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...

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