“The bad news is that the sickness really does seem to be largely contingent on things like gasoline and diesel prices, not revulsion at Trump’s hostility to democracy and the rule of law.”
The fact that voters, especially on the right, have not batted an eyelid at Trump committing approximately one impeachable offense per week does not bode well for our ability to maintain a functional democracy. If you keep gas prices low and pay off the media oligarchs then the median voters isn’t well informed enough to serve as an effective check on abuses of power.
I’m not convinced the media is the problem here per se. Trump has won in years when he did not have the same kind of institutional support from e.g. Larry Ellison (who now owns TikTok and whose son owns CBS/CNN) as he does now. Even in 2024, I would say, excepting the obvious players like Fox or OANN, most of the media ecosystem was consolidated against Trump. This seems more like a problem of negative polarization to me; Trump serves as a tool for destroying the enemies of his base. And in that sense, he is still performing his job, even if it comes at a steep cost.
Can I suggest that giving money to win Texas governor or Mississippi senate for Democrats is NOT a waste of money?
I think you’re forgetting how big the polling miss was in 2020. I think most of us politics junkies who’ve read Nate Silver for years knew those polls showing Biden up like 15 points in June, 2020 was likely some serious non-response bias going on. But polls still showed Biden with very solid lead in October, 2020; Nate Silver had Biden up 9-10 points. As it turned out, a combo of partisan deviation as to who was adhering to Covid restrictions (meaning who was literally home to pick up the phone) and polls clearly missing about 2-3% of Trump vote meant we had a gigantic polling miss. But if you went by polling, giving money to Jaimie Harrison to defeat Lindsey Graham* was actually not crazy at all.
So look at polling now for Texas governor and Mississippi senate. GOP is up in both races. If I was a betting man going on Kalshi I’d bet on Republicans to win both races. But…it’s still pretty decently close. You’re forgetting that polling misses favoring Democrats is not some ludicrous possibility..actually has happened a decent amount in our lives. We’re also scarred by the Trump era (in so so many ways**) we don’t even want to think about Dems over-performing. But again just based on relatively recent history it’s not a crazy possibility. Which means yes giving money to candidates with maybe a 25-30% chance of winning is kind of reasonable.
If on November 4th it turns out polls missed GOP votes by 3-4% I guess I’ll need to go to my nearest Cheesecake Factory and plead penance to “Real” Americans***. But just literally based on data we have donations to these races are not wasted money.
* Am I wrong in thinking these latest revelations about Lindsey Graham should be a bigger deal? Like it was an open secret and I get why Press maybe didn’t want to publish anything absent really solid evidence. But seems like we have pretty decent indication that a sitting senator of some real power was being blackmailed a decent part of his career
** I’ve said before. Think we underrate the extent that America has essentially been stuck in abusive relationship for 10+ years. Think it explains more than we think.
*** I have little doubt believing that being around the staffer class of the Democratic Party from 2018-2024 can be alienating and could maybe make you reconsider some things. So to a small extent I get Evan Barker’s journey. But we have literally MattY as a good example of being able to distinguish between “I’m not happy with the leftist part of my party” and “I should therefor throw in my lot with an aspiring Fascist” Going as far as to vote for Trump given you’re not a low info voter says something about you. But to then also not once but twice do interviews with Matt Gaetz tells me “oh, you want that sweet sweet grifter train money and influence don’t you?”
Cheesecake Factory discourse is terrible. I was at the Cheesecake Factory because my wife was craving cheesecake recently and it was a miserable experience, extremely busy, slow service, mediocre food, costing $120+ for the two of us and two little kids who barely ate without drinks. Apparently lots of “real Americans” like this overpriced stuff (or it wouldn’t be busy!). But liberals should do their countrymen a favor by introducing them to our restaurants which typically have good reasonably priced food with either reasonably fast service or self-checkout if they can’t afford that.
I have to disagree with you about Gina Hinojosa. Last I checked she was one polling error away from winning. She’s the underdog but it’s not impossible.
Sure, she’s probably not the *best* use of donations, but she’s a much better one than Maura Healey and lot nearly as hopeless as the guy in Mississippi.
As Matt has pointed out in the past, taking positions that make billionaire donors mad has not necessarily worked out well for Democrats, even if those positions are superficially popular. Perhaps in addition to billionaire donors, it is necessary to take into account the views of small dollar donors who are keeping the Democrats afloat.
"the 2028 and 2030 maps aren’t any better. Given the American political alignment that emerged in the 2016 / 2020 / 2024 cycles, there simply are no favorable maps"
The unfavorability of the map really peaked in 2016 and at least the GOP structural advantage has been declining since then. Looking back at 2012 it had been very even at that point; the red shifts of Iowa and Ohio really hurt the map for Dems, and it's too bad that as far as I can tell, there's no real idea for how to pull that whole region of the country back into competitive territory.
You can see how the senate map advantage evolved over time here:
Meanwhile, the NYT has a fairly terrible article on 8 races that will shape progressives future. No context on margin or the size of the Democratic wave, just if these guys win progressives should be set up for 2028.
The NYT obviously has a great election analyst in Nate Cohn, which makes this local yokel paper level article more annoying.
Being a former Republican, I have the dubious privilege of receiving scam solicitations from both Democrats and Republicans. Many of your readers may never have seen the Republican scams. For example:
Tariff Rebate Position Confirmation COMPLIMENTARY $0.00
GOP Membership Renewal COMPLIMENTARY $0.00
TOTAL DUE $25.00
⚠
FINAL NOTICE — INVOICE #2026-47291
We have sent this invoice four times.
During the time this went unpaid, Democrats raised millions, flipped four Senate seats from tossup to their column, and moved one step closer to impeaching President Trump.
This is the final notice before Democrats take over and Chuck Schumer runs the Senate chamber.
I've commented before that I'm genuinely surprised that, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no consumer protection lawsuits over fundraising ads in recent years. (In law school, you learn that you can't sue politicians for making campaign promises they don't keep, but it seems like there's a huge qualitative difference with fundraising ads that knowingly provide false information intended to trick people into "donating.")
RE your last point, Matt, the small dollar donation ecosystem is one of the main drivers of the dysfunctions you regularly criticize coming from the left and base (IE Nate Silver’s “Heather Cox Richardsonian” wing) of the party.
How do you reconcile that with the need to keep this ecosystem healthy? Is it simply that the ecosystem ALSO is one of our main interfaces with normie voters and thus we can’t have it be such a huge surface for turning them off? Or maybe can we strangle it in its crib and replace it with something else?
Make all candidates affiliate with some org (maybe the DNC or maybe a custom entity) as a condition of cross-endorsement, under the terms of which affiliation they have to pay 5 cents per spam text to the org, which will in turn allocate resources in what is hopefully the highest-leverage way to whatever candidates it sees fit. Encourages efficient use of solicitations to likely donors while aiding the national party’s electoral prospects.
I’ve advocated for something like this myself before. I think it makes sense to turn ActBlue into the party’s centralized funding arm, have it be the “killer app” that’s a win-win for candidates on the ground, but also use it as a tool for enforcing the big-tent ethos we want.
There's quite something to be said about a group that says it's devoted to curtailing campaign spending ending up doing scammy campaign spending.
But while I do agree with Matt that scams are worse than spam, the spam is still really bad, too. It risks being countereffective in turning off people permanently in the long run for only the benefit of hooking people in in the short term. I've never donated to a political campaign of any kind, and when I see this yapping maw of spammy begging, it makes me less likely to ever do so.
Same here. What's even more bothersome is how the money gets spent on worse than cringe advertising, both sides spouting nonsensical negative political crap. I get pitifully little actual information about what the candidates actually stand for...not that I'm expecting miracles from politicians, but these ads are are not helping the cause, for me anyway. Worse is that people buy into this stuff. When the dust settles I'd like to see a ban on that kind of advertising. Give candidates specific air time to make their case (and more debates are good). Love him or hate him but Ross Perot at least had that sensibility with all his pie charts, lol. Lastly, make voting mandatory and for goodness sake have voting on a Saturday and make a party out of it like they do in Australia.
All of the races on my ballot are pretty straightforward except for the council member for our district. The Democrat is a massive NIMBY, who only has NIMBY talking points and nothing else to say. The Republican is MAGA. I never really felt "lesser of two evils" before this election and still haven't decided who to vote for.
I haven’t given a dime to any politician since I gave money to Nikki Haley. The crap I get every day in texts is hair-on-fire, 100% of the time, and it is very annoying. I can’t remember which Presidential election I looked at, 2020 or 2024, but Democrats have their billionaires as well.
My perception is that the Democrats' billionaires are more ideological than transactional. We know that the billionaires who give to Trump are doing so to protect their businesses. Despite Sheldon Whitehouse’s admonition about Dark Money, Democrats also use Dark Money.
We have gone well past billionaires wanting anonymity. Yes, there is too much money in politics. House members have to scratch for dollars almost at the start of their second term. Doubling or tripling the number of Congressional seats would go a long way to curing redistricting issues and raising money.
Candidate quality can overcome a money problem. Yet, El-Sayed doesn’t seem to have a money problem. Troy Jackson may be the worst candidate I have seen in a long time, and he may beat Collins, and the only reason he might win is that there is a D next to his name.
None of this matters anyway; Noah Smith tells us that AI agents are going to crash the Internet for 18 months, and hackers are going to steal your money and wipe it from the universe.
There isn't enough money in politics, spending has increased a lot since 2029 but it is still a tiny industry where powerful people are often operating on a shoe string.
A candidate who advocates a tax on spam texts and emails would win massively. Up to and including a constitutional amendment revoking first amendment protection for unsolicited direct marketing of all kinds.
I guess I'll have to be the Debbie Downer and say that, like most proposed carveouts of the Free Speech Clause, this would risk allowing governments to impede with much more mundane yet important forms of marketing that could end up being tailored to hurt those with less power. And especially worrisome if we're including political speech among the unsolicited direct marketing.
I do think that a content neutral tax on all transmissions would fly. But then the downside is that it would make things like sending Substack article emails more expensive.
If PACS are going to be scams despite being in the public eye and with strong political incentives to crack down on them, think how bad many other organisations that ask for money must be scams.
I can't be the only one who has actually donated less because I don't want to encourage more spam texts
“The bad news is that the sickness really does seem to be largely contingent on things like gasoline and diesel prices, not revulsion at Trump’s hostility to democracy and the rule of law.”
The fact that voters, especially on the right, have not batted an eyelid at Trump committing approximately one impeachable offense per week does not bode well for our ability to maintain a functional democracy. If you keep gas prices low and pay off the media oligarchs then the median voters isn’t well informed enough to serve as an effective check on abuses of power.
I’m not convinced the media is the problem here per se. Trump has won in years when he did not have the same kind of institutional support from e.g. Larry Ellison (who now owns TikTok and whose son owns CBS/CNN) as he does now. Even in 2024, I would say, excepting the obvious players like Fox or OANN, most of the media ecosystem was consolidated against Trump. This seems more like a problem of negative polarization to me; Trump serves as a tool for destroying the enemies of his base. And in that sense, he is still performing his job, even if it comes at a steep cost.
Can I suggest that giving money to win Texas governor or Mississippi senate for Democrats is NOT a waste of money?
I think you’re forgetting how big the polling miss was in 2020. I think most of us politics junkies who’ve read Nate Silver for years knew those polls showing Biden up like 15 points in June, 2020 was likely some serious non-response bias going on. But polls still showed Biden with very solid lead in October, 2020; Nate Silver had Biden up 9-10 points. As it turned out, a combo of partisan deviation as to who was adhering to Covid restrictions (meaning who was literally home to pick up the phone) and polls clearly missing about 2-3% of Trump vote meant we had a gigantic polling miss. But if you went by polling, giving money to Jaimie Harrison to defeat Lindsey Graham* was actually not crazy at all.
So look at polling now for Texas governor and Mississippi senate. GOP is up in both races. If I was a betting man going on Kalshi I’d bet on Republicans to win both races. But…it’s still pretty decently close. You’re forgetting that polling misses favoring Democrats is not some ludicrous possibility..actually has happened a decent amount in our lives. We’re also scarred by the Trump era (in so so many ways**) we don’t even want to think about Dems over-performing. But again just based on relatively recent history it’s not a crazy possibility. Which means yes giving money to candidates with maybe a 25-30% chance of winning is kind of reasonable.
If on November 4th it turns out polls missed GOP votes by 3-4% I guess I’ll need to go to my nearest Cheesecake Factory and plead penance to “Real” Americans***. But just literally based on data we have donations to these races are not wasted money.
* Am I wrong in thinking these latest revelations about Lindsey Graham should be a bigger deal? Like it was an open secret and I get why Press maybe didn’t want to publish anything absent really solid evidence. But seems like we have pretty decent indication that a sitting senator of some real power was being blackmailed a decent part of his career
** I’ve said before. Think we underrate the extent that America has essentially been stuck in abusive relationship for 10+ years. Think it explains more than we think.
*** I have little doubt believing that being around the staffer class of the Democratic Party from 2018-2024 can be alienating and could maybe make you reconsider some things. So to a small extent I get Evan Barker’s journey. But we have literally MattY as a good example of being able to distinguish between “I’m not happy with the leftist part of my party” and “I should therefor throw in my lot with an aspiring Fascist” Going as far as to vote for Trump given you’re not a low info voter says something about you. But to then also not once but twice do interviews with Matt Gaetz tells me “oh, you want that sweet sweet grifter train money and influence don’t you?”
Cheesecake Factory discourse is terrible. I was at the Cheesecake Factory because my wife was craving cheesecake recently and it was a miserable experience, extremely busy, slow service, mediocre food, costing $120+ for the two of us and two little kids who barely ate without drinks. Apparently lots of “real Americans” like this overpriced stuff (or it wouldn’t be busy!). But liberals should do their countrymen a favor by introducing them to our restaurants which typically have good reasonably priced food with either reasonably fast service or self-checkout if they can’t afford that.
I have to disagree with you about Gina Hinojosa. Last I checked she was one polling error away from winning. She’s the underdog but it’s not impossible.
Sure, she’s probably not the *best* use of donations, but she’s a much better one than Maura Healey and lot nearly as hopeless as the guy in Mississippi.
I honestly heat my house with all the political junk mail I get. Those flyers and letters make great fire starters.
I'd think the glossy paper would release toxic fumes?
As Matt has pointed out in the past, taking positions that make billionaire donors mad has not necessarily worked out well for Democrats, even if those positions are superficially popular. Perhaps in addition to billionaire donors, it is necessary to take into account the views of small dollar donors who are keeping the Democrats afloat.
"the 2028 and 2030 maps aren’t any better. Given the American political alignment that emerged in the 2016 / 2020 / 2024 cycles, there simply are no favorable maps"
The unfavorability of the map really peaked in 2016 and at least the GOP structural advantage has been declining since then. Looking back at 2012 it had been very even at that point; the red shifts of Iowa and Ohio really hurt the map for Dems, and it's too bad that as far as I can tell, there's no real idea for how to pull that whole region of the country back into competitive territory.
You can see how the senate map advantage evolved over time here:
https://www.theusaindata.com/senate_map_bias
Meanwhile, the NYT has a fairly terrible article on 8 races that will shape progressives future. No context on margin or the size of the Democratic wave, just if these guys win progressives should be set up for 2028.
The NYT obviously has a great election analyst in Nate Cohn, which makes this local yokel paper level article more annoying.
Being a former Republican, I have the dubious privilege of receiving scam solicitations from both Democrats and Republicans. Many of your readers may never have seen the Republican scams. For example:
REPUBLICAN SENATE DEFENSE FUND INVOICE
#2026-47291
⚠ PAST DUE
FROM Republican Senate Defense Fund
BILLED TO Patriot
DATE ISSUED Yesterday
DUE DATE Midnight Tonight
DESCRIPTION
AMOUNT
2026 Senate Majority Protection $25.00
Conservative Voter File Maintenance COMPLIMENTARY $0.00
Tariff Rebate Position Confirmation COMPLIMENTARY $0.00
GOP Membership Renewal COMPLIMENTARY $0.00
TOTAL DUE $25.00
⚠
FINAL NOTICE — INVOICE #2026-47291
We have sent this invoice four times.
During the time this went unpaid, Democrats raised millions, flipped four Senate seats from tossup to their column, and moved one step closer to impeaching President Trump.
This is the final notice before Democrats take over and Chuck Schumer runs the Senate chamber.
One payment clears the balance permanently.
★ PAY INVOICE — CLEAR BALANCE NOW ★
I send "replies" to and most go to "info@trumptruths.org" but they are blocked.
I've commented before that I'm genuinely surprised that, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no consumer protection lawsuits over fundraising ads in recent years. (In law school, you learn that you can't sue politicians for making campaign promises they don't keep, but it seems like there's a huge qualitative difference with fundraising ads that knowingly provide false information intended to trick people into "donating.")
God people are so gullible!
Thank you for this public service message. Some of these efforts are borderline elder abuse scams.
RE your last point, Matt, the small dollar donation ecosystem is one of the main drivers of the dysfunctions you regularly criticize coming from the left and base (IE Nate Silver’s “Heather Cox Richardsonian” wing) of the party.
How do you reconcile that with the need to keep this ecosystem healthy? Is it simply that the ecosystem ALSO is one of our main interfaces with normie voters and thus we can’t have it be such a huge surface for turning them off? Or maybe can we strangle it in its crib and replace it with something else?
Make all candidates affiliate with some org (maybe the DNC or maybe a custom entity) as a condition of cross-endorsement, under the terms of which affiliation they have to pay 5 cents per spam text to the org, which will in turn allocate resources in what is hopefully the highest-leverage way to whatever candidates it sees fit. Encourages efficient use of solicitations to likely donors while aiding the national party’s electoral prospects.
I’ve advocated for something like this myself before. I think it makes sense to turn ActBlue into the party’s centralized funding arm, have it be the “killer app” that’s a win-win for candidates on the ground, but also use it as a tool for enforcing the big-tent ethos we want.
There's quite something to be said about a group that says it's devoted to curtailing campaign spending ending up doing scammy campaign spending.
But while I do agree with Matt that scams are worse than spam, the spam is still really bad, too. It risks being countereffective in turning off people permanently in the long run for only the benefit of hooking people in in the short term. I've never donated to a political campaign of any kind, and when I see this yapping maw of spammy begging, it makes me less likely to ever do so.
Same here. What's even more bothersome is how the money gets spent on worse than cringe advertising, both sides spouting nonsensical negative political crap. I get pitifully little actual information about what the candidates actually stand for...not that I'm expecting miracles from politicians, but these ads are are not helping the cause, for me anyway. Worse is that people buy into this stuff. When the dust settles I'd like to see a ban on that kind of advertising. Give candidates specific air time to make their case (and more debates are good). Love him or hate him but Ross Perot at least had that sensibility with all his pie charts, lol. Lastly, make voting mandatory and for goodness sake have voting on a Saturday and make a party out of it like they do in Australia.
The nonprofit industrial complex is a huge grift.
All of the races on my ballot are pretty straightforward except for the council member for our district. The Democrat is a massive NIMBY, who only has NIMBY talking points and nothing else to say. The Republican is MAGA. I never really felt "lesser of two evils" before this election and still haven't decided who to vote for.
I haven’t given a dime to any politician since I gave money to Nikki Haley. The crap I get every day in texts is hair-on-fire, 100% of the time, and it is very annoying. I can’t remember which Presidential election I looked at, 2020 or 2024, but Democrats have their billionaires as well.
My perception is that the Democrats' billionaires are more ideological than transactional. We know that the billionaires who give to Trump are doing so to protect their businesses. Despite Sheldon Whitehouse’s admonition about Dark Money, Democrats also use Dark Money.
We have gone well past billionaires wanting anonymity. Yes, there is too much money in politics. House members have to scratch for dollars almost at the start of their second term. Doubling or tripling the number of Congressional seats would go a long way to curing redistricting issues and raising money.
Candidate quality can overcome a money problem. Yet, El-Sayed doesn’t seem to have a money problem. Troy Jackson may be the worst candidate I have seen in a long time, and he may beat Collins, and the only reason he might win is that there is a D next to his name.
None of this matters anyway; Noah Smith tells us that AI agents are going to crash the Internet for 18 months, and hackers are going to steal your money and wipe it from the universe.
There isn't enough money in politics, spending has increased a lot since 2029 but it is still a tiny industry where powerful people are often operating on a shoe string.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
A candidate who advocates a tax on spam texts and emails would win massively. Up to and including a constitutional amendment revoking first amendment protection for unsolicited direct marketing of all kinds.
I guess I'll have to be the Debbie Downer and say that, like most proposed carveouts of the Free Speech Clause, this would risk allowing governments to impede with much more mundane yet important forms of marketing that could end up being tailored to hurt those with less power. And especially worrisome if we're including political speech among the unsolicited direct marketing.
I do think that a content neutral tax on all transmissions would fly. But then the downside is that it would make things like sending Substack article emails more expensive.
If PACS are going to be scams despite being in the public eye and with strong political incentives to crack down on them, think how bad many other organisations that ask for money must be scams.
It is depressing to find out that Wikipedia fundraising is a scam.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-next-time-wikipedia-asks-for-a-donation-ignore-it/?edition=us