Bruce Larson

Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) a...

Trump's own DOJ website still has a press release up from January pointing out that violent crime in D.C. is at its lowest in more than 30 years.

I learned a ton about campaign finance from reading Robert Mutch’s painstaking research. It is sad that his passing went with seemingly little or no notice. Maybe some CF scholars could write something up about him for PS:Political Science

Old money: Campaign finance and gerontocracy in the United States Politicians in the United States rank among the oldest globally. This study examines how money in politics contributes to age inequality in political …

@adambonica.bsky.social and I are economists now (economist salary coming soon, I imagine)

Ungated until the end of September: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Gettysburg College is hiring a VAP in judicial politics beginning August 2025! The successful candidate will teach an introductory course in American Politics and upper-level courses in judicial politics. Ad will be on APSA on Monday.

My New Draft: “Faux Campaign Finance Regulation and the Pathway to American Oligarchy” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Just early published in ARPS (open access) @garlicksauce.bsky.social @wmjunk.bsky.social & I survey remarkable recent lobbying research that shows how lobbying matters & whats ahead for studies of influence www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Just a reminder how classic what we're seeing is:
1. redefine a group as a threat to civilization
2. reduce legal protections that they enjoy
3. abuse, threaten, harm, and/or relocate them
4. dismiss/ignore concerns about abuses and harms from the process
5. repeat steps 2-4, escalating each time

Inside the Mind of an ICE Agent Is this what she signed up for?

Where does the “Abolish ICE” movement go to get its apology?

open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

RFK Jr. is seeking to destroy the consensus around vaccines, one of the greatest public health achievements in human history. People will die because of it.

Having been an expert witness in four documentary proof of citizen cases let me set the record straight:

1. Non-citizen voting is already illegal
2. It is exceedingly rare, when it happens it is almost always due to confusion
3. SAVE will burden millions of people who don't have the required id

Wesleyan's Michael Roth: "money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath. And that has served the country so well because Americans and various governments we’ve had recognized that it’s better for the country if people can practice freedom." www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

The Ultrarich Have Reshaped Presidential Elections. Here’s Where They’re Looking Next. Billionaire money could have even more impact in these races than it did in the presidential election.

This excellent piece by @rickhasen.bsky.social does such a great job of explaining the current state of campaign finance in the U.S. and how we got here. I just assigned it to my money and politics class. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Today the biggest split among Democrats is between those who want to stand and fight and those who want to play dead.

House Democrats united to stand and fight. Too many Senate Democrats played dead.

We need more leaders from the stand and fight wing of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party’s problems are not about being moderate or left. That’s a consultant and pundit red herring

The problems are in party organization, the culture of “it’s their turn” nominations, candidate recruitment, gerontocracy, inability to shape media topics, and coming off hella lame

If you are a political scientist and looking for ways to be helpful in this moment, a substantive, material thing you can do that will immediately impact on grad students is contributing to the APSA Grad Support Fund. 100% of this fund goes to students: connect.apsanet.org/graduate/gra...

You can donate here: members.apsanet.org/donate-now

The demand we've had for this fund has been 4-5x what we have in the account for any cycle. This need is going to grow with project cancellations and schools withdrawing aid. Even a small donation of $5 or $20 goes a long way.

Wyden is a NO on cloture

Dem YES

Schumer
Fetterman
Cortez Masto
Gillibrand

Dem not sures

Durbin
King
Klobuchar
Schatz
Hirono
Shaheen*

*added back after a quote saying she's still deciding

Assuming Rand Paul stays NO, Schumer needs three of the remaining YES. All eyes to Hawaii...

🧵I think there are many members of Congress who either don't understand, or don't care to understand, how central it is to their job description to show representational leadership even if there's few to no good policy outcomes that can result.

Setting aside all of the political strategizing, this CR is so incredibly awful that letting it advance when you have the power to stop it seems unconscionable to me. Do the right thing and figure out the politics after.

the tesla protest might objectively be among the most successful in history already just in terms of immediate response, if you consider they forced the world’s most powerful person & its most wealthy to fully degrade themselves like used car salesmen on live TV while the whole world watched agog.

1/ This is wildly illegal. That is not a question on which reasonable legally informed folks can disagree.

It doesn't fucking matter that he ran on doing illegal things. They are still illegal.

And striking at Congress's power of the purse is worse than illegal. It's anti-constitutional.

60 years ago today.

I am in never ending awe of John Lewis’s courage, conviction, and persistence.

Bloody Sunday Remembered: 60 Years Later

60 years ago, civil rights advocates in Selma, Alabama, were violently attacked as they peacefully marched to demand voting rights for Black Americans — a day remembered as "Bloody Sunday." Their courageous advocacy prompted the passage of Voting Rights Act.

Congratulations!

Some scattered thoughts after the most shocking and horrible moment of US diplomacy most of us have ever seen. Not even sure what the point of writing anything about this is, but here goes. 1/

🧵My statement in response to Trump illegally attempting to fire Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chair Ellen Weintraub: In claiming to fire a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, the president violates the law, the separation of powers and generations of Supreme Court precedent. 1/

New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement.

USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since.

www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin...

#EconSky

Thank you for writing it. It is remarkable scholarship. I keep coming back to it for its insights.

Is there a list of resources somewhere to help federal workers feeling threatened by DOGE? I have had several former students who work in federal agencies email me about the legality of DOGE’s actions and if I knew of any publicly-available legal resources.