This 2013 take from Ron Brownstein — that Barack Obama’s re-election proved culturally conservative white people had become irrelevant — had an unusually blunt headline but was typical of the spirit of the era.

This analysis never made a ton of sense, even on its own terms. In 2012, Obama won Iowa and Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, none of which had a particularly large Hispanic population share. This basic math was known and knowable at the time, but it was ignored amid emerging Democratic majority hype and a focus on non-pivotal states like Nevada.

But the notion that demographic changes meant Democrats didn’t have to do politics was misguided in deeper ways, and it helped set the party up for some serious tactical and strategic errors. Those mistakes led to blowing off not only the actual views of the kind of secular white working-class Midwesterners who were important to Obama’s wins but also to blowing off the actual views of most American Hispanics.

In 2020, Donald Trump shocked many liberals by making meaningful gains with Latino voters even while doing quite poorly overall. Then in 2024, with the national trends at his back, he did even better.

A huge part of the 2026 story is Hispanic voters coming back to Democrats. Trump’s own choices are the largest factor, but an important secondary one is Democrats developing a more sophisticated understanding of the Hispanic electorate. And part of that, I think, has been cultivating a larger crop of moderate Latino politicians. Slow Boring’s 2026 candidate slate featured three different Latino guys who wear cowboy hats. And if Democrats want to continue to win, politicians like that — people who actually represent their voters and know what they’re like — have to control the narrative and not let it be seized again by unaccountable NGO types spinning wildly unrealistic dreams of endless progressive dominance.

The false dawn

One serious problem with post-2012 hubris about Hispanic voters is that it kind of understandably radicalized Republican opinion against immigration.

People have a range of concerns about immigration, some more fact-based than others. But people also have lots of opinions about topics that aren’t immigration. The thrust of Brownstein’s argument was that catering to people with culturally conservative views on non-immigration topics was now unnecessary thanks to the rising Hispanic tide. This notion got rephrased by conservatives as an alarming and possibly potent narrative that immigration debates should be understood not as economic policy but as a progressive effort to perpetrate a “great replacement” of the existing electorate.

And at the same time, it generated a breakdown of ideological discipline in the Democratic Party.

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The votes are still being tallied, but Colorado Democrats appear to have had one of their best midterms in the state’s history…

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Well! Election season is a very busy time at our small shop, but reflecting back on the epic seven-hour livestream we did with GD Politics, Silver Bulletin, and The Argument, what really strikes me is the extent to which the wild inferences we drew right at the beginning of the evening from the early ballot drops in Indiana proved accurate.

We were all on there covering our asses and saying you can’t just assume that things that happen in Hamilton County will reflect national trends, but in this case, it turns out they did! It was a ton of fun, and I’m very grateful to everyone for letting me participate. Personally, though, I prefer writing to speaking live on camera, so I’m glad to be back doing election takes here in writing.

David W Lavoie: What is Trump’s play here? Is he really so shallow to say that as long as the border stays secure and the ballroom gets completed, Dems can do what they want?

My dominant answer here is that I have no idea. Donald Trump is such an incredibly overexposed figure that it’s easy to overlook how mysterious he is.

It’s relatively simple to understand, broadly speaking, what Paul Ryan thought was interesting and important about American politics. You could see which things he really emphasized and where he was more flexible. Trump sometimes seems like he doesn’t care about anything and is only interested in money and weird construction projects. But he sometimes seems borderline fanatical about tariffs and immigration. On the other hand, he rarely actually discusses his administration’s immigration policy in any detail. He gambled his presidency on a war with Iran but seems largely disengaged from it. And it’s not like there’s no reporting on this stuff; it’s just that the piling-on of information doesn’t really clarify the picture.

There were various points during Trump’s first term when it seemed like his indolence would lead him to be willing to do bipartisan deals with Democrats on reasonably favorable terms for the center-left. But as time went on, those deals always seemed to collapse and it seemed like he was a faker. But then the CARES Act did come together. And then he did a half-assed coup after he lost the election. But even there: Why? Was there really a lot of tangible upside to that? It was one of the most insane events of American political history, and the motivation behind it — especially given the shambolic nature of the plot — remains fairly obscure.

I did not spend the weeks leading up to the midterms doing dire warnings of Trumpian election theft. But it certainly occurred to me as something that might happen. When the results were in, though, he seemed almost indifferent.

So fair enough, what does Congress have to do with him? But he personally set in motion an incredible amount of redistricting drama in the House. He hand-picked disastrous Senate candidates in Texas and South Carolina. Why do this stuff if he doesn’t care?

I don’t know, and I don’t think we ever will know.

Spencer Roach: Early 2028 speculation: are Vance and Rubio still the most likely Republican POTUS nominees? On the one hand, the midterm results seem to discredit the Trump admin, making an outsider nominee more likely. On the other hand, most Republican primary voters will probably still be loyal to Trump, though it’s possible that the midterm result gives Trump loyalists permission to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: My best guess is that a viable outsider candidacy won’t come from an “anti-Trump” figure but from someone I’d call a post-Trump figure.

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After you read today’s post, I hope you’ll take a break from midterms coverage to listen to the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, where Jerusalem and I discuss the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, the difference between fact and fiction, and what makes a “true story” trustworthy. Paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free and read the transcript and show notes here. Free subscribers can catch the episode on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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I used to have a bit where I would tell people that the real secret to AIPAC’s power wasn’t their famous (or infamous) financial clout — it was that voters basically agreed with them on the issue.

Not that voters deep in their hearts agreed with every detail of U.S. policy toward Israel or truly felt that the United States should be sending aid money with no strings attached. But that in a big-picture sense, Americans had a clear view that Israel was “the good guys” in an entrenched conflict.

This meant that there was a simple playbook for taking out basically any member of Congress who drew the organization’s ire: AIPAC would put the word out that money was available to anyone who wanted to challenge said member, and politicians would leap at the opportunity because it was basically free money.

Sure, the person you’re challenging could complain that they were being targeted by the nefarious Israel Lobby. But most Americans didn’t actually think the Israel Lobby was nefarious, because they didn’t think Israel was nefarious.

The challenger wouldn’t even talk much about Israel during the campaign — very few people cared that much about it. They’d just use the money to run good ads on whatever subject their voters did really care about.

What we saw in the 2026 cycle was the degenerative version of this strategy, what happens when AIPAC tries to win purely on financial clout without having the sympathies of the public on their side.

And what happens is that it doesn’t work very well.

In 2026, a candidate really could say, “hey, I’m getting hit with tons of AIPAC money and that’s bad,” and large swaths of the electorate would agree that it was bad. Rather than wanting their financial clout to be known for the sake of the intimidation factor (like how the crypto people bragged about their spending in the 2024 cycle), AIPAC started disguising their spending because association with them was harmful to the candidates they supported. And it became relatively easy to countermobilize support and money based on being the candidate who stands up to AIPAC.

These dynamics were most present on the Democratic Party side this year and are driving the formerly bipartisan pro-Israel consensus to become sharply polarized.

Except it’s worse than that for AIPAC, since Donald Trump on Election Day just randomly announced that he wants to end aid to Israel and then Vice President JD Vance put out an election response essay on Twitter basically blaming the U.S.-Israel relationship for the G.O.P. wipeout.

It’s so over for AIPAC.

The V.P.’s aggressive election analysis

I honestly don’t think much more needs to be said about the Democratic side of this. AIPAC put everything they had into beating Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, but “everything they had” was just money, and El-Sayed could also raise money. There just was not any amount of cash that was going to turn Mike Rogers into a winner in Michigan in the political climate of 2026. Beyond that, while you can find me any day of the week waging Twitter war on behalf of the claim that El-Sayed was an electoral underperformer, there’s no reason to think his much-litigated stances on Israel were a major source of underperformance.

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We don’t have an example at hand of a politician saying “no aid to Israel” while also having moderate views on internal-combustion-engine cars or sex-segregated school sports teams. Haley Stevens was, in fact, quite left-wing on those issues, so we didn’t even get variation on those fronts in the primary.

If you look at Michigan politicians, El-Sayed ran weaker than most of the Democratic House candidates, but one of the exceptions is Will Lawrence, a fellow leftist who is more associated with the Green New Deal than with being anti-Israel.

Instead, what I find really shocking is the shift on the right over the past week. Here’s what Vance said about the election:

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results.

Between 2.5 and 3.5 of the four factors are just Israel.

And this puts pro-Israel Republicans in the pain cave because while Vance is massively over-blaming Israel (what about tariffs, corruption, health care cuts, immigration agents murdering two American citizens, or the bizarre decision to embrace A.I. accelerationism?), you can’t reasonably deny that the war was very politically costly for Republicans. The absolute worst time to be turned into a scapegoat is when you are, in fact, guilty. And make no mistake, that’s what’s happening here — one genuinely disastrous bit of decision-making is being made to carry all the weight for the Trump administration’s many, many errors of judgment.

But if Trump does pivot in this direction and Vance becomes his successor, where is pro-Israel support supposed to flow?

This cycle showed that AIPAC’s presence in Democratic primaries has become toxic, and pro-Israel institutions just spent the past three months whining that it’s not good enough to disagree with El-Sayed about Israel — you need to embrace wildly over-the-top criticisms of him and become a Republican to stay kosher in their eyes.

So what’s left here?

The perils of overreach

I think the extent to which AIPAC and other pro-Israel institutions basically brought this fiasco upon themselves is really striking.

If you go back to Barack Obama’s term in office, there was a solid bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. The thing that shattered that consensus was not anything Palestinian activists did; it was the nuclear deal with Iran.

Obama upheld all the main elements of traditional pro-Israel American foreign policy — aid, recognition, diplomatic support, arms sales — but also pursued diplomacy with Iran focused on America’s non-proliferation interests. Benjamin Netanyahu did not think this deal was good for Israel, which is certainly his right. But then pro-Israel groups went to war with Obama over this, massively resetting the bar for what constituted pro-Israel policy and rightly annoying lots of Democratic Party partisans and foreign policy hands.

Then Trump became president and tore up the deal in a way that created an unworkable situation for the Biden administration. Joe Biden very loyally stood by Israel after 10/7, making this the one issue on which he really meaningfully held firm against criticism from the left.

But what Biden wouldn’t do was get America into a war with Iran, so even as the Biden/Harris administration took on water from the left, they got little reward from pro-Israel groups, many of whom just basically preferred Trump.

Under Trump, they finally got the war they wanted.

And while Vance is wrong to solely attribute the Trump administration’s political problems to Iran, it is unquestionably true that the war supercharged anti-Israel sentiment in the United States by imposing massive costs not just on Palestinians but on everyday Americans — and for that matter, on literally billions of people around the world.

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It’s of course wrong to cast this as all Israel’s fault. It’s Trump, not Netanyahu, who bears responsibility for Trump’s bad decision-making. Neither Obama nor Biden did this, and Trump could (and should) have simply told Netanyahu no. But while Trump is responsible for Trump being terrible at his job, it is factually true that this is the outcome Israel wanted and worked toward for years across multiple presidents, and voters are right to be angry about it.

I honestly have no idea what happens next. But I am quite worried that while American Jewish institutions were going all-in feuding with Democrats over foreign policy, they’ve been ignoring the rise of totally unambiguous Jew-hatred on the American right.

The specific ideological valence of Jewish American identity politics is different from other strands of ethnic-minority identity politics. And the factional alignment of pro-Israel institutions is different from the way most of “the groups” are positioned.

But in terms of overreach, backlash, counterproductive behavior, and a preference for expressive rather than instrumentally useful conduct, the structural pathologies are pretty similar. I hope the collapse of pro-Israel politics simply lands the U.S.-Israel relationship in a healthier position. But pushing so long and so hard for unreasonable levels of American support could lead to some really bad failure modes unless the leaders of and donors to these organizations are prepared to admit — fast — that they need to dramatically change course.

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Before you go, we wanted to remind you that paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free to this week’s episode of “The Argument” or read the transcript and show notes here. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube here or listen on your podcast app of choice.

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So this evening, we just wanted to give everyone another place to chat. Never fear, though — there’s more election content to come this week and next.

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In some ways, pessimism is a frequent rhetorical register of Slow Boring and has been since its inception. I’m the one warning people that the Senate map doesn’t get any kinder after 2026, that the median voter in Iowa doesn’t share the concerns of the median Bluesky poster, and that state elections are a constant reminder that public appetite for sweeping change is actually quite limited.

But what I want the dominant register to be is actually something different: agency.

I want everyone reading to see that the choices made by politicians, staffers, aligned nonprofits, and even highly engaged citizens who pay for subscription newsletters or post about politics online make a difference. That politics isn’t just about “vibes” or vertical video skills or superficial rhetorical choices.

And I think this is truly what we’ve seen over the past two years.

The exact same country that delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024 — a mandate to secure the border and bring down inflation — turned sharply against him because he utterly failed to bring down inflation and embarked on an alarming orgy of corruption. Those choices set the table for a plausible Democratic Senate majority despite the map, and then Democrats ran very good candidates in a lot of key races.

In Texas and Kansas, strong Democratic candidates ran against bad Republican candidates and crazy things happened. Florida is not, in principle, less winnable than Texas, but the Florida G.O.P. put up reasonable candidates and Democrats did not have a Josh Turek or an Annie Andrews in the Florida Senate race. It turns out that in the right circumstances, even South Carolina can be on the map.

But note that part of winning in South Carolina was that Andrews had to align with public opinion on women’s sports teams. Progressives seem to have been happy with James Talarico, and I am happy for them, but he pulled off a win by campaigning for the kind of all-of-the-above energy strategy that post-Obama Democrats abandoned and Slow Boring has argued they should bring back.

The key to carrying all this momentum forward is to remember — and to remind people — that good things don’t just happen because of small-dollar fundraising or campaign gimmicks.

What candidates say they’ll do in office matters, and what they actually do matters even more.

In the context of 2026, that meant Trump’s broken promises were the most important factors in this election. In the context of 2028, his choices will continue to matter but so will the choices of the newly empowered Democratic majority. If they make smart choices, they can spend the next two years putting the boot on the neck of MAGA and the four after that restoring the country’s confidence in Democrats.

If they get sloppy, lazy, or undisciplined, we’ve seen over and over again that large electoral swings are very real and they happen in both directions.

But if the kinds of people who won these tough races dig in and make sure the right lessons are learned and the right momentum is carried forward, we can transform the party, and the country, for the better.

Winning the narrative and the transition

Back in 2018, moderate Democrats flipped critical House seats and gave Democrats a majority. But a handful of left-wing primary winners in deep-blue districts — the Squad — managed to make themselves the story of the midterm.

Common Sense Democrats as a community need to do a better job this time around of focusing on the people who won the tough races and put up the most impressive performances.

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Correction: This piece originally stated that Bale Dalton narrowly lost his race. That contest hasn’t been called yet and is heading for a recount.

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The fact that the outcomes of the midterm elections are not knowable in advance is a real challenge for editorial planning.

I’ve been asking if they’ll just tell me who wins under embargo so that I can plan things out, but everyone I ask insists that they can’t actually forecast the future. At best, well-informed people give me sophisticated takes about which early outcomes they’ll be looking at as indicators of the national mood.

For example, a strong performance for Democratic House candidates in the Miami area is probably good news for the Democratic House candidates in South Texas, according to one friend who believes that Latino subgroups differ more in their baseline partisan preferences than in how their voting patterns shift from election to election.

Other qualified professionals, however, say that’s wrong and heterogeneity is understated — so even here we’ll need to count the actual votes. Disappointing!

That being said, I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve seen pundits make certain kinds of predictable election night errors cycle after cycle. These analytic errors are largely inherent to the geography of the United States of America and the state-by-state variation in voting patterns, both of which change at a slow enough pace that we can be pretty confident that we’ll see these mistakes in 2026, just as we did in 2022 and 2018.

So here’s my exclusive Slow Boring guide to what not to watch for in tonight’s results.

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Demographic analysis based on exit polls

This one is huge. A fundamental challenge of polling is that survey response rates vary by demographic subgroup, so if you just naively put a survey out in the field, you’ll get a skewed sample.

If you’re trying to get a poll that tells you something about all American adults or all registered voters, you can fix this with demographic weights (the Census Bureau will just tell you what share of the population is white or over 65 or another variable of interest).

You still need to be a little bit careful. There are lots of questions about exactly which demographics matter and how to weight them. You can pretty easily make sure you have enough Latinos in your sample, but are you only getting English-dominant Latinos when you need Spanish-dominant ones? Do you have the right balance of Cubans vs. Puerto Ricans vs. South Americans in your Florida poll? It’s a hard business. But it is possible.

Polling likely voters is harder, though, because you don’t actually know who will vote. But you can at least develop an explicit model explaining how you’re defining the likely electorate.

The exit poll is a real problem, however, because you do know the election result but you do not know who voted.

It’s the opposite of an all-adults poll where you know what the demographic composition of the population is but are trying to find out who they voted for. Since the exit poll is just kind of guessing what the electorate looked like, it is spectacularly unsuited for the problem of figuring out the behavior of different demographic subgroups. Suppose Black turnout unexpectedly craters in Georgia and causes Jon Ossoff to lose his re-election bid. The exit pollsters will know that Ossoff lost but won’t know about the turnout crash. They’ll weight their survey to the outcome they know and to the electorate they were expecting and end up giving Ossoff too little support among both Black and white voters because they don’t realize that what actually happened is few Black voters showed up.

Months later, Census and voter file information will come out about who actually voted, but by then the narratives are baked.

In the immediate aftermath of an election, the best way to obtain demographic information is (unfortunately) to commit the ecological fallacy. If Democrats really overperform in the most heavily Asian precincts in America, that is decent evidence of a Democratic surge in Asian support perhaps driven by backlash to “The Indian Question” right. Stat-heads will point out that this is not a fully valid inference. Most Asian Americans do not live in heavily Asian precincts, and lots of non-Asian people do live in heavily Asian precincts. But it really is the best we can do since the exit polls are a mess.

Who wins the first races

The polls close really early in Kentucky.

Kentucky is obviously not a swing state. But there is one House district in Kentucky that is kinda sorta maybe, if you squint at it, competitive, largely due to the fact that Democrats have a seemingly good recruit in Zach Dembo. Dembo is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s official “red to blue” list, and he’s also a Blue Dog PAC endorsee.

That being said, when you look at the demographics and partisan composition of this district, I don’t totally understand how it got to be red to blue.

Or, rather, I think you have to understand this as in part about the fact that there’s an incentive to not permanently write off whole states. Kentucky has a Democratic governor and a lot of people like Andy Beshear. You want guys like Dembo who have strong bios to feel they’ll be supported if they take a crack at longshot races. I think when it comes to long-term party building, investing in races like this is the correct call. But I also think the conjunction of the investments with the polls closing at 6:00 p.m. Eastern generates a maybe higher level of awareness of this one district than it actually merits. Even in a D+9 national environment, it’s a real stretch. Dembo will probably lose, and there’s no real significance in that.

The national popular vote

Speaking of the D+9 national environment, any analysis of an individual race needs to be contextualized in terms of the overall national vote.

If a guy like Dembo loses a district like that by one point in a D+9 environment, that’s a good race. If he loses by one in what’s actually a D+11 environment, that’s less impressive for him but better for Democrats overall. If he loses by one in what’s actually a D+7 national environment, that’s very impressive for him but means that Democrats are underperforming their polling.

Unfortunately, though, we’re not really going to know anything about the national popular vote tonight. It’s not just that we’re not going to know when the polls close in Kentucky at 6:00 p.m. We’re still not going to know tomorrow morning.

The problem here is California.

California accepts mail ballots that are sent by Election Day, which means that many ballots will not arrive until days after post-election takes have been written. This mail situation reflects an understandable impulse to make it easy for people to vote, but California compounds the delay by counting the actual votes slowly. They keep getting away with this because California is not a swing state and everyone knows Democrats are going to win the big races there. But something like 12 percent of Americans — and a much larger share of Democrats — live in California, so the slow counting of California votes meaningfully distorts our understanding of the national political climate.

We’re going to know how Sherrod Brown and Abdul El-Sayed and Josh Turek and Roy Cooper and James Talarico did before we know what the national popular vote was.

What we do know is that the popular vote in California will be way bluer than the national average, so whatever the national climate looks like tonight, the reality will be bluer than that. This then means that in the short term, every individual Democratic candidate in the South, Midwest, and Northeast will look more impressive relative to the national climate than they actually were.

The races that happen to be called first

Florida is on the East Coast, its polls close early, and it counts votes fast. Also, back in 2018, Florida moved considerably to the right relative to the national average, meaning that Republicans did well in Florida’s elections that year. This led to an early evening narrative about Democrats’ disappointing performance and the forecasted “blue wave” failing to materialize.

In fact, the 2018 polls were extremely accurate, and the overall national wave was exactly what had been forecasted.

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Polling is never perfectly accurate, but on the whole, 2018 was probably the single most accurately polled election year of my career. It just happened to be the case that Republicans did well in one state where the votes were counted early in primetime.

In retrospect, I built a lot of my worldview around the opinion that the 2018 midterm result was sneakily bad for Democrats. After all, they lost Senate seats. These losses happened in deep red states, so at the time a disappointing performance was chalked up to a “bad map.” But the 2026 map is also bad and the 2028 map will also be bad. Basically all the Senate maps are bad, so you can’t grade Democratic electoral performance in any given cycle on a curve. They either win (as I hope they will tonight) or they lose (as they did in 2018).

The practical upshot of the 2018 election was that Trump was able to keep governing the country, and I’m very concerned that a “good night” for Democrats in 2026 isn’t good enough — they need the Senate. But to that point, we won’t really know whether Democrats have a good enough night until we know what happened in Alaska, which happens to be in an inconvenient time zone for those of us on the East Coast.

What you should watch instead

Instead of falling prey to nonsense and fallacies, what you really ought to do is join the election night watch party that Slow Boring, The Argument, Silver Bulletin, and GD Politics are collaborating on. We’ll be liveblogging plus live on video for many, many hours, and we’ll have guests and accurate quantitative insights and good takes!

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Wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the Substack Midterms Hub which is going to have content from Slow Boring and many of this platform’s other fine outlets today, tomorrow, and beyond — a great place to go for updates, results, commentary, analysis and more.

One week before Election Day, Nate Silver’s model said that Democrats had a 76 percent chance of taking the Senate tomorrow, while Lakshya Jain’s model said they had a 65 percent chance.

I know the people who do this kind of work mostly focus on questions like “does this model give good gambling advice” and ignore metaphysical issues. But I’m always interested in what these claims really mean. Statistically speaking, to get enough power to reliably distinguish between these forecasts, you’d need to test them across 100 elections, which you obviously can’t do because this is a real-world event and not an experiment.

In other words, while we’ll soon know which party controls the Senate, we will never know which model was correct.

And the models themselves don’t clearly distinguish between claims about epistemic uncertainty (things we do not know about the underlying state of the electorate) and a more metaphysical uncertainty (the ability of events-to-come to shape the future). Almost nobody actually cares about this, but even as a devotee of quantitative models who consumes them heavily, I find something unsatisfactory about this.

So, with nothing more meaningful or satisfying to say about the events that will unfold this week, I thought it could be interesting to take a tour of some of the most significant midterm elections of American history.

Midterms lack the personalistic drama of American presidential elections, but outside of foreign policy, Congress really is the main driving force of the American constitutional system, and midterm votes often bring big changes. The phenomenon of “midterm backlash” is something we’re accustomed to, but while it now operates more or less as a law of the political system, it’s not an actual law of physics — whether any given backlash emerges is somewhat contingent and actually drives much of the drama of American politics.

So, with that in mind, here are my picks (in chronological order) for the seven most consequential midterm elections.

1826 — the first midterm brushback

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On a wide, windy beach, a young wizard-in-training holds his friend — a free elf named Dobby — as the feeble creature takes his last breaths. Looking out over the swell, Dobby remarks to Harry Potter that it is “such a beautiful place to be with friends.”

That sc…

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There is a midterm election coming up soon, as you have probably heard, and I am hoping that Democrats will do very well in it.

One reason for this is that due to the way our political system is constructed, the Democrats I have the biggest doubts about are definitely going to win no matter what. Melat Kiros and Darializa Avila Chevalier are coming to Congress even if Democrats underperform the current polling by 11 points or whatever. But there are a whole bunch of people who I really like — Josh Turek, Mary Peltola, Adam Hamilton, Bobby Pulido, Johnny Garcia, Jamie Ager, just to name a few — who will win their seats if and only if Democrats win by margins about as big as what Nate Silver is forecasting. Indeed, the slightly stupid way the House speaker election works means that if Democrats have a huge majority, then Hakeem Jeffries will be installed with no problem, but if it’s a very narrow majority, then the hard left can block him and hold the caucus hostage to their nutty ideas. If Democrats flip the Senate, then the big story will be the senators who flipped Senate seats — Turek, Peltola, Hamilton, Roy Cooper, Sherrod Brown, and James Talarico — but if they don’t, then it’s the Abdul El-Sayed Show.

But the other reason is that I really would like to see the spell of Trump mania come to an end. I don’t hold to Obama-in-2012 delusions that “the fever will break.” But there are just tons of conservative ideological causes and policy positions that keep getting dragged down by Trump’s bluster, corruption, and incompetence. Yet the leaders of those causes have spent the past few years taking the bet that working with Trump to try to consolidate authoritarian power is their best chance forward. I think a good midterm drubbing is the best opportunity to talk them out of that and into the idea that they should try to advance a 2028 candidate who’ll stand for right-of-center policy ideas but not stand for slavish devotion to personality cult politics and endless assaults on the rule of law.

Anyway, on to your questions.

Trisha Jha: Is the idea that prices communicate useful information and we mess with them at our peril the most hated insight of Econ 101?

This goes back to something I’ve noted before, which is that it would be useful in many cases to have a clearer index of exactly what the conventional wisdom is. My sense, personally, is that the fact that we mostly don’t see a lot of price control policies being implemented is evidence that the basic point about the value of prices is pretty well-understood.

My personal vote for a widely underrated Econ 101 insight is the explanation of why a certain class of policy ideas doesn’t scale up.

I write a Substack. If you created a cumbersome licensing system before other people were allowed to launch their own Substack, that would be narrowly good for me. Similarly, if it was illegal for Americans to read takes written by foreigners, that might also be good for me. Anything you can do with regulation, trade policy, immigration, or whatever else to block the supply of new takes helps the existing stock of takesmiths. This is pretty widely understood, and you see lots of examples of different groups of people clamoring for various sorts of protections and often getting them — or at least getting a serious hearing.

What Econ 101 tells you is that each of these moves imposes very small costs on a very large number of people, such that the aggregate costs exceed the benefits.

This means that while you can boost the fortunes of any given occupation by creating barriers to entry, doing so across a large fraction of occupations will end up making everyone worse off than if you hadn’t done it. You can help auto workers by imposing tariffs on foreign-made cars, but if you put tariffs on everything, then everyone is worse off. If you block new housing on Long Island, you can inflate home values and increase the wealth of incumbent homeowners, but if you block new housing in every desirable suburb of every city, the whole country will be much poorer on average.

What makes this insight powerful is that the people pushing for specific protections aren’t “wrong.”

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