Key to understanding the senior generation of Democratic pols, eg Schumer, is that they are influenced more by worry about "Vietnam syndrome"--the idea that the US or Dems were too reluctant to use force after 1973--than by Vietnam itself, even if they were in college/draft-age during that debacle.

Thrilled to see this strong and informed endorsement of popular assemblies (also citizen or civic assemblies) from Jacobin, for Mamdani and NYC in particular. Assemblies appeal to centrists as a way to find consensus, but can also build popular power and agency. jacobin.com/2025/12/mamd...

New post on affordability, and why a political theme that doesn't name a villain might work. open.substack.com/pub/markschm...

What annoys me most about "Strong floor, no ceiling" (which will soon be forgotten) is that someone, or some comms firm, probably got paid well for it. (Yes, I've been dealing with some of the "progressive communications firms" recently. Does it show?)

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025. US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom. open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

I disagree. He's not talking about "Cadillac" insurance policies, generous private plans that were taxed under original ACA. He's never heard of them. He's talking about actual Cadillacs, the car. He's referencing an old talk-radio canard from the 1970s/80s about people on welfare driving Cadillacs.

Love this in @newrepublic.com from the brilliant @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social & @adambonica.bsky.social, but while the headline is, Gen Z is alright, I'm also struck by how little difference there is between those born in 1970 and the 1940 cohort, on racial resentment. Gen X is a political disaster.

Anxiety about *change* to health care has been a key factor in several consequential elections: 1994 (Clinton plan), 2010 (ACA), and (to some degree) 2018 . Even if people are unhappy w/ health care costs and choices, change is terrifying. GOP setting itself up on the wrong side of this dynamic. 1/3

Hemp vote indicates that cannabis is long past being a wedge issue, or even a "social issue," but is now just a parochial ag/revenue issue. Senators from legal states expecting revenue don't want competition from online/gas station hemp products. Many senators from legalized states voted no.

Still upset about no power of the purse language. You truly do hate to see it. The Trump admin undertook the most expansive set of illegal budgetary actions of any president in history, and broadcast as loudly as possible they’d keep doing it, and nothing. Budgetary lawlessness.

Few of us will see the faux-gold applique on the walls. This is the closest to the White House ("the people's house") that most people will get, looking west from 15th St along Pennsylvania Ave., yesterday evening at 5:45 pm

A pro-affordability, anti-Trump-corruption message unites the party. Every candidate can run on that, and every candidate can have their own take to fit that to their constituents. There's really no need to find fights to pick when the party agrees on more than it disagrees

The minority report of the committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, signed by Cheney when he was a member of the House in 1987, is a key document in the theory of an all-powerful president. nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/182...

One underrated aspect of Zohran is that he always wears a suit, always presents himself professionally while still doing fun and approachable retail politics. You don’t have to drape yourself yourself in hypebeast and post thirst traps, you can be fucking grown up respecting the office and be fun

Not to diminish law review articles & law school committee work, but right now law professors should be working collectively on an intellectual & service project of immense, existential importance: building consensus around a revolutionary constitutional framework-of a Reconstruction 2.0 magnitude.

He's going to put his name on it, isn't he?

"He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." --Washington Post reporter David Broder to Post columnist Sally Quinn. About Bill Clinton. In a more naive time when "trashed the place" was a metaphor for not going to the right parties. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...

Okay, look, I gotta ask because I feel like I’m having a stroke. Did we switch teams on the democracy versus economics messaging? Because the way I remember it, the libs ran on democracy and the left said they should focus on material issues like healthcare instead and now it’s opposite, I think?

For @newamerica.org's #DemocracyDeciphered podcast, I did a short (16-min.) explainer on govt shutdowns. Points at the end on why this is different: 1 Vought layoff threat; 2 Admin will break a deal & rescind spending anyway; 3 Admin got the $ it wants, e.g. ICE. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

"Infrequent voters are voting. It's a very low-trust environment. So the traditional left-right spectrum and going moderate on issues, it's not as clear. Anybody saying, 'I can win the election by tweaking positions" slightly is selling you something," says @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social.

Of all the awful things that Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins did as senators, their joint creation of DHS, in the post-9/11-Iraq frenzy, may be the awful thing with the most lasting bad consequences. A full reorg should be a priority for a future Dem president, but will take time.

I wouldn't write off Dem senate candidates in OH, IA, NE. All long shots but worth trying. But try a thought experiment: Is Sherrod Brown the strongest D candidate in OH? Of course. He ran 3 pts ahead of Harris and won 3 times. Would he be a stronger candidate if he declared himself pro-life? No! 1/

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

This also goes to a point @donmoyn.bsky.social made last week: College campuses are *uniquely* open, among all American institutions, to debate and disagreement. You can't go to an evangelical church (or any church) or corporation and expect them to give a hearing to an alternative viewpoint.

I've been involved w/ a number of think tank startups, but this is the first I've seen started with the mission of *not* doing things. There are no ideas here My only other thoughts were in response to Jentleson's 9/16 op-ed markschmitt.substack.com/p/the-groups... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/u...

Please join New America's Political Reform Program, Columbia World Projects, and @north.america.fidemocracy.org tomorrow from 11am to 12pm ET for an exciting panel that will explore the past, present, and future of assemblies in America, and their role in broader institutional reform movements.

One of the privileges of my life was to work w/ both @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social and @jamellebouie.net at @prospect.org in 2008-2011, though they didn't quite overlap. They are not "opposing viewpoints," but are both motivated by curiosity, not just glib "takes," and a commitment to human dignity. 1/2

I offer up “Borgen” as a tv series that political scientists appreciate for getting politics right.

My office for 10 years has been at 15th and H in DC, above Joe's Stone Crab. The President of the United States, describes our block: “Here I am standing out in the middle of the street. I wouldn’t have done this three months ago, four months ago. I certainly wouldn’t have done it a year ago."

I guess on this point I am on team abundance! The climate crisis is very real, and very serious. But I don't think scarcity in an economic sense is the right way to think about it. Seriously addressing climate should raise material living standards - there's no tradeoff.

If we're going to have a Department of War, maybe it's time to revive the idea of a Department of Peace, which has a long (Benjamin Rush, 1893) and bipartisan history. (I associate it w/ Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-OR, but there were many other R supporters.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departm...

I served on a DC jury last week. For @newamerica.org , I wrote about the weird experience of civic responsibility in an occupied city where Jeanine Pirro is the US Attorney: www.newamerica.org/the-thread/d...

It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.

I have found a lot of use for Melinda Cooper’s concept of the anti-social state: a government that exists only to extract wealth and inflict violence, and dismantles all its pro-social and life-enabling functions. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

I might quibble with some of the details, but this taxonomy of different abundance tendencies is really useful. A lot of discourse on this website is driven by the mistaken belief that Moderate-Abundance Synthesis is the only tendency out there. www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-va...

The "messages" Shor tested, the ones that tested well as well as some of the real ones from electeds, are all just terrible messages. They jam so many concepts-Trump takeover, distract, stunt, tariffs, price of groceries, hitting working people, "picking political fights to change the subject,"

the actual communication problem democrats have is this: their most prominent national figures filter everything through focus grouped lines and are incapable of plain speech

It's not just that no Dem politicians use the words on 3d Way's silly banned-words list. There are real problems w/ the way Dems talk, but they aren't about individual words. They involve insincerely mouthing talking points from groups like 3d Way, or talking programs rather than human goals 1/

On the Biden presidency scorecard, it needs to be noted that he appointed at least the second best justice of any Dem president since LBJ, w/ Ginsburg 1st and Sotomayor close. And by far the best writer since the previous Justice Jackson.

Arrested for "carrying a pistol without a license" is only possible in DC and the 21 states that require licenses. In almost all the red and very purple states (+northern New England), this would not be a crime. Which is why most of them have higher rates of gun violence and murder than my city.

13% of Republican senators voted against Bork's confirmation. So did the very conservative Democrats Howell Heflin & Richard Shelby of Alabama (Shelby would soon switch parties). Even 86-yr-old racist Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi voted against Bork. This wasn't even a close call.

NEW in Bolts: Seattle's democracy vouchers program hands residents $100 to donate to local candidates and it’s credited with broadening civic involvement. Voters appear to have extended it by 10 years. boltsmag.org/seattle...

There have been so many rounds of, "We need a ___ for the left": We've needed a Grover Norquist, a Powell Memo, a Limbaugh, a Heritage Fdn, a Weekly Standard, a Fox News, a Joe Rogan, etc. Maybe a pluralistic, democratic alternative needs different kinds of people and orgs than an authoritarian one.

Think tanks are a bit tangential to a lot of what Trump 2.0 is doing, but the overall war on expertise and high quality information gathering presents hard questions for how Washington has been wired since roughly the Cold War.

A great piece, but leaves out the crucial role for organizations in this benighted moment to recruit and nurture the experts that can help inform policy when facts and expertise matter again. Even if we make no headway in the short-term, we need infrastructure in place for when new space emerges.

United Kansas’ lawsuit against the 1901 anti-fusion law is a reminder that we can learn a lot from our history. There was a time in Kansas when voters had more choices. Read more at: www.kansascity.com/opinion/read...

I wrote about the role of think tanks in a moment when knowledge and ideas are under attack. Many thanks to colleagues at @newamerica.org and other organizations for sharing thoughts on this challenge. democracyjournal.org/arguments/th...

New report from @maresastrano.bsky.social @mschmitt9.bsky.social and @oscarp.bsky.social rp.bsky.social‬ lays out the why, how, and where of expanding access to statewide ballot initiatives to more states: https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/expanding-citizen-led-policymaking/

It's not just the ACA expansion of Medicaid. It was the incremental work of *decades* to expand Medicaid beyond the small group also eligible for AFDC. It ended the trap where ppl lost health coverage if they earned a little more money. One of the great generational policy achievements, tossed away.

Great to hear this, but I worry that 49+ of his colleagues barely know what Tillis is talking about. They've shut out info about the interaction btw Medicaid and their rural hospitals; they assume ppl who raise their hands at town halls are paid agitators. They've cut off any normal feedback loop.