This isn't my corner of political science, but people more in the know: Are these consultancies staffed by people who actually understand how polling and persuasion work?

Blue cities should tear up the roads in front of ICE facilities and then start decades of community engagement and input sessions to rebuild them. Let's harness our core competencies.

The primary way money skews politics is that all viable political activity has a fundraising threshold it must meet and people in the top 15% of incomes have divergent policy preferences to the bottom 85%. Sometimes this is good, but it's mostly bad.

Can't believe I'd never heard of this guy until today. This is how California should be written.

Putting aside the fact that "academic" here means social sciences and humanities, the irony is that if you replaced the weirdo Marxist drivel with higher quality empirical work, those disciplines would be far **more** hostile to the Republican Party project than they are right now.

If you live in a Blue State, you should think very hard about whether Croatia and Slovenia would've been better off if they remained tethered to Serbia or if the Baltic States would be freer and more prosperous if they stayed attached to Russia.

Why should we in California subject ourselves to a dictator with dementia who thinks of us as occupied territory just to remain part of a union with others who hate us as wish to see us fail?

Why should we remain a part of a nation without laws?

If someone from another country explained that their president could violate their constitution's plain text but that it was completely legitimate because lifetime judges who belong to political parties said he could on the "shadow docket," you would laugh at them because their country is primitive.

Imagine controlling the entire federal government and 23 states, but still being inconsolably butt hurt that no one wants to invite you to UC Davis to talk about how American boys need to learn manly Roman virtues.

The media outlet that Democrats actually need is a liberal version of the Associated Press where you stick small groups of reporters across the country to do local news coverage and enterprise stories that get distributed across the country via social media.

Generals showing up to this meeting like...

At least for public universities, all of this is downstream from changing the university from essentially a public utility to a customer-driven model built around the tuition payer.

One of the biggest things I'm learning from all the Jeffrey Epstein revelations is how and why the law and consequences are merely for assholes in this country.

This is how we get AOC to move to California.

When my grandparents left the refugee camp in Pendleton, they settled into this apartment complex in Riverside where they lived for the rest of their life with money my mom and uncles sent them and government assistance. A few years ago, I learned they were living in "luxury housing."

Repealing Citizens United and going back to the prior BCRA regime wouldn't do anything to fix our politics. The "money in politcs" reform we really need is diminishing wealth inequality in society more broadly.

This is the kind of government statement that people in the Third World wake up to.

Extremely niche complaint, but it's super BS how the ANES doesn't give you respondent age, not even an age category.

You think this guy still has juice with FBI agents? Most of them must loathe working for Patel and Bongino and would be delighted to sell those two out if they could.

It's upsetting, but entirely predictable, that an elite whose entire guiding principle is "Got mine, screw you" would be bowled over in a matter of months by the most piss pants authoritarians planet earth has ever seen.

I too think electrifying Metrolink and increasing headways is a better use of money than extending a light rail another ~10 miles into SB County, but there should be a state-wide agency planning these larger infrastructures not the Mayor of Grand Terrace, a city of 13k no one cares about.

In all seriousness, it is the height of illegitimacy to be governed by a demented pedophile who institutes taxes because he feels like it and indicts people he doesn't like via tweets. It's time for states that do not wish to be drug down into the Third World to discuss secession.

"Regime officials in the United States, a North American dictatorship, have indicted a prominent regime opponent under orders of Donald Trump, who returned to power earlier this year following a failed 2021 coup attempt. The move signals crackdown against other state enemies in the coming days."

I think it's important that liberals hear from the conservative side, but I think they ought to hear from the conservatives that actually have juice in the GOP. No more Ross Douthat or Ben Shapiro, you need to have Laura Loomer or Jack Posobiec on your show.

Tireless Mercatus team @salimfurth.bsky.social @ebwhamilton.bsky.social @charlescgardner.bsky.social just dropped 18 (!) strategies for state govts to increase housing supply. Love the ideas to limit "lawsuits of questionable merit" [ahem, Virginia]. www.mercatus.org/research/pol...

"Kitchen table issues!"

Our elites should be people who went to the best public schools in their state and had parents earning around the median income.

Tulane realized the real money for a university is housing, not tuition, so they forced students to live on campus for an extra year. Now there's a glut of rental housing surrounding campus and prices dropped. Critical geographers are flocking to NOLA to understand what made landlords less greedy.

I'm actually really surprised that Trump hasn't used NSA domestic surveillance capabilities to embarrass political opponents yet. How haven't we seen someone's private texts or emails show up on the chud news?

What's an American city you think has gotten way better over the last decade? "Better" can be however you define it.

As a student of history, I can say confidently that successful authoritarians move quickly to alienate and embitter people who command thousands of men with guns.

Many ICE agents should suffer huge criminal and civil penalties for their official actions during the Trump administration just serve as an example and to scare others away from ever acting this way in the future.

The University of Utah Department of Political Science is hiring a department chair at the rank of Full Professor! This job is open to any subfield. Let me know if you have questions about the search, including (as you likely are wondering) why we are hiring an external chair.

If global warming is real, then why ̶a̶m̶ ̶I̶ are Black and Brown communities so cold today?

There's a reluctance to confront anti-social behavior in this country. For those who live in larger cities, I think a big part is the danger and total futility of talking to a mentally unwell person. For others, it has to do with a non-zero possibility that the person you're confronting has a gun.

Bluesky is where I go to indulge all my middle-aged man interests from natural wine to Civil War history. I don't like baseball, but I might start visiting ballparks some day as well!

I think this is the year that we should finally retire the word "gentrification." You can't measure it and you can't define it, so how do we know when it started and if it stopped?

I think it's underappreciated that the mechanism through which Trump voters would feel pain for the economic consequences of their votes is that other people would yell at them and stop talking to them because their stupid asses made them poorer.

Someone has to have written something comparing Internet infrastructure companies like Alphabet and Meta to the railroads of yesteryear, right?

I will gladly stop calling Republicans Nazis when they stop behaving like Nazis.

Man, what crummy luck to be stuck in a faculty meeting today of all days.

Elected office is not an entitlement and having members die of old age in office is failure of party discipline.

This is a great short piece worth thinking about when it comes to transportation & urbanism. “We cannot optimise both proximity and mobility. Proximity and Mobility cannot be friends. We settle into one of two worlds: (a) high proximity, low mobility or (b) high mobility, low proximity.”

Moreover, @cselmendorf.bsky.social, Clayton Nall and I found that pro-housing policies are some of the **least popular** housing policies when you ask people which policies they prefer (x axis) and which they think would be most effective in bringing down costs (y axis.)

I like this post because it recognizes that there's a push and a pull with new housing. There's a supply effect of new units pulling prices down, but also new amenities that make a place more desirable and push prices up. This is hard to disentangle IRL because new housing isn't randomly allocated.

If Isaac Chotiner ever calls me, I'm just gonna hang up. I don't care if I miss being in the New Yorker, it just ain't worth that kinda risk.

Jimmy Kimmel is rich enough to never have to work again for the rest of his life. I'm more worried about the adjuncts and lecturers who comprise the shamefully disposable foundation of academia.

My dude @zacharyst.bsky.social in the @latimes.com today with results from a new survey: Angelenos want new housing--apartments included--all over the city and even in their own back yard.