“You effectively traveled a long way to pay that promoter to electrocute you.”

That was Jimmy Fallon’s music promoter character in the classic movie Almost Famous, explaining to a rock band that the move they thought was a clever win was actually an expensive, painful self-own.

But it could just as readily have been said of Trump’s Iran war.

So as the war winds into a state of perpetual living death via an extended ceasefire and protracted negotiation (if Trump wouldn’t admit it was a war, can we say that we now have a “peace" deal,” especially when talks can be mutually extended indefinitely?), it is worth asking: what did we really pay, and what did we really get out of it?

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Here are costs on Americans that we can estimate with some confidence:

• Military: On April 30, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that the Pentagon had spent $25 billion. That was hogwash at the time—a more realistic assessment was $72 billion1—and is now out of date. Costs since then plus future outlays for replacing expended missile interceptors (e.g., THAAD, SM-3) and rebuilding severely damaged U.S. military bases in the region would put the military cost alone at a floor of $100 billion.

• Fuel: additional gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel costs will hit consumers to the tune of $103 billion through the end of June, according to the American Enterprise Institute. The final tally will be substantially higher due to elevated insurance rates, replenishing of depleted inventories, and diminished production capacity.

• Growth: I’ll quote University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers: “Economists at Goldman Sachs reckon that U.S. economic growth will be 0.5 percentage points lower as a result of the war. If it takes a couple of years for the economy to return to normal, that slower growth rate would mean around $400 billion in lost income, and Goldman warns it could be nearly twice as bad.”2

These are just three big costs that we can get a reasonable handle on—it excludes $3 trillion in potentially lost stock value,3 elevated food costs that have yet to fully materialize, future veterans health benefits, and even harder-to-pin-down future military outlays for increased geopolitical risks (not to mention future tolls that Iran is apparently free to assess on shipping).4

Regardless, one can see that the lower bound on cost is $600 billion, and a reliable estimate from a Harvard economist found that the true cost is closer to $1 trillion.5 Just the amount we’ve racked up in consumer costs so far (gas, mortgages, food) amounts to around $750 per American household coming directly from our wallets.6 The rest will find its way into our taxes, our mortgage payments, and yes, again our wallet-outflow for years to come.

And none of this includes the direct cost of the “peace deal”: media reports indicate7 that we’ve agreed to an initial payment of $24 billion to Iran in two installments over the next 60 days, and then $300 billion more in reconstruction costs (don’t call them “reparations!”)8

What did we get for all of this American consumer/taxpayer pain in terms of our war objectives? We killed the 86 year old regime leader, who was promptly replaced by his clone son. The best guess of intelligence analysts is that we may have set back the Iran nuclear program by two years. We reduced their stockpile of missiles and drones.

Meanwhile, the Iranian people are just as oppressed. There are no new nuclear or democracy or ending terrorist group funding commitments. And the regime is stronger and has awoken to how much leverage they have: so much that we’re paying them a “reconstruction” sum that if laid in a continuous line of $100 bills, it would circle the Earth more than 11 times.

So we traveled a long way to have the Iranians electrocute us.

Side note: Reuters reported last night that the reconstruction fund would include private financing for Iran, and that half of it is already committed.9 How much do you want to bet that the Trump Organization is going to cash in on a piece of this “private financing” action?

Trump spent years railing about the fact that Obama’s Iran deal included releasing $1.7 billion of Iran’s frozen funds (remember “pallets of cash?”).10 Trump is set to give them 14 times that, plus almost 200 times that in reconstruction funds, and to buy this arrangement, he’s costing Americans up to 600 times that.

And Trump isn’t even getting Obama’s deal—he’s still negotiating whether he can get something that’s worse than Obama’s deal.

This is what losing a war looks like. And we’re paying our adversary for the privilege.

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The biggest story on the planet starts tomorrow.

If you had to choose one event, one expression of human endeavor that best captures what human beings are interested in and send it on one of those golden records aboard the Voyager spacecraft to be discovered by intelligent aliens one day—something that showed what our species does when we get to choose how to spend our time—you would probably choose the World Cup.

It's the most watched sporting event—indeed the most obsessed-over human activity of any kind—on Earth. And America has a lot riding on it.

While our women have set the pace and redefined the scale of the sport for female athletes, our men have struggled as plucky underdogs and downright upstarts even as America crested toward global preeminence in almost every other field.

Our men’s team remains a quintessentially American story: scrappy fighters who the world never expected to matter against the global soccer empire. Our domestic league (Major League Soccer, MLS) is dwarfed in economic and sporting relevance by European counterparts, as Nate Silver just demonstrated1 with this stark comparison between the entirety of MLS and individual European powerhouse clubs:

the combined player market values for MLS is “just” €1.4 billion, according to Transfermarkt. For comparison, PSG (€1.37b), Man City (€1.32b) and Arsenal (€1.25b) each have nearly as much player value on their rosters by themselves.

Why do we lag so far behind? Why with our giant population and economic resources, are we still stuck in a Rocky story?

There are several reasons (including our uneven, pay-to-play youth development system, which deserves its own writeup) but perhaps the biggest is simply the vicious cycle of interest and opportunity.

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Elite athletic talent among American boys (the story is a little different for our girls2) migrates to other sports like American football, basketball, hockey, and even niche-ier sports, because of a combination of cultural currency (what sports kids are exposed to) and actual currency (viable professional pathways to success). For American kids, soccer is on the menu. For the rest of the world, soccer is the menu.

As a result, our competitors end up with similar-size pools of top-tier talent to us, even when they are 1/5th (France) or 1/6th (England) our population size. Even tiny countries like Panama can produce more than enough talent to be competitive.

And yet strangely, impossibly, we do have a chance of doing something amazing at this World Cup.

We’re in the flower of a golden generation of soccer talent the likes of which our country has never seen before. We now have an historic number of players on top European clubs, while our consensus best player—Christian Pulisic—spent the first half of his club season considered the best all-around player (before a second half slump, which seems to finally be letting up) in the Italian league, one of the world’s best. And they are about to embark on this Joseph Campbell-esque journey guided by a mysterious wizard (in this case our Gandalf is an Argentinian soccer guru who is one of the world’s most celebrated soccer coaches who also believes in the mystical power of lemons) whose choices have seemed like madness until, incredibly, in recent months they’ve started to click.

After a rash of injuries, uneven performances, and soap opera blowups, the team is coalescing at the perfect time. And will they peak? Will they go on an historic run? That’s why the coming weeks will be so dramatic.

Because what’s at stake is a financial, cultural, and sporting windfall that’s hard to calculate.

The 1994 World Cup—the last on U.S. soil—drew attendance records that still stand today. It birthed MLS, still growing and with the signing of world superstar Lionel Messi, trying to claw its way into the top leagues in the world.

But most important, in 1994, soccer was the 67th most popular American sport, behind tractor pulling. 71% of Americans didn’t know the World Cup was coming to their country. Today, soccer is the third most popular sport in the country, narrowly edging out baseball for the first time ever. Only American football (36%) and basketball (17%) rank higher. For 10% of Americans, soccer is their favorite sport. And for Americans aged 18 to 34—the cohort entering the peak of spending power—soccer is their second favorite. All of this in the most powerful market on the planet.

The 1994 World Cup did the heavy lifting for all of that. And the 2026 edition could turbocharge the gathering momentum. Especially if our home team makes a deep run.

But beyond finance is hope.

Needless to say, we need this. Something we can all rally around. Something we can find joy in. A moment where we can look at our American sons—children of world leaders and felons, single moms and soccer dads, immigrants and Mayflower scions—and feel one united pride.

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1

Silver Bulletin

Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

The World Cup kicks off on Thursday, and we hope our World Cup predictions page will give you everything you need to follow the tournament. We’re monitoring injuries and friendlies as our model makes last-minute adjustments. And we’ll update the forecast after each match day t…

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10 days ago · 170 likes · 34 comments · Nate Silver

Writers know how hard this can be.

I’ve re-written this sentence a dozen times (and discarded two alternate openings), as part of a personal creative process that I sorely wish I could streamline. But after writing hundreds of articles for AlterNet, Raw Story, Washington Monthly, Newsweek, and Substack over the past six years, I’ve concluded that I write the way I write: with agonizing creative destruction.

But on Substack, that’s the easy part. You’ve still got to promote your work against the thousands of other independents writing about the same topics—many with easier-to-recognize names established through years at major media outlets1—with the number of direct competitors doubling (and likely more) in the past year alone.2 It feels like you’re Luke Skywalker in the trash compactor, constantly scrambling to avoid getting crushed from all sides.

That’s not a complaint—for many of us, writing is deeply rewarding, and until recently, the challenge of getting your work seen (and compensated) has felt somewhat manageable. But a new wave AI-infused content is changing the equation. Soon, it’s going to be too much for most of us to withstand, and I’d argue that it’s likely to hollow out Substack if the platform isn’t careful.

The good news is, there’s a pretty straightforward fix for it, or at least a temporizing partial solution (if you want to see my prescription feel free to scroll down, but I think the argument that arrives there is worth it). Before I get to that, let me lay out why the AI threat is different now than it was even six months ago, and why the clock is likely ticking on the platform.

This Isn’t Last Year’s AI Anymore

The AI-on-Substack story is very different now than in 2025.

For one thing, the volume of Ai-infused writing has vastly increased, along with the overall volume of publications. Taylor Lorenz estimated that about one-third of top publications now have at least some AI-generated content,3 and Substack’s own study found that almost half of all publications were using it, with 48% of those directly using it for “writing assistance.”4

Crucially, Substack also found that over half of the people using AI started using it in the past year—which means that usage had doubled over the course of twelve months. And that study was put out in 2025: the AI uptake rate may have continued or increased since then, but it surely hasn’t diminished, meaning there’s a ton of AI-infused or straight-up AI articles flooding in. And that much additional content volume makes audience discovery that much harder for each of us needles in a metastasizing haystack.

A related emerging problem is Chimera-writing: hybrid content that mixes AI and human elements. There’s a lot more of that too: that same 2025 Substack study found that of those who use AI, 56% use it for what they label as “ideation and brainstorming,” and 65% for research.

But those are slippery categories. I once put a toe over the line on my personal no-AI-in-my-writing rule5 in drafting an article for Newsweek6 about the Trump cabinet: while using ChatGPT for research, the AI offered a single small turn of phrase that made me sit back and ponder. “Damn,” I thought, “that’s pretty clever.” So, I decided to fold in that handful of words (if you want to take a fun mini Turing Test, see if you can spot it inside the paragraph pasted into this footnote7).

The point is, even if you’re “just researching,” AI bombards us all with phrases, metaphors, and full-on sentences that are hard to un-see or keep out of your work…even for the diminishing number of us who even try to maintain an AI firewall. Which means that many of us are at the top of a slippery slope. Many more are rocketing down it or fully at the bottom. This isn’t a value judgement. It’s a reality.

The end result is that compared to a year ago, individual writers are up against at least 2x the level of competition for discovery of their work, and a significant proportion of their competitors are able to produce their output with far less effort (or practically none at all) due to AI assistance. If you’re in any business where your competition doubles and they have much lower marginal cost of production than you do, you’re going to go out of business.

And I’d argue that Substack is particularly susceptible to this kind of bleedout because of the economics of the platform.

The Vulnerable Economics of Substack

Here is an estimate of who is earning what on Substack8—you should take the specific numbers with a big grain of salt because there is limited information publicly available, but we can have reasonable confidence that this is directionally right:

What this illustrates is the usual “superstar” structure common to many creative platforms: there’s a “long tail distribution” with a vast chasm between the very top tier of market participants and the median: on Substack it’s a 10x gap from the vast middle-class to the second tier, and then an additional 5-6x gap from the second tier to the tippy-top-ten.

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Let me reach into my economics training (where I started my career) and give a very quick snapshot of what appears to be the market structure here, because there are three economic concepts at work that help explain why Substack is vulnerable:

1. Superstar economics: as explained in Sherwin Rosen's 1981 paper, "The Economics of Superstars," tech-enabled markets characterized by “joint consumption”—i.e., where creators can serve an unlimited audience at near-zero marginal cost—can spiral into a situation where a small number of top performers capture a disproportionate share of market revenue, even when the quality gap between them and second-tier performers is small.

2. Contestable markets: low barriers to market entry or low switching costs create vigorous competition. In the case of Substack, this may combine with relatively higher barriers to exit for the audiences to top Substackers than for the middle class audiences because of brand loyalty, network effects, inertia, and other factors.

3. Zero-sum attention markets: there are a bunch of closely related economic ideas here amounting to one bottom line—our attention is a zero-sum game. Audiences across most media have a consumption diet of roughly fixed size, because we all have only so much time and attention. For example, if you start listening to a new podcast an hour a week, you don’t suddenly have 169 hours available in a week. So you substitute by decreasing consumption of something else. You could sleep less. You could read less. Or you could listen to a competing podcast less. But something’s gotta give.

You can probably see already how these ideas combine to shape the situation on Substack, and why the platform has a problem. There’s a superstar structure, a contestable market, and a zero-sum attention game. The top tier of “creators” is relatively insulated while the vast middle class is in the trash compactor, vying against the current (and growing number of) monetized publications, the current (and growing number of) free or semi-active publications, and the zillions of other online media options out there (including just asking Gemini or some other free AI to generate answers or ideas for you).

So why is the whole platform particularly vulnerable to bleeding out? Because most of Substack’s revenue comes from the middle class.

Substack relies on the hundreds of thousands of writers who are getting squeezed: it appears based on the information available that something on the order of 75%-80% of their revenue comes from that tier. And those are the writers who are most likely to exit or get replaced by AI.

In years past, a writer could use a monetized Substack as one piece in a portfolio of other creative income, and also have a clear incentive to keep investing time and effort because there was a reasonable pathway to growth to the point where Substack could be a sole source of income. That’s becoming less possible and less realistic respectively. And as it does, the incentive to keep putting time in here will diminish.9

Yes, a lot of that is from other humans joining the platform, but AI-generated content is lighter fluid splashed over the fire. Not just because it supersizes the amount of competition, but also because the economic logic for writers outside the top tier will inexorably become that they have to use AI to make the return on time spent more rational (who wants to spend the kind of time I took on this piece if the ROI is so low?) or so they can get the writing done quickly to spend time on Substack Notes (which the platform is desperate for people to do)…or do more video (which Substack also apparently wants).

It’s a vicious cycle that will start to kill the strong writing at the heart of Substack’s core business model. If nothing changes, the end point is a relatively small number of economically viable Substacks floating atop a sea of enthusiastic hobbyists and highly AI-infused Chimeras and outright AI content…and an audience that only wants to pay for the top, not the slop.

The Easiest, And Best, Temporary Solution: Just Label It.

YouTube requires a label on AI-generated content. So does Facebook. Actually, so does the entire European Union: even if you put your AI-generated image in an ad on a billboard, you have to clearly say so.10 Ditto for The Atlantic and most major media outlets. Even pornography sites are contending with—and pushing labeling on—their flood of AI-content.11

Labeling isn’t a panacea, but there’s good evidence that it throws a lot of sand in the gears of AI slop.12 And there’s reason to believe that it would erect an effective sandbag barrier on Substack in particular. Substack’s major selling point is that this is where you go for authentic, distinctive, independent voices. This is an audience trained to expect human authenticity and direct connection. Receiving an email from someone is still a human act, and something we enjoy if the sender is someone we want to hear from, like , or , or, uh, . We have a word for emails that come from robots: spam. Who wants that?

Yes, this is a temporizing move. But it at least makes the Substack playing field a more even one, since we’ll all still be in a friendly competition for attention where we can use our own ideas and idiosyncrasies to our advantage and not have to shout above the artificial din. Top publications that are already well-insulated from major competition and that have started to integrate AI will no longer feel the pressure to do so—it’s like doping in sports, rational for the top performers if everyone else is doing it, unnecessary once the sport is cleaned up.

And the best part is, it’s easy, and it’s in Substack’s best long-term interests.

3

User Mag

How Much of Substack Is Actually AI?

In March 2025 an alleged debate between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves went viral on Substack. The post amassed 25,000 likes and nearly 5,000 reposts. Even today, it continues to spread. But the debate between Musk and Reeves never happened. The Substack post was entirely generated by AI…

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2 months ago · 271 likes · 4 comments · Taylor Lorenz

4

On Substack

The Substack AI Report

AI is here—at schools, in memes, and, yes, even on Substack. But beyond sniffing out its usage—who’s being too liberal with the em dashes or the “It’s not [this]. It’s [this]” constructions—AI’s actual applications in creative work are hazy…

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a year ago · 1806 likes · 749 comments · Arielle Swedback

Note that these data suggest that top publications use AI a bit less, but the middle tier uses it more. In other words, it’s the middle tier that is duking it out for survival, and where the AI competition is greatest.

 I was having a very Biblically-inspired conversation yesterday about Original Sin. And it has everything to do with the single most destructive thing that Donald Trump has done to America.

Contrary to popular belief, Original Sin has nothing to do with sex (we can thank St. Augustine for that distortion).1 What the Bible actually says is that Eve is tempted by a serpent to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had disallowed. Adam and Eve’s disobedience was the first sin, humanity’s loss of innocence in the knowledge of the depths of evil was the consequence. Because once people realized what they could do, it became inevitable that they would. Once we gave in to the first temptation, a future of succumbing to evil was sure to follow.

I’m arguing that Trump is the American serpent.2

Yesterday, I interviewed and Ira Shapiro, co-editors of the new book Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This, representing work from the , a bipartisan group of 45 leaders from law, business, national security, health, and education cataloging the damage that Trump has caused in his second term. I wanted to ask them about Trump’s most damaging betrayal. If you missed my Substack livestream with them, you can see their answer, along with their most surprising findings and insider takeaways—plus my interview with on his blockbuster Substack article on the economic crisis that’s as little as 6 months away—on YouTube.

But in reflecting on my question—and on my Biblical conversation—I supplied my own answer:

Trump’s Original Sin is that he’s shown future presidents the depths of how far they can go in crashing through laws in the pursuit of power and personal wealth.

What Trump has done in the past year and a half, essentially, is to write a playbook. It is a guide to all of the things that you can try to get away with if you hold executive power. Like Tolkien’s One Ring, the temptation to use that power will be extraordinarily hard to overcome.

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Future presidents—whoever they may be, from whichever party—are going to have to exercise preternatural restraint to avoid the lure of breaking the norms, rules, and laws that have made our country functional.

The truth is that the Trump playbook feels so easy, and can be effective. Why get mired in Congressional maneuvering when you can declare a war, or tariffs, or funding freezes on your own, whatever the Constitution may say? Why negotiate with political opponents when you can sic federal law enforcement on them, ensnare them in defending their livelihood and freedom in the legal system for years on end? Why put up with critics when you can crush them with federal power? Why limit yourself to a post-presidency making millions when you can have a current presidency looting billions?

Yes, the system has antibodies. The courts are stopping some of the abuses. A few instances of Republican spinal fortitude are slowing others. But Trump is getting away with an awful lot for an awfully long time along the way (so what if a Supreme Court decision means that the administration must eventually refund up to $166 billion in illegally collected tariffs—the damage has been done). And he’s defining the outer contours of what is possible.

Trump has hung a shining apple before us—and that way lies The Fall for America. Can future presidents forbear?

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He believes that as much as we all think we know the story of Jeffrey Epstein and what it’s about, we really don't.

After reading Greg’s four-part blockbuster Substack series1 about this, I realized that he was right. Because of the horrible nature of the headlines involved, the story that appears in the media, in politics, and in the courts is probably hijacking our brains and diverting us from a deeper issue.

Jeffrey Epstein's story is usually told as a sex trafficking story, and it is. But the truth is that his real business was dirty money: finding it, hiding it, protecting it, and shuttling it from one shadowy recess to another. Along the way, he sat at the intersection of intelligence agencies, organized crime, elected leaders, and business moguls. He traded information, favors, and access within that world, sailing on a river of dirty money.

In short, there was a global web of secret money and immense power, and he was the spider sitting in the middle, indispensable to all of the strands.

And yes, of course, this involves Russia: the Russian mob, Russian intelligence, and a web of Russian relationships that connects directly to Donald Trump, and that may explain why Trump has been so desperate to keep his name out of those Epstein files.

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Why are we bringing this up now?

For one thing, Greg has written a whole book about it, and we talked about it in the interview embedded above.

But it's also worth talking about right now because the fight to reveal this deeper story is still unfolding.

• Thomas Massie, the lone congressional Republican fighting to make the Epstein Files public, was just drummed out of office by a wave of Trump money and influence.

• Those Epstein files are still being actively suppressed: FBI Director Kash Patel authorized $851,000 in FBI overtime specifically to redact Trump's name.

• The legal deadline for releasing the files has passed, and the media’s attention is waning. Meaning, Patel, Bondi, and Trump are getting away with burying material information in real time. This isn't a cold case.

And most of all, this matters because the defining political issue of our time has become corruption, a kind of corruption we've never seen before, not just because of its scale, but because of its widespread acceptance and the way it's embedded in every aspect of our government under Donald Trump.

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People have been warning about the danger of America becoming an autocracy, and maybe we will. But first, we seem to be going through a larval phase of becoming a kleptocracy. That's what we need to understand, and that's what we need to fight against.

I hope you enjoy this interview on which I’m making available here on Substack (my weekly livestream with incredible guests like Greg is usually available live here on my substack, and later on Worth Knowing YouTube—please subscribe over there too!), because so many people from the community tuned in and became subscribers today! And a big thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in. I hope you’ll encourage others to subscribe!

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PREVAIL by Greg Olear

Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein, Part One: The Money Thing

. . . I’ll pay the cost…

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6 months ago · 306 likes · 80 comments · Greg Olear

It’s not worth talking about the Democratic Party’s “autopsy” of the 2024 election.1

It is worth talking about the reason that report was delayed, buried, and then exhumed half-rotted to walk the earth an like addled zombie: the dog that didn’t bark inside that report, the real problem that Democrats face and that they don’t really want to discuss.

Democrats have a fundamental identity problem: it isn’t clear to voters what we are about or how we propose to solve their problems, and we’re tangled in knots on areas where voters have real concerns about us because we don’t want to offend anyone in our coalition. We’ve also lost the plot on what used to be our winning cornerstone.

But, the good news is, there’s a clear roadmap for how to fix all of it.

The Problem? Try This At-Home Test

What becomes clear looking at multiple analyses of the Democratic Party and the last election in particular is that we don’t have any clear “brand” that makes it plain to voters what we’re about. I.e., voters have no idea what we really stand for, and we’re so afraid of offending groups who are part of our base (and money supply) that we can’t speak clearly about any of the issues that are being used by our adversaries to define us.

If you want to test this out yourself, try this: say out loud in one sentence what the Democratic Party stands for. And if you’re able to concoct something reasonably coherent, get in a room with a few other Democrats and have everyone say their sentence at the same time to see if they have any overlap at all.

Difficult, huh?

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To be sure, this isn’t posing a major problem for 2026. The evidence is clear that despite our internal issues, Trump’s train-wreck leadership has left Democrats in an ultra-strong position for the midterms. Here’s the article I wrote two weeks ago about just how strong that position is—and since then, it’s only gotten better:

But longer term, the story of the 2024 election isn’t that hard to tell, and the trouble that it augurs for 2028 is clear too.

What Actually Happened in 2024?

Here’s Kamala Harris’ Deputy Campaign Manager boiling it all down to one key takeaway:

My biggest lesson from the 2024 election is that tactics don’t add up to a brand, and a brand is the most important thing in politics today. Without a brand that people genuinely feel is connected to your candidate’s deeply held beliefs, your tactics will add up to nothing. You’ll reach people but won’t close the deal.

Voters were really unhappy with how things were going in 2024. High prices, Republican attacks on immigration, and a “vibescession” took a deep toll. Moreover, voters didn’t feel good about what anyone from the Democratic Party could do to solve their problems. Kamala Harris never found a way (in the all of 107 days she had at her disposal—that part was definitely not her fault) to change that, because people never really connected to the idea that she, as a Democrat and a leader in the current administration, had any solutions to their problems or was really focused on the right things.

Blueprint, a Democratic public opinion research group, put a finer point on all of this in an actual, candid, lucid post-election report from November 8, 2024. And they titled it in the clearest way imaginable: “Why America Chose Trump: Inflation, Immigration, and the Democratic Brand.” Here’s the money quote from their polling results:

The top three reasons not to vote for Harris were:

1. “Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+24)

2. “Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+23)

3. “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” (+17).

This suggests that Harris was weighed down heavily by the Biden administration, particularly by inflation and their track record on immigration. Harris was also weighed down by voters’ belief that she focused on liberal cultural issues. In fact, this was the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump (+28).

Bottom line, we were stuck with the inflation liability, but the lack of a deeper brand on economic issues left us weakened in trying to fight our way out of it. And we had tied ourselves in knots on immigration and “cultural issues” and then tried so hard to offend nobody that we pissed off everybody.2

Take immigration: Biden got a little too lax on the border in 2021-2022. But then he retrenched. Did you know that Biden had more deportations in 2024 than Trump did in 2025? It’s true. But Harris was tied to years of Democrats’ muddle on the issue, and couldn’t work past it.

But the worst part is that we lost the “Change” argument.

There’s no more important theme in American politics than change. In fact, one could easily argue that the party who won the battle to be seen as the party of change has won virtually every election of the past thirty-five years. I wrote about this a year ago, and nothing has changed:

The Good News and the Bad News and the Good News

Democrats can fix this. We even know how. Step One: clean up the vulnerabilities in the brand. We can do that in part via Step Two: pivot back to change as a key theme, and Step Three: tie the change theme to economic ideas focused on addressing Americans’ real pain points.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a totally easy road. There’s a layer of good news, followed by a little bad news, followed by a bit more good.

The good news is that party brands aren’t built in a lab, they’re built by a leader. Party brands are defined by their presidential standard-bearer, and we’ve pulled off a rapid re-brand before. If you squint a bit, 2026 looks a lot like 1990. In 1988, Michael Dukakis had gotten crushed because of voter perceptions that Democrats were weak and too liberal (note that the slogan that Trump campaign manager James Blair is thirsting to make happen about Democrats right now is “woke, weak, and far too liberal”…sound familiar?). What happened back in 1990-1992? Bill Clinton emerged from a party primary scrum with the idea that he was a New Democrat, and the party brand shifted. This inevitably happens with parties when they pick a new leader (Donald Trump practically assassinated the Republican Party brand in 2016). So for all the worry about the Democratic Party brand, we’re inevitably going to have at least a slightly new one in two years.

The bad news: the next Democratic Party primary is going to be an absolute train wreck. You like the 2020 process? Wait ‘til you get a load of the dozens of candidates lining up to get in on 2028 who have every reason to believe (correctly) that it’s a wide-open random draw and they have as good a shot as anyone else. That will make it harder for the party to clearly coalesce and for the eventual nominee to put her/his stamp on the party’s direction.

The good news, part II: the Republicans’ brand problems are about to be just as bad! In 2028, they’re next nominee will have to figure out a post-Trump arranged marriage of MAGA Republicans, non-MAGA Republicans and swing voters in the world’s most awkward thruple.

And here’s the sneaky, final piece of good news. Parties reinvent themselves all the time. Yes, it usually takes hitting rock bottom first. But at least we're pretty sure we're there.

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The thinking behind President Donald Trump’s new $1.776 billion legal settlement fund1—which he claims is to compensate victims of political “weaponization and lawfare”—is both crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

Clear in that it’s one of the most naked acts of political corruption in American history: a convicted felon thieving two billion of our tax dollars to shower on a hand-selected cadre of other felons, traitors, and kooks with nothing other to recommend them than fealty.

Mysterious because it’s such an immediate and foreseeable debacle. The flaws in the original lawsuit that led to the fund were obvious, the widespread bipartisan outrage over the idea was predictable.

So there’s the enigma: what was the plan here? What is he really after?

After years of writing about Trump and based on my experience in government, I see three real possibilities: an obvious explanation; a souped-up second possibility that’s more cynical (and hence maybe more likely); and a third, more sinister, and yet more tantalizing explanation—one that would give some valuable insight into what, with good reason, Trump fears most.

Theory One: This is Trump

Since this is, after all, Donald Trump we’re talking about, one might search no further than Occam’s Razor: he’s essentially a walking, pathological id who struggles to makes coherent plans of any kind.

So it could easily be that there was never any scheme, strategy, or purpose here. Trump’s launched ridiculous lawsuits and been rewarded for them before (see: ABC, CBS), like a child spoiled by jumpy parents who give in to every tantrum. And acting on craven impulse is a strong baseline explanation for a lot of Trump’s behavior. That could be the end of the story.

In fact, it wouldn’t even be all that unusual outside of Trump-world. A surprising number of major government decisions are made without a strategic plan or clear endgame in mind. Watching House of Cards gives the impression that government is populated by strategic masterminds. In my experience on Capitol Hill, that’s sometimes true, but often not. Elected leaders frequently hatch hazy ideas and leave it to staff to sort out the details and make something happen. That can lead to inane results.

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So can we imagine that what went down here was a quintessentially Trump decision to launch a patently deranged lawsuit followed by the DOJ scrambling to find a face-saving way out that didn’t involve telling the emperor he had no clothes? Absolutely.

But there’s a bit more going on that might provide an even better explanation...

Theory Two: It’s All About the Money

Another good starting point for understanding any Trump action is to assume it’s all about grabbing for money. And there’s a humdinger of a financial incentive hidden inside this settlement: the deal ends—forever—an I.R.S. audit of Trump’s tax returns that’s been hanging over his head for years and that could easily have cost him over $100 million.2

That audit was quietly put on hold during the first Trump administration—and clearly was not going to move while he was president again—but could have been revived in the future.

Why not simply tell the I.R.S. to quash it? Because that’s blatantly against the law: 26 U.S. Code § 7217 prohibits executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations in language so plain not even Samuel Alito could fudge it.

So, under this theory, the story would look something like this. The $10 billion lawsuit was always a cover meant to obscure the ultimate target of ending the audit. The new settlement fund agreement is like draping Harry Potter's invisibility cloak over what amounts to a secret $100 million payout to Trump. The Trump team may have even factored in the political backlash to the settlement as a lightning rod: a useful, trollish diversion from the real purpose. This would also fit Trump’s pattern of behavior of distracting from political scandals by creating even bigger political scandals.

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In this version, the settlement fund and payouts to MAGA felons is a sideshow. But there’s also a strong possibility—one that I think is perhaps the most likely—that it’s the main show…

Theory Three: The RICO Contingency

To understand this explanation, let’s3 start out with a huge hat tip to Substacker for his May 4th article titled “This is way bigger than RICO. Is There a Legal Strategy That Could Put the Entire Trump-GOP Criminal Enterprise in Jail Without Waiting for an Election?”4

Here’s the TL;DR:

• The combination of the Supreme Court’s presidential criminal immunity ruling, the president’s pardon power, and Trump’s complete corruption of the Department of Justice has wrapped Trump and all of his minions in a protective bubble of freedom from federal prosecution.

• But state laws still apply. And if any of them breaks a state law, even in the course of performing federal duties, they can (and should) be prosecuted.

• So there is a potential to go after Trump’s criminality by using the exact same RICO model that prosecutors used in the 1980s to break the New York mafia: indict the lowest-level operatives, get them to testify against their bosses, flip those bosses and turn them against the next level up, and so on. Before long, you’re at the top.

The idea is that Trump is like the Death Star: he wields immense power at large scales, but he’s vulnerable to a small-scale attack that can set off a chain reaction. And he’s intimately familiar with this kind of vulnerability. His world is New York in the 1970s and 1980s. His lawyer, and idol, was Roy Cohn5—a prominent fixer and consigliere6 for the same New York mob families who were eventually destroyed by RICO prosecutions.

We also know that his team actively wields the power of money to try to keep the lowest levels in line. Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified7 to how the Trump team leveraged financial pressure and the promise of payouts to try to keep her from turning. As has pointed out, in just the past month, Trump’s DOJ has been quietly slipping substantial “settlement” baksheesh to risible MAGA figures like Mike Flynn8 and Carter Page,9 because mafiosos need to show their current foot soldiers that you will take care of them by taking care of previous foot soldiers.

All of this leads to the tantalizing possibility that the purpose of the settlement fund is exactly what it looks like: to take care of the last crop of foot soldiers to prevent them turning, and to show the current crop that you are doing so.

And I say tantalizing because it is also a remarkable admission of weakness. If Trump and his team are so willing to court the kind of outrage that we are now seeing, and if they are truly motivated by the ability to give out these kinds of payoffs, it shows that they recognize a deep vulnerability. And it lights a path for state-level prosecutors to follow.

The settlement fund may look like pure brazen corruption — and it is. But if Theory Three is right, it's also a map. State prosecutors, opposition researchers, and journalists should be reading this not as provocation to outrage, but as the entry point to a maze that says “start here” and that ends with holding a band of criminals accountable.

4

The Existentialist Republic

This is way bigger than RICO. Is There a Legal Strategy That Could Put the Entire Trump-GOP Criminal Enterprise in Jail Without Waiting for an Election?

Note from the author: this piece contains an article, followed by links to free books and activist training materials, followed by four template emails, amd then a references section. Now let's get after it. Also you should follow Wendy Lawrence on Substack…

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a month ago · 6470 likes · 326 comments · Christopher Armitage

It’s been a bad decade.

From economics to health, from culture to politics, if people in the U.S. and around much of Europe seem to agree on one thing, it’s that everything has gotten worse. That thread is woven through cross-country polling;1 it’s embedded in the rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide evident across countries; it’s visible inside international indicators of economic distress.2

As a result, people don’t trust their own institutions anymore, and that vacuum of trust, that gap, has led to an in-rush of political opportunists: populist movements, semi-to-full authoritarians, and out-and-out kleptocrats (lucky us, in the U.S. we got all three!) It’s been boom times for brittle strongmen.

But it’s starting to look like something has shifted, and that we may just be getting some glimmers of hope that the authoritarian-kleptocrat moment is hitting a wall.

Ten Years in Two Minutes

This is necessarily a little simplistic, but if you had to tell the story of the past decade in less than two minutes, it would sound something like this:

In the mid 2010s, the basic economic bargain of globalism, democracy, and market capitalism was flailing. A significant portion of the workforce of many countries, especially in the U.S., were feeling left behind and vulnerable to the forces of trade and immigration. That left a huge chunk of voters feeling frustrated, angry, and primed to seek disruption. [If you want to read a succinct summary of exactly what happened, what it did to American politics, and how Trump realized it and took advantage of it, I wrote it up for Newsweek here].

That was fertile ground for right-wing populist-style movements to gain power by stoking resentment. As Donald Trump put it to Black voters in the 2016 campaign: “what do you have to lose?”(a cagey provocation that even if it didn’t fully work, showed a deep understanding of how much hopelessness and anger people felt about the system)3

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At the same time, an increasingly aggressive Russia led by an actual despot with immense resources at his disposal began to go on offense. This wasn’t a cause, but it sure was a catalyst. If you want to see exactly how, read this stunning 2018 U.S. Senate investigation detailing exactly how successful Russia was at fomenting global disruption by weaponizing its "asymmetric arsenal" to make democratic processes and institutions worldwide go haywire.

The result: Trump, Brexit, the rise of right-wing forces in Europe and in what used to be the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East, Israel. Again, this is a simplification. But the basic bones are right: a noxious brew of popular resentment, opportunistic politicians, new communications technology (i.e., social media + phones), and oligarch money poisoned the politics of the U.S. and Europe. Politicians pitching disruption, channeling anger at convenient targets, and promising simple fixes took advantage.

Covid was an eye in the storm for the U.S., but contained the seeds of further slide. The interruption dislodged Trump and brought hope that the fever would break. But by creating massive economic disruptions, the pandemic built even greater resentment, frustration, and anger that spilled into elections. American voters subsequently overlooked an insurrection, felony conviction, and growing mental incapacity to bring Trump back. And Europe kept tilting rightward. Italy saw the Brothers of Italy party rise to power. In France, National Rally (RN) transformed from a fringe party into a major contender. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged in polls, moving from marginal support in 2013 to over 20% in 2025.

The power-hungry and avaricious seized the post-Covid moment. Russia took advantage of the disruption to attack Ukraine. Netanyahu took advantage of the angry vibes to polarize his own society with a power grab, and then the October 7 attacks to conduct a series of wars (including in Iran) that he had always wanted. China’s vicious repression of its Uyghur population deepened. And of course, in the U.S. Trump started engaging in eye-popping levels of self-dealing, political retribution, and corruption.

By the end of 2025, the situation felt like a flywheel of accelerating chaos, with chunks of what used to be shared laws and values flying off the sides.

But now, there seems to be a shift underway.

Hitting a Wall?

There may be some squinting involved, but there’s a picture emerging in recent months of the authoritarian/populist/kleptocrat axis running into limits and bouncing backward. Consider a few signs:

Ukraine Gaining Steam… I just did a five minute video on this (below) laying out the growing case that Trump and JD Vance have hoisted themselves on the ultimate petard of irony: by trying to undermine Ukraine and bolster Russia at every turn, they’ve inadvertently sparked a leap forward in European strength and cohesion and a wave of Ukrainian innovation that could help them ultimately win.

…As Europe Finds Its Strength closely related, and also covered in the video, is the newfound sense of purpose in Europe to strengthen itself militarily as the U.S. pulls back from the NATO alliance, and to stand up to Trump’s Greenland bullying. The defeat of right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orban has been a significant help. While Europe is still in the throes of right-wing movement growth in a number of places, it does seem to have regained some footing.

Russia—Economic Limits and Political Purging: Politico just reported on “signs of cracks and strains and of the Kremlin going through one of its periodic bouts of infighting and house cleaning — or as Ukrainian intelligence officials like to put it, ‘spiders eating each other in a jar.’” High level government officials are being scapegoated and prosecuted. Russia’s Victory Day parade was scaled back amid fears of Ukrainian drone attacks. And, again from Politico: “on the economic and social fronts, the Kremlin also has worries. ‘The patriotic consensus inside Russia is beginning to face growing pressure from worsening living conditions, expanding drone attacks, and rising social fatigue.’”

China Dealing With Growing Economic Unrest: Freedom House has reported increasing labor dissent and “a steady rise in protests by homebuyers and homeowners amid a deepening financial crisis in China’s real-estate sector”4 while other analysts have documented an uptick in “revenge on society” attacks.5 The biggest story coming out of the Trump-Xi summit last week was that there was no story. No real deals, no trade progress, nothing that really changes the economic status quo for either country.

Netanyahu In Peril: Israel’s ruling coalition just proposed dissolving parliament to pave the way for early elections. The Guardian reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “facing a possible collapse of his fractious coalition” as he comes under mounting pressure from ultra-Orthodox parties.

Trump Breaking the Floor: there’s been a running assumption among American political analysts for years that there’s a lower limit on how far Trump can sink in the public’s estimation. You have to hand it to him for once again proving the pundits wrong! In recent weeks, amid the major price spikes and failures of his Iran war and his flaunting of corruption and cluelessness—and the revelation that you can’t simply declare an end to inflation and an economic golden age—he’s found a way to sink to new polling depths.

To be sure, not every piece of evidence lines up behind a story that the tide is turning back. Far from it. The UK’s political situation is fragile, as is true of many European countries. Netanyahu’s party is currently in the lead in public polling. Putin and Xi are far from being in any real peril of falling from power. And the American midterm elections carry no guarantees.

But still, the basic storyline is there: the proposition from the mix of authoritarians and right-wing populists (and whatever Trump is, mostly a kleptocrat cosplaying a populist) that they could wave away problems and make people feel better off is colliding with reality. There are glimmers of pushback. And that’s a welcome sign after the last ten years.

If you’re a Democrat like me, last week felt like a jab in the gut. If you’re a Republican, it felt like a party.

The Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act1 combined with a state court overturning2 the Democrats’ attempt to counter-gerrymander in Virginia seemed like a withering 1-2 combo.

But really, it’s MAGA world that got a little punch drunk.

The true story is that the past week has been a small setback for Dems, but they’re still very much in the driver’s seat and still highly likely to take control of the U.S. House in November. In the larger view, the past week is doing the Republican Party no favors at all—it’s actually sinking them ever deeper into the Trump trap.

Take a deep breath there, media

Contrast two stories in Politico in recent days. After the SCOTUS ruling, under the headline “GOP midterm warnings mount” we got this very balanced takeaway:

The Supreme Court just handed Republicans a win in the redistricting wars — but they’re still facing gale-force headwinds in the charge toward the midterms.

But after the Virginia ruling, it was a pileup of giddy quotes from GOP strategists:

Republicans are taking a victory lap. “HUGE WIN,” one GOP strategist texted Playbook.“ It’s a great sign going into the midterms,” another told Playbook in an interview. “Today, Democrats are looking at potentially a net loss of double digits in seats heading into this fall’s elections,” Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz said in a statement.3

It was the same in headlines everywhere (there was a lot of blowing: USA Today called it “a seismic blow to Democrats,” the New York Times called it a “huge blow,” and Reuters went with plain-old “blow.”) So, if you felt an urge to take an edible, Xanax, and Pepto-Bismol at the same time, you’re not alone.

But (as is evident below) a quick look at the actual math doesn’t line up with this conclusion at all. What’s really driving the coverage is just the usual heavy dose of horse race journalism driven by the way news media are incentivized to cover elections.

There’s a great scene in the movie The Shipping News that captures the dynamic perfectly. A newspaper editor explains to the main character, a new reporter, how to write a headline about a cloudy day: “Imminent storm threatens village.” The reporter asks, but what if no storm comes. The editor says: “Village spared from deadly storm.”

As someone who’s worked in media for outlets like AlterNet, Raw Story, Washington Monthly, and Newsweek, I can tell you that if I pitched my editors a story that basically said “new judicial rulings don’t change much about the midterms” I wouldn’t get very far.

The story the numbers actually tell

The first, balanced Politico story was actually about right: last week’s judicial rulings represented a modest Republican win at a time when they are facing gale-force headwinds. They move the needle. Just not as much as the media and Republicans wanted to make it seem.

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For example, Nate Silver pointed out that the result in Virginia has less impact than at first blush—the Democratic map was widely portrayed as providing a four-seat Democratic pick up, but applying actual win probabilities in those races set it at more like two or three.

Nate Cohn in the New York Times also adds incredibly useful numbers. Before these rulings, Cohn estimated that across the country, Democrats would need to win the total popular vote for the House by 2.5 percentage points in order to win control. That could rise to just under 4 points if there’s further redistricting in Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

But as of today, depending on the pollster, the generic ballot is showing voters preferring Democrats by 6-8 points. And history shows that this far out, the generic ballot is not only fairly predictive of the final national result, but also that it almost always moves against the party that controls the White House in midterm elections as we get down to the wire.4

Considering Trump’s galactically awful approval ratings, the ongoing chaos and cost burdens that he keeps splattering on voters’ heads, and the recent evidence of polling and special election turnout (for more on this and why people are also underselling Democrats’ likelihood of taking the Senate, see my recent article), it seems unlikely that Republicans are going to turn things around—unless there’s a truly dramatic change in the political environment.

Not to mention that people may be overestimating the impact of the Voting Rights Act ruling because elections are not static. They’re thermostatic. People react to new information.

The Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies looked at reactions to voter ID laws and voter suppression messaging, and found that they resulted in measurable voter mobilization, especially among older Black voters. MIT’s election lab found the same thing: that when more obstacles were put in front of voters, it increased their desire to vote. Over and over, we’ve seen the pattern that when voters—particularly Black voters who have had to endure a horrendous history of voter suppression—feel that their rights are being taken away, they tend to react with higher determination.

The bottom line is that it’s completely fair and accurate to say that the pathway for Democrats got a bit narrower last week. On the other hand, on Polymarket5 on May 1 Democrats were given an 84% chance of winning the house. Now it’s 79%. Not a seismic blow.

The long term Republican trap just got worse

One of the underappreciated aspects of the Republican push for aggressive gerrymandering is that it created the breeding ground for Trump and today’s MAGA reality. I wrote about this in Newsweek last year, laying out exactly how it happened:

For Republicans, gerrymandering helped drive the MAGA-fication of the party. To achieve the 2010 backlash that would fuel their predatory gerrymandering scheme, Republican leaders engineered an angry populist movement—the Tea Party. That Frankenstein’s monster came alive and helped Republicans shellack Democrats in the 2010 midterms, but then escaped lab containment. Feuds between Tea Party-aligned activists and establishment Republicans roiled the party in 2012 and sank them in 2014, leaving the party rudderless, confused, and ripe for Trump’s takeover. Then the Trump faction became a force inside America’s gerrymandered districts. Since his endorsement was seen as the critical factor in winning Republican primaries, and with almost all Republicans districts being “ultra-safe,” the majority of state and U.S. House elected officials became Trump acolytes. Trump’s gerrymandering-enabled leveraged buyout of the Republican Party—and now the U.S. government—means his faction of MAGA Republicans (which represents only 16 percent of Americans) gets to drive a radical agenda that the majority of us oppose.

Trump’s successful destruction of the careers of five Republican State Senators last Tuesday—Republicans who dared oppose his redistricting demands—and replacement with MAGA primary contenders, was the latest notch on the gerrymandering belt, and may have been a short-term MAGA victory.

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But by perpetuating this same pattern of driving the GOP toward only being able to sustain MAGA candidates, it was actually a long-term Republican loss. The same is true of the VRA ruling, the Virginia ruling, and all of the gerrymandering that is now unfolding. It is a Pyrrhic victory, sending Republicans out onto an ever narrower ledge, with their only lifeline held at the other end in the hands of one old, vindictive, and highly erratic man.

None of this is to sugarcoat what was clearly a challenging and demoralizing week. But the truth is, the pathway ahead remains clear, and it remains promising for the Democrats.

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4

Silver Bulletin

Actually, sometimes polls underestimate Democrats

It feels like just yesterday we were wrapping up our coverage of Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024. But that was more than 400 days ago, and once again, we’re back to the beginning…

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5 months ago · 140 likes · 25 comments · Eli McKown-Dawson

Ever since the crushing loss to Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats have been stuck on one question: how much do we need to change in order to start winning again?

Each hammer saw a nail: moderates said “we need to be more moderate and meet voters where they are;” progressives said “no, we need to be more progressive to motivate our base;” and Jill Stein supporters said “sHemdARlgrlfab…quantitative easing…modern monetary theory…graggkkkhh” and went back to water coloring.1

But a new analysis from suggests that there’s at least some resolution to the fight—especially if you apply a key lesson I learned in my graduate course on persuasion.

Looking at it that way not only suggests that, in a way, both sides are right,2 it also helps explain a lot of Democrats’ behavior and makes it seem downright…rational.

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Breaking Down the “Missing Voters” Problem

There’s a lot of valuable stuff in Morris’ analysis,3 but let’s focus on the key point: the way he tries to solve the mystery of the “missing voters.”

The mystery is that polling consistently shows more people disapproving of President Trump than approving of him by a margin of ~20 points. At the same time, on the “generic ballot,”4 Democrats are only ahead of Republicans by about 8 points. So what happened to the 12% of “missing voters” who disapprove of Trump but don’t favor Democrats?

Morris helps answer that by showing that the missing 12% is actually comprised of three sub-groups: ~3% who did not vote for Trump in 2024 and aren’t Republicans (Group 1), ~1% who did vote for Trump in 2024 but show no other Republican lean (Group 2), and ~7% who are actually Republicans who disapprove of Trump.5

The bottom line is that Group 3 are Republicans. Expecting them to vote for Democrats is magical thinking. By contrast, Groups 1 and 2 are totally gettable. They’re independents or lapsed Democrats and great targets to persuade ahead of the midterms because either they’re primed to vote for Democrats and just haven’t committed yet (Group 1), or they’re one-off Trump voters ready to be won back (Group 2).

The Four Types of Persuasion: “CARD”

We can think about how to go after these voters by applying the most important lesson I learned in my course on persuasion at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government: most of the time, you can’t persuade anyone of anything.

At least, not in the sense that we usually think of persuasion to mean “someone used to believe A, but after I worked on them, they changed their mind and now they believe B.” Rather, there are actually four kinds of attitude change and you can remember them via the handy acronym “CARD.”

When people talk about persuasion, they usually mean “conversion,” but it’s actually a lot more nuanced. Most attitude change comes from activating people’s existing views to get them moving; reinforcing people’s stance to amp them up from mild to urgent feelings; or deactivating people to get them to become more indifferent.

Which Is Why Everyone’s Right

That framework maps readily onto the example of the “missing voters.” Group 1 needs activation—they’re disengaged voters who want to oppose Trump and just need to be coaxed off the sidelines. Group 2 needs reinforcement of their anti-Trump impulse to get them to remember that they are fine voting with Democrats.

Group 3 needs…nothing. Democrats can’t really get them, and are happy if they just sit out the next election. Sure, Dems could do a little mild reinforcement of pre-existing exasperation with Trump to keep them at home in the election, but beyond that, they shouldn’t waste their energy.

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That helps resolve some of the tension over what direction Democrats should take.

In the short run, it’s clear from polling that voters’ number one issue by the length of Trump’s tie (like, below the knees and then some) is affordability—and that is especially true for the gettable voters in Groups 1 and 2 and even more so for the Republicans in Group 3.

Talking about the nexus of high prices and outrageous bills is a one-stop shop for persuasion. It activates and reinforces the targeted voters, and it deactivates the Trump-disapproving Republicans by making them more apt to show their displeasure by sitting this election out. It’s what allows a Democratic Socialist like Zohran Mamdani and a moderate centrist like Mikie Sherril to thrive in the same election in neighboring states on more or less the same message.

In other words, for right now, Democrats don’t have to choose moderation or progressivism, they just need to choose affordability.

And indeed, that’s what Democrats are doing, because they totally get this. In fact, they’re even intentionally not swinging at what seems like obvious hanging curveballs in order to keep their focus on the cost of living. Look at my most recent edition of That’s Bullshit: where I address the mystery of why they’re staying mum about what should be the biggest issue on Planet Earth right now. You can see how it connects:

But in the long run, the polling is also unambiguous: Democrats do need to pivot and fix their brand problem. The Group 3 Republican voters are out of reach because of their ingrained brand perceptions of the Democratic Party when it comes to the Republican hot-buttons / 2024 Trump levers on immigration, culture, and crime. Morris points to data from — which I’ll reproduce below— to show one slice of the problem:

To get the Group 3 types of voters in 2028 and beyond—people who are unhappy with the direction of the Republican Party under Trump but who think Democrats are wildly off the rails—Democrats need to fix the broad brand perception of their party.

If there’s good news here, that isn’t actually that outrageously hard to do. I explained why in this earlier deep dive into the question of moderation and branding this past Fall (including why they should wait until next year to worry about this anyway):

Democrats are doing the right thing for the near term, and they still have room to maneuver for the future. Focus on what’s in front of you, and eat the elephant one bite at a time.

3

Strength In Numbers

Pundits are wrong about the Democrats’ "missing" voters

Strength In Numbers is reader-funded. This piece is free to read, but it was not free to produce. Paid subscriptions keep the monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll going, fund data infrastructure for bigger projects, and make analysis articles like this possible…

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2 months ago · 249 likes · 27 comments · G. Elliott Morris

What if I told you that a “crisis” that we’ve heard about our whole lives is actually, finally, upon us? And that it’s going to change the political landscape radically over the next few years.

As far back as I can remember, Washington politicians have been saying that our country is on the edge of disaster because our debt (and annual deficits that add up to debt) is a razor sharp icicle hanging over our heads, growing drip by drip every year.

But now, things truly are different—and the crisis is upon us. In the decade that I worked in Congress, it was an open secret that we were in big trouble…in the long term. But back then, the long term meant problems that were 15 or 20 years off. Remember that an average length of service in congress is 9 years. In other words, it was going to be someone else’s problem.

Now, we’re someone else.

Several factors have converged and are highly likely to make the inevitably dull, eye-glazing topic of our country’s finances one of the defining issues of the next few elections.1

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Here are just three of them:

1. Social Security is now on the brink: The Social Security trust fund is now just six years away from insolvency. That means the U.S. Senators we elect in this year’s midterms will be in office when we cross over the line. Ditto for the next president. Social Security is still "the third rail of American politics" (i.e., touch it and you're dead).2 Much to my surprise, one of my most popular articles for Newsweek was about Trump’s backdoor plan to privatize Social Security (here it is below, reprinted for Substack). This is going to be something that the highest-propensity voters (i.e., current seniors and GenXer’s like me) are going to be following closely. Hence it will be a presidential debate topic, a growing media topic, and an unavoidable issue in the next few years.

2. The big squeeze is coming. In just a few years, the interest we pay on our debt is going to consume about one-third of our tax revenues. And that’s the rosy scenario. In a more pessimistic version, it could be HALF. That’s going to force the issue. Imagine what it will look like when, sooner than most people realize, we have to cut back everything else we do by between 10% and 30% and/or raise taxes by that amount (to be sure, we could just keep borrowing, not cut back, and start running truly eye-popping deficits; but the bond markets would put up with that for about the length of an average Survivor season. If there’s one rule in Washington that seems have been repeatedly proven in the last 40 years, it’s that the bond markets are truly in charge. A bond market wobble is what caused an oval office hyperventilation panic and ended Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs). Like winter in Game of Thrones, this is coming. And the squeeze starts during the next Senate/Presidential terms.

3. Medicare turning into a sinkhole: Medicare now faces a $109 trillion cash shortfall over 30 years. Last year, the federal government spent about $7 trillion on, well, everything it spends money on. So we are now at a point where we could do nothing but pay for Medicare for the next 15 years and still be in the red. That’s because of the dirty little secret that Medicare is paying out a lot of benefits to retirees. These days, the average couple gets three times back what they paid in. Sure, this seems like an issue with a longer time horizon. But not really. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton reputedly said “because that’s where the money is.” Medicare (along with Social Security) is where our money is. There is simply no way out of problems #1 and #2 above without dealing with Medicare. And if there’s a political topic that’s even more emotional than Social Security, it’s Medicare.

And these three drivers are only a part of the picture (for the full picture, again, I recommend my interview from yesterday with one of the world’s leading experts on every public dollar that we spend, Jessica Riedl).

But ironically, just as we’ve caught sight of this freight train coming around the bend, the chatter is as muted as it’s ever been. Republican holdouts on the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—Representatives Thomas Massie, Warren Davidson, and Senator Rand Paul—got shouted down and steamrolled. The president, with 2.5 years to go in office, couldn’t care less. And Democrats have no incentive to be the turd in the punchbowl when they’re trying to win the election in front of them in 6 months. Why ruin it with a Cassandra turn?3

One final thought that I run to ground in my interview with Jessica: it is entirely fair to say that almost everything you’ve been told about this brewing crisis and why it is happening is wrong: either misleading, incomplete, or just not true. The Republicans’ scapegoats are innocent (hint, think big Dem spenders, which is a myth), and the Democrats are dancing around the real issue (hint: defense spending matters, but not as much as you think).

Which means that the real crisis isn’t even the debt. It’s that there’s no one left who’s willing to deal with it.

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It’s OK if you’re skeptical.

As a Democratic political operative who spent seven years working for members of Congress from Maine, I had a front row seat to every edition of the long-running horror film series: “Susan Collins Returns.”1

But with the surprise exit of Maine Governor Janet Mills from the Democratic Senate primary yesterday—de facto handing the torch to Democratic rival Graham Platner—we’ve entered the final stretch of the campaign…and what truly looks like the final act for Collins. I’ll explain why below.

First, for a fun, fast-paced look at the rapidly escalating stakes in politics this week and the biggest stories shaping the news, please check out this week’s Political Rehab, premiering at 12:30 EDT and available this week exclusively on Worth Knowing YouTube [I’m testing a new approach of putting Political Rehab exclusively on YouTube…let me know what you think!]

An Agonizing Case of Lucy-and-the-Football

U.S. Senator Susan Collins is the Democratic Party’s white whale, a Houdini-esque escape artist who specializes in tormenting us with tantalizing near-misses. Here’s a painful but instructive brief history of Democratic futility:

• 2002: Collins’ first re-election race, usually a senator’s most vulnerable point. Dems rally around the very capable (later House member) Chellie Pingree. But it was 17 points and a cloud of dust for Collins2 after running treacly but well-timed flag-themed ads leveraging the post-9/11 Republican surge.3 Maine Democrats subsequently launch a steady drinking habit.

• 2008: Dems nominate the likeable, erudite, accomplished congressman Tom Allen (one of the most genuinely warm and thoughtful members I ever worked with in my decade on Capitol Hill). Since being smart and thoughtful is the mark of Cain in politics, he gets crushed by 23 points even as Barack Obama wins the state by 17. Maine Democrats upgrade to heroin.

• 2014: This time, Dems bring the intelligent, energetic, feisty (and future Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate) Shenna Bellows (an old friend of mine and a cool person). A tough year for the party nationally leaves Shenna to explore the frontiers of “how much can a Democrat lose by.” Maine Democrats decide that the occasional acid microdose is worth exploring.

• 2020: Like Darth Vader declaring “I have you now”—and with the same result—Dems concoct Sara Gideon in a lab as the perfect machine to take down Sara Conner, er, Susan Collins.4 Things look amazing. Gideon leads by an average of 6 points in polling after Labor Day, and assesses between a 2/3 and 3/4 probability of Democratic victory. Joe Biden wins Maine by 9 points. So does Susan Collins. Maine Democrats go to town on the entire pharmacy.

So why is 2026 different?

There are three basic reasons: trends, new realities, and vibes.

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Trends: When I worked for Maine Congressman Mike Michaud during his first—and per above, most vulnerable—re-election campaign, his pollster told us something interesting about Maine politics: once Maine voters decided they liked you—i.e., once they finished the test drive and took a politician off the lot—they just kept liking you more and more. As a result, Maine politicians tended to see slow and steady gains in approval rating year after year.

Susan Collins surfed that wave: from an approval in the low 60s early on, by 2016, Morning Consult ranked her as the second most popular senator in the nation at 79% .

And then she ran into two things: Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. Her decision to support Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court created a psychological break among voters and kicked off a steady downward approval slide: by July 2019, her approval had fallen 16 to 45%.

That was still high enough to survive in 2020: Collins retained enough support to run a hard contrast campaign against Gideon and make it work. But by early 2026, she had become the second most unpopular senator in the country (trailing only Mitch McConnell). And a Public Policy Polling survey last year saw Collins’ approval rating at just 24 percent. That is crisis level.

New realities: Over the past 30 years, American political polarization has gone from “bad” to “awful” to “someone call General Grant.” When I wrote speeches for Congressman Michaud—who represented the more conservative, swing district in Maine—I was always careful to highlight points of common ground with then-President George W. Bush. That was politically essential.

Nowadays, forget about it. Democrats’ utter loathing of anything associated with Trump, combined with his own cratering approval rating among independents and even non-MAGA Republicans (21% of Republicans now wish they had a do-over on their 2024 vote), has made the political environment for Collins fundamentally different than anything she has ever faced.

Vibes: You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned Platner in all of this. But if I’ve learned anything in my years in politics, it’s that politicians do actually matter. As polarized as we’ve become, people still don’t just vote for a generic party cypher.

Platner is clearly a skilled politician. Anyone who can sail through the controversial statements he’s made online and literally having to cover over a Nazi tattoo and can dominate a popular sitting governor in primary polling by 35 points is pretty darn good at this.

On top of that, a longtime Maine political observer friend of mine emailed me this morning to point a few things out:

Platner is a tireless candidate. He’s done more town halls in the last month than Collins has done in the past 20 years. He’s resonating with people in a way that the national media cannot understand because they’re not taking the time to go to these small towns in Maine and see what he’s doing.

I’m not some political romantic who swoons for a vision of old-fashioned New England town hall gladhanding, but in small New England towns (I’ve managed congressional operations across a lot of them) it does make a difference.

Platner’s Lead is Different

What it all adds up to is that Platner’s average 6 point lead across polling is a lot different than Gideon’s: it is against a deeply weakened Collins operating in the most toxic environment for Republicans potentially ever, and generated on the strength of real organic grassroots energy and political deftness. Prediction markets (the 2026 successor to Nate Silver) are catching the drift and putting Platner’s chances of winning at 73%.5

As for the argument that Platner is vulnerable to his past controversies, that is possible, but Republicans have been running ads on those issues for 6 months now to no avail.

Of course, if we learned anything from Freddy Kreuger, Jason Voorhees, and that Saw bad guy, it’s that there’s always one more sequel. And there could be here. But the evidence is mounting that this particular franchise has finally run out of steam.

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This weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner marks a return to the scene of the crime. Political insiders have long believed1 that President Barack Obama’s mockery of then-reality TV star Donald Trump at the 2011 dinner was the reason not only that Trump ran for President,2 but also that he made it his top priority to undo anything that Obama had done.

It almost became a Trump reflex: if Obama had touched it, it must be destroyed.

That certainly seems to have been a major reason that once he came president, Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal that Obama had negotiated with Iran, calling it “the worst deal in history.”3

Which begs the question: as he tries to wind up a war with Iran that he claims to have won convincingly, why does he seem to be trying to revive Obama’s deal?

Sound far-fetched? Check out my newest edition of That’s Bullsh*t (short clip above) and see for yourself [subscribing to the YouTube channel while you’re there makes you a superstar].

Here is a side-by-side comparison that I assembled of what was in Obama’s 2015 deal and what seems to be on the table for Trump, based on reporting from the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Washington Post.4

To be clear, this comparison is based on reporting of what Trump appears willing to accept: it remains possible that the Trump administration will add new, tougher elements, or in other ways diverge from the Obama blueprint.

But it stands to reason that eventually, the most likely outcome to this war will be a deal that looks remarkably similar to Obama’s, because the universe of disagreements and solutions is largely unchanged.

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The major divide in the Obama negotiation was the American determination to keep Iran from possessing nuclear weapons, and Iran’s determination to retain a nuclear capability that it claimed (unconvincingly) was for civilian energy purposes.

If Iran can’t be compelled to renounce that interest—and clearly this war has not shaken their resolve, while Trump seems all too happy to avoid further exchange of fire in the face of strong domestic opposition, so he does not seem prepared to fight it out of them—then the only alternative is limitations on their nuclear capacity with strict inspections.

And on the economic front, since Iran can’t be compelled to allow free traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and the Trump administration is highly reluctant to commit the ground forces that it would take to control the waterway, then the only alternative to a military inducement is an economic incentive.

In other words, any deal would likely have to boil down to  one core concept: Iran sharply restricting its nuclear capability and allowing international monitoring in exchange for allowing free maritime commerce and phased relief from economic sanctions.

That’s the Obama deal.

The key caveat here is that the situation is different than in 2015. In some ways it is worse: because Trump tore up the JCPOA, Iran went from  essentially zero stockpile of nuclear material in 2015 to almost a thousand pounds by 2025. The war also allowed Iran to demonstrate that it has a hammer to wield over the world economy.

But in some ways things are markedly better. The major reason that then-National Security Advisor John Bolton gave for Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama deal was that it failed to restrain Iran’s support for proxy terror campaigns against its neighbors.5 That might have been a fig leaf or a full sock puppet narrative from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, but there’s truth to it. And today, those proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—have been kneecapped, so the new objective is to prevent them from rebuilding their capacity.

The bottom line is that there’s a chance at a deal that meaningfully adds to what Obama did a decade ago, perhaps through a plank that hems in support for terrorist groups.

But the most likely outcome is that we end up back where we started. A JCPOA with a red hat on it; the Obama deal with a face-saving cosmetic difference.

I say grenade, not bomb, because the real explosion was delayed. The big news wasn’t the historic level of support for impeaching Trump in the headline. One actually had to scroll down to get to the true “whoa, what did he just say?!?” moment.

And I won’t make you wait. Morris noted that in his newest poll:

21% of Trump’s own 2024 voters now say he should be impeached.

I broke down why this number is a sign of a politically devastating tide on yesterday’s livestream (watch here).

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What?

When your own voters turn against you in such numbers so quickly, it’s a potentially serious warning sign that your political position is crumbling. It makes your Congressional allies more apt to run for cover and less likely to help you make the moves you need to try to stabilize. It accelerates lame duckhood.

Of course, one could always dismiss a finding like this as an outlier. But this one carries a lot more weight because it lines up with several other pieces of evidence suggesting that Trump and his Republican Party are approaching a real crisis:

• Per the short clip at the top of laying this out in my livestream yesterday, Republican insiders say that fear is rising behind closed doors, with Republican political operatives increasingly exasperated with Trump and his core supporters who seem to want to stick their heads in the sand.

• The University of Massachusetts Amherst just found1 that 38% of 2024 Trump voters have lost confidence in their vote, and a full 16% said they would not vote for him if they had it to do over again.

• That aligns almost exactly with Morris’ last poll:2 “13% of Americans who cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024 say they regret how they voted in the last election.”

• Navigator Research’s January focus group3 of Trump voters found that many felt disappointed or duped, and most graded him with D’s and C’s.

• The White House can’t generate a crowd, as when Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to a mostly empty arena last week and got heckled (covered on Political Rehab last week here).

• And as I laid out last week, the special election and polling evidence is mounting that Democrats are now in a stronger-than-expected position not only to retake the U.S. House, but also the U.S. Senate—considered by most analysts to be a longshot even just a few months ago:

Ultimately, all of this only becomes real if it turns into actual voting outcomes in the midterm elections, now just over six months away. But this amount of collapse can still matter along the way: it can further dampen Republican voter enthusiasm, embolden Democratic donors and voters, and spawn more media coverage of Trump’s problems. In short, it can create a self-fulfilling spiral.

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Watch yesterday’s full livestream here for the key question now facing both parties: Is this a temporary wobble—or the start of a real Trump collapse?

2

Strength In Numbers

Poll: 1 out of 8 Trump voters has buyer’s remorse about 2024

Programming note: I have a pressing family event this Saturday so there will be no Sunday roundup this weekend. I will also probably miss out on producing a crowdsourced estimate of the third No Kings demonstrations like I did for the first two, though precise details are TBD and things…

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3 months ago · 196 likes · 29 comments · G. Elliott Morris

The lie was sneaky, seedy, and premeditated: for almost a year now, President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have been trying desperately to push the idea that the One Big Beautiful Bill1 would deliver a big middle class tax cut, which the public would see in the form of record refunds.

But as I explained in this week’s edition of That’s Bullsh*t!, that was a total scam from the start (in fact, as I lay out in the video, it was really three scams, nested one inside the other like a Russian matryoshka doll).

I included a short clip above, and you can watch the full 5 minute video on Worth Knowing YouTube here.

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This isn’t just another “look, Trump is lying” story. It matters because last week, I just happened to be interviewing former Washington Post Fact Checker on my livestream when I asked him which of the more than 30,000 Trump lies that he documented had the most juice. He said this:

That’s the issue: the foundational myth of Trumpism is that “Trump is good for the economy.” Everything he has been allowed to do has sprung from that perception.

In Greek myth, Hercules fights the giant Antaeus and finds he is losing, because Antaeus regains his strength whenever his feet touch the ground. Hercules realizes that the only way to defeat his adversary is to lift him in the air and thereby separate him from his ability to recharge.

Similarly, the perception that people are better off economically when Trump is president is Trump’s lifeline, the fuel that propels him and allows him to come back from outrages that would have destroyed any other politician. The only way to finally defeat him is to pierce that myth and separate him from the source of his strength. Bursting this tax scam is one piece.

The $1000 Refund Scam

The MAGA echo chamber (which includes the White House, Fox News, right-wing influencers, Russian bots, and pliant Republican congressional leaders) has been saying that people would get an average $1000 tax refund.

But not only does new IRS data from last week’s tax filing deadline show that the average refund is up by only about $350, but the figure is also a poster child for how misleading averages can be.

It turns out that fewer than half of taxpayers making under $100,000 are getting an increased refund at all. For those that do, the average increase in their refund is only about $200.2 It’s mostly much wealthier people who are getting huge refunds of around $15,000 ($50,000 for people in the top 1%)3 that are skewing the average.

And the amount of savings that most of us are getting is incredibly close to what the Trump administration is costing the average American just to pay their taxes. As my former Capitol Hill colleague and Washington Monthly senior editor revealed this weekend, Elon Musk’s DOGE team killed an initiative to help people file for free, which would have saved the average taxpayer $160 in tax prep fees.

The Washington Monthly

You could have filed your taxes for free this year...

In 2024, Joe Biden’s administration piloted Direct File, a free tax filing program offered by the Internal Revenue Service to save taxpayers time and money…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Washington Monthly and Anne Kim

That’s also about the same amount Trump’s Iran war is costing the average household in higher energy costs per month.4

Scads of reputable economists have been warning for much of the past year that refunds would be way lower than what the White House was claiming (the folks at Oxford Economics actually nailed the real amount almost exactly more than six months ago). None of that stood in the way of MAGA echo chamber’s determination to keep repeating the false number.

And as I describe in the video, the $1000 refund scam is just an entry point into the larger strategy of selling a broader set of economic myths and devious traps.

With the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment showing Americans’ views of the economy at all-time lows, polls showing two-thirds of voters blaming Trump for high gasoline prices, and presidential approval surveys plunging to new depths, Trump has become incredibly vulnerable on his lifeline issue, and desperately needs a political recharge.

Which is why evaporating the refund scam is so important in order to keep his feet from touching ground.

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What does it mean when the general says that we’re losing the war?

That’s essentially what happened when —the former Washington Post fact checker and one of the world’s leading experts on lies in politics— declared that the “falsehoods are winning.”

And actually, it wasn’t even really that close anymore.

This isn’t just an academic question, a philosophical problem, or another round of handwringing about the sad state of the media.

In just the past month, we’ve been living the consequences when reality is drowned in a sea of lies. We’ve lived through through an entire war built on assertions that were obviously untrue at the start and that failed to conclude in a fake cease-fire, based on assertions that were even more untrue.

Our inability to tell fact from fiction—or more importantly to make the facts matter—has become the defining theme of this whole era in our country.

So when Glenn joined my livestream today, I asked him:

• Why are the falsehoods routing the side of the truth?

• Is this a media failure, a Trump thing, or is it something that changed in us?

• Can truth win someday?

Plus I gave him a fun lightning round of questions about all of the tens of thousands of lies he’s covered, like:

1. Which lie got the most most repeated?

2. Which lie was most effective?

3. Which lie was most dangerous?

4. Which lie shocked you most?

5. Which lie did media mishandle?

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video!

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This morning, Jessica Taylor at the highly regarded Cook Political Report announced that Democrats’ chances to take the majority in the U.S. Senate this November have risen slightly:

“the Senate battlefield is shifting in Democrats’ favor. But due to the difficulty of the map, winning back a majority still remains a tall order. The GOP remain the narrowing favorites to retain the upper chamber.”

But there’s a strong case that this is greatly underselling it, and as of right now, Democrats have not only pulled into the lead, but are actually solid favorites.

To be sure, Cook and Taylor’s caution is fair. I have the exact same analytical instinct, and feel the need to stress the usual caveats when it comes to forecasting elections—polling is only a snapshot in time, it is therefore only moderately predictive this far out from an election, and the world can easily change. Honestly, four months ago, I thought Democrats were a Senate longshot, and I said so on my YouTube show. At least part of that is my built-in instinct as a Democrat not to get hopes up only to have them dashed. I’ve seen that movie too many times and in too many races before (see Collins, Susan) in recent decades.

But things have changed, and the evidence is what it is. If one looks at it without fear or bias, it is telling a reasonably clear story. So if I had to place a large bet on who would control the Senate next year, as of today, I’d now bet on Democrats.

Here’s why:

1. The generic ballot is already very promising. Voters’ answer to the poll question “which party would you prefer to be in charge in Congress” is actually a good bellwether of the eventual vote outcome, even this far out.1 As of today, Democrats lead by 5.7 points2—not quite 2018 “Blue Tsunami” territory (Democrats led by 8 points on election day) but close to 2010’s Republican “shellacking” territory (GOP +6.2 points). History also says things should keep moving Democrats’ way, since final results have almost always tended to break toward the opposition party to the White House.3

2. Specific polls are very promising. Don’t look now, but Democrats are currently leading in the most recent polls in five of the six most competitive Senate races.4 It is true that they need four pickups to control the Senate, and that is a hill to climb, but Democrats are already where they need to be to pull it off.

   

3. The election evidence is piling up. An open, not-so-secret of polling is that it involves at least one major educated guess: who will actually show up to vote. Right now, pollsters haven’t even begun that exercise, so they are just sampling from all registered voters or even all adults. But the thing is, voters are telling us who is actually most motivated to vote: Democrats and independents who oppose President Trump. That’s who is actually turning out—which is why in special elections last week we saw 20+ point shifts in Democrats’ favor since 2024, and why in 2025, pre-election polls actually turned out to be biased toward Republicans by an average of 6 points.5 The upshot is that current polls are very likely underestimating how the Democrat would do in Senate races if the election were held today, and quite possibly by a meaningful amount.6

The bottom line is that the evidence says that Democrats are already in Senate-winning territory right now, and all things being equal, they are likely to do better by Election Day.

Of course that is a guarantee of nothing. But under-confidence can be as counterproductive as overconfidence by becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. So at the very least, Democrats should cure themselves of that.

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1

As Nate Silver put it: “Even with nearly 300 days to go before the midterms, the generic congressional ballot is a reasonable predictor of the House popular vote.” Note: this question is sometimes posed as whom the voter would prefer in their specific race for congress, an unnamed Democrat or an unnamed Republican. Note Number 2: I am using Nate Silver’s data and analysis a lot throughout this piece—and I owe him a debt of gratitude for his work. It should be said that one can derive data to support the exact same arguments using other sources—but Nate has provided the best material here.

Silver Bulletin

Midterm polls have good news, great news, and bad news for Democrats. Wait, what?

If you’re a Silver Bulletin reader, you know that the party out of power (this time around, Democrats) tends to gain seats during the midterm elections. You probably also know that there’s a difference between a tsunami like 1994, a wave year like 2006, and a…

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5 months ago · 136 likes · 29 comments · Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson

2

Silver Bulletin

Who’s ahead on the generic congressional ballot?

🕒 The latest on the generic ballot…

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2 months ago · 205 likes · 25 comments · Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson

5

Silver Bulletin

Actually, sometimes polls underestimate Democrats

It feels like just yeste…

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5 months ago · 140 likes · 25 comments · Eli McKown-Dawson

I was compiling a list of all the reasons that this ceasefire with Iran is…well…BS (because I do a weekly series called That’s Bullshit—if you want to see the full video about it here it is, and there’s a preview clip above) and something brand new struck me about it that was pretty odd. Something I hadn’t noticed earlier this week.

In this triumphant presidential announcement, where’s the president?

As the video clip (and the longer video on my YouTube Channel—please subscribe!) above lays out, this was supposedly a crushing victory. The kind of moment that presidents yearn for. The day you hand a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. The kind of thing that noted camera-hog Donald Trump usually elbows other world leaders out of the way to bask in.

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But the once-reality TV star wasn’t on TV. He was talking to a few reporters by telephone.

What’s even stranger is the timestamps on the entire evening. As the video shows, it looked like a made-for-TV setup. Literally timed to the evening news.

So where was the dog that didn’t bark? And why was the dog so quiet?

I hope you’ll check out the full 5 minute video and the whole surrounding episode of Political Rehab.

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As a candidate, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani became known for three big promises to voters: free child care, a rent freeze, and free city bus service.1

He just admitted that he’s about to break one of them.

But that isn’t noteworthy because of the dog-bites-man story that another politician broke another promise. It’s revealing because it demonstrates something important about politics—a lesson that Democrats in particular struggle to learn.

Politico reported today that the free bus plan is dead:

“The mayor campaigned on a plan to make buses free. But it isn’t going to happen this year, he acknowledged in an interview…Tight city and state budgets and disagreement among Democrats are blocking the mayor’s plan, and the mayor himself does not appear to be pushing hard to get it done this year. Instead, the mayor is touting a pilot program.”

So, no free buses.

Well…NO KIDDING. The problems with the bus plan were obvious from the start:2

• It would cost at least $800 million. Neither the state nor the city has that money.3

• The true cost is much higher because when you make something free, people consume a lot more of it, which means the city would need more buses and get less from the subway system because people would switch.

• NYC bus service is already the slowest in the country.4 Adding more riders would make the problem worse. And low-income passengers actually say in surveys that they would prefer faster and more reliable service over cheaper service.

But of course, Zohran Mamdani is an intelligent man. He knew all of this even as the words were leaving his mouth, the same way he surely knew that his other ideas like city-run grocery stores run face-first into giant math problems.

The point isn’t that he’s two-faced—it’s that he’s insightful.

It’s often been said of Donald Trump that he should be taken seriously, but not literally.5 In Trump’s case, that’s in no small part because of his pathological lying. But it’s also because he’s recognized that, as wrote yesterday, in populist rhetoric, “the hyperbole is the point. Losers sweat the specifics.”

Mamdani’s version of non-literal speech is far more nuanced and benign, and a lot more clever. He probably genuinely believes in his campaign planks, and would implement them if they were possible (so in a way, he doesn’t even feel like calling for these things is a deceit).

But he also understands that to most voters, free buses, apartments, and child care are directionally symbolic rather than specific receipts that they expect to cash in upon election…or even remember. It’s a way of making tangible his broader message: “I care about affordability.” Voters won’t feel betrayed by the free bus plan evaporating, because they probably weren’t especially attached to it.

Mamdani clearly gets the most underappreciated dynamic in politics—how little attention most people pay. As I wrote in Washington Monthly two years ago:

The share of Americans who say they are following any kind of news closely dropped 13 points in the past eight years to just over one-third. And a segment of voters takes almost no notice of what’s happening at all, particularly when it comes to politics. According to studies conducted by pollster Ian Smith, up until a couple of months before an election, “people spend as little as ten minutes a week absorbing political news.” That’s 0.1 percent of voters’ time, about the same amount they spend brushing their teeth.

“People who work in politics consistently overestimate how much attention the average voter is giving to politics or their elected officials,” says Jim Papa, the political advisor to the White House under President Barack Obama. “They’re going to their jobs, they have to pick up their kids after school, there’s life happening. The average voter isn’t paying week-to-week attention, they’re sort of…catching it sometimes. So, when there’s a big story in Washington, like a government shutdown, maybe they’ll notice that. But they may not know the name of their congressman.”6

Ad makers have long understood this principle, which is why you end up seeing the same commercial so many darn times. When I managed congressional campaigns, the rule of thumb was that a voter needed to see your ad about 15 times in a short timespan to even gain some familiarity with your candidate’s name, let alone recognize what they stood for.

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Or, in an even more basic example, my wife and I used to watch football together. When our daughter was about three years old, she was playing on the floor in our living room and happily ignoring the game, but happened to glance up for about one second during a McDonald’s commercial. The volume was muted, and the ad was showing a young woman playfully snatching at a friend’s Big Mac. Our daughter said, “She wants his cheeseburger.”

The larger story? Lost. The details? Irrelevant. She got the point: that cheeseburger was delicious.7

It’s not that I don’t think politicians should be truthful. They should. Or that they don’t need to at least try to live up to their promises. They do. It’s that Democrats get stuck on thinking about policy specifics as literal contract terms that are part of the voting transaction, rather than a language that they can use to connect with the core problems that voters care about in their lives. As Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman wrote in the New York Times today:

Democrats insist that policy agendas are what determine a party’s political success and failure...The problem is that policy-as-politics doesn’t work. Parties can, and historically have, forged stronger, more sustainable connections with voters through other means.

As another New York politician—Governor Mario Cuomo—famously observed: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Democrats could take a page out of Mamdani’s book, and do with a little more poetic license in their messaging before getting down to the business of governing.

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