Free bus

It’s important to set priorities

Mini dive into Democrats’ actual best electoral performance last week which came in some utility regulator races in Georgia www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-...

I still don’t understand what the NBA Cup is.

You may have seen the eerie chart from Harcourt (2011) but if you extend the data...

If you project Mikie Sherrill's 4.5 percentage point overperformance relative to Kamala Harris nationally, you'd get this map (Biden states + North Carolina) which is great in a presidential race but still pretty dicey as a senate proposition.

Should also have fewer elected officials, which would make it easier to pay them more. What's a Public Advocate? Nobody needs this.

Stefanik campaign seems like a honey trap for GOP donors, decent early polling but she’s dramatically more tied at the hip to Trump’s most egregious stuff than Jack Ciatterelli ever was and the midterm political headwinds will be blowing straight in her face.

Something you see with both the ACA subsidy fight and the SNAP disputes is that concrete safety net arguments are very unifying for Democrats. No daylight between Bernie and Slotkin, I’m on the same side as all the Bluesky Yglesias haters.

College has gotten cheaper in real terms and much more affordable relative to incomes, but good luck trying to convince anyone to ignore the nominal price ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Clearly the worst thing Trump has done on the merits, though obviously not going to be the centerpiece of anyone's midterm ads.

Political giving is intermediated by a big set of donor-advisors whose structural incentives point away from rigorous thinking about tradeoffs. www.slowboring.com/p/who-advise...

One take I've flirted with is that aspects of the modern media ecosystem mean incumbents are doomed to be unpopular, but doesn't seem to be true in Canada.

It's funny that the ugly new buildings nobody likes are the explicit result of regulations adopted in the name of aesthetics.

I mean people are saying they are upset about inflation, I don't think the inference is any more complicated than that.

So there's a City Council member in NYC who's just like an agent of the Chinese government?

Are there any moderation denialists bold enough to say that Mamdani would have done just as well if he’d stuck with “defund the police”?

Was nice to see Ciattarelli's explicit degrowth campaign flop. The truth is that Sherrill's YIMBY platform was extremely modest and kinda disappointing, but I hope she's emboldened by how poorly the NIMBY attacks on her fared.

Calibration is challenging

People naturally think of Nancy Pelosi's Trump era exploits, but a lot of the most interesting and impressive aspects of her career date back much earlier — ahead of the curve on China, a critical architect of the 2006 midterm win. www.slowboring.com/p/a-nancy-pe...

Strategic redeployment for immigration enforcement www.slowboring.com/p/an-immigra...

Well, mission accomplished by Indivisible www.bangordailynews.com/2025/11/05/o...

The left promises to solve the problems of the world and usher in a utopian society, while the right just promises to crush the left. This speaks well of the left! But it does create asymmetric and hard-to-meet expectations when leftists win.

Need 10,000 op-eds on the lessons Democrats can learn from Jacob Frey

Progressives winning mayor's races is not that rare — what's rare is mayors who progressives continue to like after a term or two of grappling with budgetary tradeoffs. www.slowboring.com/p/now-comes-...

Probably the single most effective thing any oligarch ever did to help entrench Republican Party political power was Mark Zuckerberg making a large investment in FWD.us to promote soft on crime and lax immigration policies.

I also think Sherill illustrates the need to define terms here — to me the need for moderation is not about supporting mainstream Dems like her versus leftists like Mamdani, it’s about the fact that the national party needs to ditch commitments both factions share.

Nice, if late

I always forget which is the motte and which is the bailey

Democrats are pretty smart and mostly make reasonable choices about what to “run on” but voters can — and to an extent do — evaluate your whole record and not just your campaign. www.slowboring.com/p/theres-mor...

Separate from any impacts on new housing supply, if you apply price controls to ~half the rental market that increases price pressure on the other half so I’m not sure what’s really achieved except a transfer from one set of landlords to another.

My ten year-old is very anti-Trump but strongly endorses the RFK view that he shouldn’t have to get any shots.

A lot of good points in this PDF perhaps framed more congenitally than some Yglesias Takes open.substack.com/pub/workingc...

lol; as statistical power goes up, effect sizes go down

Some prominent people on this website have talked themselves into a model of how democracy works — where issues don’t matter to voters and voter preferences are irrelevant to election outcomes — that’s so bleak and nihilistic that I sincerely don’t know why they’d find it worth trying to preserve.

SNAP is a little bit of an odd program — too flexible to really be “nutrition assistance” but much less flexible than cash — but it’s a vital boost to poor families’ living standards and there’s lots of evidence that its benefits far exceed the costs. www.slowboring.com/p/trump-turn...

I think material politics mostly means doing material politics — let people use the straws and bags they prefer, don’t try to force people to buy electric cars, don’t make their electricity more expensive to hit net zero goals — advance policies that make people wealthier in material terms.

Incredible stuff

Younger cohorts are much more pessimistic

Realistically this is correct, the party establishment has completely discredited itself by losing elections by being too left-wing so their hand-wringing about even further left primary challengers will fall on deaf ears. By the 2032 or 2036 cycles, new leftist leadership will figure it out.

I actually think the *core* of Democrats’ unwise leftward move was on climate because it creates direct tensions with a classic kitchen table pitch. All the other stuff (crime, immigration, guns, gender) matters too but the post-2012 pivot off of “all of the above” energy is the most important.

Harvard undergrads have gotten a lot smarter since I graduated

Trump approval is badly underwater but Democrats have only a small edge in the generic ballot www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Not much doubt on Kalshi about Tuesday’s elections

Six for 2026? www.slowboring.com/p/what-you-s...

This is definitely a good way to raise the salience of immigration relative to the health care fight that congressional democrats are trying to center politics on. And that in turn is definitely helpful to Pritzker's presidential ambitions. Does it help win a senate majority?

What is happening with this outfit?

Pro-housing voices from the right of center are increasingly focused on a "we need housing For Families" framing. In a new column I explain why broad-based liberalization, especially for inexpensive types of housing, is important for helping people start families: www.governing.com/urban/to-sup...

Would be easier to plan next week’s articles if I knew exactly what all the election results were going to be.

If you're going to block a pipeline because of climate change, then I think you ought to first stop and check and make sure that blocking the pipeline leads to lower rather than higher emissions. www.slowboring.com/p/climate-po...