I agree with all of this. Seems like the loss of the Times’ local endorsements will be a real loss to New Yorkers, as the hole will be filled by the right-wing New York Post and the further left-wing Village Voice. I really rely on the Seattle Times for local and state endorsements, as it’s more moderate than the main alternative the Stranger (an alt-weekly).
I'd imagine that the reason for the Times not doing local endorsements is that it's just much harder to build consensus for them. All Times staff prefer Harris over Trump so it's easy to say the organization endorses Harris. (It also makes it worthless as a political action, although it probably has some value in HR and audience relations.) But if, say, 60% of your writers prefer Adams and 40% Garcia then it's going to be pretty controversial (and in some sense, maybe, misleading) to publish an endorsement.
In the spirit of making endorsements by telling your audience what they might not know and would want to know:
Californians, Vote against Prop 33 and for Prop 34.
Prop 33, the rent control measure, is a bad faith measure endorsed by bad actor NIMBY cities who want to be able to impose punitive rent control that will prevent any new multifamily housing from being built. Huntington Beach, the baddest of actors, has already said they will do this. Don't fall for it.
Prop 34 is aimed squarely at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a group funded by an incredibly lucrative government-backed AIDs drug sweetheart deal—a special privilege to buy low and sell high— and which uses that money to lobby for NIMBY causes rather than helping sick people. AIDS Healthcare is also a slumlord. They're a terrible institution which should be forced to use their government-supplied bounty for health care.
I haven't looked into the California ballot measures at all, I have to educate myself and decide how to vote sometime between now and Nov 5, so I will be interested in reading that thread!
Well, if the New Yorker and the New York Times were trying to influence electoral outcomes, this would be pretty stupid. If their goals were to virtue signal and express group solidarity, then mission accomplished.
I wish the Washington Post would stop making local endorsements that are bad and opaquely determined.
The Post endorsed an anti-statehood Republican for the Ward 3 CM race - he lost overwhelmingly. In the Dem primary, the Post endorsed the most conservative candidate - Eric Goulet - who is often petty and mean on Twitter and I'm glad the Post endorsement didn't help him the Council seat. There's plenty more examples of bad endorsements on candidates and policy - and it's not just that I disagree with the choice, it is that their explanation for the endorsement and the process is severely lacking.
I think Erin Palmer would have been far better as Chair of DC Council than more of the same from Chair Mendelson - the Post endorsement's only reason for dismissing her was calling her "untested".
I don't want to support the Post when they spend their influence on bad local endorsements - so I'd wish they'd change course or drop them altogether.
🍷I think the Scientific American endorsement will be a good thing if it’s part of a flood of similar endorsements—by multiple media sources—leading up to the election. The NYT endorsement is similar. The Cheneys endorsements are similar. The letter from 700 is similar. Each is a part of an effort to give GOP voters “permission” to vote against Trump. And hopefully a few other GOP nuts. If the effort fails, will the Scientific American lose GOP voters? Perhaps. Will it harm the long term belief in science? I doubt it. Personally, I hope every Republican who reads Scientific American thinks again about their vote. And that some will change their vote.
But I wholeheartedly agree that focus on local elections is critical and that those endorsements will carry more weight.
I will continue to maintain that losing confidence in scientists because Scientific American wrote an editorial is like losing confidence in athletes because Sports Illustrated chooses to endorse someone.
It's a little murkier with Nature and Science, because they are trade publications and organizations, a fact often confused by people outside of the field. (For instance, contrary to what Matt writes, the Zhang study was published in the open access journal Nature Human Behavior, not Nature, although a discussion of the paper written by a third party was published in the section of Nature devoted to such things). In fact, although the endorsement is what the greater media picked up on, Nature wrote well-reported articles on both the Trump and Biden policies for science and related issues at the same time, just as Matt recommends:
AAAS, the publisher of Science, is a non-profit and doesn't formally endorse, but they do push a pro-science agenda on the HiIl and sponsor fellowships to put Ph.D. scientists in Congressional offices and cabinet departments for both parties. The journal employs reporters who publish weekly on science-related political topics - they were great at keeping me informed on the various hearings and progress on the CHIPs act - and they too did deep dives into the policies of both candidates in the run up to the 2020 election and I expect them to do the same this year.
I feel like if the Journal of Oil and Gas Extraction or Charted Accountancy Weekly endorsed a candidate based on their policies for those professions, no one would bat an eye; it's odd scientists aren't allowed to discuss issues in the same manner.
Your comparison between scientists and other professions misses an important difference between these groups: Scientists, along with a few other professions such as journalists and judges, have a special and privileged place in society — they get to (collectively) decide what is true. That important social function depends critically on most people trusting them.
They are *also* a trade group like chartered accountants or oil drillers, but that’s not the main thing they are.
David Rausch has a book exploring this idea in much greater depth; it’s called The Constitution of Knowledge IIRC.
Mostly agree. I think the problem with peer reviewed professional journals endorsing partisan issues is it may suggest to the broader public, or at least some of it, that there is a political agenda at work in the scientific community and that we "experts" have an agenda other than doing good science. As far as Nature or Science, I am far more interested in what they say about science and government policy/support of it. Also, those two links were signed by individuals rather than Nature, right?
As far as Sci Am, it is not a trade journal so I don't hold them to the same standard. As I said in my own post, I am not sure the general public splits that hair between Sci Am and a trade journal. Sci Am's endorsement went light years beyond science policy, too.
I think some expect scientists to pick sides on important issues, e.g., climate change policy, gun control, covid policy, etc. The job of the scientist as a scientist is to collect and interpret quality data, skeptically test models, avoid question-begging, and dispassionately advise policy makers what the science says and as importantly, what it does not say. I think it is inevitable that once one studies a topic, one forms opinions on how to deal with its societal implications. Seems like a logical outcome. Kerry Emanuel's little essay about using nuclear power ("Nuclear Salvation") as a way to rapidly decarbonize our energy demands is an example. But that was based on his years of individual research in climate science and he was speaking for himself.
I think scientific organizations that wade too much into policy risk political blowback--recall the Dickey Amendment resulted from what some Congresscritters saw as too much hat-swapping. Jim Hansen resigned from NASA so he could wear the political policy hat full time and not implicate the scientists working in that agency with a political agenda.
Anyway, all something to think about. I don't personally think it is either/or as much as both/and.
Here in Chicago we will be voting for school board for the first time in November. Since my votes for President and US House* are, let's be honest, meaningless in my solid-blue community, I've been trying to learn more about the school board candidates (there are, I believe, 4 in my district). It took a good half-hour plus of combing through the Sun-Times interviews, their donors, and their respective endorsements (which I take with a hefty grain of salt). I expect the majority of voters in my district are going to walk in to vote, look at the ballot, have no clue who any of the candidates are, and not vote for anybody for school board. Endorsements for these and other local races are essential for voters. I feel really bad for New Yorkers that the Times has chosen to abandon them so they can waste even more redundant coverage on the presidential race and Israel's various wars.
*and maybe Senate? I haven't bothered to see if Duckworth or Durbin are up this year...
When I first saw that the NYT would stop endorsing local candidates in New York but would continue endorsing candidates for President, I found that very reasonable. My guess is that it's easier for NYT staff to agree on which party is better to win the Presidency, and harder for them to agree on which specific Democratic Party faction is better in New York. I imagined that the (maybe more centrist) management may clash with (maybe more progressive) junior employees on local issues, but that they could unify against the Republicans.
I'm a bit surprised that neither Matt nor any of the comments I've read so far addresses that, but I'm not American, so maybe I'm way off here.
It seems like a better policy would be to say, “we’ll endorse local candidates when there is robust agreement among our editorial staff at all ranks, and stay out when we can’t agree” - that has the added effect of making the endorsements they can agree on more meaningful.
On one hand, this makes sense! On the other hand, maybe this will lead to more articles about internal NYT Slack disagreements, and we definitely don't need those articles.
Random observation: For a comment section of mainly self-identified Democrats opining on the daily postings of a self-identified Democrat, there sure are a lot of people here who give me "I desperately *WANT* to like Trump" vibes.
I would reference the point that some Democrats and Democratic aligned groups have used Trumps unpopularity to move the party to the left - especially on social issues - rather than try to rack up massive majorities to push Trump out of the political arena.
This naturally has left centrist voters feeling a bit homeless, including on this blog which is full of centrists.
1) I think the comment section leans further to the right than the readership as a whole
2) Yglesias attracts a lot of conservative readers through the occasional lefty-punching content. That's why some of the most-liked comments here are rants about DEI, transgender college leftists, and how Ron DeSantis is the best governor in the US.
What I like about Matt is that he's resistant to the audience capture bug that melted the brains of Taibbi, Greenwald, James Lindsay, and other "why I left the Left" folks.
Greenwald hasn't left the Left, he is critical of Progressivism, which is not a leftist philosophy at all. I think Taibbi is in the same place. Lindsay got run out of the circles he was used to being in for some fairly anodyne opinions, and clearly couldn't handle it. I don't think Lindsay thinks about his audience at all, he would be saying the same things if he were strapped on a gurney in a padded room (which is where he may still end up, frankly.)
"I desperately want Republicans to stop being irrational and crazy, and forcing me into being a single-issue voter who has to vote Democrat because there is no other rational choice" is not the same thing as "I desperately want to like Trump"
I'm also pretty sure that literally zero of the people you are talking about have ever "self-identified" as Democrats. The Democratic affiliation sounds more rather more like an assumption you are making about us.
Really? I don't "*WANT* to like Trump", but I do *WANT* to feel like I can vote Republican again (not least because I want to feel like I can vote for _either_ candidate and thus make an actual choice) (and thus I want Trump to get out of our politics). I'm a self-identified Democrat right now because the Republicans are not currently offering me palatable options.
I agree with this - I want Republican House/Senate/Presidential candidates to not obviously be a crazy choice. I suspect I would still very often vote Democratic, but Trump - and at least as alarmingly, his acolytes' - looming presence over the entire Republican Party makes a comparison of the pros and cons of respective policies seem a little silly.
I really got to see the importance of local endorsements when I moved from Baltimore to Miami. When I lived in Baltimore I always knew who aligned with my views at a local level, because there is (or at least was at the time) a robust local journalism ecosystem. DC, where I lived before, was even better. In Miami there's hardly anything. It's extremely difficult to figure out who to vote for in local elections - most candidates don't even have websites and there is not enough media coverage of them to learn anything useful.
Even in the DC area, there are super-local races for positions like natural resource management where candidates don't even consistently have websites, nevermind actually having local news articles about the candidates' positions and backgrounds. At best, I could find a press release for local parties announcing whom they endorsed.
I wish that newspapers and audio and visual media would stick more to news, and to impartially reporting it. Keep the endorsements to the editorial page and try to firewall out how reporters treat actual newsworthy information. It gets a little old when newspapers take an obvious slant.
Case in point, here in New Mexico there was a plea bargain in a case where an identity-politics addled conservative shot a Native American at an event staged by the NA's to protest an Onate statue about to be honored by a local government. A recent article in my local paper merely said that the conservative shot into the crowd, which he sorta did, and just got four more years in the slammer. Having followed the case, he did shoot, but he did so as he was being manhandled, assaulted, and tossed over a low stone wall by Native American group members who were offended by his obnoxious behavior. Sure, he was not justified in shooting at them (he took the plea bargain to limit the damage, I suppose) but by leaving a key part of the story out, it warps public understanding of what actually happened.
Another example was KUNM News, a few years ago, lumped Milo Yiannapolis, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ben Shapiro into a single category of "extremist speakers" on the air and suggested they were not worth the cost of bringing them to the U of NM campus, citing damage caused by anti-Yiannapolis rioters and the university's attempts to impose a security fee. Bias? Nah! BTW, a Federal judge just enjoined the U from imposing that fee, citing numerous appellate cases all the way up to the SCOTUS (Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement).
I missed the Nature endorsement but read the Sci Am, which discussed stuff having nothing to do with science. Professional journals should stay out of the endorsement game. As a Ph.D. working scientist (geochemist/analytical chemist and registered D), I think science is often unfairly accused of being politicized; not that it is never politicized. There is no point to supporting that notion with partisan endorsements. Nature is a peer-reviewed publication; they should have known better. Sci Am is more of "Science for the People" magazine, but that subtlety might be lost on some.
Thanks for approaching so many of these topics in a strategic fashion, assessing what the outcomes of different actions will be and whether they’re useful. I wish we had more of that type of analysis out there in general.
> If you read Slow Boring, you can probably guess who I’m voting for in November.
Wait. You're voting in November?! For whom? You've never mentioned that before.
I agree with all of this. Seems like the loss of the Times’ local endorsements will be a real loss to New Yorkers, as the hole will be filled by the right-wing New York Post and the further left-wing Village Voice. I really rely on the Seattle Times for local and state endorsements, as it’s more moderate than the main alternative the Stranger (an alt-weekly).
I'd imagine that the reason for the Times not doing local endorsements is that it's just much harder to build consensus for them. All Times staff prefer Harris over Trump so it's easy to say the organization endorses Harris. (It also makes it worthless as a political action, although it probably has some value in HR and audience relations.) But if, say, 60% of your writers prefer Adams and 40% Garcia then it's going to be pretty controversial (and in some sense, maybe, misleading) to publish an endorsement.
> A well-reported and fair article about Trump versus Harris on funding for scientific research could be politically impactful.
They'll both be pretty bad on this issue, and the electorate doesn't care.
In the spirit of making endorsements by telling your audience what they might not know and would want to know:
Californians, Vote against Prop 33 and for Prop 34.
Prop 33, the rent control measure, is a bad faith measure endorsed by bad actor NIMBY cities who want to be able to impose punitive rent control that will prevent any new multifamily housing from being built. Huntington Beach, the baddest of actors, has already said they will do this. Don't fall for it.
Prop 34 is aimed squarely at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a group funded by an incredibly lucrative government-backed AIDs drug sweetheart deal—a special privilege to buy low and sell high— and which uses that money to lobby for NIMBY causes rather than helping sick people. AIDS Healthcare is also a slumlord. They're a terrible institution which should be forced to use their government-supplied bounty for health care.
This is a very helpful comment! I’m going to post a CA Prop thread in today’s open thread, we should definitely bring this info up then.
I haven't looked into the California ballot measures at all, I have to educate myself and decide how to vote sometime between now and Nov 5, so I will be interested in reading that thread!
Excellent!
Well, if the New Yorker and the New York Times were trying to influence electoral outcomes, this would be pretty stupid. If their goals were to virtue signal and express group solidarity, then mission accomplished.
I wish the Washington Post would stop making local endorsements that are bad and opaquely determined.
The Post endorsed an anti-statehood Republican for the Ward 3 CM race - he lost overwhelmingly. In the Dem primary, the Post endorsed the most conservative candidate - Eric Goulet - who is often petty and mean on Twitter and I'm glad the Post endorsement didn't help him the Council seat. There's plenty more examples of bad endorsements on candidates and policy - and it's not just that I disagree with the choice, it is that their explanation for the endorsement and the process is severely lacking.
I think Erin Palmer would have been far better as Chair of DC Council than more of the same from Chair Mendelson - the Post endorsement's only reason for dismissing her was calling her "untested".
I don't want to support the Post when they spend their influence on bad local endorsements - so I'd wish they'd change course or drop them altogether.
🍷I think the Scientific American endorsement will be a good thing if it’s part of a flood of similar endorsements—by multiple media sources—leading up to the election. The NYT endorsement is similar. The Cheneys endorsements are similar. The letter from 700 is similar. Each is a part of an effort to give GOP voters “permission” to vote against Trump. And hopefully a few other GOP nuts. If the effort fails, will the Scientific American lose GOP voters? Perhaps. Will it harm the long term belief in science? I doubt it. Personally, I hope every Republican who reads Scientific American thinks again about their vote. And that some will change their vote.
But I wholeheartedly agree that focus on local elections is critical and that those endorsements will carry more weight.
I will continue to maintain that losing confidence in scientists because Scientific American wrote an editorial is like losing confidence in athletes because Sports Illustrated chooses to endorse someone.
It's a little murkier with Nature and Science, because they are trade publications and organizations, a fact often confused by people outside of the field. (For instance, contrary to what Matt writes, the Zhang study was published in the open access journal Nature Human Behavior, not Nature, although a discussion of the paper written by a third party was published in the section of Nature devoted to such things). In fact, although the endorsement is what the greater media picked up on, Nature wrote well-reported articles on both the Trump and Biden policies for science and related issues at the same time, just as Matt recommends:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02786-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02800-9
AAAS, the publisher of Science, is a non-profit and doesn't formally endorse, but they do push a pro-science agenda on the HiIl and sponsor fellowships to put Ph.D. scientists in Congressional offices and cabinet departments for both parties. The journal employs reporters who publish weekly on science-related political topics - they were great at keeping me informed on the various hearings and progress on the CHIPs act - and they too did deep dives into the policies of both candidates in the run up to the 2020 election and I expect them to do the same this year.
I feel like if the Journal of Oil and Gas Extraction or Charted Accountancy Weekly endorsed a candidate based on their policies for those professions, no one would bat an eye; it's odd scientists aren't allowed to discuss issues in the same manner.
Your comparison between scientists and other professions misses an important difference between these groups: Scientists, along with a few other professions such as journalists and judges, have a special and privileged place in society — they get to (collectively) decide what is true. That important social function depends critically on most people trusting them.
They are *also* a trade group like chartered accountants or oil drillers, but that’s not the main thing they are.
David Rausch has a book exploring this idea in much greater depth; it’s called The Constitution of Knowledge IIRC.
Mostly agree. I think the problem with peer reviewed professional journals endorsing partisan issues is it may suggest to the broader public, or at least some of it, that there is a political agenda at work in the scientific community and that we "experts" have an agenda other than doing good science. As far as Nature or Science, I am far more interested in what they say about science and government policy/support of it. Also, those two links were signed by individuals rather than Nature, right?
As far as Sci Am, it is not a trade journal so I don't hold them to the same standard. As I said in my own post, I am not sure the general public splits that hair between Sci Am and a trade journal. Sci Am's endorsement went light years beyond science policy, too.
I think some expect scientists to pick sides on important issues, e.g., climate change policy, gun control, covid policy, etc. The job of the scientist as a scientist is to collect and interpret quality data, skeptically test models, avoid question-begging, and dispassionately advise policy makers what the science says and as importantly, what it does not say. I think it is inevitable that once one studies a topic, one forms opinions on how to deal with its societal implications. Seems like a logical outcome. Kerry Emanuel's little essay about using nuclear power ("Nuclear Salvation") as a way to rapidly decarbonize our energy demands is an example. But that was based on his years of individual research in climate science and he was speaking for himself.
I think scientific organizations that wade too much into policy risk political blowback--recall the Dickey Amendment resulted from what some Congresscritters saw as too much hat-swapping. Jim Hansen resigned from NASA so he could wear the political policy hat full time and not implicate the scientists working in that agency with a political agenda.
Anyway, all something to think about. I don't personally think it is either/or as much as both/and.
Here in Chicago we will be voting for school board for the first time in November. Since my votes for President and US House* are, let's be honest, meaningless in my solid-blue community, I've been trying to learn more about the school board candidates (there are, I believe, 4 in my district). It took a good half-hour plus of combing through the Sun-Times interviews, their donors, and their respective endorsements (which I take with a hefty grain of salt). I expect the majority of voters in my district are going to walk in to vote, look at the ballot, have no clue who any of the candidates are, and not vote for anybody for school board. Endorsements for these and other local races are essential for voters. I feel really bad for New Yorkers that the Times has chosen to abandon them so they can waste even more redundant coverage on the presidential race and Israel's various wars.
*and maybe Senate? I haven't bothered to see if Duckworth or Durbin are up this year...
Fantastic work, thank you
When I first saw that the NYT would stop endorsing local candidates in New York but would continue endorsing candidates for President, I found that very reasonable. My guess is that it's easier for NYT staff to agree on which party is better to win the Presidency, and harder for them to agree on which specific Democratic Party faction is better in New York. I imagined that the (maybe more centrist) management may clash with (maybe more progressive) junior employees on local issues, but that they could unify against the Republicans.
I'm a bit surprised that neither Matt nor any of the comments I've read so far addresses that, but I'm not American, so maybe I'm way off here.
It seems like a better policy would be to say, “we’ll endorse local candidates when there is robust agreement among our editorial staff at all ranks, and stay out when we can’t agree” - that has the added effect of making the endorsements they can agree on more meaningful.
On one hand, this makes sense! On the other hand, maybe this will lead to more articles about internal NYT Slack disagreements, and we definitely don't need those articles.
Au contraire. Bring them on.
Random observation: For a comment section of mainly self-identified Democrats opining on the daily postings of a self-identified Democrat, there sure are a lot of people here who give me "I desperately *WANT* to like Trump" vibes.
I would reference the point that some Democrats and Democratic aligned groups have used Trumps unpopularity to move the party to the left - especially on social issues - rather than try to rack up massive majorities to push Trump out of the political arena.
This naturally has left centrist voters feeling a bit homeless, including on this blog which is full of centrists.
Couple Things:
1) I think the comment section leans further to the right than the readership as a whole
2) Yglesias attracts a lot of conservative readers through the occasional lefty-punching content. That's why some of the most-liked comments here are rants about DEI, transgender college leftists, and how Ron DeSantis is the best governor in the US.
What I like about Matt is that he's resistant to the audience capture bug that melted the brains of Taibbi, Greenwald, James Lindsay, and other "why I left the Left" folks.
Greenwald hasn't left the Left, he is critical of Progressivism, which is not a leftist philosophy at all. I think Taibbi is in the same place. Lindsay got run out of the circles he was used to being in for some fairly anodyne opinions, and clearly couldn't handle it. I don't think Lindsay thinks about his audience at all, he would be saying the same things if he were strapped on a gurney in a padded room (which is where he may still end up, frankly.)
"I desperately want Republicans to stop being irrational and crazy, and forcing me into being a single-issue voter who has to vote Democrat because there is no other rational choice" is not the same thing as "I desperately want to like Trump"
I'm also pretty sure that literally zero of the people you are talking about have ever "self-identified" as Democrats. The Democratic affiliation sounds more rather more like an assumption you are making about us.
Really? I don't "*WANT* to like Trump", but I do *WANT* to feel like I can vote Republican again (not least because I want to feel like I can vote for _either_ candidate and thus make an actual choice) (and thus I want Trump to get out of our politics). I'm a self-identified Democrat right now because the Republicans are not currently offering me palatable options.
Are you conflating the latter with the former?
I agree with this - I want Republican House/Senate/Presidential candidates to not obviously be a crazy choice. I suspect I would still very often vote Democratic, but Trump - and at least as alarmingly, his acolytes' - looming presence over the entire Republican Party makes a comparison of the pros and cons of respective policies seem a little silly.
I really got to see the importance of local endorsements when I moved from Baltimore to Miami. When I lived in Baltimore I always knew who aligned with my views at a local level, because there is (or at least was at the time) a robust local journalism ecosystem. DC, where I lived before, was even better. In Miami there's hardly anything. It's extremely difficult to figure out who to vote for in local elections - most candidates don't even have websites and there is not enough media coverage of them to learn anything useful.
Even in the DC area, there are super-local races for positions like natural resource management where candidates don't even consistently have websites, nevermind actually having local news articles about the candidates' positions and backgrounds. At best, I could find a press release for local parties announcing whom they endorsed.
I wish that newspapers and audio and visual media would stick more to news, and to impartially reporting it. Keep the endorsements to the editorial page and try to firewall out how reporters treat actual newsworthy information. It gets a little old when newspapers take an obvious slant.
Case in point, here in New Mexico there was a plea bargain in a case where an identity-politics addled conservative shot a Native American at an event staged by the NA's to protest an Onate statue about to be honored by a local government. A recent article in my local paper merely said that the conservative shot into the crowd, which he sorta did, and just got four more years in the slammer. Having followed the case, he did shoot, but he did so as he was being manhandled, assaulted, and tossed over a low stone wall by Native American group members who were offended by his obnoxious behavior. Sure, he was not justified in shooting at them (he took the plea bargain to limit the damage, I suppose) but by leaving a key part of the story out, it warps public understanding of what actually happened.
Another example was KUNM News, a few years ago, lumped Milo Yiannapolis, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ben Shapiro into a single category of "extremist speakers" on the air and suggested they were not worth the cost of bringing them to the U of NM campus, citing damage caused by anti-Yiannapolis rioters and the university's attempts to impose a security fee. Bias? Nah! BTW, a Federal judge just enjoined the U from imposing that fee, citing numerous appellate cases all the way up to the SCOTUS (Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement).
I missed the Nature endorsement but read the Sci Am, which discussed stuff having nothing to do with science. Professional journals should stay out of the endorsement game. As a Ph.D. working scientist (geochemist/analytical chemist and registered D), I think science is often unfairly accused of being politicized; not that it is never politicized. There is no point to supporting that notion with partisan endorsements. Nature is a peer-reviewed publication; they should have known better. Sci Am is more of "Science for the People" magazine, but that subtlety might be lost on some.
Thanks for approaching so many of these topics in a strategic fashion, assessing what the outcomes of different actions will be and whether they’re useful. I wish we had more of that type of analysis out there in general.