Sr. Elections Analyst, @RCPolitics, Visiting Scholar, @AEI, Lecturer, @osupolisci. Recovering Attorney. Husband, Dad. Writes about elections, history and more.
Jun 11 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
So I thought it was sufficiently clear from the first sentence that I don't buy into the LA fraud story, but apparently not. I don't, which means there's not much interesting to say about it, but I do have one important thing on the Washington Times story and its statistics. 1/
Almost all statistical analysis you'll see in popular print has an assumption embedded that you're sampling evenly from the same distribution. Think of it this way: If you're doing a poll of Texas, you only want to poll Texans. If you accidentally mix in people from RI, 2/
May 19 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Given that @jaycost and I are doing a presidential ratings podcast (among other things -- check out @aei_STpodcast!), I hate to get ahead of myself but: FDR is genuinely a God Tier president. I say this as someone libertarian-ish, so I don't really *want* to. But it's true. 1/
People underestimate how grim things were on March 4, 1933. The Depression wasn't a single event: It was a slow moving cascade of disasters, with plateus in between. 1932 was a sort of plateau, until the end, when another series of bank failures hit. 2/
Sep 25, 2025 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I read @chrislhayes "Twilight of the Elites" book for an upcoming book project and it's extremely good -- it is a shame it was overlooked. One concept from it hit hard: The idea of fractal success. There may be a few overachievers in my timeline so read on. Hayes idea grows 1/
from a trip to Davos.He relates that when you go, you're excited to be among the movers and shakers, and you get off the plane and you're greeted by nice people who give you swag and escort you to your bus that takes you into the Swiss mountains. But as you deplane you notice 2/
Feb 8, 2025 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
People are going to react strongly to this comparison, so I really do mean this narrowly. But when you read about first 100 days of the New Deal, you hear about Congress just being totally overwhelmed with new legislation and orders, things being broken or rebuilt every day. 1/
I wonder if the sense was the same as we are feeling today (and yes, a lot of people ((mostly) Southern) Democrats and Republicans alike, were concerned FDR was trying to make himself a dictator). That's not (at all) to predict this will be as successful as the New Deal 2/
Jan 29, 2025 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The move to allow podcasters and bloggers into the Press Corps is part of a broader shift on the Right, that really starts with @elonmusk's acquisition of X. Before that, when conservatives complained about bias and censorship on social media, the left/lib response 1/
was "well go ahead and build your own social media site." Which everyone knew was very difficult. And then there would be moves to get whoever hosted the new site to refuse to host it and the response would be "well build your own hosting platform" and so forth. 2/
Jan 21, 2025 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
To understand the Right re J6: They believe that the reason the dividing line between J6 getting prosecuted and, say, Portland rioters not is because norms are set by liberals to protect liberal ingroups while allowing the prosecution of outgroups. 1/
This is also the dividing line between Trumpy populists and GOP establishment types; the latter says "well we should prosecute the goons in OR too" while the former says that is hopelessly naive bc, again, the lines are set by liberals to protect their ingroups. 2/
Jan 10, 2025 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
So there's been a lot of talk about Justice Barrett and Supreme Court ideology in general, which happened to occur as I'm getting a paper on Supreme Court ideology ready for publishing. The answer, unsurprisingly, is Justice Barrett is no Souter (much less Stevens). 1/
This relies on a computer program that looks at the frequency with which justices vote with which other. It then uses these pairs to rank Justices by ideology and to estimate where the ideological fissures on the Court are. Here's where things stood in 2016-18. 2/
Dec 11, 2024 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Since we're doing the autism anecdote thing, I'll share some. During law school I coached high school debate at Chapel Hill High School and Durham Academy (my star student, one @JeffJacksonNC, who I won't embarrass with stories). There was a student, John, diagnosed w/ ADHD. 1
(not his real name btw). John was...strange. He sort of mumbled his speech, had weird facial expressions, had trouble writing in straight lines, and would say bizarre things. Once on a trip he just busted out "once I found a CD in the snow. It had no scratches, except Track 1."
Dec 10, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
One of the lessons from the past month or so is that people don’t understand the podcastverse, its ideological ecosystem, and/or how men/boys < 30 get their information/news these days.
Like seriously there is an entire genre of podcasters dedicated to this dude’s worldview. The whole loosely interrelated UFC/Rogan/manosphere/plant medicine genre/genres don’t map onto modern politics in any way that seem obvious to people over 30 but make perfect sense to youngz
Dec 6, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
So to explain something I posted about the Southern realignment yesterday, obviously 64 is an important year and was a breakthrough for the GOP. But the overall remaking of the South was a gradual, complex 70+-year process (long-ish 🧵). It can be thought of as 4 realignments 1/
The first was in the 1860s, when the GOP won in the mountain areas. A lot of the eastern-TN/western VA seats have mostly elected Rs since the Civil War. These voters didn't own slaves, and needed the roads and internal improvements that the GOP used to win over Whig voters. 2/
Nov 20, 2024 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
🧵 I know peak Ozempic discourse was earlier in the year, but I did want to talk about some things that I think get overlooked amidst the "miracle drug" talk and contribute to the backlash. First the good: I lost 50 pounds on it in 10 months. There are the typical side-benefits 1/
My knees don't hurt, I get tired less easily, I work out more, my cholesterol and triglycerides are in line, etc. etc. It was 100% worth it. WITH THAT SAID. Ozempic is not some miracle drug that melts off fat while you stick with your old bad habits. 2/
Nov 15, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
In one sense the "realignment/demise of the Dem coalition" argument is overblown. Ds lost the popular vote by 1-2 points, held their own in the Senate, and are a few special elections away from winning the House. 1/
I think it's more of a sense of "it wasn't supposed to be this way." Trump was supposed to be a hiccup, and Obama's "Coalition of the Ascendant" was supposed to roll over Trump like he was a speedbump. 2/
Nov 8, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
You know, when Obama broke on to the scene, the one thing that took me aback was his comment before his DNC that he wasn't nervous because "I'm LeBron Baby!" But you know what? He kind of was. Rs obviously underestimated him but in a weird way Ds did as well. 1/
There's been a sort of attitude toward the Obama coalition about "we just need to rebuild that" without appreciating just how unique and powerful his skillset was. There just aren't many people with his life experience: 2/
Nov 7, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
I've posted this a couple of times, but here are 40 pages on the 2021-23 elections. It's dense, but the pictures tell a story, and the story is that people were either badly misled or misled themselves about that election. 1/
aei.org/research-produ…
The commentary turned an obviously disappointing Republican night into a repudiation of Republicans, and a demonstration that Trump was radioactive. But if you scratched the surface, you saw that wasn't true. First, a majority of Americans voted for Rs by 2-3 points. 2/
Oct 23, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
And FWIW, my meta-take on the election is this: I thought Harris would walk away with it when she got the nomination, because the calendar was so favorable. Nominee -> Veep pick -> Convention -> Debate -> Early Voting starts. 1/
What I missed was that, by not going through a primary process, she never really had a chance to define herself. I have no idea what her elevator pitch is, except Not Trump. Which is not a terrible pitch, but I'm not sure it's a winning one either. 2/
Jan 2, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
On supposed conservative hypocrisy re Gay (setting aside whether plagiarism really =s "canceling") there's a deep split among conservatives going back to the (highly consequential, in hindsight) @DavidAFrench vs. @SohrabAhmari fight. Rufo, Linsday and Gov. DeSantis 1/
are clearly in the Ahmari camp. That camp basically boils down to "if they want a war, we'll give them a war good and hard." There's no hypocrisy there. They're clear that they're coming for lefties, even if it means losing some conservatives in the process. 2/
Dec 14, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The biggest re-alignment of the last 100 yrs -- the sudden movement of Black voters from Republicans to Democrats -- caught both parties utterly flat-footed in 1936. In some ways it made no sense: Democrats still had segregationists throught their party. 1/
But for most, the economic issues trumped the social issues (interestingly, wealthier Blacks stayed Republican until the 1960s). Rs didn't fully appreciate those voters weren't coming back until the 60s. Italians flipped R in 1940 because of a speech FDR gave. 2/
Dec 13, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've been saying this over and over again, but: This is why inflation is so destructive to presidencies. With unemployment, overwhelming # of people are still employed, lots of unemployed expect to get hired back, etc. When you get your job, it's largely done. 1/
Inflation is different. People at all income levels notice it, whether it's the $10 happy meal or the $150 Outback delivery or [whatever good someone really rich buys and notices, I don't know]. 2/
Dec 11, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So I finally had the time to sit down and look at the questions below the headline in that WSJ poll and, um . . . wow.
s.wsj.net/public/resourc…
Trump has double digit leads on being able to best handle the economy, inflation, crime, securing the border, the Ukraine War, and the Israeli conflict. Biden has a double digit lead on abortion rights. Everything else is single digits which sounds good except . . . 1/
Aug 9, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Today is my son Judson's 16th Birthday. Sixteen years ago, I thought about how on today we'd drive together to the DMV, get his driver's license, and how proud I'd be of him for passing, and frankly myself for teaching him how to drive, the way my Dad taught me and his him. 1/
That's not how today is going. Judd was diagnosed with autism at age 2.5. At the time, his doctor said he just had a "touch" of autism. I viewed it as a roadbump. To the extent I'm smart, it isn't in a traditional way, it's in a "think way outside the box" way. 2/
Jun 10, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I continue to hold to the position that we should not prosecute former presidents or candidates for the presidency except in extreme circumstances. I thought the NY indictment fell far short of that threshold. This one is different.
Basically, it is true the president shouldn't be above the law. If Trump had actually shot someone on Fifth Avenue, yes, he should have been prosecuted. If they had found hookers buried in the basement of Trump Tower -- which would not have surprised me -- indict.
