Jonathan Bernstein

Senate Dems have won a chance to negotiate. We won't know the outcome until it's over; expect false rumors. And they're still facing unified GOP gov't.

They will listen to party actors/constituents about what to ask for - so do that! - but there's another side too and they have more votes.

<<Taps sign>> abolishing ICE is off the table for now, so the immediate the goal is harm mitigation.

Harm mitigation is good, even if it comes in banal forms like tying up ICE with red tape.

I don't know; people, Republicans included, aren't thrilled with Paxton either.

But yes - I think Dems have a chance.

People are reading this way wrong. Schumer detached DHS from the other five bills in return for a two week CR on the DHS bill. Now Democrats can make demands on DHS spending without having to shut down agencies covered in the other five bills. They have way more leverage to get real concessions.

Threats against members of Congress rose 58% compared to last year, according to US Capitol Police.

Here's an updated version of a chart showing levels of threats since 2016 in my PolComm article "Threats as Political Communication," w/ @lilymasonphd.bsky.social.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Really not sure. Probably means there will be a runoff, presumably between them, although Hunt does have some money and three candidate races can be weirdly volatile.

Gotta say that if stopping sharia law from taking over Texas was my top issue for my US Senate voting decision that the Cornyn ad about stopping sharia law I just saw would really not have convinced me that he was taking this extremely urgent question as urgently as Paxton and Hunt are taking it.

There are bad polls out there, and bad interpretations of polls, but there's simply no better way of finding out what people overall think about stuff.

I'm absolutely the last person to say that public opinion should automatically translate into public policy, or that doing so = representation. But that doesn't mean what people think about things is or should be irrelevant.

I’m begging folks to understand that not everything Dems do is because they’re weak/craven/evil/hate Americans. Everything that happens in Congress is part of a negotiation.

Yeah I don't really give a damn about optimal campaign strategy when it's January outside. (And I'm not all that interested in it even in October).

This, also - public opinion research is ultimately a way of making people's voices heard at scale.

It can get easily sidetracked into a conversation about campaign strategy, but it's also a marker of where we as a country actually are. (And I think that has historical value as well.)

All that said...I agree that people are too quick to interpret everything in terms of electoral effects, as important as elections are. And again, I agree that there's a lot more to politics than public opinion. Very much so! But still, what people at large think remains important. And so, polls.

I'd say that last winter a lot of political (including media) elites were dead wrong about what people were thinking, and the world would be a better place now if they had based their beliefs on the polls, properly interpreted.

Having reasonably accurate estimates of that is a really good check on easily manipulated guesses about what people think.

2. To the extent it's still a democracy, what people think and, perhaps even more, what political elites believe about what people think, is actually very important to what happens next. And so...

So as someone who wrote an item on polling numbers today, two things.
1. It's a democracy; it's good to have a sense of what our fellow citizens think about stuff. Of course that's not the only important thing at all - something can be monstrous whatever people think - but it's still important.

Even for those who didn't live through or remember Carter, he was so bad at presidenting that he set the bar incredibly low for Reagan, who was halfway decent at it.

It's all Jimmy Carter's fault.

So far at least the courts seem to be working. (I mean, the Supremes aren't helping, but still the normal everyday stuff appears to be pretty normal).

I think he, Lee, et al. oppose the bill for normal vote-no-on-approps reasons, and are jumping at the chance to do so on a vote where they weren't needed.

Yeah there are things Trump/GOP might want out of GA/Fulton/Atlanta, but this seems an unlikely way of going about that.

Look, this is obviously horrible and dangerous, but it sounds to me a lot more like an effort by marginalized people at the king's court to impress his majesty than like part of an actual plot to disrupt 2026/2028 elections. Again, that doesn't necessarily make it less dangerous or horrible.

For electoral purposes, it's a real problem that Republicans are so cut off from reality that they can't find their way to swing voters even if they try. But for governing right now, with GOP majorities...on many issues it's apparently not GOP fear, but GOP belief in nonsense, that's the problem.

*Sincerely? Well, he's now opposing Trump on multiple things very publicly, including in that interview, so why not this unless he really believes it?

Been thinking about this since yesterday...
1. Obviously complete nonsense.
2. Shows what Dems (and democracy) are up against. Tillis is the 50th vote in this Senate for sanity on many issues - 51 needed - and he apparently sincerely* buys crap like this.

Yeah, I know. Just having fun with it.

Hmmm.

Interesting wager though...is the pressure for more concessions going to go up or down over time?

Gigante!