FiveThirtyEight’s top politics stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular In Politics] Thursday, September 30, 2021 [1. White, Evangelical And … Progressive]( [POLITICAL-OUTSIDERS_0930-4×3]( Welcome to Political Outliers, a column that explores groups of Americans who are often portrayed as all voting the same way. In today’s climate, it’s easy to focus on how a group identifies politically, but that’s never the full story. Blocs of voters are rarely uniform in their beliefs, which is why this column will dive into undercovered parts of the electorate, showing how diverse and atypical most voters are. [Read more]( [2. We Polled Members Of Congress … About Baseball]( [Congressional Baseball Game]( Once a year, members of Congress take a break from delivering grandiose speeches and passing historic legislation to do something significantly more humbling: play baseball. On Wednesday evening, Democrats and Republicans will face off in the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual event that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. Though the play is something less than major league quality, the game is beloved enough to fill the lower seating bowl at Nationals Park, inspire creative signs and cheers, and even attract its own sabermetricians. [Read more]( [3. Why House Democrats May Be More United Than They Seem]( [Nancy Pelosi walking down the hall]( Two factions of the Democratic Party in Congress are currently playing tug-of-war over the centerpieces of President Biden’s legislative agenda. Moderate Democrats have balked at the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation budget bill, attempting to delay a vote on it in the House and insisting that the price tag will have to come down in the Senate. At the same time, House progressives have threatened to block a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation bill passes first — with the current price tag intact. (The House is scheduled to vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday.) [Read more]( [4. When It Comes To China, Biden Sounds A Lot Like Trump]( [Xinhua Headlines: Xi holds extensive strategic communication with Biden]( President Biden hasn’t been shy about undoing the legacy of his immediate predecessor. It was a rallying cry of his presidential campaign, and as such it has defined his first eight months in office. On Biden’s first day in the White House, he signaled climate change would once again be a top issue by bringing the United States back into the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Donald Trump had withdrawn from when he was president. Biden also reversed Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has taken a number of steps to repudiate a president who made white identity politics and racial resentment central to his message. [Read more]( [5. Texas’s New Congressional Map Could Give A Huge Boost To GOP Incumbents]( [TX-Social-4×3]( On Monday, Texas lawmakers gave a first glimpse at what the state’s new congressional districts may look like. The redrawn map was highly anticipated given that Texas gained two additional congressional seats — the most of any state — during the reapportionment process and because Republicans are fully in control of the state’s redistricting process. Yet the new map, if passed, would not substantially alter the topline partisan breakdown of Texas’s seats. It appears that Republican mapmakers prioritized defending the GOP’s current seat advantage over trying to significantly expand it. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Forecasts How popular is Joe Biden? [How popular is Joe Biden?]( [See all polls]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: How To Poll People About Their Political Identity]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.