"I unequivocally reject identity politics" i scream, right before selecting my five gallon cowboy hat for my Fox Business interview.

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

"Indeed, much of the grousing about Democrats’ supposed lack of moderation around social issues was not because these social issues are inherently losing issues electorally, but because they are losing issues when nothing else is offered." Great piece from @ryanenos.bsky.social

A May 2025 presentation by its (Meta's) safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S. (Think about who these scams target - the sick, homebound elderly)

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.

Beshear: Let me be clear. The president has both the funding and the authority to fund snap during a shutdown. In fact, every other president in every other shutdown has done so. People going hungry in this instance is a choice that this president has made.

ah, perhaps instead of pumping millions into endless factional infighting Dem donors could invest in making local Dem organizations genuine civic spaces that can reach people during and between elections

BREAKING: Democrat Johnny DuPree has flipped a Republican-held Mississippi Senate district in a special election. DuPree was previously the mayor of Hattiesburg. His win imperils the Mississippi Senate GOP's narrow supermajority. www.mississippifreepress.org/democrat-joh...

Brad Lander is at the victory party and, folks, he has the custom one-of-one “GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE” shirt.

Normal people are just sick to fucking death of the cruelty and meanness

BREAKING: Colorado voters approved a ballot measure that would raise state income taxes on higher-earning households to fund free meals for all public school students. Follow AP for live updates.

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

Cuomo was drummed out of office 4 years ago for sexual harassment. He then lost the mayoral Dem primary. He then employed rank gutter racism to win as an independent -- winning Trump's endorsement! -- and that didn't work either. Few modern politicians so richly deserve obscurity and exile.

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

score one for "the pundits are projecting their own preoccupations onto the electorate"

ah, america

it's ironic that Dems keep losing voters in the Midwest because this is some apologizing to the person who bumped into you behavior.

i want to repeat this: mamdani and spanberger have run similar campaigns tailored to their respective electorates and it is maddening to watch political journalists attempt to create some broad contrast where none exist

Bumping this biting and deeply relevant @rtraister.bsky.social piece from right before the primary, on election eve. This Fucking Guy:

“All these super smart people mystifyingly don’t see this the way I see it and therefore they are wrong because the right answer is the one that confirms my priors”

Let me excerpt the concluding paragraph:

Such a perfect example of what we all give up when we refuse to address basic inequalities. I don't want to live in a country where all the public space is militarized to keep hungry people from stealing food, just give them money to buy food!

This right here, this exact sentence, is THE problem in American political journalism. The IRA *was* cheap energy and good jobs! That was the whole bill! Democrats did precisely what political pundits are telling them to do and the pundits just ignore it.

Also, we typically think of policy as what you to for voters, but we know performative politics is also about what you will do to other people. We have an effigy politics today that is steeped in destruction and performative dominance. We don’t poll for this or make policy on this but it works.

I like these policies, and would be happy to see Dems endorse them, but I think this is a backwards approach to crafting an agenda.

Best metaphor I've heard is that using AI is like bringing a forklift to lift the weights at the gym. The point is to build YOUR muscles, not to make the weights go up and down.

one of the things i think is that policies answer the question of “what will you do” but they don’t answer the question of “why should i vote for you” and i think there is a tendency in this broad conversation to equate the two

New in PN: Trump couldn't (legitimately) win a third term If he tried "What’s astonishing about the media’s 'third term' coverage is how it doesn’t clearly state the obvious: Voters are openly rejecting Trump, as seen in poll after poll."

Remember how just a few years ago during the worst of the pandemic when we saw how the govt can actually do big things and saw that our collective health & well-being are intertwined, and then corporations got mad that they lost a modicum of power and helped fund a backlash of amnesia and fascism?

But what does it mean to "drop them"? If abolishing the death penalty is unpopular, should blue states reinstate it? Should the next Democratic administration leave Trump's no-one-but-white-South-Africans refugee policy in place? (Because anything else will be an increase, and thus unpopular.)

I jump into the moderation debate. I agree with @adambonica.bsky.social and @gelliottmorris.com on the methodology, but I want to draw attention to a bigger issue. The collapse of candidate effects generally. leedrutman.substack.com/p/the-modera...

What an odious thing to say. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...

crazy it is almost as if weiss has been promoted beyond her ability

Sigh. All politics is identity politics. It’s just a matter of what identities are being made salient, how, and what for. There is no *outside* of identity. Very obviously, this includes class politics.

If you had told me in college that Nate Silver, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009, would eventually be reduced to cursing me and a coauthor out on a podcast and writing a whole angry article about us, I woulda been like damn, poor guy, sending love and support

even the democratic consultants are evaluating the democratic party according to the caricatures put out by republican-aligned media

The trend is real, but this NYT analysis at the Congressional district level has big ecological bias Poor *areas* vote Republican, but it's often the richer *individuals* within those poorer areas that are most Republican And many poor *individuals* rich blue urban *areas* vote Dem

This misunderstanding from Jain is a great teachable moment (might use it in methods class) Bonica pointing out that controlling for incumbency changes NYT’s result shows NYT’s estimate is biased and not causally identified It does *not* mean that once you control for incumbency it’s more causal

So much talk about "working-class" voters becomes a discussion of how to accommodate and reinforce misogyny and bigotry in order to win elections. "Working-class" in these discussions invariably means men (usually white men). If those are the voters you're trying to reach, just be honest about it.

The largest mass protests by number of participants in US history happened yesterday and the only mention on the front page of the NYT is Jamelle Bouie's opinion column: no diner-diving for sentiments of the unheard masses, no coverage of the Trump video, no sense for what it says about the moment.

Trump clocks in at 37%-61% in new AP-NORC poll. It’s the worst poll of his rancid 2nd term. Happy No Kings Day!

Has anyone written about how slogans like “Build the wall,” or “Free busses” are visual and tangible? Compare, for example, to “Stronger Together” or “Restore The Soul of The Nation.”

Good observation for the “pivot to health care” people to consider.

This is capitulation. It is not the "Department of War." If CNN concedes on this point, they'll concede on any point.

This is an excellent observation on how the fact that people still go to school, work, and play in similar ways obscures the nefarious changes taking place and makes those who are highlighting the danger seem like they're catastrophizing.

Where we are as a country

What Americans Die from? And what the media reports on... Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

There has been basically no (public) reckoning with the democratic strategists who said that "raising the salience" of immigration/deportations in ~March would help Trump, which was obviously wrong at the time and has been proved wrong over the last 6 months www.gelliottmorris.com/p/kilmar-abr...

"Klein’s musings about redrawing the line are, more importantly, a manifestation of a pervasive tendency in American elite circles to accommodate rather than fight back, to acquiesce rather than stand firm," says @thomaszimmer.bsky.social. Excellent piece. democracyamericana.com/posts/c5d024...