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...

Chief Strategist for Rand Paul.

You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

I've been reading about historical changes to technology and trying to grapple with the alternatives, here's an extremely rambling take about that open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

In the 1990s, cable news networks discovered that viewers were less likely to click away from coverage of culture war issues than coverage of economic matters. TV news started giving social issues greater priority - and caused voters to do the same, a new study suggests www.vox.com/politics/475...

extremely cool info environment to tweet something and a half hour later once it’s riled everyone up to be like “no haha jk it’s the opposite actually”

All of these fucking careless guys and the people responsible for their deployment should be fired

Ritchie adding "getting phished by a bad QR code" to the list of risks of interacting with ICE

Imo the important part here is "say what you mean". If you mean "abolish" as "shunt immigration enforcement to another agency", say that. If you mean "stop enforcing immigration law", say that (although you'll be way out of step with voters)

It's impossible to comply with these goons, they tell her to go, she starts to go....and then the guy runs up and smashes the window and they all surround her and drag her out. Criminals doing carjackings are more organized than this

Why is so much of modern American politics about people allegedly drawing/writing/failing to write things on coffee cups.

I would really love to see the distribution of responses here, since I think the median numbers are obscuring a lot. Generally when I look at data like this it's all peaks at various round numbers.

A WSJ visual investigation found that the Minneapolis ICE killing is one of 13 times federal immigration agents have used deadly force against civilians in vehicles since July.

I kind of thought we were past this sort of thing but Bowen Yang posted an apology about his (correct!!) comments on Jasmine Crockett. He was right and should say it, etc

Damn Canadian pollsters are cooler than us

Here’s a comment for the people who are upset that MN hasn’t charged Jonathan Ross already: If you just Leeeroy Jenkins this shit you will lose and you will empower fascism and murder. It is indescribably hard to prosecute cops for murder. It is even hard when the murder is ON VIDEO. /1

FREY: “.. the administration is sending a message to the entire country: If you show up for your immigrant neighbors, or even are simply present when those neighbors are taken, your rights will not be protected by the law and your life will be at risk.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/o...

absolutely horrific

the flip side of this is if you try to do "soft popularism" and talk about what the public wants/thinks and how to work around where it diverges from your beliefs, people immediately accuse you of secretly wanting whatever you think the public wants

it is very, very important to believe true things, even if false things are better evidence for what you want to be true

Feels like a narrative violation but nationally however you slice it, asking rents nationally have grown less than wages and less than non-shelter parts of CPI since the pandemic, basically averaging 2.5% per year

They've got tinfoil hats for your junk now, oh my god

Omg new Isabel Kim story this is a great day

There are barely enough Bsky users for a crosstab but from what data we have we gotta keep in mind what a weird place it is ideologically. If understanding politics matters to you, please remember you are currently on a platform with ~zero people who hold America's most popular political label.

So I strongly disagree with the notion floating around here that Democrats retaking Congress (or even just the House) would have little effect on the war that Trump just started unlawfully. That is pretty much the only meaningful move on the table and war opponents should pursue it relentlessly.

Just as a practical matter, how is the United States going to “run Venezuela” after the overnight abduction raid. Do US forces currently control an airport? A television station? A major road?

I cannot *believe* we are arguing about WAR scores again. I am so tired. This does not matter to the underlying point, and I'm more interested in arguing about Casten's substantive point, with which I also disagree

What's an incumbency effect, we've never heard of that, that definitely couldn't impact the difference between raw overperformance and WAR scores.

Texas is very obviously a red state, that isn't an insult, and I hate the way candidates talk in primaries- today on the blog open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

release the report you cowards

We dropped at an AI poll yesterday at Searchlight! A lot of AI polling has been either very industry driven, or detached from the politics of it all, and I feel our work filled a real gap. The tl;dr is: people want this regulated. Now. www.searchlightinstitute.org/research/ame...

Is it worth a whole blog post to explain why "a blue state" is a term with meaning and is not the same thing as "a state Democrats might win" or should I just save my breath and non crockettpost

New from me at Searchlight- Voters have a pretty dour view of the state of government and corruption

I'm going to walk into the sea ☺️

Happy Thanksgiving! If you're making cocktails, consider this one (but don't make my mistakes) open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

Today on the blog: Democrats should run weirder campaigns, and people with clever ideas should go run a long shot state legislative campaign open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

Seems like someone could do a better more deeply reported story on this!