President Trump's national approval rating is still historically low — 39.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average and 40.2 percent at FiveThirtyEight — but "as state-by-state polling of Trump's approval rating shows, the national mood really isn't so national," Nathaniel Rakich notes at FiveThirtyEight. "Voters in different corners of the country differ in how deep their anger runs — and at whom it's directed. ... To take control of the Senate, it doesn't much matter how Democrats perform elsewhere if they can't win both Nevada and Arizona and defend red-state Democrats in places like Missouri and Indiana." According to a new poll by Axios and SurveyMonkey, that could be very difficult for Democrats to pull off.
"Five Senate Democrats would lose to a Republican candidate if the election were held today and three have approval ratings under 50 percent," Axios says. Moreover, out of the 10 states Trump won and where a Senate Democrat is up for re-election, Trump's approval rating tops 50 percent in six of them — West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio. The most vulnerable Democrats, according to the survey, are Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.), and Claire McCaskill (Mo.).
"With the election many months away and final Republican opponents not set, these numbers are likely to change as real GOP challengers get involved in the race," Axios says, but they "underscore how hard it will be for Democrats to pick up the two seats needed to win the majority despite Trump's troubles." SurveyMonkey and Axios conducted the online poll Feb. 12-March 5 among 17,289 registered voters in the six states above plus Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Axios did not provide a margin of error. Peter Weber
A new program in California is helping former inmates get back on their feet by pairing them up with people who have rooms to spare, NPR reports.
The Homecoming Project, run by nonprofit organization Impact Justice in Alameda County, California, gives subsidies to those who are willing to rent a room to a recently-released former inmate. The group covers the formerly incarcerated person's rent for six months and goes through a lengthy screening process to find a good home for them. Not only does the organization aim to help former inmates return to a normal life as quickly as possible rather going from prison into restricted communal living, but they also hope to fight misconceptions about ex-convicts in general, they told NPR.
"Project Homecoming says you're a person and we're going to treat you like a person and give you the footholds and the scaffolding to be able to come back home and to be a full member of society just like anybody else," said Alex Busansky, who runs Impact Justice.
Coordinator Terah Lawyer also told NPR that "most of our hosts are familiar with redemption and change and want to be a part of helping be the stepping stone for someone's second chance." There are currently only six former inmates participating in the program, but Impact Justice says it is looking to expand to 25 this year. Brendan Morrow
The Trump administration has owned up to taking 2,737 migrant children from their families after they crossed the border. A government report shows that number is probably way off.
Family separation is largely attributed to Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, and previous counts usually just included children split from their parents after the policy took effect in spring 2018. But the Office of Refugee Resettlement actually saw a "steep increase" in family separations that started in summer 2017, a report issued Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services' Inspector General says. "Thousands of children may have been separated" during that time, the report says — and the government never tracked just how many.
Even before zero tolerance took hold, "HHS faced significant challenges identifying which children in its care had been separated by" the Department of Homeland Security, and which had just arrived alone, assistant inspector general Ann Maxwell told BuzzFeed News. That meant the government had no accurate count of which children were separated, and couldn't easily find those children's families after a July 2018 lawsuit ordered their reunification. Separated children "were still being identified more than five months after the original court order" to find their families or sponsors, the report says.
Since the lawsuit, DHS intake forms now indicate whether a child was separated and include parental information. But Maxwell is still skeptical if they've recorded enough data to eventually reunite a child with their family, she told reporters Thursday. Based on this report, the inspector general's office plans to issue recommendations to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Read more about the report's findings at BuzzFeed News and read the whole report here. Kathryn Krawczyk
Hollywood has spent more than a decade trying to get a Monopoly movie made, and they're still not giving up.
A film based on the popular board game is moving forward at Lionsgate, with Kevin Hart starring in the lead role and Tim Story (Ride Along) directing, Deadline reports. Hart, who has also signed on to produce, confirmed the news with an Instagram post.
This is the first we've heard about the Monopoly movie in nearly four years, as it was reported in July 2015 that it would be happening at Lionsgate, but there had been no updates since then. Attempts to turn the board game into a movie stretch back much further than that, though. Ridley Scott was set to direct back in 2008, as Slashfilm reported at the time. Universal eventually dumped the movie, only for it to be revived in 2015.
Although there's not much by way of a storyline or characters to adapt from Monopoly, that's not stopping Hasbro, which is probably targeting the success of 2014's The Lego Movie, as well as Hart's live-action family friendly hits like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. With Hart on board, could it finally be time for this project to pass go and collect $200? Lionsgate can certainly hope. Brendan Morrow
