"you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by “financial news for low-trust illiterates” accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)"

Hahaha

And that has sweeping implications for how elections work, how politics works, how people work.

I mean it’s exceptionally clear people thought the economy was bad. It’s pretty clear that was moving votes. The question is WHY they thought the economy was bad: -because of what they were experiencing? -or because of what they were hearing? And the evidence heavily points toward Option B, IMO

the piece is not supposed to be an exhaustive account of why Harris lost — more a note that the reasons Trump won are not all about Trump

It’s truly a loss today. First time since 1948, the government didn’t collect information on unemployment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isk...

As an occasional viewer of television who has seen a few clips from Shark Tank, I've been trying to get a meeting with O'Leary. So far for me it's been crickets. cc @mcuban.bsky.social please tell him to return my calls this is an outrage

I do actually think that Biden should have done a lot more to get Maduro removed, and that if he had managed it that maybe could have been one of the few things big enough to swing the election. Trump is not going about this a rational or sane way and it's going to be a shit show.

This is really the whole ball game here. I do not want to get into traps like "greeted as saviors," but the vast majority of Venezuelans want the Maduro regime gone, and we know this because they just voted to get rid of them last July. But how he is removed matters, as does what comes after.

this also is, technically and literally, true (and, thanks!)

The regime’s authoritarian ambitions have no limit, but its capacity very much does. In pursuing their priorities of lawbreaking, corruption, soothing the president’s ego, and ending democracy, they’re reducing their own resources. Fewer lawyers = fewer politicized prosecutions and convictions.

Kids: Study counterfactual reasoning.

I think this is really underestimating the informational value there. You can go on Metaculus where there's no direct cash at stake and get very similar forecasts, and the evaluations show that these markets perform extremely well when we compare them to human forecasts or measure calibration

I'm with Kevin here. What they're good for is quantifying conventional wisdom. That can be useful in some cases, but it doesn't tell us much about whether conventional wisdom is correct. (Also reporting it has the same misinterpretation problem as poll-based election outcome odds).

We really need to stop treating betting odds (even if you call them "prediction markets") as politically meaningful data. They're not assessments of what people think (that's polls), they're assessments of what some bettors (many seemingly with more money than sense) think that people will think.

This headline doesn't mention that he got *super* into race science late in his career.

To show how bad things are — and, no, I am not even saying this is new, but — here is the latest from the Trump admin on conditions at the Broadview ICE facility outside Chicago. A humane govt would be addressing bedding and food before starting detentions — not needing time after a TRO to do so.

If anyone’s actually concerned about mass migration and/or drug trafficking, collapsing the Venezuelan government with no plan to stabilize the situation after would be, um, counterproductive.

He gets remembered as a safe boring pick for VP, but one thing where Kaine is an outlier is he is genuinely good on congressional war powers and has had a keen interest in it for a long time, including finding bipartisan support when he can.

to be fair, I shouldn't be arguing about p-hacking on social media either

I think Will's basic thesis is that "the economy" in polls is largely driven by social media spoonfeeding outrage when compared to prior political eras. He has advocated for Dems to focus on driving narratives rather than only responding to them.

gotta kill em. time for them to go. 18th century ass technology. we have a Temu constitution

This is what every single person with any experience in China has been warning about from the start. Very good WaPo story by Katrina Northrop and Rudy Lu. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1... And good, clear headline!

frequently when things are many peoples’ problem, they’re no one’s problem …

The infuriating thing is that we have objective mathematical tests for detecting gerrymandering and courts have dismissed them, either out of partisanship, which is surely part of it, or possibly for cultural reasons, since they are accustomed to reasoning with words, not numbers.

The original undemocratic gerrymander is the US Senate. 500K US citizens in Wyoming get 2 senators and 40M US citizens in California get the same. If democracy ever arrives in America, it will be with a fairly apportioned Senate.

48% yes, 19% no, 32% don't know for proportional representation. That's with very little public campaign for PR so far. Tracks similar results we found a couple of years ago polling various reforms in Wyoming. It's not some wonky thing only nerds get. The concept is intuitive and naturally popular.

A jury's power to acquit (not necessarily to convict) is the most unchecked power that exists in our whole system of government. No judge can overturn it. No prosecutor or president can challenge it. Nobody can punish them for it. They don't have to explain why. End of story, case over.

"Over the past 18 months, we have reduced user reports of scam ads globally by 58 percent" Easy to do when you change the UI so things are harder to report

100% correct. The Dem ads about Trump weren't just "orange man bad." They were: I'm focused on lowering costs while my GOP opponent is serving Trump, who is raising costs with tariffs, canceling infrastructure, etc.

Sam Altman saw Trump give taxpayer $$$ to Intel and Nvidia, and realized he can get a turn at the teat too

And apparently little self-awareness that the reason they are hated is because of how ecstatic they are to hurt other people themselves.

Cool. What would you call the other wing then? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

"They view empathy as weakness." That's a lot of it, yes. The 2020s American right is so into the idea that empathy is weakness—see Trump, Musk, multiple Christian best-sellers, etc.—that they convinced themselves their eagerness to hurt average Americans would make Democrats give them concessions.

Sky News does a great job here of showing that right wing voices get outsized amplification on X. The why of it is complicated (we have upcoming work on this). But the fact if it is undeniable. The platform is also full of clickbaity bullshit. Not unrelated.

This headline is a good reminder that it's bad on purpose so you'll click on it.

Cops are great @gregdoucette.bsky.social

Well played.

Monstrous

They did that with 2022 CO senate race too.

The Supreme Court has to understand that the president is breaking the law in ways I like. Or at least in ways that I'm unwilling to challenge even though they're objectively not achieving their supposedly national interest goals and also breaking the law. So the Court must defer to that.

NOVA Magas so wrapped up in their made up story they're now afraid the BLS economist nextdoor is going to go full dexter on them

Pro Tip: If you donate to @opensecrets.org you will get access to their weekly newsletter in your email and it truly is some of the best politics reporting happening in the current era. Yes, I'm biased (I sit on the board of this non-profit and I'm a donor), but I don't have to promote their stuff!

The single biggest question in American law today is: Are lies a get-out-of-laws-free card? Can the government simply lie to grant itself new powers? And is everyone else under an obligation to act as if obvious lies are true, or at minimum, that they might have merit and deserve respect?

I've seen this go by a few times on TikTok now and I have to say, I love this idea. We need a way to convince people to keep running even if they don't win, maybe building the loss into it as a troll move is the secret.

The initial versions of ECA reform did a bunch of stuff Republicans would have never supported. It got to a good bill that was able to pass, I worked on hammering out some of the details, but Mitch McConnell effectively had a veto over what could or couldn't be in it.

I think there's merit to a standalone gerrymandering bill, but Manchin and Sinema wouldn't have granted a legislative filibuster carveout for anything. The one bit of election law that did pass that Congress, the Electoral Count Reform Act, was painstakingly negotiated to pass w/ bipartisan support.

“The Groups made Mister Manchin so anxious that he hid behind the filibuster forever!” (In reality Mitch McConnell took control of committees hostage from the incoming majority, and Manchin and Sinema “freed” the hostages by promising to preserve the filibuster under all circumstances.)

Or North Carolina.