Jim Geraghty of National Review Online highlights once huge problems that appear to have been resolved.
They are big and consequential, and strike me as a better record for incumbent Republicans to tout on the campaign trail than posing as born-again data center opponents.
One: Islamist terrorism a shadow of its former self.
Whenever I write this, I knock on wood; the world seemed peaceful and quiet on September 10, 2001, too. But the available data indicate that the preeminent threat in American life for most of the past quarter century is genuinely smaller, weaker, and so minute a menace that most Americans rarely ever think about it. …
… Two: The terrifying spike in violent crime from during the pandemic is . . . largely fixed?
After a troubling spike during the pandemic and immediately after, the violent crime rate has not just returned to pre-pandemic levels, some analysts contend it is now dropping to levels lower than before the pandemic. …
… Three: Drug overdose deaths are declining rapidly.
It wasn’t that long ago that the term “deaths of despair” — fatalities caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related diseases — was common in our discourse and a sign of a faltering, failing country.
But we’ve made significant progress on the drug overdose front over the past three years. Total opioid drug overdose deaths dropped from 105,007 in 2023 to 79,384 in 2024. …
… Four: The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025.
Think of this as the silver lining to the declining birth rate. … While every child is a blessing and parenthood is one of the greatest joys in life, we all recognize that high schoolers having children of their own is extremely suboptimal. This is part of a 35-year-trend; in 1990, there were 521,626 births to U.S. women aged 15-19 years, and last year there were only about 126,000. But what’s more, in 1990, there were approximately 8.83 million teenage girls aged 15 to 19 living in the U.S.; in 2025, there were 10.76 million teenage girls.
