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.

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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...

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.

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