New focus group sound this week, this was with Dem defectors (flippers and skippers) in NV. The amount of just acute economic suffering in these will really stick with you. The increasingly extreme right wing social experiment is not going so great on the ground.

Elon Musk is never going to sell 1 million robots with "human-like qualities" or increase Tesla's stock valuation by a factor of eight, or sell a self-driving software package to 1 out of ever 35 Americans. Let alone all three. This is stupid.

This is a rare moment I think @jamellebouie.net isn’t correct. The Constitutional and institutional guardrails set up to protect against the rise of fascism DID work. It’s just that in the 1970s oligarchs embarked on a multi-decade plot to co-opt our institutions. That’s what the Fed Soc is.

Introducing ADX Florence, the Network State for billionaires who want to overthrow democracy. New units coming online in 2028 and beyond. (If the billionaires can imagine eternal life, Mars colonies and a post-democracy world, we can imagine this. "Meme it and we will be it.")

If it's true that RealClearPolitics removed their polling average of the VA Attorney General race because it was wrong, that should really be the nail in the coffin for them. It's GOP polling propaganda that hasn't been rigorous or transparent in a long time (www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-pollin...)

For months, certain right-wing pollsters on here have accused me of rigging my POTUS approval average against Trump. They say I weight pollsters like YouGov too highly and am "bat shit insane" Avg bias of right-leaning firms in 2025 gov: 8 pts pro-R (2x 2024 POTUS err) YouGov avg error: 1pt

Mamdani lost middle age and older white votes and got a ton of young people and lgbtq votes. Is that a template for success elsewhere? Depends on the electorate!

Regular reminder that when we are mad at Ross Douthat and/or the institution of the New York Times, we are actually mad at AG Sulzberger. Sulzberger is the reactionary centrist marketer who has essentially full control over who works at the Times and what is written about there.

Meta is incapable of innovating. Is growth comes through predatory acquisition and mindless, ethics-optional engagement slop at unmanageable scale. The CEO is a creepy, technofascist manbaby. But when you read most tech press coverage, the company is treated with such furrowed-brow seriousness

Two things can be true: To win the immediate next national election it can be good to laser focus on affordability and kitchen table. And to avoid losing the election after, avoid a Biden 2020-24 back-to-worse-fascism redux, we must include democracy, big structural change, and liberal values.

This is the way I feel about the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo donor money.

US Senators can and should be ”guardians“ of the world’s peoples. Schumer should care about the civil and human rights of Israelis. But he can’t be a “guardian“ of any *country* besides the US. Because if he is the guardian of another country, and that country elects a fascist gov‘t, well…

I'm sorry, the United States senator is a "guardian" of what country? I feel like there's one correct answer here, and if that answer isn't "the United States," then we have an issue.

Golden seems like a fine person but given his importance to the bad-data crowd, used to pull every candidate to the right, I can‘t help but feeling a bit of shadenfreude. 1/

The robber barons of America are going to do everything they can to destroy Mamdani. They will follow the SF playbook: they will run wedge campaigns, pay PR firms, manipulate social media, encourage cop work slowdowns then crow about crime, and run impeachment campaigns.

That editorial was an ”AG Sulzberger hates Mamdani” editorial. It doesn’t get out the door without the consent of the publisher.

The problem of our time is that billionaires have learned to use modern media to influence public opinion and corrupt democracies from the inside.

please! Bluesky Orwell is a much better choice

Logically, you'd want to respond to that with deeper levels of political reform, year-round organizing, democratizing the party itself, buying media outlets and constitutional hardball if not a new constitution. To that end, Prop 50 results are heartening even with gerrymandering's downsides.

EAT SHIT BOOK BANNERS

How did we not have this between Obama and now? How did we fall back on poll-tested, small-effect appeals to swing voters rather than leaning into this? This is the way. Hope. Hope over tyranny!

This is going to get spun as a "thermostatic shift" chart, but it should be properly interpreted as a "information environment is broken" chart. In 2024, voters didn't know what Trump would do, and so they shifted towards him based on vibes. Now they are finding out, and they hate it.

Cry more, Bari

Many people are saying

Counterpoint to the dunks on Yglesias today, from an extremely smart and experienced observer, @glastris.bsky.social. check this out

I think this is basically a Chomsky point but if you rise to a high enough level in this media system you're not the type of person who's going to do a serious deep dive on how the media system is asymmetrically tilted toward right wing propaganda, including nonsense about what Democrats believe.

In case you forgot or missed class that day:

This idea still rattles around the centrist group chats. People who are accomplished as measured in current society were often those who worked hard and did well in school - and Matt Y is one. They're often deeply upset that some schools have defined down math standards.

This week in "know your Trump administration assholes" we have Arielle Roth, a former Ted Cruz staffer and Hudson Institute "think tanker" promoted to head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for some incoherent reason.

When I was 18, I was a raging bigot Republican. that's what I was raised to be. One year in college moved me left because I met some gay and trans people. By the time I graduated I had learned the horrors of white colonialism and I'm "guns back" left. They know what they're doing. It's always kids.

Trump & MAGA Republicans are destroying the western alliance we've relied upon for 80yrs. Putin loves Trump as Trump's policies are helping Moscow.

United Front or Bust, yes.

This is incorrect for the same reason economists talk about marginal effects: 1 percentage point in a tight race is WILDLY different than 1 point in a race that’s won handily. It‘s why WAR is dumb for politics and it’s why Simon Bazelon’s report is naive.

“ @leedrutman.bsky.social , a political scientist at the New America Foundation, titled “The moderation debate fiddles with 2% while democracy’s dimensionality collapses.” Yes. This is what Hal Malchow was saying since 2019. I know that because I was trying to get people to listen to Malchow!

Ah the Thiel Fecklessness Fellowship raises its head: Palantir and Thiel want employees that don’t know anything about how the world works, autocracy, or billionaires. So they hire high schoolers.

"...ending federal oversight of IDEA isn’t about giving control to the states. It is about denying the civil rights of all students with disabilities. "

“ @leedrutman.bsky.social , a political scientist at the New America Foundation, titled “The moderation debate fiddles with 2% while democracy’s dimensionality collapses.” Yes. This is what Hal Malchow was saying since 2019. I know that because I was trying to get people to listen to Malchow!

As Dan Froomkin said, if you’re mad at the Times, your issue is with AG Sulzberger, who wants to keep Ross Douthat on.

The root problem here is AG Sulzberger, who pays Ross Douthat to write things like this. Douthat is a ninny and there are thousands of better writers the NYT could hire. But Sulzberger, the wealthy reactionary centrist head of the Times, LIKES this.

The U.S. gov. has been now closed for a month. R congresspeople & senators not in DC. The White House starting to show some urgency just now by asking for ending the filibuster & reopening the gov as most citizens blame Rs. Paychecks have now stopped for many, SNAP in question, healthcare primes up.

The first thing I saw here was “tranches.” And reacted strongly. but on second thought, I don’t know that the risk is the same type as in 2008. Back then, hiding mortgage risk allowed many new junk mortgages to be issued; many defaulted. With AI there is no *hidden* risk, really

HAHAHAHA YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS @adamjentleson.bsky.social totally vindicated, his secret long-term strategy has paid off

@gelliottmorris.com, using data in the spring, said that increasing the salience of Trump’s immigration policy lowered Trump’s approval rating. But maybe it’s better to ignore it, we can not fight, and just keep doing what Dem leadership has been doing since 2016: all healthcare nothing else.

The move for Republicans would be to try to blame Dems for SNAP cuts by blaming the shutdown on them. But they can't help themselves. They hate the poor too much!

Tara Palmieri is a rightwinger. She built her career at Phil Anschutz’ DC Examiner & Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post. Her source network is rightwingers and she leans to the right. Is there much else to say? She‘s lying abt being unbiased; it’s the Ailes ‘fair and balanced‘ schtick. @katmabu.bsky.social

Not a word from the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on Tucker hosting Fuentes. Amazing. I just checked his Twitter feed and plenty on Mamdani and even Norway (!) but not a word about a top conservative podcaster hosting an infamous Holocaust denier. Greenblatt is beyond parody at this point.

I KNEW IT I knew Fred Hiatt did this. It was obvious! It is, in fact, the Bennett Business Model for neutral news in the internet age, co-developed by Hiatt & James Bennet (at the Atlantic) around the same time. Today we say “int diversity” but it’s just using reactionaries as trolls, for clicks.

This ultimately is the biggest problem with the Deciding to Win/etc approach. It's just not *useful*. If you're constantly looking back over your shoulder terrified some voter somewhere is going to think you're a dreaded not moderate, you're trapped in strategic muck. We have got to do better.

Glad that we had a thread on tech oligarchs misusing Tolkien a week ago. Tolkien is complex and flawed in many ways but he hated fascism and would have HATED Thiel and Musk today. And this quote captures the man well 👇👇👇. He grappled with christian ordering of society but believed in equality.