IMO there is a fair amount of motivated reasoning that goes into scaling the data that creates this kind of chart, but a lot of people's reactions to this stuff just reflect having very bad intuitions about what it looks like when a group is negatively selected.

not unrecognizable but he does look like if Belgium had a dictator

One thought I keep having re: Callais, beyond dummymander wish casting, VRA districts anchored Dems in the South to a specific vision of their state parties and their relationship to the national party. All gone now and we really have no idea how much the party in these states will change to adapt.

One thing I've been thinking about since the election results, devolution in the UK is a little silly but it's wild how much structural experimentation the regional govts in the UK have done while U.S. states have stronger powers and fewer constraints but mostly choose to LARP as the US Congress.

Glad people are coming around and this is a good piece overall, but, I'm consistently shocked by how few American political scientists know that PR is *better* for local representation than single member districts when it's a consistent finding in comparative politics with a robust theory behind it.

Great story that covers some of the gaps in my understanding of the Platner story, basically: 1) National anti-establishment Dems discover and promote Platner, introduce him to local prog and union groups. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/05/01/p...

I've been resisting it, but I think I've been @leedrutman.bsky.social pilled on proportional representation for america. It doesn't prevent democratic backsliding in all countries — and can sometimes facilitate it. But it seems like a uniquely appropriate solution for the US' current problems.

Old Soviet joke, man is arrested for waving around a sign that says 86-47. He explains to the Department of justice that he only meant peacefully voting out of office or impeaching 47 for his many crimes. DoJ replies: 'Don't be foolish, we all know the only way to 86-47. '

Trump knows Vance wants to be president but thinks he should aim higher at being the world’s second catholic integralist astronaut.

I went down a rabbit hole about messianism in the Haredi community recently and the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned it to orthodox and ex-orthodox people are some of the strangest talking points I have maybe ever heard about why something they’re clearly deeply alarmed by is a non-issue.

I went down a rabbit hole about messianism in the Haredi community recently and the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned it to orthodox and ex-orthodox people are some of the strangest talking points I have maybe ever heard about why something they’re clearly deeply alarmed by is a non-issue.

I went down a rabbit hole about messianism in the Haredi community recently and the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned it to orthodox and ex-orthodox people are some of the strangest talking points I have maybe ever heard about why something they’re clearly deeply alarmed by is a non-issue.

I find this line deeply frustrating and tedious, impeachment as a method of holding govt ministers accountable barely worked and was abandoned in the UK, then never worked for 2+ centuries in the U.S., it’s not a scandal that something that never worked and was never going to work didn’t work.

Ok, serious poli-sci methods question, how common is running analysis in the cloud at this point. I have been optimizing something so it can run on <16GB of memory (ie actually run in R on my PC) and I want to hype this as a replication feature but worried I’ll get a lot of ‘just use AWS’ feedback.

I totally believe that term limits erode expertise and move power from Congress to external party orgs and lobbyists. The thing is that there are still people outside Congress who would like Congress to do its job. There don’t seem to be many of those people in Congress.

The disconnect about the Iran War and TACO is that TACO works because markets get to avoid a panic sell off and Trump retains agency to do the same thing again later, but Iran's leadership can't let up while that agency exists because they value being alive for longer than the next ~ two years.

I'm sorry, but no, Trump does not have a pet Bishop named Robber Baron. This was fine as an April fools joke but it's time for the writers to give him a real name that is less immersion breaking.

Of the many horrible things the Trump admin has done perhaps the worst is that it has forced me to pay enough attention to markets that I immediately understood what these were without labels like some sort of stock pervert.

The year is 2028, Trump has been assimilated by a powerful foot fungus that emerged from Rubio and others having to wear 5 pairs of socks every day to fit in their Trump shoes. The fungus made peace with Iran and stabilized world trade, GDP is up 15%.

I’m a broken record on this, but if you look at how Duverger’s law is supposed to work mechanically, the U.S with its 1.1-1.9 party system is a way bigger violation than the U.K. with its 2.1-2.9 party system. Duvergerian FPTP systems develop serious third parties when under stress.

Kash Patel destroy the effectiveness of the security services via autocratic personalization any % speed run.

Easy to treat this as a world historic irony, but the constitution explicitly gave the president more power than the King of Britain had when it was drafted and scholars have been trying to resolve the contradiction between that decision and the rhetoric of the revolution for centuries.

The dynamics of the redistricting fight are fascinating to me from a 'are legislators self interested or not' perspective. Blue state Rs have basically accepted that their political careers are being sacrificed so that right wing psychos in the Houston suburbs can go have fun being in Congress.

It doesn't often come up, but there is a latent dimension with the filibuster of outsider pols who see it as a way for 1 incumbent to disrupt the status quo vs more party building oriented pols who see it as a way to obnoxiously grandstand that makes everything worse. Happened with Sanders too.

disturbingly plausible

I try to stay off Xitter these days but it's been fascinating watching right wingers start to come to terms with the fact that there is no cleansing or redemptive power in violence that can make their policy goals achievable and gradually going insane.

I think this is basically correct but more broadly they are trying to use citizen ignorance about the kinds of voter data that is widely available to gin up a panic about being targeted through your voter registration. It's not so much a sincere ask as an implicit but disingenuous threat.

The DOJ demand for voter rolls is not about micro-targeting. That kind of voter data is already freely available between the public voter lists and data brokers. The difference in what they're demanding is more technical backend metadata so they can make spurious claims about list maintenance.

Seeing calls for Dems to offer Greenland an independence referendum in 2029 if Trump really annexes it, but the clear solution is for the rest of the U.S. to be turned into a non-state territory which the Greenland Dems disingenuously claim will be given sovereignty or statehood every few years.

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Cool flag, right? Fucking sick. The Roaring Bear Flag. That and so much more, available at wideawakes.army 👁 🫡

So far Goldman vs Lander is looking like a pretty solid test case for my "competitive races that are not structurally pre-determined (e.g. huge recession, backlash to scandal, etc) are won by the person who wants it more' theory.

The irony here is that the Roman senate was both far more administratively critical and much more protective of its own power than the U.S. Senate is today even centuries into the imperial period.

I feel like the through line to a lot of these shockingly polite and insightful local wing nut takes on Mamdani is that the kind of politics leftists want to do, retail driven, pluralist, material demand oriented, is actually a reality in New York City in ways that it isn't even at the state level.

from: [email protected] subj.: DC recs Hey Jeff, taking a young friend to lunch next week in DC. Was thinking we'd try Radici? from: [email protected] subj.: re: DC recs not a good idea .. xexican food prolly more her style. good cantina down the street ,, very "spicy"

This is a useful thread but I also feel like on a conceptual level there is an unreasonable desire to have it both ways here in survey research. We want lower info, less considered responses because the types of people who give them are under-surveyed, then we get mad that they're not very coherent.

This also really complicates the 'Behn was a bad fit for the district' discourse. She ran in a district that was 1/3rd of a normal Dem district that could easily elect a progressive Dem and 2/3rds of a deep red rural district. Hard to get 'candidate fit' when the district itself is frankensteined.

Something that I keep seeing in survey responses but haven't really seen discussed in the media is how figurative and occasionally literal necromancy has become a load bearing GOP heuristic for everything. Voting is compromised by dead people on the rolls, welfare is compromised by dead people, etc.

IMO this is sort of backwards, stereotypically the machines are/were very good at campaigning and very bad at 'good govt' type stuff (efficient services provision, minimal corruption, etc). Cuomo is better at running for office then running the govt, he's just not very good at either.

The really funny possibility here is that some future set of Trump admin or post-Trump actors rationalizes and lowers the tariffs but in a way that causes the effective rate and enforcement felt by consumers to go up. You could even name the legislation after a class of imported goods like Tea.

At this point if I were running someone's campaign for anything more important than dog-catcher I would have a few of these non-scandals to leak to opposition media as an inoculation tactic. There is clearly jut no discernment about what to run with from outfits like the NY Post at all.

One of the weirder things about Sliwa is that he is an OG right wing paramilitary operative in ways that Trump is at least in theory trying to emulate with the current iteration of ICE and violent currents within MAGA but neither recognizes any kind of kinship with the other.

Everyone already implicitly believes the tax code should hose wealthy DINKs who rent bougie apartments. The potent distributional question right now is whether the tax code should favor working parents with young children trying to buy a home or their empty nester parents with paid off houses.

A lot of people have argued that the filibuster will be the main casualty of this shutdown fight but there is an underrated possibility that the main casualty is the leverage/meaningfulness of the concept of a shutdown itself.

The thing that is really weird about the Trump admin is that it has been massively corrupt without either sucking all of the surplus capital out of the corporate economy or converging with the private sector on a profit maximizing governance strategy.

Every news organization in every state can localize these findings from @adambonica.bsky.social, which 100% constitute elder abuse. data4democracy.substack.com/p/spam-pacs-...

This is interesting, I still think their fundraising messages make them a bad actor but I read this as a de-facto acknowledgement that my theory that they are mostly a campaign finance end run for Democratic House Candidates is correct. medium.com/@motherships...