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People don't believe Democrats want them to have a good life

Democrats are also not short of strong candidates in Michigan and yet they managed to pick the most bang-average (and lowest WAR) incumbent House Democrat. I'm not saying to pick Tlaib or Thanedar, but I am saying that perhaps McMorrow might be better given her fundraising?

Janet Mills 10 years ago is a different proposition to Janet Mills now. The more you dig into it, the less impressive her record looks. Neither her 2018 nor her 2022 wins were especially strong when contextualized against downballot results.

In general, the Democratic Party establishment has done a *very* good job of picking electable Senate and House nominees. I am completely unconvinced re: this for 2026, though — Haley Stevens is very unimpressive in Michigan, and Platner might be better than Mills in Maine.

Electability doesn't always mean taking the safe option. There were a lot of good reasons to be skeptical of Platner early on, because his fundraising and public speaking skills were untested. But he's quite good at those, and there's no evidence Mills is an electoral titan.

This is entirely expected. The DSCC is not going to be funding a primary challenger when the alternative is the incumbent governor of Maine, especially when the primary challenger has said he won't support leadership. (Platner might be a better candidate, though!)

new polls website just dropped

You don't need to look at Trump approval here to raise questions (-7 underwater among RVs is...a bit low, but believable. Whatever.) Allred being at +11 and Crockett being at +7? No.

I would be interested to know if they validated their voters against the voter file, because not doing that usually explains a bit of this. It'd also be nice to see weighting targets. But methodology is really sparse. https://t.co/IWnjkTQgek

If I was a gambling man, I'd be willing to put a lot of money on this being wrong, especially among *registered voters*. Based on all the survey work I've done, and all of the rigorous work I've seen from experts, this is just unbelievable.

It is incredible how uncontroversial this is. Across every demographic, people agree that AI companies should not be insulated from consequences.

Imagine if ChatGPT tells your teenager to commit suicide. Should you be able to sue OpenAI? I think the answer is obviously yes. And this is something that an healthy supermajority of Americans are very much in agreement on, as our polling finds. https://t.co/DA64VEthz6

Americans want AI companies to be held liable for a wide variety of potential harms. And they're right!

Voters are smart and dumb at the same time. Politicians have to deal with that. They are pretty good at sensing things that matter to their lives and also half of them don’t know who represents them in Congress.

Well…

@lxeagle17 What political hobbyists don't understand is that their political instincts would be much better if they paid *far* less attention to politics. Living in another country is a good proof of concept: very few things break through but with clear implications.

We are all vastly underestimating how little most people know about government beyond the most basic details. You have a president who's broadly quite unpopular, and his party controls government. So if the government shuts down, people blame him.

I like Liam but I don't think this is a work/content issue for the Republicans or Democrats. It's mostly this: the Republicans have a trifecta. Ergo, voters blame Republicans for a shutdown.

But in general — the hits it gives a party's image are largely overwrought and a function of bored people having nothing else to do. Nobody sane is paying attention to politics right now unless you live in Virgina or New Jersey. Let it go and take a break.

We should be ok with embracing many different threads on this. For instance, it is great that Jared Golden blames the shutdown on far-left groups, because he represents a Trump +9 seat. At the same time, you can see the logic for the rest of the Democrats not following.