David Kimball

Polls show that a clear majority of Israelis oppose the resettlement and annexation of Gaza. Even some Israelis who dream of one day ruling the entire land balk in practice at the notion of maintaining a perpetual military occupation against a Hamas insurgency. But Israel’s prime minister is beholden to the minority demanding exactly that. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s last election, and relies on explicitly anti-Arab far-right factions to remain in power while Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. President Joe Biden understood this dynamic, and his administration undertook a public and private pressure campaign to prevent Netanyahu from acceding to his hard-right allies.

“We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land,” the State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a January 2024 statement, publicly rebuking two Netanyahu ministers for their “inflammatory and irresponsible” call to encourage “migration” from Gaza to make way for Jewish settlement. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to the region and assured America’s Arab allies that it opposed forced displacement. “Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow,” he said at a press conference in Doha, Qatar. “They cannot, they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.” Blinken then traveled to Israel, where he apparently delivered the same message to Netanyahu. The next day, the Israeli leader posted a video in which he declared, “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.” A member of Netanyahu’s party told the press that the prime minister’s stance had shifted because of American pressure. For the moment, maximalism had been shoved back into the box.

Something many do not know: The Biden administration engaged in a public and private pressure campaign to compel Netanyahu to reject the ethnic cleansing calls of his far-right allies. It worked. Then Biden lost, the pressure stopped and Trump reversed everything.
www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

Germany gave people €1,200/month no strings attached.

They kept working, slept better, switched to better jobs, and even gave more to others.

Turns out, when people aren’t drowning, they swim further.

#UBI doesn’t kill ambition, it frees it.

🚨New forthcoming paper at JOP: @noamlupu.bsky.social and I use data from 10 surveys in N&S America to see whether lower-income, lower-wealth, and working-class people are less interested in running for office. Interest in running (nascent ambition) can lead to representation gaps. However, ...(1/2)

How did voters experience the election process in 2024? Our latest report details our findings from the 2024 Survey of the Performance of American Elections; you can find it (and the data behind it!) on our website now: buff.ly/40I25IF

He's right, and it's not just Brazil.

Around the world, at least 31 democratic leaders who committed similar crimes have been jailed or banned from office since 2010. The failure to hold Trump accountable in the US was a unique and systemic failure of our institutions and political culture.

William F. Buckley's Bill Never Came Due | Defector Perhaps the highest praise I can offer a book that took 27 years to complete and runs over 1,000 pages is that I can see why, and that it doesn’t feel like it. Sam Tanenhaus’s extremely long and anxio...

A very good essay.

Here's the actual data on recorded crime on New York City's transit system, from 1993–2025, for the period from January 1–July 13. There's little evidence of an upsurge in crime, a phenomenon that the US DOT Secretary often claims is occurring.

Reduce state capacity, reduce government performance

I thought this was very nice. It was respectful yet forced people to listen.

New paper. What happens when a presidential candidate steps way out of line, not only with the public, but even with his own voters? And on a highly salient issue? Candidates typically don’t do that—they’re too strategic. But Trump isn’t. He’s good for social science. 🧵

Measuring Conflict in Local Politics Mirya Holman1 , Rebecca Johnson2 , and Tyler Simko3

It’s publication day!!🎊 In a new Urban Affairs Review @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social piece, Rebecca Johnson, Tyler Simko @simko.bsky.social & I ask: How do you measure conflict in local politics in the United States?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New article out in World Politcs. We analyze how different groups react to varying programs of social democratic parties. We find less trade-offs than often assumed. Generally, more left-progressive programs increase support among social democratic potentials
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Sum: Harmful, bleak, and grim.

Dark Age 2.0

Trump’s second presidency begins: evaluating effects on the
US health system www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... by @scottlgreer.bsky.social @hjarman.bsky.social @mirandayaver.bsky.social @xrkulik.bsky.social

A former F.B.I. agent who was charged with encouraging the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to kill police officers has been named as an adviser to the Justice Department task force that President Trump established to seek retribution.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/u...

Dachau in July 1933... reported in the New York Times

timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine...

Line chart titled “America’s Political Donors Are Getting Dramatically Older,” comparing average donor age and donation-weighted age across five U.S. election cycles (2016–2024). • The green line shows average donor age, starting at 55.6 in 2016 and rising to 63.8 in 2024. • The purple line shows donation-weighted age, starting at 61.5 in 2016 and increasing more steeply to 67.4 in 2024. The gap between the two lines illustrates that older donors contribute more money on average. The chart highlights a growing trend in which political campaign funding increasingly comes from older Americans. Source: DIME, L2 voter files.

Lotta discussion of age and political participation this week. Despite NYT data error, Zohran really did kill it on youth turnout.

But money in politics is going the other direction. Average campaign $ in 2024 came from a 67.4 year old!

new from me and Bonica w/ updated voter file & DIME data:

Local boards are critical for communities, but they underrepresent women and people of color | USAPP Municipal boards and commissions are an important part of how towns and small cities in the US are governed and managed.

Local boards are critical for communities, but they underrepresent women and people of color find Anita Manion, Jake Shaw, and @kimballdc.bsky.social of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Sapna Varkey of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

With this budget, ICE alone would have nearly as large a detention operation as all 50 states' prison systems combined. Bigger budget than the Marine Corps. Police-state levels of spending

You’ve seen this movie before: Maybe Reagan guessed, Bush hoped, and Trump tried—but tax cuts never paid for themselves. Given the mountain of evidence, claiming once again that "tax cuts will pay for themselves" is no longer ideologically motivated optimism.

It's a lie.

Some have asked me what I did when I found out @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social won the primary. I’m so grateful to be able to share that experience and memorize that profound moment in my life @alannavagianos.bsky.social @huffpost.com

cuomo conceding overlayed with the drewjanda tweet: "The haters said I couldn't do it. And they were correct. Honestly great call from the haters"

Screenshot of a Pew Research Center analysis about Medicaid.

Quite a stat: Medicaid paid for 4 out of every 10 births in the United States in 2023. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.

Words fail me.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/u...

If you're interested in seeing what the conversation on X looked like on Saturday morning, as the information warriors there went to work framing the shootings of Democratic lawmakers for political gain, I made an interactive graph: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...

Delighted to see my article, "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory," in print in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social. It is my favorite thing I've written, and I hope you'll read it.

Like most people, I learned in school that political theory began in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. This is wrong. (1/)

It's infuriating how 99% of the coverage of this new war doesn't bother to mention that it is happening because we had an agreement to limit and monitor Iran's nuclear program, which even Trump's own aides said was working, and he blew it up because it was negotiated under Obama.

Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last night, was the Speaker of the Minnesota House in the 2023-2024 session, when Democrats ran the state government.

That means she had a leading role in shepherding the many landmark reforms that Dems adopted in that period—an important legacy. Brief 🧵.

Well, this ain't no picnic

NO KINGS Dublin, Ireland Sat, Jun 14 12:00 PM — 2:00 PM EDT US Embassy, Dublin Dublin, DC 20001

NO TYRANTS - London UK Sat, Jun 14 10:00 AM — 12:00 PM EDT US Embassy Greater London, DC 20001

I do enjoy the country-specific name changes for No Kings protests this weekend