this is true but it's true in a different way than people think the report NEVER MENTIONS INFLATION the word "inflation" appears 18 times, but exclusively for "inflation-adjusted" statistics on media spending the report ignores *all* the decisive issues of 2024 www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Ehhhh. I don't think that's the right interpretation. There's always going to be pull towards status quo in these questions, I think the real comparison is between the two "move" options

The extreme sloppiness of the DNC autopsy is exactly the point of incapacity in the formal party as they chose to contract out the job to someone who was manifestly incapable.

There's a lot wrong with the DNC autopsy, but the sheer laziness of it all is perhaps the worst

Bad : that this rubbish is going around again Good: I get to share this excellent history by @bretdevereaux.bsky.social acoup.blog/2025/07/11/c... It’s long but in depth and shows really well the amount of work it took to survive for the vast vast majority of people in the past.

Free Primary Care For All? It's possible! We have a policy about it! www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

They should really just publish the damn thing so we don't go into a primary cycle where candidates get asked about it. It's silly.

More DNC posting, the org's finances are currently held up by a fifteen million dollar loan. This is filling the gap of extremely lackluster fundraising for now, but it can't forever open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

People online should quit trying read the tea leaves of every single special election, uncertainty + the online environment makes you unlikely to learn anything. open.substack.com/pub/theargum...

this from the new @gelliottmorris.com Strength in Numbers poll gets at the core problem for Democrats in winning over swing voters swing voters hated Joe Biden, they hated the inflation, they hated him running again and then hated how he dropped out www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-23...

Living in a high trust society is good, actually

oh MY godddddddddddd. i hate it.

ankylosaurus ERASURE

Low key he's bringing back hortatory names. Collarbone Pete, Canthal Tilt Jones, Cheekbones Johnson

Happy tax day! New from Searchlight: Voters think paying taxes is part of being a good citizen....and feel like they're "a punishment". But, the thing that would make them feel better is increased transparency, not paying less.

Be very careful about claims like "the number of people <X> is the highest its ever been". This is often true, including in this case, because of the growing population. The percent of Americans who had cost burdened rent (>30% of income) is lower than it was a decade ago.

Please no. This will not go well. Let us at least run a candidate who can make *new* mistakes.

Like they’re literally having a conference call today to talk through the mechanism for impeachment, Bluesky stop falling for Dem rage bait challenge level impossible

I will never get over people saying Kamala campaigning with Liz Cheney meant she was more neocon than trump when he was openly campaigning with Rubio

Each individual chapter of the first Malazan book is incredibly compelling but the whole experience is of someone hurrying to make all the plot happen before they run out of space. I hear the second one slows down a bit?

Our latest poll out today: www.cnn.com/2026/04/01/p... Full toplines/crosstabs: www.documentcloud.org/documents/27...

Electricity prices are essential to the US economy. But it’s very hard to get recent, granular data on them. We’re changing that. Today, @heatmap.news and MIT released the ELECTRICITY PRICE HUB, a new tool breaking down local power rates and bills going back to 2021. electricity.heatmap.news

This is super illegal, but also hilariously ignorant of how election administration in the US works. It's incredibly decentralized, controlled by county level officials, and not something the federal government controls.

This keeps happening and it keeps making this place worse (not least because people with real expertise stop posting here because of it). There is also a fairly dire tendency for people involved to double down rather than admit causing / contributing to a pile on in error. Sigh.

also republicans love to pay for twitter but i don't think anyone is really using Grok

I got distracted and went looking for what campaigns or PACs are paying for AI tools. It's not that many just yet! open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

I'd be happy to see more specific examples in this piece, but Democrats broadly are absolutely saying Voter ID is bad in all cases. Here's Indivisible on this indivisible.org/resource/vot...

People hate high prices SOOOO much

there are quite literally not enough of them to do this!

New polling today- voters oppose supplemental funding for the Iran war. Unsurprisingly, there's a big gap on partisanship. www.searchlightinstitute.org/research/a-m...

New short paper w @jkalla.bsky.social ! Candidates gain from moderation, but less than many theories expect. Many conclude voters must not care about issues. This is wrong. Small *average* effects mask large effects on specific issues & are consistent with widespread issue-based voting 🧵

There's a growing worry that AI will break empirical social science -- that agents can p-hack until they find something that "works." We think that worry deserves to be taken seriously. Our new paper shows that is true empirically and makes it precise: njw.fish/static/paper...

Interesting AmericasBarometer result from @johnsides.bsky.social in this week's @goodauth.bsky.social newsletter. Strong public willingness to trade features of democracy (free elections, free expression) for material and physical security, with some party differences. mailchi.mp/goodauthorit...

If you want something fun to read between bouts of tarriff-related-scrolling, I have a suggestion cauldronllc.substack.com/p/hermetica-...

My new column: If people want the horrors of ICE to end, we must oust the GOP. All Democrats must vote for the Dem in the primary who can win the general ... and in the general vote blue no matter who. No 3rd party voting or staying home. That's deadly. www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...

Most Americans have 3 months of savings and are able to finance normal expenditures in the absence of a missed paycheck. America is a rich country - most (not all!) Americans are financially comfortable compared to anywhere else (or Americans at previous points in history).

Reading this paper in more detail you actually learn that the effect is found to be null among Democrats and Dem leaners and on partisanship in general and the changes in attitudes they find are concentrated among republicans.

Wrote about this more for Searchlight. It's a huge tragedy and a blow to public opinion research. open.substack.com/pub/searchli...

Gallup says it will stop doing presidential approval polls (after 88 years of doing it) because of "an evolution in how Gallup focuses it's public research". This is eliminating a time series that goes back to FDR. thehill.com/homenews/med...

Very cool paper- kind of wild that you have to literally pay people to pay attention before this content has an impact

We find that voters are slightly, but not substantially better represented than non-voters. In contrast, people active in multiple forms of nonelectoral participation (like demonstrations, petitions, contacting officials) are better represented.

I kind of love this, although I don't think people who aren't survey nerds would tolerate it. My least favorite thing about polling is the false sense of precision.

On the blog today: how similar are the donors of major senate candidates? Turns out, something like 60% of them are literally the same people open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

oh god we're doing it again aren't we

It's probably a futile exercise to be trying to explain to the folks in this argument that they largely agree, but still: everyone agrees that incumbents with fundraising advantages do very well. This is why I have so much heartburn over primarying swing district candidates!

Could not disagree more with this, I love my job very much but if I was suddenly not needed for my job, I have a stack of hobbies and side projects waiting to fill that gap.

This guy doesn't know that women love to take surveys (or like, presumably he does and is just being a dick)

More stuff from our polling that is also kind of a rorschach test- 23% of Trump voters say ICE tactics are too forceful. Is that a. depressingly low or b. surprisingly high? I lean towards b, personally.

New from Searchlight today, some hopefully helpful polling on ICE. Voters reeaaaally hate ICE detaining Americans and entering homes without warrants. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

Madel had surged into contender status for the nomination in December and built his message around 1) defending cops 2) attacking corruption (ie the social services fraud story) quite something www.startribune.com/who-has-earl...