Current votes are really tight, not that many left to report. Struggling to understand why NY Times seems so certain unless all of unreported regions are GOP.
The USPS
a) slowed down mail the week of the election
b) said 300K ballots cannot be traced
c) is ignoring a Judge's call to sweep for missing ballots to ensure they are delivered by midnight washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
DeJoy reassured state election officials that processing mail votes was his top priority. Hard to equate that with the data, or the fact that courts are still pushing him to get ballots delivered. (via @_cingraham) washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
To provide both sides on the "sweeping" for ballots - DOJ lawyers say USPS plans to do that, at a later time than when the Judge is ordering. Plaintiffs in the case say USPS schedule will be too late. We will find out, but in many states late-arriving ballots will not be counted.
The President barricaded himself in the Presidential Palace on the eve of elections.
Some say it was a precaution against mass protests, while others speculated that it signaled a refusal to leave office, especially as legal concerns of future prosecutions mounted.
Meanwhile in the capital and major cities, businesses boarded up, reflecting the unrest that had accompanied the Presidency and a deep sense of uncertainty about the future that conflicted with the President's promise of restoring greatness to the country.
While many of the intelligentsia suggested fears of authoritarian action were overblown, the President called on the judges he had appointed to cancel legal votes in crucial districts. Others read the message as a call to his paramilitary supporters to mobilize.
A standard critique on the right is that academia can't be trusted because most academics are liberals. This claims are often based on cherry-picked examples rather than a real analysis.
New high-quality analysis shows that political beliefs do not affect key research outcomes.
Something like the Grievance Studies hoax generated enormous hand-wringing about how broken academia was, w/o any real consideration act generalizability.
This new finding that political beliefs do not bias research will not get the same attention despite being better designed.
Its not that academics don't have biases - I assume that political beliefs might shape the types of questions researchers find interesting. But we have strong reputational incentives to do good research according to scientific norms.
New by Alex Kroll & I in @PAReview: we compare legislative & executive approaches to performance management reform in the US federal government. We conclude that legislative reforms work better partly because they avoid patterns of partisan implementation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pu…
The origins of this paper are that I love Terry Moe's work on the logic of bureaucratic structure, but I also felt it is too critical of the legislative branch and too dismissive of legislatively-led reforms. So we set out to test his claims in the context of performance reforms
We compared three performance reforms using @USGAO survey data - the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, the Program Assessment Rating Tool of the George W. Bush era and the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act (bad title, I know) of 2010.
I see JD Vance is making a late run to displace Thomas Chatterton Williams as the character of the day.
Who was the character of the day? Thomas Chatterton Williams or JD Vance
Just watched Hillbilly Elegy - wow: big takeaway is to mock what people do, call them a mediocrity and then tell them need a better sense of humor. If you’re lucky your university will pay tens of thousands of dollars for JD to come to your campus and share this message in person
If you haven't read it Emily Ratajkowski's essay about controlling her own body, it's worth doing so, if only to serve as a contrast to Thomas Chatterton Williams droolfest profile of her.