If you want a quick temperature check on how the political realities of this are unfolding in his administration, consider that Elon Musk has said absolutely nothing on Trump's signature policy (the tariffs) today, despite usually being Trump's #1 defender. Bessent is reportedly looking for a way out, Tillis and *French Hill* are suddenly expressing openness to congressional laws on tariffs, and Republicans mostly seem shell-shocked. Another day or two of drops and you might see things shift, because this is a self-inflicted wound.

We have not and will not model Florida's 6th (FL-06). Split Ticket will not make any prediction here. But the race is close, as both sides acknowledge, and though a Democratic win would still be a HUGE upset, it is a possibility the GOP has braced for.

🧵on some things to note: Firstly: this seat is Trump +30. Randy Fine is a terrible candidate and is probably costing the GOP quite a bit across the board in both turnout and persuasion.

But again: it was Trump +30. So keep that in mind for everything. An upset here would be monumental and unprecedented.

I'm teaching databases this semester at Berkeley. My students all seem unusually brilliant. Not many go to office hours, and not too many folks post on the course forum asking project questions.

Weirdly, the exam had the lowest recorded average in my 10 semesters teaching it. Put another way, I'm pretty sure a lot of Computer Science students are using ChatGPT to complete their coding assignments instead of actually doing the assignments themselves.

If true, it's a huge problem. The process of learning debugging is critical to growing as an engineer.

The most common reply I get to this point on progressive underperformance is "the media is rigged against progressives so that's why we do worse" and this is just not a convincing explanation.

So again: if progressives are more electable, why do they keep underperforming?

https://twitter.com/lxeagle17/status/1897703500966154643

What I think is worth pointing out is that you keep seeing this underperformance. I'm not talking as much about New Democrats vs Progressives, which are still very close together — I'm really talking more about people like the Squad vs Blue Dogs.

Reminder: Trump won 2024 because he gained 20 points of ground with voters who don't pay attention — they voted for him based on a pre-COVID economy and hated Biden's. He's sold new voters on a vision, while alienating a lot of his old ones. If he can't deliver, there's trouble. People are not internalizing how dangerous this situation can get for the Trump administration. These new voters do not have any special allegiance to him. You just cannot sell these people on their bank accounts being drained and wages stagnating. No one is immune to that.

Approaching Trump's inauguration, this is *probably* the zenith of conservative influence in pop culture and society over the last 30 years, despite Trump's relatively slim victory of 1.5%.

The movement may last. But I *suspect* people are overconfident here. 🧵 To begin with, it is unquestionably true that public opinion has shifted *sharply* to the right on a host of issues over the last four years — transgender rights, immigration, and even "coolness" (zoomers are way less Dem than millennials were, and tech is lining up behind Trump)

Okay. So I've wanted to articulate this for a while, but never really knew how.

But I'm personally absolutely, completely disgusted with the Democratic Party — *my* party, in many ways — and not because of the party moving "too far left/right". Let me explain.🧵 Everything I write here is in my personal capacity. And this is not a giant thread on "why I left the Democratic Party". I'm not doing that, because I agree with Democrats significantly more than I do with the GOP, and I vote for the side I agree with more.

But I'm still angry.

Here's where we stand in the House (11/10, 23:59 EST).

- Democrats at 213 seats with the latest #CA27 drop, but have lost #CO08. Rs at 217.
- Dems must sweep #CA13, #CA45, #AKAL, #AZ06, #CA41.
- #CA13 is tilt D. #CA45 a tossup/tilt R. #AKAL leans R. #AZ06, #CA41 very likely R. #CA13: the two counties that are the most complete already have Duarte underrunning his 2022 margins by ~2, when he won by only half a point.
- Merced (Gray's home county) has yet to report a ton of blue-leaning mail. Would narrowly rather be Gray, but it will be *very* close.

The Washington Primary has served as a historical canary in the coal mine. This year, it tells us that Democrats are in pretty good position to make gains in the House and have a modest popular vote victory.

From me and @maxtmcc, for the @WashingtonPost.

wapo.st/3Aw0wRg @maxtmcc @washingtonpost A lot of you had been asking us for *something* at least discussing the high-level takeaways of the Washington primary. The piece gives an easily-digestible overview of what it is, why it's important, and what it means.

In short: it's way better than what Dems feared a month ago

MONEYBALL (2024):

The pundits see Kamala Harris and they see a candidate with a -14 favorable rating, a horrible 2020 campaign, and similar odds against Donald Trump if she replaces Biden.

When I see Kamala Harris, I see...an imperfect understanding of what candidate quality is "She's got her issues. She tacked way to the left in the primary in 2020 and came out in favor of ridiculous things like banning fracking and signals to defund the police despite being a DA.

But is she 82 years old? No. No!"

It is worth pointing out that however this all plays out, Kamala Harris has played her role as Biden's VP to perfection at this point, and it is a *far* cry from the relative chaos that seemed to permeate her orbit and her office during the 2019-2021 period. Harris has managed to acknowledge Biden had some issues in the debate, played the role of loyal soldier since then, and has made several high-profile appearances to reinforce confidence in her without making a single move to undermine the President. It's not easy.

🚨 NEW POLL (@SplitTicket_ and @DataProgress) 🚨

Trump: 41%, Biden: 40%, RFK Jr: 10%

Generic Ballot: Democrat: 48%, Republican: 45%

split-ticket.org/2024/07/10/we-… @SplitTicket_ @DataProgress Two-way vote:

Biden 47/Trump 46
Harris 46/Trump 46

IMO a reason many Dems are upset is that it feels like Calvinball

Dems do well in specials? Doesn't matter.
Trump does poorly in primaries? Doesn't matter.
Biden does poorly in primaries? Sign of weakness on the left.
Biden polls badly? Awful. Polls already overshot him in 2020.

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1783188871292838161

I'm explaining. I'm not saying I agree with all of those arguments.

But it's clear to me that the reason this sentiment on Twitter exists is because there is a lot of talk focused around Biden's vulnerabilities in the data world, and not many about Trump's.

It's a fascinating chart.

Couple points: you won't find hard electoral data for a big racial realignment yet. I edited it to show what it's like without 2024 polling.

But there's some evidence to suggest depolarization is happening, if not realignment🧵

https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1767198788689465639?s=20

There's a very clear dip in support between 2016 and 2020, but it's not obvious that it's part of a massive trend — that dip is comfortably in line with historical margins of variability. Much of the variability you see is in current polling.

https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1767198792464433293?s=20

FWIW the "Uncommitted" campaign has to be very, very happy with tonight's results — the narrative in the media is already set.

They set a benchmark of 20K votes, and they cleared it easily. Virtually every politician and reporter is now saying it was a big success. The truth is that this wasn't a good benchmark, because turnout is massively up. Percentage-wise, this is underwhelming for them — they're on track for 12-13% of the vote, which isn't much more than the 11% that voted against Obama in 2012. But the narrative is what mattered.

So, one thing I have seen that seems obvious but is very much ignored in analysis is that in basically every election where it turns into "normal vs weird", the normal side massively overperforms. Which side is perceived as normal depends on the race, of course.

Let me explain.

Joe Kent vs MGP and Mark Kelly vs Blake Masters were both successfully framed as a weirdo with Nazi ties vs a pretty normal person.

Kathy Hochul vs Lee Zeldin and Tina Kotek vs Christine Drazan were both basically campaigns run by Republicans and independents who successfully took an issue the left is very weak on in the eyes of the electorate (crime).

Frisch vs Boebert, Ilhan Omar vs a random Republican, and Hobbs vs Lake are other good examples of candidates who are way too Out There being punished heavily by voters.

This isn't really about progressive vs moderate vs conservative. It's more about normal vs not-normal. Our @SplitTicket_ research found that within a certain ideological box, people all did pretty similarly. Freedom Caucus WAR (-0.8) was pretty similar to the Progressive Caucus (+0.2), which was similar to the New Democrats (-0.2).

But the Squad? 5.5 points below replacement. The "MAGA Squad" (Gaetz, MTG, etc)? 7 points underwater.

I think there's an increasing amount of evidence that a lot of this is just about being normal.

https://twitter.com/ChazNuttycombe/status/1731527409868939354

Now, to tie this back to the original post: Book bans themselves are just a symptom of why Democrats overperform in these races. When successfully weaponized, they repulse people by making the opposition look really extreme — usually because they have other crazy stances too.

Not sure this is true. Evers won by 3.5% as an incumbent governor in a heavily pro-choice state. Barnes lost by 1% against an incumbent GOP Senator who outspent him. That 4.5% delta is pretty normal, and our @SplitTicket_ metric has Barnes as a better candidate than Johnson.

https://twitter.com/brent_peabody/status/1716843809307263260

@SplitTicket_ You can say that Barnes *still* underperformed because Ron Johnson was a bad incumbent (I have seen this argument from a couple data people I do respect) but I am personally not sure that I'd chalk this loss down to Dems picking a poor candidate, given the spending data here.

She's absolutely correct, but people like Kara Swisher (and a large chunk of the Silicon Valley tech journalists) helped build up the myth of Elon Musk in the first place and I think this is a great example of these things eventually coming full circle.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1693814364220895333

There was this recognition in SV (at least, among those I know) that Elon was both brilliant in some technical aspects and *also* very socially inept with a reputation that was somewhat overinflated from the PayPal exit. Somewhere along the line, people forgot about the last part

Currently, I think it's fair to say that while Joe Biden was the best nominee for Dems in 2020, he is *not* the strongest nominee for them in 2024, even accounting for an incumbency advantage.

Doesn't matter. Won't change the matchup. But that's what the data says. If voter sentiment on the economy improves a lot, this may no longer hold — if voters begin associating Biden with stability and a great economy (possible, the election is a year out and economic indicators look good), then this might flip!

But that's not the current reality.

I've done a *lot* of analysis on the tendency for special elections in very white districts to have a Democratic edge because of education-driven turnout differentials. But using that to routinely explain away 16 point underperformances is lazy.

https://t.co/bN1eLRVJuScenterforpolitics.org/crystalball/ar…

https://twitter.com/jrrosswrites/status/1681483344289099778

Yes, it's a low turnout election and swings are magnified there. But what would be good to remember is...

(1) Democrats win white college+ voters by like 10, not 50
(2) in *this* part of Wisconsin, they very likely lose them. It's very ancestrally Republican.

The sentiment on certain wings of Twitter is increasingly turning into a variety of "very few people know this but everything is extremely bad and will stay forever bad as nothing good will ever happen again."

I don't know how people live like that. It's exhausting to even read. There's people saying that by 2025, the US will lose every one of its democratic traditions because Biden is "completely cooked". Or that it will become a theocracy that again opposes gay marriage (despite 70% of the population now supporting it). Why? Online Vibes, I guess?