Recent quotes:

Bernie Sanders, and How Indian Food Can Predict Vote Choice - The New York Times

In Iowa, supporters of Mr. Sanders are its biggest fans: 71 percent of them report going to an Indian restaurant sometime in the last 10 years. Mr. Biden’s supporters are less likely to have done so by about 30 points. This makes sense. Mr. Sanders’s supporters are younger and perhaps more likely to live in the college towns or in major metropolitan areas. Still, this relationship persists even after accounting for age, race, gender, education, ideology, being an independent, or where a person lives in the state. Mr. Biden loses 14 points of vote share among those who have been out for Indian food relative to those who have not, and Elizabeth Warren loses three. Mr. Sanders gains eight points, Pete Buttigieg gains five, and Ms. Klobuchar gains four.

PC is for wussies (just don't call me a hick!)

Objecting to this sort of thing is for the coddled, the liberal, the élite. […] The ability to shrug off the mean crack, the sexist joke, the gratuitous jab at the weak is, in some quarters, seen as a form of strength, of “being flexible,” of “not taking shit serious.” A woman who wilts at a sexist joke won’t last long in certain workplaces. A guy who prioritizes the sensitive side of his nature will, trust me, not thrive in the slaughterhouse. This willingness to gloss over crudeness becomes, then, an encoded sign of competence, strength, and reliability. Above all, Trump supporters are “not politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.

Iowa neighborhoods and churches

To explain Iowa’s swing state status, Lasley notes that Iowa has had a reputation as a conservative state with values that focus on farm, faith, and family. But in Iowa, those community values also tend to have what Lasley called a “progressive edge”: Iowa has never had segregated schools and in 1851 became the second state to legalize interracial marriage. In 2009, Iowa became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage. “It’s hard to hate someone when you have to live next to them and you depend on them for help and you sit elbow to elbow with them in the pew every Sunday morning,” Birkby says. “This is what has always made Iowa so great. We are great neighbors, because we have to be. Or we were anyway.”

Income chasm in Minnesota

Since the 1970s, the city’s minority population has swelled, and segregation has worsened, particularly in its schools. About 62 percent of black students attend high-poverty schools, compared with 10 percent of white students. Beyond Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in black-white student achievement. Recently, WalletHub analyzed the black-white gap in census indicators such as household income, homeownership and educational attainment. It ranked Minnesota as the worst state for financial inequality.
Harvard University said it had a 2.1 percent drop in applications for the next school year, led by a 5.8 percent fall-off from the Midwest. Atlanta-based Emory University reported a 3.3 percent decrease from the region, while Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, attributed a 14 percent slide in total applications partly to a 20 percent drop from the Midwest. The decline at Dartmouth was the biggest in 21 years. Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, is projecting an 8 percent drop from the region and 11 percent overall.