culture war cachet to surge too.

“Tofu Talarico” is just one of what will be numerous examples of meat symbolizing what the future of the country, its leaders and its citizens should be.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The murder rate in 2025 was the lowest in modern American history.

Preliminary data shows the murder rate fell nearly 20% from 2024, likely making it the lowest rate since reliable national data began to be collected in 1960.

Why was the murder rate so low?

I’m a professor of sociology and criminology who studies crime trends. In my book, “Crime Wave,” I explore how homicide rates have closely followed three trends over the past decade: alcohol consumption, drug abuse and firearm purchases. Now that the drug and alcohol crises are waning and gun purchases are falling, so too is the murder rate.

The 2015-2021 murder increase

The murder rate’s previous low came in 2014, capping a decline that had been more or less continuous since the early 1990s.

The murder rate usually rises and falls alongside other crimes, so through the 2010s, with property crime and overall youth offending dropping, criminologists expected the murder trend to follow suit.

Instead, the national murder rate increased sharply in 2015 and 2016, and then by an even larger margin in 2020.

Suddenly, it appeared that violent crime was spiraling out of control. By 2021, the homicide rate hit its highest level since the mid-1990s.

Popular, but incomplete, explanations

Some researchers and commentators attributed the homicide spikes to a so-called “Ferguson effect” in 2015 and, likewise, a “Minneapolis effect” in 2020. These theories are based on the idea that law enforcement officers were reluctant to be proactive or make arrests after nationwide protests against police brutality related to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The evidence for these claims is mixed.

There is little consistent indication that a decline in proactive policing contributed to a crime increase in 2015, although the homicide spike in 2020 was likely exacerbated by a police “pullback”.

Still, the majority of the homicide spike took place before June 2020, when protests over Floyd’s death spread nationwide. A study published in the journal Epidemiology found that the increase began as early as October 2019, suggesting de-policing in the summer of 2020 likely worsened the rise rather than caused it.

De-policing is, at best, an incomplete explanation.

Substance abuse, guns and the ‘homicide epidemic’

As I document in “Crime Wave,” the crisis in violence was related to another crisis: deaths of despair, which include drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related fatalities.

In the years leading up to the 2015 homicide spike, the prescription opioid crisis gave way to the illicit opioid crisis. As opioid use shifted toward heroin and fentanyl, it became deadlier. People were more likely to overdose, and the drug market moved from pharmacists into the hands of street dealers. It wasn’t just the pharmacological effect of drugs but the systemic nature of drug markets – disputes between dealers, buyers and users – that contributed to the spike in homicides.

At the same time, alcohol consumption began to accelerate. Alcohol is connected to homicide rates in part because it decreases inhibition, nullifying social and personal constraints. A high percentage of both homicide offenders and victims are under the influence of alcohol during a fatal assault.

Finally, amid growing distrust of the police and the government, firearm sales began to increase during 2015 and 2016, setting an all-time record in 2020. Given that assaults with a firearm are more likely to lead to the death of the victim than assaults using other weapons, confrontations became deadlier.

In my assessment, the homicide rate moved in near lockstep with trends in drug overdoses, alcohol consumption and firearm purchases, each of which increased by its largest margin in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic likely exacerbated the substance abuse crisis, and the gun-buying spree was especially pronounced at three points: in March 2020, when the U.S. declared a national emergency over COVID-19; in June 2020, following the Floyd protests; and in the months surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

With more people under the influence of alcohol, an expanding illicit drug market and more guns available, the murder rate dramatically increased.

The murder rate decline after 2021

After peaking in 2021, the murder rate began to fall. This occurred slowly at first in 2022, but the estimated declines in 2023, 2024 and 2025 have been substantial. The reversal in the homicide trend has followed a similar timeline as the substance abuse and firearm purchasing patterns, though some indicators of firearm possession, such as their use in suicides, remain elevated.

When the homicide rate was rising, it defied criminologists’ expectations, breaking away from the property crime decline of the 2010s. Now, the murder rate is falling back in line with other crime trends, many of which are also among the lowest ever recorded. As the substance abuse crises continue to wane, I expect murder rates to fall even further in the near future.

Additionally, with youth criminal involvement hitting historic lows, the next generation appears to be one of the least criminally prone in decades, which bodes well for continued reductions in the murder rate.

James Tuttle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the annals of Supreme Court decisions, the public likely remembers what justices wrote for the court in famous cases, such as the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.

Or perhaps the public remembers great dissenting opinions that display foresight and speak across the ages. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which legalized racial segregation, is a shining example.

But Supreme Court scholars and the public alike seldom pay much attention to concurring opinions, in which a justice expounds on the views of their colleagues in the majority. Some legal experts have denigrated concurring opinions as “the worst form of legal clutter… that are, usually, better left unwritten.”

On June 30, 2026, in the Trump v. Barbara ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson showed how wrong that view can be when she delivered a monumental concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil. The decision invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny citizenship to children born to foreign parents who are unlawfully in the United States.

Jackson, however, used her concurrence to go far beyond that and offer a new understanding of the origins of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and its promise of equal treatment. She did so while emphasizing the singular contributions of Black Americans to that endeavor.

Along the way, Jackson criticized Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s dominant originalist jurisprudence – centered on interpreting the Constitution based on how it was understood when it was adopted – for distorting the historical record. Jackson has previously signaled that a responsible use of history requires examining all relevant sources instead of cherry-picking among them to make a particular point.

As a politics scholar who has written about history and law, I believe that years from now, when Americans look back on Trump v. Barbara, it will be Jackson, not Roberts, whom they remember.

No shrinking violet

During her brief tenure on the court, Jackson has shown herself to be no shrinking violet. From the start, she has made her voice heard during oral arguments and in her written opinions.

As political scientists Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman wrote in December 2022, after her first three months as a justice, Jackson “was by far the most active participant in oral arguments.”

Since then, nothing has changed about Jackson’s style on the bench. The Washington Examiner reports that she “took up more than 20% of the Supreme Court’s questioning last term.”

Jackson also is not shy about writing dissenting opinions, and the occasional concurrence, whether in combination with others or alone. In both her dissents and concurrences, Thomas, the court’s only other Black member and its leading proponent of originalism, has been one of her main targets.

For example, in her 2023 dissent from the court’s decision to end affirmative action in higher education, Jackson directly criticized Thomas when she wrote that “those who demand that no one think about race … refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

Originalism, Jackson-style

Jackson has also called herself an originalist. However, she departs from Thomas’ brand of originalism.

For Jackson, to understand how any provision of the Constitution was understood requires unearthing sources of constitutional meaning that have been largely ignored by others on the court.

That vision was on display in her concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case. There, Jackson paid particular attention to what Black Americans did in inspiring and crafting the 14th Amendment.

This contrasts with the traditional originalist story that highlights white protagonists such as Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, who introduced the proposal to add the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, or President Andrew Johnson, who resisted the 14h Amendment on the grounds that it infringed on states’ rights.

Justice Thomas embraced this sort of vision in Trump v. Barbara. As he tells it, the birth of the 14th Amendment can be traced to the concerns of members of the Reconstruction Congress that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which extended certain fundamental rights to “all persons born in the United States,” would be repealed or overturned in the courts.

Black people have little or no role in Thomas’ account.

Black Americans and birthright citizenship

Jackson’s opinion registers her impatience with such an exclusion. She faults Thomas for his “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment (that) bears little relationship to the history of its ratification.”

Instead, Jackson traces the 14th Amendment to work done by people “within and beyond Congress.”

Jackson follows Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s suggestion that originalist judges should always attend to “all the people who are basically knocking on the windows and banging on the doors with their ideas about what should be in the Constitution.”

As Jackson recounts, “In the decades leading up to the ratification of the 14th amendment, black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country. There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding of the 14th amendment and, later, for the black civil rights movement more generally.”

Contrary to Thomas, who argues that birthright citizenship applies only to former slaves and their offspring, Jackson notes that Blacks “helped galvanize the push for full equality.” When ratified, Jackson explains, “the citizenship clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the colored conventions and their allies in Congress.”

And in a pointed dig at her colleague, Jackson writes that the “distortion of historical facts – retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims” – poses a grave threat to the constitutional project and America’s well-being.

Extending the work of the 1619 Project

Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright case builds on the approach to history taken by the so-called 1619 Project. That project, unveiled by The New York Times in 2019, “aimed to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, insists “the United States simply would not exist without us. The idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of black Americans have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”

Jackson fully embraces that story and, in her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, extends it to include what happened in 1866 when the U.S. restated and renewed its founding commitment to equality. She suggests that the 14th Amendment would not have come into being without similar “patriotic efforts” by Black Americans.

What makes Jackson’s concurrence extraordinary, Slate’s Robyn Nicole Sanders writes, “is that it insists on telling the 14th amendment story honestly … (and) it is at moments elegiac in its remembrance of the people whose suffering and resistance gave birth to the citizenship clause.”

That is why I believe Jackson’s concurrence will be remembered as one of the great opinions produced by a Supreme Court justice.

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When Colorado replaced its landmark AI law in May 2026, the move looked like a retreat from ambitious lawmaking. The state abandoned a first-of-its-kind framework that required companies to actively prevent algorithmic discrimination. That’s the risk that automated systems produce biased outcomes based on race, gender, age or other protected characteristics when making decisions about people’s jobs, loans or healthcare.

In its place, on May 14, 2026, the legislature passed something far narrower, including a set of transparency requirements telling companies what they must disclose to consumers.

I study how AI and technology are reshaping policymaking and democratic accountability. I also track state AI legislation through the U.S. State AI Policy Tracker at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

Colorado’s back-and-forth on AI legislation exposes a fundamental shift in how state leaders are thinking about governing AI. It also raises an unresolved constitutional question that could determine whether any state AI law survives federal challenge.

From prevention to disclosure

The original Colorado law, called the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act, asked companies to prevent harm. The replacement asks companies to inform consumers. That distinction may sound technical, but it reflects a meaningful change in governing philosophy.

The Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act was built on direct obligations. Developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems – such as tools used to screen job applicants, evaluate loan applications or determine insurance eligibility – had to establish risk management programs. The law also required companies to conduct impact assessments and take proactive steps to avoid discriminatory outcomes. In essence, the state was telling companies: Govern yourselves, and prove you’re doing it.

The replacement law, called the Automated Decision-Making Technology Act, takes a different approach.

Companies must notify consumers when automated technology plays a role in a consequential decision. That could include a hiring determination or a loan denial. If that decision goes against a consumer, the company has 30 days to explain how the technology contributed to the outcome.

Consumers can also request corrections to inaccurate personal data and ask for meaningful human review. The duty of care, risk management mandates and impact assessments from the first iteration of the law are gone.

For Coloradans, the practical difference is significant. Under the old law, a company using AI to deny a loan application, for example, would need internal processes designed to catch discriminatory patterns before they reached the consumer.

Under the new law, that company must tell the consumer that AI was involved and explain its role after the fact. However, the company has no obligation to audit the system that produced the decision. The burden shifts from the institution deploying the technology to the individual affected by it.

Equal protection out, free speech in

A federal lawsuit filed in April 2026 brought the timeline for this legislative overhaul forward quickly. Elon Musk’s company xAI sued to block enforcement of the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act, the original law.

Days later, the DOJ intervened in support of xAI. It was the first time the federal government had moved to invalidate a state AI law.

In its legal filing, the DOJ made two constitutional arguments against the original Colorado law. The new law neutralized the first argument but may have sharpened the second.

The first was an equal protection argument. The DOJ argued that the law’s antidiscrimination framework effectively forced developers to make race- and sex-conscious decisions about how their models behave. For example, companies would have been required to test whether their AI systems produced different outcomes for different demographic groups and to adjust them if they did.

That kind of government-imposed classification is one courts subject to heightened scrutiny, meaning the government bears a heavy burden to justify it.

The new law eliminated this argument entirely. The algorithmic discrimination provisions are gone, and there is nothing left in the statute that requires developers to monitor or adjust their outputs for discriminatory patterns.

The second argument made by the DOJ was a First Amendment argument, specifically what is called compelled speech. The idea is straightforward: The First Amendment does not just protect a person’s right to speak, it also protects the right not to speak. When a government requires a private company to deliver specific messages to consumers, that mandate has to meet a constitutional standard. Courts ask whether the government has a strong enough reason to force someone to say something they otherwise would not.

xAI characterized the Colorado law’s disclosure and reporting requirements as exactly this kind of forced communication.

In my opinion, this argument was strengthened, not weakened, by the rewrite. The new Automated Decision-Making Technology Act kept little besides notice and disclosure duties, so the new law is, at its core, the government telling companies what they have to say to consumers.

In narrowing the statute this way, the state legislature may have made the compelled speech argument easier to isolate and litigate, even as it made the equal protection argument disappear.

The executive order behind the lawsuit

The DOJ’s decision to intervene in a state-level lawsuit did not come out of nowhere. It followed directly from Executive Order 14365, which President Donald Trump signed in December 2025.

The order declared that a “minimally burdensome national policy framework” should govern AI, and it directed the DOJ to challenge state laws that conflict with that vision. The order also instructed the Commerce Department to publish an evaluation of existing state AI laws, identifying those it deems “onerous.” It included a specific mandate to flag laws compelling disclosures that could violate the First Amendment.

That evaluation was due by March 2026, but it has not yet appeared. If that list materializes – and if Colorado’s new law lands on it – it will signal that the administration sees this state not as a single problem to resolve but as a test case for a broader federal campaign against state AI regulation.

Dozens of states have introduced AI-related legislation in 2026 that touches on the same areas Colorado tried to regulate, including employment, lending, housing and healthcare.

What Coloradans should expect

For now, not much changes in Colorado. A federal judge stayed enforcement of the original law in April 2026, and that stay applies to the replacement law as well. This means none of its provisions can be enforced yet.

The stay will remain in place until at least 14 days after the court rules on xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction, which is a court order that would block the law from taking effect while the case is decided. That request will not be filed until 28 days after the state completes its rulemaking process. So the timeline depends on the attorney general, the courts and the DOJ’s willingness to press a challenge against a law that already conceded substantial ground.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Stefani Langehennig receives funding from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Centennial Center Research Center..

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a bombshell.

On July 6, 2026, Politico published the detailed account of a Maine woman who said she had been sexually assaulted by Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner almost five years ago. Platner called the allegation “categorically untrue,” then said he was “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

Platner had gained the fervent support of progressives in Maine and outside. But he had been dogged by accusations of, variously, racist, misogynist and dishonest behavior – he claimed not to have known the meaning of an SS tattoo on his chest. But his supporters remained behind him.

Soon after the assault allegations appeared, the Platner campaign was in trouble. His early political champion, Sen. Bernie Sanders, took a day to echo what party officials and once-supportive social media stars had almost immediately demanded: that Platner drop out of the campaign. By the evening of July 8, Platner had suspended his campaign.

Politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit spoke with political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, who has followed the campaign and talked with Platner directly in 2025.

An NPR host yesterday opened an interview with a Maine reporter by observing, “A lot going on in your little state.” Maine has two senators, just like other states. Why is this such a high-profile race?

I thought when I moved to Maine in 2019 from Virginia, I was going to the quiet countryside. Politics has been anything but since then. Maine was destined to be in the national spotlight this year because Republican Sen. Susan Collins is up for reelection, running for her sixth consecutive term in office. Every time she is up for reelection, she is viewed as a vulnerable incumbent, if not the most vulnerable incumbent, in the Republican Party. So we were destined to get lots of outside money and outside attention before the whole Platner story even began.

In the past, candidates generally emerged from a pipeline – electoral experience, vetting by the party. They did not emerge out of candidate recruitment by outsiders or party critics. But nationally we’re seeing that kind of insurgent recruitment, including with Platner. Is this a new kind of politics?

Political scientists have been thinking about that question for quite a long time. As far back as the early 1970s they started thinking about how changes to the structure of these party organizations, in particular the rules governing the nomination process, began to produce a different type of candidate. Those changes sat side by side with different types of technologies that I think also increased the likelihood of a candidate-centered campaign.

Now, you could say we’re living in an anti-establishment era, which might mean that voters on the right and the left are more disposed or more likely to favor candidates who are running against the establishment.

As unusual as Graham Platner is, this style of politics is increasingly more common. In 2010, scholars were becoming attuned to something known as the “invisible primary.” That’s where a lot of endorsements among party elites and interest group activists, well before voters had any say in the primary process, meant these insiders had come to some sort of consensus on who the candidate should be.

There’s a flip side of that, which is mirrored in Donald Trump in 2016 and in some of these progressive insurgencies of the past couple of years. Would-be candidates themselves and activist organizations are able to put forward potential contenders for nomination outside of that traditional system where you work your way up through legislative office. That’s clearly what happened with Platner.

In 2025, individuals associated with the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign – now sort of the Bernie Sanders machine – came up to Maine looking for candidates. They found a guy who did an ad against some Norwegian salmon commercial fisheries, realized he was cut straight from central casting, and that’s how we got Graham Platner.

Is there a connection between Platner’s populism and why his deeply engaged supporters weren’t able to look past his obvious problems?

Donald Trump, as a populist candidate, has been able to let scandal after scandal just roll off his shoulders. The left was very critical of Trump supporters forgiving him, to the extent that even Trump himself famously says he can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone and people will still support him.

There’s an equivalency with Platner, and some of it has to do with a populist style of politics. Platner and Trump really excel, as all populists do, in defining who they’re against, at identifying the enemy, whether it’s immigrants, the deep state, the swamp, the oligarchy or the establishment.

Both Platner and Trump have viewed the national media as an enemy. Every scandal, every attack, every criticism that’s levied at the leader of a populist movement seems to vindicate their idea that there’s some larger force out there trying to take them down. The sexting scandal that broke about a month ago, it was the Platner campaign itself that said this was a hit job, a smear from The New York Times.

There is a sizable mass of individuals in the state, including some elected Democrats, who view this latest set of allegations of sexual assault that Politico reported as a fabricated hit job from the Democratic establishment.

If the critics are the enemy, then Maine’s Democratic Party has a serious problem in terms of who gets to be the next candidate.

Not every Democrat in Maine is ride or die with Platner, nor were they when he did a very impressive job in getting the most votes ever in the Democratic primary last month, after Gov. Janet Mills had suspended her campaign.

The Mills campaign really never mobilized. By early spring here in Maine, when Mills tried to fight back, she ran one set of ads calling out some post that Platner had written diminishing sexual assault, particularly in the military. The left in the state attacked her pretty strongly, saying, “You’re going to weaken our candidate. This isn’t right.”

The fact that a lot of the women who were featured in the ad were Democratic Party stalwarts kind of played into this idea that it was the establishment taking on the insurgency. Several months later, it seems they might have had a point.

Are there lessons from what happened with Platner?

The simple, shallow lesson is this was just bad campaign strategy.

People came in and recruited Platner and just didn’t do enough opposition research. So the next time that they come in and pull somebody out of central casting, they just would want to hire better lawyers to dig up dirt on their own candidate.

But what’s problematic about this is something else.

I sat down with Platner in October 2025. I asked him, “Well, why are you wearing the Scarlet D – for Democrat – around your neck? Why would you do that?

And he said, “The only reason I’m doing it is to get access to Act Blue, so I can raise money.” Act Blue is the Democratic Party’s main fundraising platform.

Editor’s note: The Conversation has reached out to the Platner campaign for a comment and will update this story if it receives one.

So you have this individual who doesn’t want to be a Democrat. He’s openly said he’s not going to vote for the Democratic leadership. He’s an acolyte of Bernie Sanders, who also doesn’t want to call himself a Democrat. What are such individuals able to do? They’re able to take over the Democratic Party.

This is the same type of problem that we saw in 2016: An individual who never really wanted to be a Republican, who was a Democrat for much of his life, bursts out on the scene and ends up taking over the Republican Party.

So the deeper, longer-term problem is the hollowness of America’s organized political party life. I get that there are very few defenders of our two-party system, but our politics, our political system, our Constitution only work with two healthy, robust political parties.

When they can be hijacked by outsiders, parties are not able to do the work of selecting candidates, of building consensus, of doing the work of democratic persuasion. You might say it becomes an entirely different political game altogether.

This story has been updated to reflect Platner’s withdrawal from the Senate race.

Nicholas Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

From 2020 to 2024, Florida’s population grew by 8.5%, from 21.6 million to 23.4 million.

This is nothing new: The state’s warm weather, amenities that include world-class golf courses and beaches, and lack of income tax have long attracted newcomers, so Florida often leads the U.S. in population growth.

But recent data suggests that population growth may be slowing.

As demographers – social scientists who specialize in population change – we evaluated the current trends in the Sunshine State.

Property tax amendment on the ballot

Demographics have political implications, and at the moment, Florida’s government is relying on continued growth.

In early June 2026, the state Legislature approved a ballot initiative for November aimed at reducing property taxes for homeowners. The proposed amendment to the state constitution would expand the homestead tax exemption, not including school taxes, for current Florida homeowners on their primary residence. The exemption would start at US$150,000 in 2027, then ramp up to $250,000 in 2028 and be adjusted for inflation after that.

In other words, the tax collector would deduct the exempted amount from the assessed value of a homesteaded property, and the property tax rate would then be applied to that lower number.

Supporters of the tax cut argue that reduced tax revenue would be recouped by the continued arrival of new residents. These newcomers would be buying homes at the usual property tax rates, with an exemption of only $50,000. After four years, that would increase to $250,000. It’s also possible that the proposed tax cuts might attract new residents.

If Floridians vote for this exemption in November, the state’s continued population growth would be vital to maintaining local and state government budgets.

The state Legislature also recently approved a new congressional map for 2026. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says this new map is needed to address “malapportionment” and uneven migration patterns within the state since 2020. Before redrawing the districts in April 2026, the governor more than once had said that the state was shorted a congressional representative because there was more population growth in some areas than others.

Is Florida still growing?

To determine whether Florida’s population is still growing, we used the Census Bureau’s components of change dataset. The Bureau provides annual estimates of population size and the factors responsible for changes: births, deaths, domestic in-migrants, domestic out-migrants, immigrants and emigrants.

From this data, we estimated the annual growth rate for Florida and its 67 counties, along with the contribution of three factors: natural increase, meaning the difference between the number of births and deaths; the net domestic migration, which is the difference between the number of people moving in from other states and moving out; and net immigration, meaning the difference between the number of immigrants and emigrants.

Our data shows that Florida’s population was still growing in 2025, but at an annual rate of just 0.9%. This pales in comparison to Florida’s peak growth rate of 2.5% in 2022 and is also much lower than the five years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Three demographic factors explain this change. First, domestic migration has slowed to a trickle. In 2025, just 22,000 more people moved to Florida from other states than moved out. For comparison, the annual average during the pandemic, from 2020 to 2022, was around 208,000. While no single shift can fully explain this slowdown, rising housing costs in the state may be a culprit. Predicted increases in both property insurance rates and severe weather may also be discouraging newcomers from moving to Florida.

Second, since 2020, more Floridians are dying than being born each year. While this natural decrease is not unique to Florida, its social, economic and demographic impacts may be more pronounced if the state is no longer a migrant magnet.

Third, immigration to Florida from abroad dropped sharply in 2025, a year that saw new anti-immigration policies nationally and within Florida. Plummeting immigration is concerning, since our data suggests that immigration was the biggest contributor to Florida’s growth since 2023.

Where is Florida still growing?

While the currently available data does not indicate the exact changes in the types of people moving in and out of Florida, we can find clues by looking at county trends.

Florida’s peak growth rates occurred following Desantis’ 2021 decision to lift pandemic-era restrictions. During that time, growth was most concentrated in Florida’s retirement destinations.

Sumter County, home to The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, had an astonishing growth rate of 7.4% in 2022. Gulf Coast counties with large retiree populations, such as Collier County where Naples is located, also grew rapidly at 3.6%.

Post-pandemic, these same places saw growth rates slow. Sumter County’s rate fell to 2.3%, while Collier County grew by just 0.1% in 2025.

Some Florida counties are still growing rapidly. St. Johns County, located in the Jacksonville metro area, led all counties in the state with a 3.9% growth rate. St. Johns is suburban, with a high percentage of families with children and some of the best-rated schools in Florida. This suggests that this growth may be due less to retirees and more to families with children moving in from other parts of the state.

Marion County, home to exurban Ocala about an hour north of Orlando, was the only county to experience higher growth rates in 2025 than in 2022. Last year, Marion County grew by 3.4%. Notably, the median home value in Marion County was around $275,000, while the statewide median home price was roughly $397,000. Growth in places like Ocala suggests that rising housing costs are indeed shaping Florida’s demographic future.

Florida has long thought of itself as a state that catalyzes growth, backed up by its booming population. However, our calculations show that population growth in Florida, particularly from out-of-state migrants, has nearly stopped.

What this means for the future is unclear. The parts of the state growing fastest now were not the places growing fastest earlier this decade, and other counties may surge between now and 2030. Regardless, Florida’s population slowdown will bear watching by its government and demographers.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Young women are moving away from exclusive heterosexuality faster than young men.

In a recent poll, Gallup found that LGBTQ+ identification has more than doubled since 2012, with especially high rates among Gen Z women, or those born between 1997 and 2012. In 2023, 28.5% of Gen Z women identified as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men.

As researchers who study sexuality, gender and young adulthood, we, along with our former colleague Sarah R. Young, have tracked these patterns in our Human Sexualities Research Lab since 2011. The national trend matches what our interdisciplinary team – spanning psychology, social work and gender studies – has documented over a decade.

Our most recent study asked whether young women and men are changing in similar ways across three measures of sexual orientation: sexual attraction, or who someone sees as a sexual partner; sexual behavior, or who their sexual contacts or partners actually are; and self-identification, or how they label their sexuality. Our findings suggest they are not. In our analysis, this gender gap is not only about who claims an LGBTQ+ identity; it is also about how the boundaries of heterosexuality are changing.

Women are drifting from exclusive heterosexuality

Identity is only one part of sexual orientation. People also differ in who they are attracted to and who they have sex with.

In a study now under review, our team examined 15 years of responses from more than 10,000 public university undergraduates in New York state between 2011 and 2026. We also analyzed more than 700 open-ended responses from 2024 and 2025 in which the same student population explained why they chose their particular sexual identities.

Our research found that, across 15 years, young women have steadily become less likely to report being exclusively attracted to the other sex. In 2011, about 22% of female students reported attraction that was not exclusively to men; by 2026, that had increased to close to 50%. Similar movement appeared across sexual behavior and identity: The share of women who reported not having exclusively male sexual partners increased from 8% to 35%, while the share identifying as something other than exclusively heterosexual increased from 18% to 44%. These trends were broadly consistent across racial groups.

In our survey, students rated sexual attraction on a scale from exclusively other-sex attraction (women attracted only to men; men attracted only to women) to exclusively same-sex attraction (women attracted only to women; men attracted only to men). For young women, the shift was not mainly from exclusive attraction to men to exclusive attraction to women. Instead, women’s responses spread across the scale, from mostly attracted to men to mostly attracted to women. The largest change was a decline in exclusive attraction to men.

Young men have barely budged

Young men showed no comparable long-term shift and instead remained concentrated in exclusive heterosexuality; any movement away from that was limited and less sustained. The share of male students reporting attraction that was not exclusively to women remained nearly unchanged: about 14% in 2011 and 13% in 2026. This lack of movement was also seen in behavior and identity.

Among students who identified as something other than exclusively straight, male students were more likely to report exclusively gay identities than female students were to report exclusively lesbian identities. This is consistent with gender norms that leave men less room for sexual ambiguity and sort male desire into either entirely straight or entirely gay.

The pandemic didn’t start the trend

Researchers and journalists have suggested Covid-era lockdowns changed conditions for exploring sexuality and gender: Social life moved online, dating was interrupted, and some people had more time for reflection, online connection and experimentation away from peer scrutiny.

Our research does show a pandemic-era shift. Around 2020, more women reported being attracted to people other than just men, a change that leveled off somewhat after 2023. But COVID-19 lockdowns did not create the broader trend. Among women, movement away from exclusive heterosexuality was already visible before 2020 and has since continued along the same general path.

In contrast, there was no steady, long-term movement among men away from exclusive heterosexuality. The changes we observed were smaller and more concentrated around the pandemic and the years that immediately followed.

Why the ground shifted for women

To understand why these changes matter, consider what feminist writer Adrienne Rich argued more than four decades ago: Heterosexuality has never simply described who someone desires. As a social expectation, it has helped define women and men as complementary but unequal. It gives men greater authority and social status, encourages women to organize their attention, care and futures around men, and makes that arrangement appear normal, natural and even romantic. As the norm, it also stigmatizes those who do not conform.

Over the past century, feminist movements expanded women’s access to education, paid work, political rights, contraception, divorce and other legal protections. Those changes made adult life outside of heterosexual marriage easier to imagine and, for some, easier to pursue. Although scholars argue this progress has been uneven and, in some areas, has stalled, women today encounter a wider range of possible futures – professional, partnered, child-free, queer, bisexual, activist, caregiver or combinations of these.

At the same time, LGBTQ+ visibility, same-sex marriage, online queer communities, expanding language for sexuality and gender, and the #MeToo movement have challenged the idea that heterosexual partnership should be the unquestioned center of women’s lives.

For men, heterosexuality defines masculinity

Similar efforts to reimagine masculinity have existed for decades, but they have had less cultural reach and have not loosened masculinity’s reliance on heterosexuality to the same extent. For many, masculinity is still tied to heterosexual dominance, sexual confidence with women and distance from anything seen as gay or feminine.

Heterosexuality also still offers men advantages in relationships, including authority, sexual entitlement and unequal freedom from domestic labor.

Feminist progress loosened assumptions that men and women naturally complete one another through heterosexual relationships. As gender becomes less tightly bound to heterosexuality, marriage and family, some people have found room for exploration. Others have responded by trying to restore more traditional views of masculinity, femininity and heterosexual roles.

That may explain why public arguments about what young adults should want – in dating, sex, marriage, family and identity – so often circle back to gender.

Whereas some young adults embrace queer, pansexual, nonbinary or fluid self-descriptions, others turn to ideals that restore traditional roles: “trad wife” femininity, which casts homemaking and deference as aspirational; “feminine energy” dating advice that prizes softness, receptivity and letting one’s partner lead; male dominance promoted across the manosphere; or claims that men and women are naturally suited to opposite roles. These attempts to restore traditional gender roles offer certainty as expectations linking gender, sexuality, relationships and adulthood weaken.

Our findings don’t just tell the story of young people becoming less heterosexual or young women becoming more queer. Instead, we believe they support the idea that heterosexuality may no longer organize gender in quite the same way for women and men. For young women, its boundaries appear more permeable. For young men, heterosexuality remains bound to masculinity, status and social recognition.

Our research examined young adults at a pivotal life stage, as they begin figuring out who they are and what they want. But those identities form within a changing social world, shaped by rising LGBTQ+ identification, political backlash over LGBTQ+ rights and shifting expectations for dating and family life.

The larger question is what happens as these young adults carry different relationships with gender and heterosexuality beyond college. Those relationships will shape, and be shaped by, dating, families, workplaces, politics and law. They will also face expectations about what women and men should want, with all the pressures, backlash, policing and resistance that come with them.

In our analysis, the gap between women and men may persist unless masculinity itself becomes less dependent on dominance, control and compulsory heterosexuality.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation