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...

One thing that feels underrated about 'Trump unleashes a nationwide mid-decade redistricting war' is how much of a middle finger it is to actually existing Congressional Republicans. All of their re-elections are about to get harder and a bunch of them may just straight up lose their jobs.

I hasn’t thought about it this way but seems pretty clear that with a little finessing you could get DC statehood AND move the U.S. closer to a national popular vote system.

Find something you love as much as Eric Adams loves committing campaign finance fraud. He's got billionaires fawning over him and still doing it purely for the thrill.

[Nodding, more nodding, taking a few notes]: 'Is Zohran Mamdani in the room with us right now?'

I think there is a way to do this that would be helpful but you would need to be really careful about how you did it. Essentially trying to shape the next generation of conservatives into people with some basic respect for small-d democracy.

Just finished up an internal tracker (this is from YG Blue, not our daily news team) and voter awareness of the contents of BBB remains pretty bad. Barely half know about the Medicaid impact and it falls below half for voters who aren't currently paying super close attention to politics.

'What Republicans say they want to do is so bad, there's no way they'll do it' are these people huffing gas? Do they have object permanence?

Zohran should do a video where he's admonished by Brad Lander as Tim Robinson, Tim Robinson as Brad Lander, and Patti Harrison as her sketch character for his flagrant disrespect for tables and makes a public apology.

Not really the point but how does dragging college property from one location owned by the college to another location owned by the college demonstrate a casual attitude towards private property?

Some really interesting 'what is it like to campaign under RCV' perspective from Lander here: hellgatenyc.com/brad-lander-...

I was an early proponent of this take but I am starting to think the truth is more complicated. I think what's true is that we've gone from a very badly run/institutionalized Democracy to a catastrophically run oligarchy and that produces both disadvantages and advantages.

What's wild is that you can literally see a 'Commie Corridor' with more Mamdani supporters in it (Running through Park Slope and Prospect/Crown Heights instead of being discontiguous) on this map. I guess they didn't want to slander the Crown Heights Hasidic community.

I think the honest truth about Mayor of NYC as explicitly demonstrated by the De Blasio -> Adams transition is that there's both much less good and much less damage that they can do then people think, so having someone in the office who wants good things and is willing to take big risks is valuable.

The article doesn't even really make the claim that the title does but the failure of democracy in New York is very clearly that despite nearly a decade of reform New York democracy is still so bad that Cuomo may be inevitable, not that Mamdani may have a shot: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Has a Star Wars property ever made meaningful use of Alderaan as a setting? Kind of wild that they seem so averse to it.

An uncharitable person might say 'when people say there is no housing shortage, this is what they mean' but actually they wouldn't have to because the no housing shortage people are literally making this argument repeatedly in the replies.

New piece: Trump’s approval rating among low-engagement voters has fallen 30 points since Jan, the worst decline for any group. The GOP’s big advantage with hard-to-reach voters has evaporated as economic turmoil & toxic politics turns them away from Trump www.gelliottmorris.com/p/what-do-di...

One possibility that has been lurking since TPM but which Andor really highlights is that the story of PT-ST Star Wars is a late roman or bronze age trade collapse in which what we see will be a footnote in a history which mostly talks about how 90% of everyone starved to death.

I support Stancil in courageous fight against materialism but the new front he is opening against institutionalism is a step too far.

Maybe I'm missing something but this looks to me like an electorate that is 5% more left then the actual results albeit with much less strategic voting, why are we mad at young people for not voting strategically in a fake election?

Ugh I’m getting so many of these

when an american electronic appliance chirps at me: I did not invite you to speak. I despise you. I wish to destroy you when a japanese appliance chirps at me: You are my little friend. You are my companion in the journey of life

This is why I still think all of the 'maybe it would have been better if Trump had won again in 2020' talk was premature. Trump + gradually cooling economy at full employment is way less dangerous then Trump + growing economy that is under capacity.

Salesforce is using a hallucination to sell AI: defector.com/salesforce-i...

One of the assumptions that seems to be ungirding the RW reaction to DOGE firing the Groyper 25 year old is that Groypers are loyal foot soldiers of the Trump policy agenda in ways others are not. I don’t see any meaningful reason that would be true though.

the logical demand at this point, I think, is for a constituent assembly

So many federal agencies, particularly the foreign aid ones but even the Census and other domestic programs, have bent over backwards to appease their conservative critics and get Republican buy in. If none of that matters that’s existential even for the agencies that don’t get destroyed.

Even setting aside research there is so much good you could do with a better central repository of U.S. Govt data (automatically qualifying people for all welfare programs among other things) and Musk is going to poison Americans on the idea even more while doing none of it.

In case anyone needs it -- the tariffs are underwater (as of 2/2/25). The illegal federal firings are underwater. Just *3 percent* of voters wish Elon Musk was "more influential" in the government. I did not conduct this poll but if anyone wants help convincing their MC to act on it, let me know.

Congressman @beyer.house.gov will be going to USAID today with colleagues to shine a light on what is happening there, I think others will join us. Figuring out details now and will share but flagging now for press and public in the area

This isn't important, but I went and dug up the Ickes passage about FDR and Frances Perkins that Yarvin mentioned in his interview with the NY Times, and.... there's no indication that it had policy importance. It's a powerful man under enormous stress unfairly tearing into his female subordinate.

@protectdemocracy.org did some great and timely work on pardons last week that I had the privilege of working on: protectdemocracy.org/work/new-pol... Key Takeaways: * Topline opinion on pardons has softened since Trump won. * But pardoning violent J6 offenders was still EXTREMELY unpopular.

Trump aims to grind down critics by throwing so much at the media, civil society, and his political opponents that they can’t keep up. Here are four ways to help stay focused and not lose heart. Read and subscribe: www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/how-to-pay...

Bob Dylan: ‘In my albums, I created the Greenwich Village resident as a cautionary tale.’ NYU Freshman: ‘At long last, I live in the Village from the classic Bob Dylan song “Everyone in the Village is a Talentless Poser who Resents my Success”’

Let the intrusive thoughts win and went down a wiki rabbit hole about Brian Herbert's Dune prequels and it produced some newfound respect for what George Lucas did with the SW prequels. Way too far in the opposite direction but at least he tried new things.

On this last point: STEM majors do have to take humanities classes, including history. I get a ton of them in my mil-hist and anc-hist surveys. I think the problem is that the structure of the university is such that they almost never take *difficult* humanities courses. 1/

There was a pretty significant reading of inflation/deflation from the mid 1800s to the 70s that inflation is good for debitors and bad for creditors and therefore populist and it's interesting how little that is discussed now. Maybe because we have financially engineered around it.

I joke a lot about how early political scientists wouldn't have seen various contemporary US dysfunctions (like our all powerful supreme court) coming, but in the interest of fairness, I would not have guessed 10 years ago that the House would be the least functional U.S. Govt institution.

Wound up talking to someone at a party who had been running a WoW guild for four years and it struck me that we basically still have the bowling league/civil society organizing capacity that people pine for, it’s just concentrated in areas they find distasteful.