I own a small factory in Ann Arbor, Michigan with about 70 employees (a lot of 20 somethings). We discovered that when we brought a nurse in to administer free flu and covid shots and gave everyone a paid half our off to recover, our company vax rate went from 40% to 90%. I'll never underestimate human inertia and laziness again, and am now paying my staff an hour of PTO (all shifts will begin an hour later) + reimbursing Uber rides to the polls on election day. We aren't asking who they voted for (though Ann Arbor is a leftwing outlier), but you may have similar opportunities in your life to enable people to vote who have been persuaded and are just that lazy or unmotivated to go actually vote.
Maybe you are underestimating how many employees can't afford to lose even an hour or two of pay? It's likely not laziness, it's a calculation based on need.
They all had free vaccines available under company health care before - they just had to go to CVS or Kroger (walkable from our factory doors) after work (or the majority have cars, and could go on weekends, etc.) These aren't 3rd world wage-slaves, they're working 40 hours a week for decent pay (most turn down overtime opportunities, which is fine). We just made it as frictionless as possible, and were shocked at how much of a difference the convenience seemed to matter. Given the historic voting rates for young people, I'm hoping this is a similar scenario.
That's great to hear, and I do respect that you took the time and money to make it a much easier choice to get medical treatment and vote. But I'll say to you what I said to other people here, which is that the fact that they took action when the disincentives of losing time and money were removed indicates that it's not laziness which was the issue. Lazy people would not have taken you up on the offer, and I wouldn't think that you employ a lot of lazy people at your factory.
Fair, I guess. But as I said to another commenter, when the loss of time and money was taken off the table, people took action, which speaks to them not being lazy, but weighing choices.
Jerry: thanks for sharing this experience and insight. Much appreciated. And I think most of us understand that we are ALL lazy in the way that you meant. We shouldn't have to be so careful with phrasing but for the sake of Lapsed Pacifist let's say: "I'll never underestimate the effect of FRICTION on normal people's ability to act, even in their own self-interest". And this really is important when it comes to thinking about other civic responsibilities beyond vaccination, like voting, preventive health care, entitlements, etc. Anyway, thanks. And also thanks for not being so precious with your word choice. Most of us get it.
This article has a coincidental timing: just last night I had my first chat with one of my relatives on who to vote for. She very much believes in ticket splitting, so my persuasion strategy was to get her to vote for a few Republicans that were going to win no matter what, while reserving Democrats for the few races that will actually be close, which are on the county level. There will be different persuasion strategies for different people, of course.
While I do think having competitive elections does result in better governance, the very fact that most Republicans have given up on actually attempting to govern for the public benefit means that ticket splitting is generally a bad strategy (from a public welfare perspective.)
It's a shame, because in states like mine ticket splitting in theory is pretty defensible. New York Dems absolutely could stand to lose a few elections especially in NYC. Problem is much like GOP in other blue states, the NY GOP has become pretty Trumpy. And even if they are only semi-Trumpy the local GOP is often just as corrupt (good chance to bring my House rep Anthony D'Esposito who is in the news today for his corruption).
I brought it up before but two of the most famously blue states in the country just had multiple term GOP governors. The one in Maryland wasn't even that moderate if you look at his record. Just a giant missed opportunity because a party that's decided that actual governing is not actually part of the remit of being in office.
New York really needs a state-level party (or, perhaps preferably, several parties) that has no affiliation or overlap or affiliation with the national-level Democrats -- basically Canada-style local governance.
I like open primaries in theory, but I'm unsure if they have much of an impact.
> The most comprehensive study is Seth Hill’s “Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates.” Hill found that changing the nominating process had no effect on the ideological composition of primary election voters. “I find no evidence that … closed and semi-closed primary states had more ideological primary voters than states with more open primary systems…To the extent that there is a relationship between primary ideology and closed primary institution, it is in the direction opposite that hypothesized.”
The Idaho proposition isn't really open primaries, it's doing away with the primaries and replacing them with a two round system with four finalists in the second round chosen by ranked choice voting.
Meanwhile, I remain baffled why so many people want to yell at Nate Silver over his model. It seems to be some sort of a lengthy chain that goes like this: they don't like something he said (probably on Twitter), so they're looking for some way to declare he's bad (find that he does a little work for a firm who among many investors has one that is also declared bad), and then look for a reason to say that his model is bad (it's not as bullish for Harris as they think everyone should be) without any consideration on what the model is actually about.
Nate is right, as is Matt: those people need to chill out and go do something more productive. Or at the very least, if they want to yell at Nate, then yell for the right reasons: either say any of his non-model takes are wrong, or separately point out why one says his model is wrong. Don't conflate things.
The ones who PAY HIM to tell him his model is wrong (inevitably because they think one or the other candidate is going to win decisively) are the real head-scratchers.
a: in high-uncertainty situations, different reasonable methodologies will sometimes produce different conclusions, and
b: when a complex model has a problem, it’s usually not for nefarious reasons
Like, I think that Nate’s convention bounce adjustments were way too big given data from recent cycles and they added a ton of unnecessary volatility to his forecast, but he straight up told us how they work. There’s nothing nefarious there, he just made a bad call.
I think that a lot of reactions to the NYT/Sienna polls have similar drivers. Like, those polls produce some kind of unusual results because they’re methodologically kind of unusual, and consequently model a fairly different electorate than most polls. Even more so than the convention bounce adjustment, NYT/Sienna’s methodological choices are all really defensible. Given the level of effort involved, it’s clear that Cohn et al are really trying to get to the truth, and if they’re wrong, it’ll probably be because they didn’t quite nail their probabilistic likely voter model, not because they’re trying to gin up traffic by making shit up.
I believe the conspiracy is Silver is a consultant to Polymarket in which Peter Thiel is an investor which is apparently proof Thiel is paying Silver to rig the forecast (even though it's not clear if or how the forecast actually impacts people's voting intentions).
It’s similar to the argument from the revolving door people. Anyone who maintains a disagreement with someone can’t possibly be doing it for good faith reasons, they must be bought by some nefarious actor.
You don't trust polls because you think polling is difficult and what is a 52:48 poll telling you anyway? Or you don't trust polls because you think there are a bunch of people creating fake results because 52:48 is going to change the mind of a significant number of voters?
It's a really dumb criticism since Silver stated on Ezra Klein's podcast that he's almost certainly going to vote for Harris. If one is looking for political bias, a statement about your preferred candidate is a lot stronger evidence than tenuous allegations of influence via a six-degrees from Kevin Bacon analysis.
Silver's trolling of liberals and Dems is beyond being a tired shtick.
As for his model, I really don't care about it because at the end of the day it's just clickbait; as we get close to voting, all that will matter will be polls and we can see them just as easily as he can; he has no special sauce.
But it's the clickbait thing that gets me. I thought he was a serious quantitative guy, but the fact that he goes to three significant figures in his probabilities is just absurd; that's absolutely totally fake precision and is meant just to make him look serious and scientific and get people all wound up when today's probability goes from 53.2% to 53.7%. If he were a serious guy, he would report his probabilities as something like "Harris's chances of winning continue to be in the 50-55% range, up from the 45-50% range from two weeks ago." Heck, I'd be even happier with "50-60% probability."
I really think most of the frustration with Silver is his trolling. He's one of those guys that is just very condescending and dismissive by nature. He's got some good takes, and he was right about a lot of COVID stuff. Nevertheless, I found his tone and condescension during the pandemic very alienating even when I agreed with what he was saying. He also seemed to have this expectation that federal, state, and local gov'ts would be able to pivot to respond to new data instantaneously. Obviously, we would live in a better world if govt's could do that, but it's hardly surprising that they can't. Yet Silver, Barro, and even Matt seemed to be pretty surprised about this at times.
In summary, Silver would benefit from employing a little bit more humility when slinging his takes.
I actually disagree on this one— higher precision makes probabilistic forecasts easier to evaluate, especially if (like Silver), you’ve made a lot of them.
How do you evaluate the 53.7% probability of Harris winning as of Sept. 23? (Or whatever the current number is). The election hasn’t happened yet!
If by Nov. 5, Harris’s probability is, say, 83.4% and she wins, then hooray for the model I guess. But of what value was the earlier number that justifies three significant figures?
The answer is something like “use a very large number of prediction-outcome pairs from the same forecaster to measure calibration”— basicslly, what percentage of things they assigned a 60% probability to actually happened? (The goal should be “something around 60%”.)
Basically, we wouldn’t evaluate on the basis of any single probabilistic forecast in isolation. We’d look at Nate’s track record over many distinct forecasts. (538 did this and presented it; their track record is quite well-calibrated).
I've seen their reporting and calibration of their various predictions. Those appear to be sound to me. But those are for final predictions on events that have since occurred.
I'm just saying that a 53.7% probability on Sept. 23 really doesn't have any meaning better than "this is what the vibes and current polls seem to be telling me." You can't prove, validate, or test something which has no conceivable testable outcome (no election on Sept. 23) so your current estimate shouldn't reflect more certainty than you perforce must have. "Somewhere between 50 and 60%" is maybe acceptable; "53.7%" is near crackpot.
Not an expert but for 538 they always do retrospectives where they check if the candidates they gave a 60% chance actually won 60% of the time. I imagine that similar to polling, you could find a point in time when the percentage predictions are as accurate as they are on election day. That said even on election day their prediction percentages are still multiple points off, so agreed that the decimal point is more theatre than true accuracy.
You're asking him to purposefully blur his numbers, but you're welcome to do that yourself. I think it's fine that he just gives the output from the model and leaves it up to us as to how to interpret them (and in fact, he often says that people are overinterpreting them).
I’m asking him to be a reputable data scientist and forecaster. He already knows that people live and die off these tiny and meaningless perturbations, so don’t produce them. And he’s already blurring his numbers because I assume his computer model could just as easily spit out a 53.2068341% probability as a 53.2% one. Neither has any larger meaning.
This is a weird hill to die on. I assure you, if he did what you suggest, people would just accuse him of obfuscating the numbers to make his preferred outcome seem more likely.
Don’t forget one I hear all the time, Nate has been bought and paid for by Peter Thiel therefore the model and his interpretations are totally untrustworthy.
At the heart of it, it's a channel for frustration and anxiety. Nobody is perfect, but when you don't like what someone is saying it becomes easy to nitpick reasons not to believe it. His model has Trump with a 10% higher chance than pretty much every other model. I have no particular reason to believe that he's more accurate than 538 or BTRTN, but also no reason to believe he's less accurate.
My beef with every model is that everyone says you can't predict ahead of time the magnitude and direction of polling error. But I would really like to see a thorough study to prove that. Take a bunch of variables (previous years polling errors, number of volunteers for each candidate, number of individual donors for each candidate, October surprises, special elections, incumbency, party incumbency, rally attendance, number of undecideds in the polls, percent of primary vote achieved). For each variable, run a test to see if there is a correlation with polling error direction and magnitude across elections. I don't see any reason to believe any one particular data point would show correlation. But the idea that none of those data points would show correlation is something I would like to see evidence for.
Nate Silver's convention bounce put him badly out of sync with other models for a few weeks and now he's back in sync, with pretty much all the convergence on his side, not his competitors'. He messed up and really did understate Harris. That's not to say all or even most criticism is fair
The most important thing is to decisively beat the Republican party on all political levels to hasten the party's transformation away from anti-democratic trickery (gerrymandering etc), extremism, conspiracy theories, fascism and theocracy. Whatever hurts the Republican party most is the right way to go at this juncture in history. They need to reform so that the US can return to a competition between two normal political parties, one more to the left and one more to the right.
There is no democratic future with the current Republican party.
Having said that, one important way in which this could happen is for the Democrats to once and for all move right on (non-high skilled) immigration. Perhaps also give up on gun control (there’s no way of turning the genie back into the bottle with hundreds of millions of guns already out there). Remove these issues from the political agenda.
It already has been, you just haven't noticed because you've lost sensation in your fingers.
No meaningful legislation on guns is going to survive the current SCOTUS, and spending political capital on an impossible cause seems counterproductive.
(1) The current SCOTUS is not a permanent feature of American democracy; (2) the current SCOTUS has not disallowed all sane gun regulations (per Heller); (3) various sane gun regulations enjoy majority popular and electoral support; (4) properly understood, political capital is not fixed stock of goods or assets that are "spent", but a dynamic process of discovering, refining and investing in issues that eventually yield political advantages that result in the adoption of (sometimes only marginally) better policies. Australian-style mandatory gun buy-backs in the US would be a bad investment, but various policies that would create a more restrictive environment for gun ownership and operation (red flag laws, background checks, etc.) continue to be good investments.
How will the ”bad guys” be stopped from getting weapons when there are hundreds of millions out there that we will not be able to get back, with or without a buy back programme.
Voters are very angry about immigration right now. If Trump is elected and pursues draconian crackdowns on immigration, voters will be angry about that too, just like they were during the first Trump administration.
Immigration is fundamentally a very difficult problem to solve given the US’s extremely strong economy and our very long, highly traversed border with Mexico. Voters want the whole thing to magically disappear.
Ugh, I kind of agree with you about the genie out of the bottle, but we have had a bad summer of gun violence where I live, and I just hate that there are millions of guns floating around that even young teens have easy access to in my supposedly strict gun law state. I would like to find some way of working a long game on gun control.
In a sense the map will only get harder after reapportionment, in an entirely foreseeable own goal of Democratic state governance driving people to states that don't ban housing against their preferences.
> The most important thing is to decisively beat the Republican party on all political levels to hasten the party's transformation away from anti-democratic trickery (gerrymandering etc), extremism, conspiracy theories, fascism and theocracy.
Don't let me dissuade you from trying to beat the GOP, but my takeaway from the Republican party in states where it has been decisively beaten on all political levels is not that it hastened a transformation away from any of those things.
I think there should be a serious effort for pro-democracy conservatives like Cheney to form right-wing regional parties that either split the GOP vote or that Dems can strategically support for key statewide races.
Similarly, many blue states would benefit from regional centrist party's to compete against left Dems (I could be convinced of flipping that to be centrist Dem and lefty third party, but I think that would be less likely to work). Certainly a popular front against GOP authoritarianism is the more immediate priority, but I think the single party blue state governance (particularly as to housing but on various other national party priorities) is quietly helping exacerbate the national dysfunction.
I think the evidence that Democrats are willing partner with a Cheney Republican is incredibly weak. If you look at the list of Representatives, Matt is asking people to support the opponent of one of the two Republicans to vote for impeachment. Which is reasonable from someone who wants Democrats to control the House - its just that approach precludes what you are suggesting.
Minnesota races didn't make the list here, but if you are a resident, there is a poorly advertised program that will reimburse you for $75 of political contributions to MN state office candidates or political parties: https://www.revenue.state.mn.us/political-contribution-refund. Take action for free!
Can we have a thread discussing state ballot measures and/or local races like mayors and city councils, some time in the next few weeks? Matt likely only has views himself about a few of them, but it might be good to have a canonical place for all the rest of us to have our local discussions about our local recommendations. (I’m particularly interested in the Irvine mayor race, because I know little about the candidates, and have gotten mailings supporting one guy for opposing hundreds of thousands of housing units, and attacking a specific opponent for supporting them, but I would like to know if the one he is attacking is the best one to vote for, or if there’s another candidate who is actually some mix of better and more likely to win).
I lived in STL for 6 years and Missouri has the most batshit insane ballot measures that are always posted in flowery language. "Protect farmer freedom act" was to not regulate puppy mills. "Commercial sales freedom act" to block tax increase on cigarettes (currently literally around 60c, advertising made it sound awful that it was a 300% increase to 1.80 even though national average is like $5)
Strongly second this! I, too, have yet to decide how to vote in the Irvine mayor race. Interestingly, I received a "how to vote" brochure for all positions *except* mayor.
"have gotten mailings supporting one guy for opposing hundreds of thousands of housing units" Because if there's one thing Irvine needs, it's opposition to more housing units. /facepalm
I think all that needs to happen is one post where Matt talks about any state/local things he thinks are especially interesting or important, maybe says something about how he thinks about district/local things when voting himself, and then opens it up in the comments for the rest of us to discuss what we think the preferred SB recommendations would be in our area.
One important way for candidates running in tough seats to signal moderation is to embrace anti-price gouging rhetoric.
“When asked to choose between two approaches to lowering the cost of living, 64% of swing state voters favor cracking down on price gouging by harshly penalizing big businesses that unfairly jack up prices and coordinate to increase costs, while only 23% say “Soviet-style price controls will only make inflation worse” and that the government cut regulations and reduce spending rather than attacking businesses.”
I'm not against some shameless pandering here or there. Hell, maybe they'll even find a small price fixing scheme or two and they can have a big press conference about it. But for the love of God, don't actually try to do large scale price controls.
Thanks for answering last night why a mention of the Soviets made the question, that's dumb for Trump to use but Trump going to Trump. I'm still curious as to what qualifies as "price gouging" and "jack[ing] up prices", as well as "coordinat[ion]", as well of the mention of price controls, which lead to shortages and rationing.
Right I mean it’s up to respondent interpretation in the poll. I will note that they did a point/counterpoint test on this—one message from Harris on gouging, a response from Trump saying her policies would create shortages and bread lines—and the result was Harris +5.
I think the example of what Google has done with respect to the online advertising market and the lawsuits surrounding that are a prime example of price gouging (I just listened to a podcast on it.)
"Price gouging" -- a term used by Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign whose last recorded usage dates from October 15, 2024, and never heard again after Jan. 20, 2025 when inflation hit 1.9% and no one gave a crap anymore.
That's the border, I'm referring specifically to deportation.
You could be more hawkish on anti-trust actions, but that's different from penalties on price-gouging. Similarly, the being hawkish on border control is different from deportation.
For many definitions of "price-gouging," being more hawkish on anti-trust is all that is needed. There are actually individuals who should be deported. Saying that you will deport the people who need to be deported is perfectly reasonable. I don't believe that Milan is suggesting that Kamala should put on her jack boots and make an add claiming she supports mass deportation.
Except that mass deportation polls positively. As does price controls.
Large numbers of Americans don't understand what the results of either actually mean. I support politicians who appeal to our better natures, not to our base natures.
I’m not saying that bad economics is never good politics, but many gettable former Rs (who still need to be persuaded to not vote R down ticket) are sophisticated (or tribal) enough to be really turned off by that kind of traditional dem red meat.
I believe you that a bunch of Rs like a bad idea. I don’t believe that supporting that idea gets more of them to vote for you than you risk losing from college educated former Republicans who are deeply allergic to that kind of D stuff. I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, though!
I’d recommend tracking which house candidates adopt these things and see if that affects their over/under performance. My guess is that your favored position will be more helpful in rural districts than suburban ones.
Ok, that sounds totally plausible. But do you get why that's orthogonal to the point I'm making? I can try to explain it more clearly with an example.
Suppose you have ten voters in a district, RRRR NN DDDD (Republicans, Nerds, and Democrats, respectively). R1 and R2 like price gouging laws and D1 through D4 like them, too! Unfortunately, both N1 and N2 have read the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, etc. for the last 25 years and hate all this talk of price controls. They know Trump's economic proposals are full of crap, but if they think that Harris's and their local Dems are crap, too then they're way more likely to stay home and/or vote R on downballot races.
In the meantime, there's no way R1 and R2 are going to vote for the Democrats. To the extent they even care about price gouging, they blame Biden for inflation and/or will be satisfied with Trump talking out both sides of his mouth on the issue. "He'll take care of it - he's a businessman who knows all their tricks."
So your polling could be completely accurate and you're right that the rubes outnumber the nerds, but that wouldn't mean the clever position-taking gets you to a 6-4 majority. Now, obvs, I have no idea how close to reality my example is - I'm merely a snooty economist. But if I had to bet (or advise a candidate), my guess is that all the talk of price gouging/controls will have much stronger negative salience among gettable voters. It's just too specific of an issue that lights up all the wrong pain-receptors in their Republican brains. I would think that most of the 64% of approvers doesn't care that strongly about the issue - similar to the situation with gun voters vs. massively popular "common-sense gun reforms."
Just like how I call all the climate crisis and banning LNG terminal construction (after all the permits for the next decade of construction have been granted) green meat. I guess you can call it pink meat if it was to appease the unappeasable Left.
If you choose to advocate price controls because it polls well, don’t be surprised when people take you seriously and insist on burning down the economy.
I don’t think they are advocating price controls. The actual policy that fits these words could just as well be a ban on “resort fee” and “service fee” type charges that are added between the price listing and the tax calculation.
It will reduce cognitive costs and transaction costs and might result in more direct fare / price competition instead of lying about headline prices and then putting it all in the resort fee, which creates less incentive to be honest about upfront pricing and (presumably definitionally) less pricing pressure.
I agree that it may not reduce prices *much,* but I'd be surprised if it didn't reduce prices *at all,* since the whole point of drip pricing scams are to take advantage of cognitive limitations and bounded rationality to hide prices from consumers who would otherwise be deterred by headline prices. This is mostly a way to seek marginal benefit over competitors, but impairing fair competition in turn probably reduces downward pricing pressures.
There’s a link at the top of the post that allows you to give to any (or all!) of the candidates. Not everyone will want to give the same amount to each of them, so I don’t think it makes sense to automatically do that, but you’re able to do so if you’d like!
It always looks bad to have that be the case. But buying more ads gives you more chances to look good. If you’re Beto O’Rourke or Amy McGrath and already buying all the ads you could use, then more out of state money will hurt more than help. But if it’s a low attention state legislative race, then getting the first few eyeballs is going to matter more than your opponent having one more thing to put in the ads they can’t afford to run either.
This is how I feel too. I'm conflicted because I don't actually like geographic representation as a system and would prefer proportional representation. But I also think it's important to respect the norms of the system we have.
I think this is something that might've worked in 2004 when most out-of-state fundraising was from rich people or the old style of PAC's, but in 2024, when everybody gets political fundraising emails, I don't think it really works.
>Unfortunately, that’s completely consistent with a scenario in which she loses pivotal Electoral College states and Republicans secure a majority in the Senate.<
I fervently hope she wins (and yes, I'm a campaign donor!) but, one tiny little bit of my id would like to witness the specter of MAGA heads exploding after they take back the White House and Senate, only to learn on Wednesday morning that they're going to be greeted by a House with 223 Democrats.
(In the above scenario, maybe the Dems could ride thermostatic effects to a Senate flip in 2026!)
1. Talk to your state legislators, especially in person. Most voters ignore them so your voice can have real weight.
2. Write an opinion piece for your local newspaper.
3. Run / volunteer for local boards, notably planning commissions.
4. Run / volunteer for QUANGOs with clout—whose endorsements does your Congressperson brag about getting? Do they have an open seat on their governing committee?
I highly recommend donating to local races as it makes a huge difference having competent like-minded people in local government. In my state, there's a $500 cap on donations to local candidates and most city-level races run on roughly $10,000 or so. You can have a substantial impact on those races.
"...but it’s a lot more important to do things in the world than to just read about them."
Still down with your Theses on Feuerbach, I see. But what I admire about your work is that by setting the allusion in a new context, you help to improve on its meaning.
After all, Marxists have hitherto only quoted the Theses in various ways: the point is to change them.
I am quite eager to donate, but I have been burned so many times by the incessant political messaging resulting from it that I find myself very reluctant to do so this cycle. Has anyone found a good method (besides supplying fake contact info - is that legal?) to avoid this outcome? I wish there was a "here's some money, but if this contact info is ever used in a political mailer, I will be contractually obligated to donate double to the opposing party next cycle" service.
I mean, I think helping strong liberal democracy survive for a bit longer is worth some annoying emails and mailers, but I also don't live in a swing district/state.
Yes, but the marginal effect of my donation on the odds of democracy surviving are basically 0, even in these swing districts, whereas the odds of my being annoyed as fuck by endless pings whether or not democracy disintegrates around me are basically 100% if I make the donations. Though I suppose a very small silver lining of the death of democracy is that I'll no longer get 15 texts a day about who should be Deputy Under Secretary of the City Garbage Board.
"here's some money, but if this contact info is ever used in a political mailer, I will be contractually obligated to donate double to the opposing party next cycle"
I sympathize with the sentiment, but I just cannot agree with this. "I'm annoyed by receiving constant emails/texts/flyers from various political campaigns [which presumably share my values; I mean, it's not like I'll get solicitations from the Trump campaign after donating to Harris], so I shall retaliate by donating double to the candidate whose policies and values I hate with the fiery heat of a million suns." Like, what the hell? This makes zero sense and is completely disproportionate. And self-defeating!
It's like saying, "If you ever mention the 2024 election in my presence, I shall hit myself in the nuts with a baseball bat, and then you'll feel really guilty and bad about mentioning it!"
Poe's Law strikes again. I was mostly being facetious.
But, to game it out: if I give you safe with key, and tell you "don't open this safe until tomorrow, or the money blows up and, and an equal amount is deposited into the bank account of your worst enemy", whose fault is it when you open the safe early? Just don't do that, and my check against your bad behavior is never activated. Or do, and face the consequences of YOUR actions. If you feed the Mogwai after midnight, it is YOUR fault for misusing it, not my fault for giving you a good thing with easily met terms and conditions.
The point is that the spamming politicians would know about the threat and consider it credible, would hence refrain from spamming after your donation, and thus no money would go to the opposing candidate.
I think that political donations are legally required to be listed by donor and that list is public record. Possibly, as someone said, you can use something (Donor Advised Fund?) other than your cellphone # and email address for identification to avoid the insane spam.
It's an obvious bluff, and politicians wouldn't fall for it.
"Oh, so if I, Kamala Harris, send you follow-up requests for more money, you will donate to Trump (or to Vance in the next presidential election cycle)? The candidate you hate, who is for policies that you 100% oppose, whom you consider a threat to our democracy? Sure. Suuuure."
I haven't paid by check in ages. But if I can get my bank to make me checks without my address on them, I'll go ahead and do this. Though I suppose junk mail is already much less annoying, since it doesn't notify me and immediately demand attention. Thanks for the tip!
A less-known Gmail feature is that you can stick in a dot anywhere (e.g. use b.obsmith instead of bob.smith) and it will be considered the same email address. There isn't an obvious way of "undoing" a dot, so this would be harder for scrapers to circumvent.
yeah makes sense! The obvious alternative is creating a second email that you don't check except once in a blue moon (for KYC or equivalents etc). It's a bit different from a fake contact info since you technically still have access to it.
Wait, are you saying that the incessant political messaging eventually stops? I wouldn't have donated this year had I known that I was just adding another 4 years to the clock.
I feel this way about giving to charity. I've only given to two charities for years bc if you give to a charity once they'll send you letters for the next five years.
Using a DAF (a Donor Advised Fund, which will not harass you), you can then donate anonymously to whoever you want.
It can take little time and money to set up but if you already have an account with an institution that does (Schwab, in my case), then it is cheap and easy. Your cost/benefit analysis may vary, but I suspect the DAF starts making sense once you plan to give away $500-$1000 per year. In particular, if you itemize deductions, a DAF will likely save you time and money.
I own a small factory in Ann Arbor, Michigan with about 70 employees (a lot of 20 somethings). We discovered that when we brought a nurse in to administer free flu and covid shots and gave everyone a paid half our off to recover, our company vax rate went from 40% to 90%. I'll never underestimate human inertia and laziness again, and am now paying my staff an hour of PTO (all shifts will begin an hour later) + reimbursing Uber rides to the polls on election day. We aren't asking who they voted for (though Ann Arbor is a leftwing outlier), but you may have similar opportunities in your life to enable people to vote who have been persuaded and are just that lazy or unmotivated to go actually vote.
Jerry is a good boss and a good owner.
There are dozens of us!
lol
Maybe you are underestimating how many employees can't afford to lose even an hour or two of pay? It's likely not laziness, it's a calculation based on need.
They all had free vaccines available under company health care before - they just had to go to CVS or Kroger (walkable from our factory doors) after work (or the majority have cars, and could go on weekends, etc.) These aren't 3rd world wage-slaves, they're working 40 hours a week for decent pay (most turn down overtime opportunities, which is fine). We just made it as frictionless as possible, and were shocked at how much of a difference the convenience seemed to matter. Given the historic voting rates for young people, I'm hoping this is a similar scenario.
That's great to hear, and I do respect that you took the time and money to make it a much easier choice to get medical treatment and vote. But I'll say to you what I said to other people here, which is that the fact that they took action when the disincentives of losing time and money were removed indicates that it's not laziness which was the issue. Lazy people would not have taken you up on the offer, and I wouldn't think that you employ a lot of lazy people at your factory.
Are you seriously #wellactuallying Jerry for having the temerity, the audacity, to make it easier for his employees to get vaccinated and vote?
No, I'm questioning whether the choice to lose wages or do X is about laziness.
I usually don't declare likeliness a priori when I'm, a ha, "just asking questions".
Fair, I guess. But as I said to another commenter, when the loss of time and money was taken off the table, people took action, which speaks to them not being lazy, but weighing choices.
Jerry: thanks for sharing this experience and insight. Much appreciated. And I think most of us understand that we are ALL lazy in the way that you meant. We shouldn't have to be so careful with phrasing but for the sake of Lapsed Pacifist let's say: "I'll never underestimate the effect of FRICTION on normal people's ability to act, even in their own self-interest". And this really is important when it comes to thinking about other civic responsibilities beyond vaccination, like voting, preventive health care, entitlements, etc. Anyway, thanks. And also thanks for not being so precious with your word choice. Most of us get it.
Convivence is a big driver of many things. That is why healthy habits entail making good decisions easy.
That's true. I object to the framing of people as lazy. They obviously weren't lazy, because when the disincentive was removed, they took action.
This article has a coincidental timing: just last night I had my first chat with one of my relatives on who to vote for. She very much believes in ticket splitting, so my persuasion strategy was to get her to vote for a few Republicans that were going to win no matter what, while reserving Democrats for the few races that will actually be close, which are on the county level. There will be different persuasion strategies for different people, of course.
While I do think having competitive elections does result in better governance, the very fact that most Republicans have given up on actually attempting to govern for the public benefit means that ticket splitting is generally a bad strategy (from a public welfare perspective.)
Larry Hogan is trying to make the opposite case. Vote for him to keep Republicans in check >> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/opinion/larry-hogan-angela-alsobrooks-maryland-senate.html
It’s really silly but he needs Democratic votes to win. The problem is he is part of the problem.
The only way he could establish credibility is drop the Republican affiliation if he won and worked as a tiebreaker vote or something similar.
He could say he will caucus with the Dems if Trump wins but would stay GOP if Harris wins
It's a shame, because in states like mine ticket splitting in theory is pretty defensible. New York Dems absolutely could stand to lose a few elections especially in NYC. Problem is much like GOP in other blue states, the NY GOP has become pretty Trumpy. And even if they are only semi-Trumpy the local GOP is often just as corrupt (good chance to bring my House rep Anthony D'Esposito who is in the news today for his corruption).
I brought it up before but two of the most famously blue states in the country just had multiple term GOP governors. The one in Maryland wasn't even that moderate if you look at his record. Just a giant missed opportunity because a party that's decided that actual governing is not actually part of the remit of being in office.
New York really needs a state-level party (or, perhaps preferably, several parties) that has no affiliation or overlap or affiliation with the national-level Democrats -- basically Canada-style local governance.
Sure, the strategy can be bad, but sometimes the immediate circumstance call for the tactics to diverge.
I think a lot of bidens worst policies would have been tempered by a republican senate
Which legislation that got signed into law do you have in mind?
That last round of unneeded stimulus for one.
The poorly named "inflation reduction act" for another
Biden has never had a Republican Senate. Did you mean House?
EDIT: never mind, I can't read properly.
He wrote "...would have been..."
You'd better be donating to/volunteering for the Open Primaries Initiative!!!
I like open primaries in theory, but I'm unsure if they have much of an impact.
> The most comprehensive study is Seth Hill’s “Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates.” Hill found that changing the nominating process had no effect on the ideological composition of primary election voters. “I find no evidence that … closed and semi-closed primary states had more ideological primary voters than states with more open primary systems…To the extent that there is a relationship between primary ideology and closed primary institution, it is in the direction opposite that hypothesized.”
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/what-we-know-about-congressional-primaries-and-congressional-primary-reform/can-primary-reform-change-who-votes-runs-and-wins/
The Idaho proposition isn't really open primaries, it's doing away with the primaries and replacing them with a two round system with four finalists in the second round chosen by ranked choice voting.
I just talked with one of my friends about that who's involved in it last weekend!
Meanwhile, I remain baffled why so many people want to yell at Nate Silver over his model. It seems to be some sort of a lengthy chain that goes like this: they don't like something he said (probably on Twitter), so they're looking for some way to declare he's bad (find that he does a little work for a firm who among many investors has one that is also declared bad), and then look for a reason to say that his model is bad (it's not as bullish for Harris as they think everyone should be) without any consideration on what the model is actually about.
Nate is right, as is Matt: those people need to chill out and go do something more productive. Or at the very least, if they want to yell at Nate, then yell for the right reasons: either say any of his non-model takes are wrong, or separately point out why one says his model is wrong. Don't conflate things.
The ones who PAY HIM to tell him his model is wrong (inevitably because they think one or the other candidate is going to win decisively) are the real head-scratchers.
And he's far from the only person to have people pay a subscription to tell the publication what they think is wrong.
Why, that’s unheard of!!
People generally struggle to understand that both
a: in high-uncertainty situations, different reasonable methodologies will sometimes produce different conclusions, and
b: when a complex model has a problem, it’s usually not for nefarious reasons
Like, I think that Nate’s convention bounce adjustments were way too big given data from recent cycles and they added a ton of unnecessary volatility to his forecast, but he straight up told us how they work. There’s nothing nefarious there, he just made a bad call.
I think that a lot of reactions to the NYT/Sienna polls have similar drivers. Like, those polls produce some kind of unusual results because they’re methodologically kind of unusual, and consequently model a fairly different electorate than most polls. Even more so than the convention bounce adjustment, NYT/Sienna’s methodological choices are all really defensible. Given the level of effort involved, it’s clear that Cohn et al are really trying to get to the truth, and if they’re wrong, it’ll probably be because they didn’t quite nail their probabilistic likely voter model, not because they’re trying to gin up traffic by making shit up.
I believe the conspiracy is Silver is a consultant to Polymarket in which Peter Thiel is an investor which is apparently proof Thiel is paying Silver to rig the forecast (even though it's not clear if or how the forecast actually impacts people's voting intentions).
Headline below kinda says it all.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/19/2255800/-Nate-Silver-and-Peter-Thiel-Do-not-trust-media-OR-polls
If these people think the forecast is wrong, do I have good news about how Polymarket works!
"But, but, PETER THIEL owns Polymarket, any use of that means you're contributing to the end of democracy!!!!"
Oh right I forgot, odds markets create reality rather than the other way around!
That actually is a directionally true statement, though. Any prediction market incentivizes its becoming an action market.
I always wondered if you could use prediction markets as a way to solicit assassinations. Bet $500,000 that XXX won't die this week.
I’ve repeatedly seen Nate disclose his role with Polymarket. I don’t get what the supposed conspiracy is.
It’s similar to the argument from the revolving door people. Anyone who maintains a disagreement with someone can’t possibly be doing it for good faith reasons, they must be bought by some nefarious actor.
It's fine to call him that, it's the guilt by association that's the issue.
You don't trust polls because you think polling is difficult and what is a 52:48 poll telling you anyway? Or you don't trust polls because you think there are a bunch of people creating fake results because 52:48 is going to change the mind of a significant number of voters?
Yep, this is it, you made explicit what I made implicit in this comment, and explicit on SB before. https://www.slowboring.com/p/tuesday-thread-342/comment/68519091
It's a really dumb criticism since Silver stated on Ezra Klein's podcast that he's almost certainly going to vote for Harris. If one is looking for political bias, a statement about your preferred candidate is a lot stronger evidence than tenuous allegations of influence via a six-degrees from Kevin Bacon analysis.
I don't know man... I have never trusted Kevin Bacon.
Silver's trolling of liberals and Dems is beyond being a tired shtick.
As for his model, I really don't care about it because at the end of the day it's just clickbait; as we get close to voting, all that will matter will be polls and we can see them just as easily as he can; he has no special sauce.
But it's the clickbait thing that gets me. I thought he was a serious quantitative guy, but the fact that he goes to three significant figures in his probabilities is just absurd; that's absolutely totally fake precision and is meant just to make him look serious and scientific and get people all wound up when today's probability goes from 53.2% to 53.7%. If he were a serious guy, he would report his probabilities as something like "Harris's chances of winning continue to be in the 50-55% range, up from the 45-50% range from two weeks ago." Heck, I'd be even happier with "50-60% probability."
I really think most of the frustration with Silver is his trolling. He's one of those guys that is just very condescending and dismissive by nature. He's got some good takes, and he was right about a lot of COVID stuff. Nevertheless, I found his tone and condescension during the pandemic very alienating even when I agreed with what he was saying. He also seemed to have this expectation that federal, state, and local gov'ts would be able to pivot to respond to new data instantaneously. Obviously, we would live in a better world if govt's could do that, but it's hardly surprising that they can't. Yet Silver, Barro, and even Matt seemed to be pretty surprised about this at times.
In summary, Silver would benefit from employing a little bit more humility when slinging his takes.
I actually disagree on this one— higher precision makes probabilistic forecasts easier to evaluate, especially if (like Silver), you’ve made a lot of them.
How do you evaluate the 53.7% probability of Harris winning as of Sept. 23? (Or whatever the current number is). The election hasn’t happened yet!
If by Nov. 5, Harris’s probability is, say, 83.4% and she wins, then hooray for the model I guess. But of what value was the earlier number that justifies three significant figures?
Good question!
The answer is something like “use a very large number of prediction-outcome pairs from the same forecaster to measure calibration”— basicslly, what percentage of things they assigned a 60% probability to actually happened? (The goal should be “something around 60%”.)
Basically, we wouldn’t evaluate on the basis of any single probabilistic forecast in isolation. We’d look at Nate’s track record over many distinct forecasts. (538 did this and presented it; their track record is quite well-calibrated).
I've seen their reporting and calibration of their various predictions. Those appear to be sound to me. But those are for final predictions on events that have since occurred.
I'm just saying that a 53.7% probability on Sept. 23 really doesn't have any meaning better than "this is what the vibes and current polls seem to be telling me." You can't prove, validate, or test something which has no conceivable testable outcome (no election on Sept. 23) so your current estimate shouldn't reflect more certainty than you perforce must have. "Somewhere between 50 and 60%" is maybe acceptable; "53.7%" is near crackpot.
Not an expert but for 538 they always do retrospectives where they check if the candidates they gave a 60% chance actually won 60% of the time. I imagine that similar to polling, you could find a point in time when the percentage predictions are as accurate as they are on election day. That said even on election day their prediction percentages are still multiple points off, so agreed that the decimal point is more theatre than true accuracy.
I think it is only meaningful as a shift from the previous result, and only then if the change is larger than the (1 sigma?) noise.
Maybe two sigma given the very narrow range in which these numbers tend to move.
You're asking him to purposefully blur his numbers, but you're welcome to do that yourself. I think it's fine that he just gives the output from the model and leaves it up to us as to how to interpret them (and in fact, he often says that people are overinterpreting them).
I’m asking him to be a reputable data scientist and forecaster. He already knows that people live and die off these tiny and meaningless perturbations, so don’t produce them. And he’s already blurring his numbers because I assume his computer model could just as easily spit out a 53.2068341% probability as a 53.2% one. Neither has any larger meaning.
This is a weird hill to die on. I assure you, if he did what you suggest, people would just accuse him of obfuscating the numbers to make his preferred outcome seem more likely.
"Here I stand; I can do no other."
(The 95.3 Theses, or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Predictive Models)
Don’t forget one I hear all the time, Nate has been bought and paid for by Peter Thiel therefore the model and his interpretations are totally untrustworthy.
That's the one Binya and I were talking about downthread!
At the heart of it, it's a channel for frustration and anxiety. Nobody is perfect, but when you don't like what someone is saying it becomes easy to nitpick reasons not to believe it. His model has Trump with a 10% higher chance than pretty much every other model. I have no particular reason to believe that he's more accurate than 538 or BTRTN, but also no reason to believe he's less accurate.
My beef with every model is that everyone says you can't predict ahead of time the magnitude and direction of polling error. But I would really like to see a thorough study to prove that. Take a bunch of variables (previous years polling errors, number of volunteers for each candidate, number of individual donors for each candidate, October surprises, special elections, incumbency, party incumbency, rally attendance, number of undecideds in the polls, percent of primary vote achieved). For each variable, run a test to see if there is a correlation with polling error direction and magnitude across elections. I don't see any reason to believe any one particular data point would show correlation. But the idea that none of those data points would show correlation is something I would like to see evidence for.
Nate Silver's convention bounce put him badly out of sync with other models for a few weeks and now he's back in sync, with pretty much all the convergence on his side, not his competitors'. He messed up and really did understate Harris. That's not to say all or even most criticism is fair
The most important thing is to decisively beat the Republican party on all political levels to hasten the party's transformation away from anti-democratic trickery (gerrymandering etc), extremism, conspiracy theories, fascism and theocracy. Whatever hurts the Republican party most is the right way to go at this juncture in history. They need to reform so that the US can return to a competition between two normal political parties, one more to the left and one more to the right.
There is no democratic future with the current Republican party.
Having said that, one important way in which this could happen is for the Democrats to once and for all move right on (non-high skilled) immigration. Perhaps also give up on gun control (there’s no way of turning the genie back into the bottle with hundreds of millions of guns already out there). Remove these issues from the political agenda.
You will have to pry my legislation for sane but restrictive gun ownership and carry laws from my cold, dead hands.
It already has been, you just haven't noticed because you've lost sensation in your fingers.
No meaningful legislation on guns is going to survive the current SCOTUS, and spending political capital on an impossible cause seems counterproductive.
(1) The current SCOTUS is not a permanent feature of American democracy; (2) the current SCOTUS has not disallowed all sane gun regulations (per Heller); (3) various sane gun regulations enjoy majority popular and electoral support; (4) properly understood, political capital is not fixed stock of goods or assets that are "spent", but a dynamic process of discovering, refining and investing in issues that eventually yield political advantages that result in the adoption of (sometimes only marginally) better policies. Australian-style mandatory gun buy-backs in the US would be a bad investment, but various policies that would create a more restrictive environment for gun ownership and operation (red flag laws, background checks, etc.) continue to be good investments.
How will the ”bad guys” be stopped from getting weapons when there are hundreds of millions out there that we will not be able to get back, with or without a buy back programme.
It took me a long time to come to terms with it, but at this point I just shut up on gun control for the most part.
Voters are very angry about immigration right now. If Trump is elected and pursues draconian crackdowns on immigration, voters will be angry about that too, just like they were during the first Trump administration.
Immigration is fundamentally a very difficult problem to solve given the US’s extremely strong economy and our very long, highly traversed border with Mexico. Voters want the whole thing to magically disappear.
Ugh, I kind of agree with you about the genie out of the bottle, but we have had a bad summer of gun violence where I live, and I just hate that there are millions of guns floating around that even young teens have easy access to in my supposedly strict gun law state. I would like to find some way of working a long game on gun control.
Add bringing down the deficit too
In a sense the map will only get harder after reapportionment, in an entirely foreseeable own goal of Democratic state governance driving people to states that don't ban housing against their preferences.
Although if this turns Texas reliably blue the Republicans will be forced to change
> The most important thing is to decisively beat the Republican party on all political levels to hasten the party's transformation away from anti-democratic trickery (gerrymandering etc), extremism, conspiracy theories, fascism and theocracy.
Don't let me dissuade you from trying to beat the GOP, but my takeaway from the Republican party in states where it has been decisively beaten on all political levels is not that it hastened a transformation away from any of those things.
I think there should be a serious effort for pro-democracy conservatives like Cheney to form right-wing regional parties that either split the GOP vote or that Dems can strategically support for key statewide races.
Similarly, many blue states would benefit from regional centrist party's to compete against left Dems (I could be convinced of flipping that to be centrist Dem and lefty third party, but I think that would be less likely to work). Certainly a popular front against GOP authoritarianism is the more immediate priority, but I think the single party blue state governance (particularly as to housing but on various other national party priorities) is quietly helping exacerbate the national dysfunction.
I think the evidence that Democrats are willing partner with a Cheney Republican is incredibly weak. If you look at the list of Representatives, Matt is asking people to support the opponent of one of the two Republicans to vote for impeachment. Which is reasonable from someone who wants Democrats to control the House - its just that approach precludes what you are suggesting.
Pls help WA-3 I don't want a pro-J6 guy representing me :/
Man, Vancouver is an interesting place.
Vancouver ain't voting for that guy, it's the rest of the district doing that 🤦
Bellwether will be the exurbs like Camas, Ridgefield, etc.
It's always intrigued me since when I used to be a Portlander, but JSG describing it makes it so much more intriguing.
Allow me to leave this little nugget of slander here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwCkZiEQ7A
Ah man been a long time since I've seen this
Minnesota races didn't make the list here, but if you are a resident, there is a poorly advertised program that will reimburse you for $75 of political contributions to MN state office candidates or political parties: https://www.revenue.state.mn.us/political-contribution-refund. Take action for free!
Can we have a thread discussing state ballot measures and/or local races like mayors and city councils, some time in the next few weeks? Matt likely only has views himself about a few of them, but it might be good to have a canonical place for all the rest of us to have our local discussions about our local recommendations. (I’m particularly interested in the Irvine mayor race, because I know little about the candidates, and have gotten mailings supporting one guy for opposing hundreds of thousands of housing units, and attacking a specific opponent for supporting them, but I would like to know if the one he is attacking is the best one to vote for, or if there’s another candidate who is actually some mix of better and more likely to win).
I lived in STL for 6 years and Missouri has the most batshit insane ballot measures that are always posted in flowery language. "Protect farmer freedom act" was to not regulate puppy mills. "Commercial sales freedom act" to block tax increase on cigarettes (currently literally around 60c, advertising made it sound awful that it was a 300% increase to 1.80 even though national average is like $5)
I strongly concur with this, I would love to see this piece, and it's so much more fulfilling to talk about the issues than it is about politicians.
Strongly second this! I, too, have yet to decide how to vote in the Irvine mayor race. Interestingly, I received a "how to vote" brochure for all positions *except* mayor.
"have gotten mailings supporting one guy for opposing hundreds of thousands of housing units" Because if there's one thing Irvine needs, it's opposition to more housing units. /facepalm
I'd love to see that too, but there are a lot of states and localities and so I think that's a pretty big ask - maybe too big.
I think all that needs to happen is one post where Matt talks about any state/local things he thinks are especially interesting or important, maybe says something about how he thinks about district/local things when voting himself, and then opens it up in the comments for the rest of us to discuss what we think the preferred SB recommendations would be in our area.
One important way for candidates running in tough seats to signal moderation is to embrace anti-price gouging rhetoric.
“When asked to choose between two approaches to lowering the cost of living, 64% of swing state voters favor cracking down on price gouging by harshly penalizing big businesses that unfairly jack up prices and coordinate to increase costs, while only 23% say “Soviet-style price controls will only make inflation worse” and that the government cut regulations and reduce spending rather than attacking businesses.”
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/swing-state-priorities-memo-9-23/
I'm not against some shameless pandering here or there. Hell, maybe they'll even find a small price fixing scheme or two and they can have a big press conference about it. But for the love of God, don't actually try to do large scale price controls.
Thanks for answering last night why a mention of the Soviets made the question, that's dumb for Trump to use but Trump going to Trump. I'm still curious as to what qualifies as "price gouging" and "jack[ing] up prices", as well as "coordinat[ion]", as well of the mention of price controls, which lead to shortages and rationing.
Right I mean it’s up to respondent interpretation in the poll. I will note that they did a point/counterpoint test on this—one message from Harris on gouging, a response from Trump saying her policies would create shortages and bread lines—and the result was Harris +5.
Poll result: Americans are stupid.
I think the example of what Google has done with respect to the online advertising market and the lawsuits surrounding that are a prime example of price gouging (I just listened to a podcast on it.)
"Price gouging" -- a term used by Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign whose last recorded usage dates from October 15, 2024, and never heard again after Jan. 20, 2025 when inflation hit 1.9% and no one gave a crap anymore.
These are just words. There is no policy behind it and no fact about what qualifies.
I believe you and Matt have also noted the deportation is popular, should candidates in tough seats signal moderation by supporting that as well?
Yes, “Democrats should be more hawkish on the border” is something both Matt and I agree on I think
That's the border, I'm referring specifically to deportation.
You could be more hawkish on anti-trust actions, but that's different from penalties on price-gouging. Similarly, the being hawkish on border control is different from deportation.
As I said: “yes”
I appreciate your commitment to winning. I really hope you are wrong and change your mind about this.
No, Milan is an opportunist and has shown his true colors. Anything for victory
For many definitions of "price-gouging," being more hawkish on anti-trust is all that is needed. There are actually individuals who should be deported. Saying that you will deport the people who need to be deported is perfectly reasonable. I don't believe that Milan is suggesting that Kamala should put on her jack boots and make an add claiming she supports mass deportation.
Except that mass deportation polls positively. As does price controls.
Large numbers of Americans don't understand what the results of either actually mean. I support politicians who appeal to our better natures, not to our base natures.
Don’t confuse marginal and average!
I’m not saying that bad economics is never good politics, but many gettable former Rs (who still need to be persuaded to not vote R down ticket) are sophisticated (or tribal) enough to be really turned off by that kind of traditional dem red meat.
Things that poll at 64% don’t get there without persuading a lot of marginal Rs. But to be sure I just asked for the cross tabs.
Should add: memo on the website says 47% of Trump 2020 voters prefer the price gouging-crackdown approach.
I believe you that a bunch of Rs like a bad idea. I don’t believe that supporting that idea gets more of them to vote for you than you risk losing from college educated former Republicans who are deeply allergic to that kind of D stuff. I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, though!
I’d recommend tracking which house candidates adopt these things and see if that affects their over/under performance. My guess is that your favored position will be more helpful in rural districts than suburban ones.
There are more non-college educated voters than college educated ones, especially in the pivotal states and districts.
Ok, that sounds totally plausible. But do you get why that's orthogonal to the point I'm making? I can try to explain it more clearly with an example.
Suppose you have ten voters in a district, RRRR NN DDDD (Republicans, Nerds, and Democrats, respectively). R1 and R2 like price gouging laws and D1 through D4 like them, too! Unfortunately, both N1 and N2 have read the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, etc. for the last 25 years and hate all this talk of price controls. They know Trump's economic proposals are full of crap, but if they think that Harris's and their local Dems are crap, too then they're way more likely to stay home and/or vote R on downballot races.
In the meantime, there's no way R1 and R2 are going to vote for the Democrats. To the extent they even care about price gouging, they blame Biden for inflation and/or will be satisfied with Trump talking out both sides of his mouth on the issue. "He'll take care of it - he's a businessman who knows all their tricks."
So your polling could be completely accurate and you're right that the rubes outnumber the nerds, but that wouldn't mean the clever position-taking gets you to a 6-4 majority. Now, obvs, I have no idea how close to reality my example is - I'm merely a snooty economist. But if I had to bet (or advise a candidate), my guess is that all the talk of price gouging/controls will have much stronger negative salience among gettable voters. It's just too specific of an issue that lights up all the wrong pain-receptors in their Republican brains. I would think that most of the 64% of approvers doesn't care that strongly about the issue - similar to the situation with gun voters vs. massively popular "common-sense gun reforms."
I call it blue meat rather than red meat.
Just like how I call all the climate crisis and banning LNG terminal construction (after all the permits for the next decade of construction have been granted) green meat. I guess you can call it pink meat if it was to appease the unappeasable Left.
If you choose to advocate price controls because it polls well, don’t be surprised when people take you seriously and insist on burning down the economy.
I don’t think they are advocating price controls. The actual policy that fits these words could just as well be a ban on “resort fee” and “service fee” type charges that are added between the price listing and the tax calculation.
Banning the obscuring of fees isn't going to reduce prices, though, even if it's meritorious on other grounds.
It will reduce cognitive costs and transaction costs and might result in more direct fare / price competition instead of lying about headline prices and then putting it all in the resort fee, which creates less incentive to be honest about upfront pricing and (presumably definitionally) less pricing pressure.
I agree that it may not reduce prices *much,* but I'd be surprised if it didn't reduce prices *at all,* since the whole point of drip pricing scams are to take advantage of cognitive limitations and bounded rationality to hide prices from consumers who would otherwise be deterred by headline prices. This is mostly a way to seek marginal benefit over competitors, but impairing fair competition in turn probably reduces downward pricing pressures.
It definitely won't reduce prices as much as people will think--how about that?
That is reasonable.
Seems plausible.
Capitalism only works if buyers can make choices based on price. Opaque pricing is a real problem.
Inasmuch as banning said fees and making prices more transparent help competitiveness....
Yes, as EG said in my reply to me.
Watch your step on that slippery slope, man; it looks very dangerous.
Is it possible for Slow Boring to set up an Act Blue thing that takes donations and sends distributes them evenly to your chosen list of candidates?
There’s a link at the top of the post that allows you to give to any (or all!) of the candidates. Not everyone will want to give the same amount to each of them, so I don’t think it makes sense to automatically do that, but you’re able to do so if you’d like!
I found the link and donated accordingly.
What is Democracy First PAC? If I donate at the top of that page does the money go straight to the candidate?
It does - before you commit to the donation it shows you how much will go to each candidate.
For a small fee for Ben of course
Of course
Does it ever look Bad for a small level candidate to have the majority of their donations come from out of state?
I feel like I’ve seen campaign ads to that effect
It always looks bad to have that be the case. But buying more ads gives you more chances to look good. If you’re Beto O’Rourke or Amy McGrath and already buying all the ads you could use, then more out of state money will hurt more than help. But if it’s a low attention state legislative race, then getting the first few eyeballs is going to matter more than your opponent having one more thing to put in the ads they can’t afford to run either.
My personal rule is to never donate to a candidate I'm not eligible to vote for.
This is how I feel too. I'm conflicted because I don't actually like geographic representation as a system and would prefer proportional representation. But I also think it's important to respect the norms of the system we have.
I think this is something that might've worked in 2004 when most out-of-state fundraising was from rich people or the old style of PAC's, but in 2024, when everybody gets political fundraising emails, I don't think it really works.
If you want to have an impact, GiveWell's Top Charities Fund can save a life for about $5K. https://www.givewell.org/
>Unfortunately, that’s completely consistent with a scenario in which she loses pivotal Electoral College states and Republicans secure a majority in the Senate.<
I fervently hope she wins (and yes, I'm a campaign donor!) but, one tiny little bit of my id would like to witness the specter of MAGA heads exploding after they take back the White House and Senate, only to learn on Wednesday morning that they're going to be greeted by a House with 223 Democrats.
(In the above scenario, maybe the Dems could ride thermostatic effects to a Senate flip in 2026!)
Then everything Maga will be by Executive Fiat, and the Supreme Court, recognizing the unitary executive will say it's all fine.
They won't say it's all fine. Just the parts they like. SCOTUS is the new executive branch.
Project 2025 is designed to use things they've already said is fine.
Three cheers! Other actions you can take:
1. Talk to your state legislators, especially in person. Most voters ignore them so your voice can have real weight.
2. Write an opinion piece for your local newspaper.
3. Run / volunteer for local boards, notably planning commissions.
4. Run / volunteer for QUANGOs with clout—whose endorsements does your Congressperson brag about getting? Do they have an open seat on their governing committee?
I highly recommend donating to local races as it makes a huge difference having competent like-minded people in local government. In my state, there's a $500 cap on donations to local candidates and most city-level races run on roughly $10,000 or so. You can have a substantial impact on those races.
"...but it’s a lot more important to do things in the world than to just read about them."
Still down with your Theses on Feuerbach, I see. But what I admire about your work is that by setting the allusion in a new context, you help to improve on its meaning.
After all, Marxists have hitherto only quoted the Theses in various ways: the point is to change them.
I am quite eager to donate, but I have been burned so many times by the incessant political messaging resulting from it that I find myself very reluctant to do so this cycle. Has anyone found a good method (besides supplying fake contact info - is that legal?) to avoid this outcome? I wish there was a "here's some money, but if this contact info is ever used in a political mailer, I will be contractually obligated to donate double to the opposing party next cycle" service.
I mean, I think helping strong liberal democracy survive for a bit longer is worth some annoying emails and mailers, but I also don't live in a swing district/state.
Yes, but the marginal effect of my donation on the odds of democracy surviving are basically 0, even in these swing districts, whereas the odds of my being annoyed as fuck by endless pings whether or not democracy disintegrates around me are basically 100% if I make the donations. Though I suppose a very small silver lining of the death of democracy is that I'll no longer get 15 texts a day about who should be Deputy Under Secretary of the City Garbage Board.
"here's some money, but if this contact info is ever used in a political mailer, I will be contractually obligated to donate double to the opposing party next cycle"
I sympathize with the sentiment, but I just cannot agree with this. "I'm annoyed by receiving constant emails/texts/flyers from various political campaigns [which presumably share my values; I mean, it's not like I'll get solicitations from the Trump campaign after donating to Harris], so I shall retaliate by donating double to the candidate whose policies and values I hate with the fiery heat of a million suns." Like, what the hell? This makes zero sense and is completely disproportionate. And self-defeating!
It's like saying, "If you ever mention the 2024 election in my presence, I shall hit myself in the nuts with a baseball bat, and then you'll feel really guilty and bad about mentioning it!"
Some people just don't think things through.
Poe's Law strikes again. I was mostly being facetious.
But, to game it out: if I give you safe with key, and tell you "don't open this safe until tomorrow, or the money blows up and, and an equal amount is deposited into the bank account of your worst enemy", whose fault is it when you open the safe early? Just don't do that, and my check against your bad behavior is never activated. Or do, and face the consequences of YOUR actions. If you feed the Mogwai after midnight, it is YOUR fault for misusing it, not my fault for giving you a good thing with easily met terms and conditions.
The point is that the spamming politicians would know about the threat and consider it credible, would hence refrain from spamming after your donation, and thus no money would go to the opposing candidate.
I think that political donations are legally required to be listed by donor and that list is public record. Possibly, as someone said, you can use something (Donor Advised Fund?) other than your cellphone # and email address for identification to avoid the insane spam.
It's an obvious bluff, and politicians wouldn't fall for it.
"Oh, so if I, Kamala Harris, send you follow-up requests for more money, you will donate to Trump (or to Vance in the next presidential election cycle)? The candidate you hate, who is for policies that you 100% oppose, whom you consider a threat to our democracy? Sure. Suuuure."
Send a check.
I haven't paid by check in ages. But if I can get my bank to make me checks without my address on them, I'll go ahead and do this. Though I suppose junk mail is already much less annoying, since it doesn't notify me and immediately demand attention. Thanks for the tip!
Haven't tried it (yet) but Oath ( https://app.oath.vote/ ) advertises itself as a privacy-respecting (and impact-oriented) donation platform.
If you have gmail, you can immediately set up alias emails like bob.smith@gmail.com -> bob.smith+electiondonations@gmail.com
And then just filter out all emails to bob.smith+electiondonations@gmail.com
I think most sophisticated scrapers of data are wise to this strategy now, unfortunately.
A less-known Gmail feature is that you can stick in a dot anywhere (e.g. use b.obsmith instead of bob.smith) and it will be considered the same email address. There isn't an obvious way of "undoing" a dot, so this would be harder for scrapers to circumvent.
yeah makes sense! The obvious alternative is creating a second email that you don't check except once in a blue moon (for KYC or equivalents etc). It's a bit different from a fake contact info since you technically still have access to it.
Wait, are you saying that the incessant political messaging eventually stops? I wouldn't have donated this year had I known that I was just adding another 4 years to the clock.
I feel this way about giving to charity. I've only given to two charities for years bc if you give to a charity once they'll send you letters for the next five years.
Using a DAF (a Donor Advised Fund, which will not harass you), you can then donate anonymously to whoever you want.
It can take little time and money to set up but if you already have an account with an institution that does (Schwab, in my case), then it is cheap and easy. Your cost/benefit analysis may vary, but I suspect the DAF starts making sense once you plan to give away $500-$1000 per year. In particular, if you itemize deductions, a DAF will likely save you time and money.
(Note that this only works for registered 501c3s, if I understand correctly).