Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available behind the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about elite perception, AI, crime, gender issues, and much more.

You can see every single poll published by The Argument here.

Our full methodology can be read here.

Before any politician makes a major policy change, they may want to ask themselves one simple question: Who are we helping with this?

Had Donald Trump asked himself that question before launching a war with Iran, he could have prevented what’s likely to become the biggest electoral cataclysm a political party has seen in a generation. New polling from The Argument shows that the conflict is even more toxic than George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, with only 33% of voters thinking it was right to enter, versus 55% saying it was wrong.

It’s not that the American electorate is reflexively opposed to military conflict. Our latest national poll found that a majority of registered voters think the U.S. would be justified in going to war in a variety of hypothetical cases — including one where the goal is to prevent a hostile country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. (That, of course, was the justification the administration gave for going to war with Iran.)

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But voters are not OK with this war. In fact, the conflict in the Middle East has been so disastrous for Republicans that it’s allowed Democrats to open up a 6-percentage-point lead in voter trust on foreign policy. That’s the biggest lead the party has held in the year we’ve been tracking this metric, and it’s up from the 1-point deficit it faced on this issue in May, before the ceasefire with Iran collapsed.

I could come up with any number of explanations for why this is the case. Memories of the Trump campaign’s vows to stay out of “forever wars” still ring fresh, and it seems likely that the anger Republicans face is the natural consequence of broken promises.

But fundamentally, I think Americans hate this war so much because of what it’s doing to their pocketbooks. It’s hard not to notice the inverse correlation that Trump’s approval rating has with gas prices. (It’s also important to point out that though this tracks with the empirical literature on the correlation between gas prices and approval, Trump is probably paying an outsized penalty because the price shock was a direct result of his specific actions.)

By itself, the deepening quagmire in the Middle East would be an unwelcome headache. But when it’s combined with a spiraling cost-of-living crisis, an unpopular trade war, and a chaotic and toxic immigration enforcement agenda, the picture is nothing short of disastrous for Republicans heading into the midterm elections. In fact, among likely voters, trust in Republicans now trails trust in Democrats on every single issue except crime.

There simply isn’t much good news for Republicans anywhere in our latest national survey. The president’s net approval sits 25 points underwater with registered voters and 26 points underwater with likely voters. These numbers make for an extraordinarily ugly contrast with 2018, when his net approval was “just” -9 in exit polls.

Though Democrats won the popular vote by 7 points and retook the House of Representatives in that election, today’s situation looks far more likely to yield a disaster for the Republican Party. Although the party “only” trails by 5.6 points with registered voters, this gap expands to 9 points with the likely 2026 electorate. (In some ways, I suppose Republicans are lucky it’s not even uglier, considering Trump’s approval is so much worse today than it was back then.)

It’s worth focusing on those generic ballot numbers for a second. If you were just to focus on the registered voter numbers, Republicans would actually be doing a bit better than they were in 2018. But not all of these people are going to vote, and considering the demographics, voting history, and self-reported enthusiasm of each voter allows us to more precisely estimate the population that is actually likely to vote. After factoring that in, Democrats open up a gaping lead on the congressional ballot, bolstering their advantage by more than 3 points.

In other words, though persuasion is a critical part of the story, the thing that takes this from a “blue wave” to a “blue tsunami” is the significant enthusiasm gap between the two sides.

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For a while, Republican leaders have hoped that Democrats would be dragged down by perceptions that the party is too far to the left. As recently as this summer, in fact, they might have been justified in this expectation. Republicans were actually perceived as less extreme than Democrats in our July poll. Back then, 47% of likely voters said the Democratic Party was too far to the left, while 45% said the Republican Party was too far to the right.

But now the environment has deteriorated so badly for Republicans that this is no longer true.

In a stark reversal from our results a year ago, the Republican Party is now also considerably more unpopular than the Democratic Party.

As a result, Democratic odds of taking the Senate have never looked better, with deep-red states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska moving into play as Republican strength in the Midwest evaporates. Combined with a rebellion among Hispanic voters and a polling lead that Mary Peltola continues to hold in Alaska, Republicans find themselves outright underdogs in the Senate for the first time in the cycle.

This was unthinkable a year ago, given that Democrats have to flip at least two seats in states Trump won by double digits in 2024.

Pundits and analysts alike have a tendency to overdetermine results after they have happened and tell the story of an election with far more confidence than that story really deserved. But let me be clear: The current unpopularity of the Republican Party is the result of a series of entirely avoidable actions taken by the president. Trump entered office as popular as ever, and he has proceeded to summarily squander that popularity through a sequence of unforced errors.

It was a choice to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Minneapolis, kick-starting a needless firestorm after three poorly trained agents shot two innocent Americans dead. It was a choice to levy incredibly unpopular tariffs and start an inflationary trade war during a cost-of-living crisis. And it was a choice to attack Iran and send gasoline prices skyrocketing during a time when Americans already felt stretched financially.

Our survey isn’t without glimmers of hope for Republicans. It’s still possible for them to keep the Senate if a systematic polling error happens. Polls in 2020 and 2016 far overstated the Democratic margin due to a systematic undersampling of low-propensity voters. Though we employ a lot of sophisticated survey guards to ward against this very thing (like including respondents who begin taking our surveys but drop off before completing them, a far less Democratic-swinging group than the other respondents), we can’t ever fully rule out the possibility of an error.1

If the war ends, gas prices dip, and the Republicans’ considerable cash edge begins to dent the image of Democratic candidates, it is conceivable that the party could claw back some of the ground it lost throughout this process. But that would require a series of actions that the president has not expressed interest in taking.

Without a serious and sudden reversal in fortune, Trump is about to send his political party off of an electoral cliff.

METHODOLOGY NOTE

Our poll was fielded between Sept. 16 and 21, 2026. We surveyed 1,603 registered voters across the nation; 1,533 completed the survey, while 70 partial responses completed at least until the generic congressional ballot question, where they were asked which party’s candidate they intended to vote for in November.

The sample was weighted to be representative of the universe of registered voters in the United States by race; age; gender; education; census region; race by gender; age by gender; race by education; modeled presidential partisanship by age, education, and gender; and 2024 vote choice. Questions up until the generic congressional ballot were weighted including partial interviews, and then questions after the generic ballot were weighted separately to the same parameters, but using only the complete interviews.

The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The design effect of the survey, which measures the loss of statistical precision due to weighting and design, was 1.22. Accounting for the design effect, the full margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

This iteration of The Argument’s national survey produces estimates of both registered and likely voters for the 2026 midterm elections. The likely voter screen takes every respondent’s demographic and voting history and calculates a probability that they will vote in 2026. It then aligns this with probabilistic turnout scores from self-expressed vote likelihood and rakes this to the likely 2026 electorate, calculated via historic demographic turnout data from a Catalist voter file sample, in order to estimate their likelihood of voting.

This survey was designed and weighted by The Argument. Data collection was performed by Verasight, and voter file data and weighting targets were obtained from Catalist. A full methodology statement is available on the last page of the survey PDF. A detailed explanation of how our surveys work is available here.

Thanks to Josh Kalla, Amanda Iovino, Guy Molyneaux, Charlotte Swasey, and Carroll Doherty for reviewing this month’s polling language. As part of The Argument’s polling advisory committee, these experts have provided comments to ensure the rigor and objectivity of this polling project. They are not responsible for the ultimate language choices made by The Argument, and all errors are our own.

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The new California map has left some of the state’s conservative members of Congress facing daunting odds in November. After his district was redrawn, Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., left the Republican Party and became the only independent serving in the House of Representatives. While he shares Democrats’ frustration with Republican gerrymanders, he also took issue with Democrats’ tit-for-tat strategy in a Substack live conversation with The Argument.

“If you fight fire with fire, then the whole world burns,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason that you should deprive your own citizens of fair representation based upon what some other state is doing.”

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Republicans only held a two-vote majority at the time he left the party, so Kiley’s departure wasn’t exactly a token gesture. But given that he continues to caucus with Republicans, liberals may still view his newfound independence with suspicion.

Kiley noted that he wasn’t thrilled to continue caucusing with Republicans, but without affiliating with one party or another, he would not be allowed to serve on committees — a rule Kiley called “crazy.”

“I’m the chair of the K-12 Education Subcommittee. That’s actually the main reason I got involved in politics … to work on educational equity and educational opportunity,” he said. “So simply to fulfill that commitment for the remainder of the term, I’ve been forced to have that formal affiliation.”

Check out the full video above to hear more about being an independent in a hyperpartisan Congress.

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Like many readers of The New York Times, I found Nikole Hannah-Jones’ reflection on her decision to send her daughter to one of New York City’s worst-performing schools both poignant and maddening. Hannah-Jones believed she could fix the school with the attention she would bring as a prominent journalist, but she ended up changing practically nothing as her daughter floundered.

Many elements of this story — Hannah-Jones’ reluctance to look at high-performing majority-Black schools, her lack of follow-through on her plan to fix the school, her continued insistence on the very educational policies that failed her family — have been discussed at length, but one piece of the picture remains, to my mind, underexplored: How did she not realize that her daughter was being failed?

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It took Hannah-Jones years to realize that her daughter was severely behind in school — that despite getting good grades, she had huge deficits in her math knowledge, for example, that led to her failing New York’s standardized Algebra I exam. Her daughter struggled on other standardized tests as well, but Hannah-Jones wrote, “I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests.”

It’s easy to dissect Hannah-Jones’ choices, and it’s easy to say she in particular should have known better: She worked as a journalist on education policy! Why wasn’t she paying far more attention to how her daughter was doing in school?

But in this respect in particular, I’m on Hannah-Jones’ side. Student grades ought to reflect how well a student is doing. If a student is getting good grades, their parents ought to be able to assume that they’re adequately academically prepared for the next year’s material.

This is, these days, broadly not true.

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Join The Argument for a live event on Oct. 8 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing Princeton economist Owen Zidar about his new book (co-written with Eric Zwick), The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.

Drawing on a decade of research with IRS data, Owen explains who America’s millionaires actually are. Spoiler: They’re mostly not tech founders or Wall Street titans. They’re the people who own the car dealership, the beverage distributor, and the regional chain down the road. (Yes, boring businesses can make you very, very rich.)

The doors open at 5:30 p.m. at the Princeton SPIA DC Center (1333 New Hampshire Ave. NW). [Details here].

This year, about one-fifth of all U.S. GDP growth has been tied to investment in the AI industry. At the same time, safety concerns are taking center stage: Figures as disparate as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and Sen. Bernie Sanders agree that we should “pace” or pause frontier AI development. Meanwhile, tech industry boosters — particularly those connected to President Donald Trump, like venture capitalist David Sacks — argue that prioritizing AI safety means forgoing economic growth.

The boosters are wrong. Their worries about undercutting the economy stem from a basic misunderstanding: If we create oversight measures that slow down the pace of new model releases, that does not mean we are slowing down all AI-driven innovation.

The central issue is that the anti-AI-safety crowd appears to assume that all AI innovation comes from the so-called frontier development of the most powerful models at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. But frontier AI is not all AI.

Policymakers need to be able to distinguish between the lofty technological promises made by frontier AI companies and the potentially very large innovation-driven growth that could happen just through the widespread adoption of current models. If they don’t, they will be overly reluctant to tap the brakes even if frontier AI poses real safety risks — as it already has in multiple instances of autonomous hacking “swarms.” They will, like Senate Majority Leader John Thune, insist upon a “light touch.” They will view safety and growth as a trade-off, when it mostly isn’t.

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Yes, hyperscalers like Alphabet and Microsoft need their investments in data centers to pay off. But that revenue could come from people and businesses using any model — new or old, proprietary or even open models, which are free to download and modify but still need to run on chips somewhere. As long as more and more people and businesses are running new queries, then AI can continue to drive meaningful economic growth. And if those queries make those people and businesses more efficient at whatever economic activity they’re doing, that will drive even more growth.

The central requirement is just that there is enough demand for AI in the future to make use of the build-out. That primarily depends on all of society finding more and more uses for the technology. It depends, largely, on diffusion.

AI diffusion is just starting

“Diffusion” is a word that makes sense to economists, but it’s quite hard to get a picture of in your mind. It’s not like Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb. Instead, it’s a wide variety of people and businesses spending years figuring out how to use a technology in new ways. It may only become clear in retrospect.

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The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The Tigray war, one of this century’s deadliest conflicts, killed an estimated 600,000 people from 2020 to 2022, and that may have only been the beginning.

At a very basic level, the Tigray War is a dispute between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian federal government, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, over regional autonomy and political power. The TPLF and other subnational groups want to get rid of Abiy because of his efforts to centralize power. Some of these groups are divided over territory, even as they unite to oppose the federal government.

Hundreds of thousands of people died when the TPLF and the Ethiopian government went to war in 2020; while the Pretoria agreement negotiated in South Africa led to a short peace, key underlying disputes remain unresolved. They appear to be flaring up again now as both the federal government and the TPLF accuse each other of instigating the latest round of clashes this week. Even if the subnational groups succeed in getting rid of Prime Minister Abiy, the internal tensions are so strong that a brutal civil war is a likely outcome.

Most people know very little about the Tigray War. I would probably be one of them, except for the fact that I myself am ethnically Tigrayan. I was born just a few hundred miles away from Tigray’s capital, and when I look at the faces of the people involved — both those doing the killing and those being brutalized — they look like me.

At the same time, I live in the United States, speak broken Tigrinya in an inextinguishable American accent, and have no memories of my country of origin. Still, I have particular ties to the region and its people, so I care and know much more about Ethiopia than I otherwise would.

But you probably don’t. Many prominent political figures think this is good. While what’s happening in Ethiopia may be tragic, they argue, human beings are socially embedded creatures, which means that our obligations to other people are determined by the proximity of our relationships to them.

In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance sparked controversy by invoking the theological concept of ordo amoris (Latin for “order of love”) to claim that there is a hierarchy of obligation that requires you to care most about the people closest to you, in particular your family. Then, if there’s any room left over, you can give some consideration to people really far away from you. Vance argued that the far left has inverted this natural hierarchy to care more about people from other countries than people in its own — including, of course, migrants.

Pope Francis responded to this controversy by reaffirming the Catholic Church’s commitment to moral universalism: “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”

As a Protestant, I can empathize with Vance’s frustration at a man 4,500 miles away schooling him on his own religion, but I also think that’s exactly what you sign up for when you convert to Catholicism.

Alongside Vance-like arguments that we have few or no obligations to people outside our own communities is the argument that even empathizing with these people can be harmful. In The Atlantic, the Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig describes a growing right-wing literature warning against “toxic” and “suicidal” empathy. These books argue that indulging our empathy induces us to help vulnerable people at the expense of societal cohesion. As Bruenig points out, these books are targeted at conservatives who are torn between their concern for the poor and immigrants, on one hand, and their affiliation with a political party that increasingly rejects any obligation to marginalized groups on the other. It’s notable that some of the most active civil-society institutions aiding migrants are Christian organizations.

Empathy is a tool that helps us recognize the innate moral worth of every individual person, so it’s no surprise that people who seek to reject this moral fact are hostile to its power. However, it’s true that empathy can’t settle all our obligations. Because the world contains billions of people, my attention is selective. I pay attention to the Tigray War in part because I see my own features reflected in the faces of the participants. But that’s not the basis for a just or functional society.

There’s a soft form of particularism that is obviously true. I am a person who was born to a specific family in a specific place and therefore have special obligations to those people. If my father gets sick, my obligation to take care of him is greater than anyone else’s.

But when we move from explaining our duties to family and friends to relieving ourselves of obligations to other people, the particularist argument breaks down. If I were helping my dad deliver a package and a stranger collapsed in front of me, I think everyone would find it quite strange if I decided to ignore the dying man because of my preexisting duty to my family. In short, my obligation to care for my father does not, by itself, settle what I owe a stranger in desperate need.

Of course, recognizing that we owe something to strangers doesn’t tell us exactly what we owe them. I care a lot about what’s happening in Tigray, but that empathy doesn’t contain the answers to what the optimal immigration, foreign policy, or charitable arrangements are to relieve the suffering.

I don’t expect you to follow what happens in the Horn of Africa as closely as I do, nor does your lack of attention mean that you’re a bad, unempathetic person. Our personal connections can help us notice things that deserve everyone’s attention. My connection to Tigray helps explain why I know about its suffering, but the sheer scale of that suffering — hundreds of thousands of individual lives, each with innate moral worth — is the reason why it matters.

Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

What do Hasan Piker, Hunter Biden’s memecoin, and convicted FTX fraudster Caroline Ellison’s return to the philanthropic world all have in common? They all suggest that society may be losing a useful taboo against associating with public figures who have demonstrated questionable ethics and judgment. This week, staff writer Jeremiah Johnson argues that we need to bring that taboo back.

The shift from phone- to web-based opinion polling has made high-integrity polling harder to do. It’s also made bad or outright fake polls far, far easier to produce. The result? Havoc in the epistemic commons. Pollster Charlotte Swasey analyzes the past decade in her industry so you can better understand your political news.

Should we be nice to AI? Personally, I think it’s worth trying, even if the odds are low that an AI is the kind of thing we owe moral consideration. But if we do want to be nice to AI, what thing should we even be kind to? The chatbot? The chips? It’s hard to know because “Claude” is really only the seamless orchestration of disparate unseen processes, just like a film is a bunch of still frames sped up past the point where we can see the gaps. Take a tour of an AI mind (if, indeed, such a mind exists) in my entry in our one-year anniversary series.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized the design of a pilot process to speed up drug development. The program will pair drug makers with qualified research institutions to support their applications for first-in-human trials of new drugs. Instead of waiting for completed applications, the FDA will review application components piece by piece. The hope is to bring trial time down from its current two-year average and get closer to the faster timelines seen in China and Australia.

• The United States Department of Energy selected 21 projects for up to $99 million in funding to explore next-generation geothermal drilling technology. One recipient is Fervo Energy, a company that also recently struck a deal with Google for the largest-ever geothermal project. So-called enhanced geothermal could provide abundant around-the-clock clean energy without the intermittent availability of solar and wind.

• Just across the state line north of The Argument’s Washington, DC, headquarters, Maryland’s Montgomery County introduced a bill to make it easier to construct Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). If passed, the law would remove both an owner-occupancy requirement and certain fees relating to ADU construction.

Worth watching…

Matt Yglesias is worried about AI doom. Jerusalem thinks that Terminator-style scenarios can distract us from more practical AI-related concerns, such as cybersecurity risk, economic fallout, and biological weapons. In other words, worrying about the end times might prevent us from seeing all the harms AI could cause along the way. So how much should you worry? And what exactly should you worry about? Tune in to sort it out for yourself.

Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s Director of Polling & Data, recently sat down with Adam Carlson from the polling firm Zenith Research to discuss projections for the upcoming midterms. Right now, all signs point to a massive swing toward Democrats. “I think earlier in the cycle, I was thinking a lot of things have to go right for Democrats,” Carlson told Jain. “Now I’m almost thinking the opposite, where a lot of things have to go well for Republicans to kind of keep this [blue wave] at bay.” Watch below to learn more.

In 2025, AI couldn’t beat the top high school students in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but this year, it’s solving open problems that no human mathematician has ever solved. Kai Williams, a reporter at Understanding AI, sat down with me discuss what this means not only for math but also for human achievement in other fields, as AI overtakes human abilities in new domains. Watch to find out.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

Lately, these recommendation sections have had a consistent theme: Dolly Parton for the week of her passing; “birthdays” for the week of The Argument’s one-year anniversary. I greatly enjoyed the prompts, but I also thought it was time to pop the top button of the shirt collar, get loose, and leave things open-ended once again.

I asked my colleagues for “a recommendation,” plain and simple.

I did not expect the avalanche that would follow. My dear colleague Milan Singh, who’d just come back from a stint working from home, unleashed a torrent of kitchen-related recommendations. In a long string of Slack messages, he insisted on the centrality of the whetstone to the kitchen arsenal.

“Learn how to sharpen your knives in the kitchen!!” he implored.

Angela Tracy also spent time in the kitchen, but her recommendation came through with the cutting parsimony of a Han Shan poem: “pickling a bunch of stuff at home.”

At this point, I realized a theme was emerging, despite my best intentions to suppress it. How do people work in unstructured space?

Justin Zuckerman aligned with Angela’s exactness. He plucked out the very first line of the opening edition of a 1980s literary magazine he’s reading right now, called The Quarterly.

“The year I began to say vahz instead of vase,” its inaugural story, “The Harvest,” begins, “a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.”

Maibritt Henkel tended toward Milan’s overflowing grandeur in her assessment of the recent television series Furious. “I think a lot about gender — I’m the Gender & Culture fellow — but I think we all got desensitized to what sex trafficking really means in the post-Epstein era, and this show has called me out on how little I have conceptualized the actual crime,” she told me.

Jeremiah Johnson then tumbled into the chat, like a kid trying out his cannonball at the pool for the very first time.

“The End of Oak Street” he decreed. “It’s the Year of [Anne] Hathaway, so if you’re a Hathaway completist you need to see it!”

The Argument contributor Joseph Politano chimed in to recommend Ghost in the Shell (“best movie about an AI safety incident!”) while his fellow Substacker Michaela Jameson lamented that Mad Men didn’t top Breaking Bad on the recent New York Times list of the top 100 TV shows of this century.

After all this, you may find the title of this week’s final recommendation, Stephen King’s Misery, to be fitting.

In the novel, a psychotic fan both rescues and tortures her favorite author. Jerusalem told us she “enjoyed King’s exploration of the writer’s desire to be taken seriously.” She thought King would portray the novel that Paul, the writer, wrote while being held captive by this super-fan as a bad work of art, “but the fact it produced a good novel says a lot about what [King] thinks keeps popular writers honest.”

There it was, an implicit exhortation to mind the ultimate judge, the ultimate jury, the ultimate constraint on open-ended-ness: the loyal fans (and readers) who keep you honest.

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-Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about Massachusetts lesbian bar drama, Clavicular’s criminal charges, and why hit music seems to stick around forever.

What Western Massachusetts lesbian bar drama says about our news environment

This week’s incredibly viral story from The Boston Globe kicked off when the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, announced a new policy on Instagram: On Saturday nights only, the bar will lift its normal requirement that guests wear KN-95 masks. The new “mask optional” policy was received about how you would expect from patrons of a bar that still has a mask mandate in 2026.

“People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” said one commenter.

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic],” said another.1

Accusations of eugenics ensued, and the drama only snowballed from there. The story itself became more and more absurd:

• The bar was forced to apologize, but the Instagram apology post sparked controversy because it lacked alt-text and was thus inaccessible for the visually impaired.

• The bar’s most strident critic is a self-described gender-expansive lesbian who uses he/him pronouns named Soe Noire.

• When Jackie Matellian, one of the bar’s owners, broke down in tears during a facilitated mediation session because she was paying off a $50,000 loan trying to make the bar function, Noire accused Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) of “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” on social media.

• The bar had two other founders, by the way, though Matellian is the only one still involved. The second is a drag performer who uses it/its pronouns. The third abandoned the bar to attend clown college. (I swear I am not making this up.) Presumably she enrolled with a number of credits already fulfilled.

• The bar, which boasts a native plant garden and a free community store, describes itself as a welcome space for unhoused people. Poor people don’t have to pay if they can’t. The bartender? Also not being paid a salary.

Remarkably, the bar’s latest Instagram post is asking people to Venmo Noire money. I can only speculate as to why, but an enormous number of “queer spaces” seem to end up less about LGBT people hanging out or hooking up and more about “practicing revolutionary politics” in the form of being insufferable. Or in other words:

The entire incredible story is filled with the kind of insane little details that separate good reporting from great reporting.2 But while I can’t stop thinking about this story, I also can’t stop thinking about what it says about the state of the news industry. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, the article is on pace to shatter records at The Boston Globe and is the newspaper’s best performing story of the year, leading to more than 1,000 new subscriptions.

The decline of the news industry is (sigh) old news at this point, but what if the key to reviving it is simply to keep finding weird, insane stories like this?

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News has always worked best as a business when it’s part of a bundled package. In generations past, newspapers bundled traditional news with sports, weather, stock information, and the funny pages — someone who wanted a subscription to access one of those things had to pay for them all. But the internet unbundled these functions, making each less valuable on its own.

That said, you can still see the virtues of the business model in some of the few news success stories of recent years: Today’s The New York Times has been called a “games company with a newspaper side hustle.” Maybe the new bundle looks something like this: viral slop stories that generate outrage and drama, which bring in eyeballs and subsidize more serious journalism for the rest of the publication.

After all, this is the same week that The Philadelphia Inquirer published the revelation that a white Jewish teacher in Philadelphia spent years pretending to be both Black and Palestinian, a story that would have consumed a whole week’s worth of discourse if not for the exceptionally crowded field this week.

Stories that take over the discourse do sometimes serve a serious public purpose. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ viral story about betraying her own daughter by sending her to a dysfunctional public school spawned a lot of productive arguments about the state of low-income schools and education policy. It was discourse-generating, sure, but in a potentially useful way.

But other stories are pure slop with no real value other than making people laugh and argue like lunatics on social media. New York Magazine’s The Cut vertical is the undisputed master of this genre in recent years, with pieces about a personal finance columnist who put $50,000 in a shoebox and handed it to a stranger, a mother who was cyberbullying her own daughter, and a bestselling author who divorced her husband to begin a relationship with a friend who was dying of cancer, only to help said friend relapse on heroin and cocaine and then abandon her just before she died.

It seems like publications of all types are now relying on viral stories of questionable news value to generate traffic. This harkens back all the way to the very first era of mass-distributed newspapers in the United States, when the so-called penny press featured a mix of wild sensationalism and normal reporting on public affairs. It’s a very, very old truth that most people don’t want to pay for sober, professional reporting by itself without some sort of sweetener. If you want the public to eat its vegetables, you’d better be offering some form of dessert. So maybe this kind of discourse slop is what can ultimately save journalism?

Just one more post about the bar

Clavicular gets charged

Earlier this week, I wrote a column arguing that it’s a bad idea for political parties or actors to associate with scumbags.

The basic logic is simple: Nominating scumbags as candidates makes your party more susceptible to future scandals. Hanging out with them on the campaign trail will come back to bite you later. And they’re almost always unreliable partners, the first to turn on you when they sense an opportunity to benefit. Even if you think there are some short-term benefits, they rarely outweigh the costs.

My article was mostly focused on political actors, but the same logic can easily be transferred to other walks of life. If you’re a company, don’t hire a known scumbag as a spokesperson. If you’re a media personality, try not to buddy up to scandal-ridden influencers, no matter how cool or intriguing or famous they might be. If you do, you might be forced to explain why on earth you were associating with them when the next big scandal drops.

Anyhow! You’ll be shocked to learn that Braden “Clavicular” Peters, the influencer famous for his nihilistic view that enhancing your own physical attractiveness (“looksmaxxing”) is the sole defensible aim of life, has been charged with drugging and raping an underage woman in Massachusetts. It’s always the ones you most suspect.

Clavicular had been on a publicity tour recently, appearing onstage at the All-In Summit (he rated cohost Chamath Palihapitiya a 4/10) and going on Howie Mandel’s podcast, among others. If only there had been signs that Clavicular was not on the level. All we had was his penchant for hitting his own face with hammers, allegedly shooting at an alligator, getting arrested for battery, and singing “Heil Hitler.”

It’s a very simple rule, folks. Just don’t cozy up to scumbags!

Why is THIS becoming the most successful song of all time?

Earlier this week, Ella Langley’s smash hit “Choosin’ Texas” broke the all-time record for nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s in the top slot for the 23rd week, and the 13th in a row.

I, like many people, find this a bit hard to believe. Before writing this article, I had literally never heard the song once. And I’m not alone; I’ve seen dozens of posts expressing incredulity that this could be the biggest song ever. Granted, I’m not a regular country music listener, and I live in New York City; I’m not the target demographic. But I do follow cultural trends closely, and I’m online all the time. It feels odd for what is now the most successful song of all time (at least by one metric) to be something I could just completely miss.

So what’s going on here?

At least part of the story is an increasingly fragmented and polarized media landscape. For as much as I’ve never listened to her, Langley is authentically very popular. Her tour announced a second leg, and she’s got legions of fans (including male followers who call themselves Ella’s Fellas). Maybe those of us who are confused by all this just aren’t living in the right part of the country.

But that can’t be all of it. If you look at the top 15 songs with the most time spent at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, almost all of the 20th-century hits were truly and unavoidably omnipresent. You could not escape Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” or, God forbid, the “Macarena.” It didn’t matter what subculture you were in: Those songs were everywhere. “Choosin’ Texas,” for all its genuine popularity, is no “I Will Always Love You.” So how has it stayed at the top so long?

There’s something else funny about the list I linked above: Around half of the longest runs at the top of the chart have occurred in the last decade. This isn’t a coincidence. There’s research showing that songs that hit the top 200 on Spotify now hang around in the top 200 more than twice as long as they used to. The problem has grown so acute that Billboard changed its rules last year to prevent the same songs from charting for several consecutive years.

There are two main reasons why this might be happening, and both have to do with how the internet has changed music. In the past, the charts were calculated based on sales and radio play. Today, streaming is by far the most important distribution channel for music, and Billboard is constantly updating its formula to give streaming numbers more weight. A fan of a song in a previous era was counted once when they bought the single or the album. But streaming is an endlessly renewable vote; rather than measuring a one-time purchase, streaming measures attention, which can last for years.

In addition, success on streaming platforms now creates an algorithmic feedback loop. Once a song becomes popular, it starts getting heavily recommended across the platform. It gets added to a wide variety of playlists that people use for background listening. And because it’s being recommended and it’s got a semi-permanent spot on so many playlists, it remains near the top of the charts, sometimes indefinitely. Teddy Swims’ hit “Lose Control” was in the Hot 100 for 112 consecutive weeks. It only dropped off because Billboard changed the rules to kick it out.

I think this is what really explains the mystery of the popularity of “Choosin’ Texas” — every hit song is much, much stickier today than it was in the past. Current popularity becomes algorithmic evidence that it’s what people want to hear, and that in turn leads streaming platforms to recommend a song even more heavily. Throw in a polarized media environment, and you end up with one of the most successful songs of all time (that a giant chunk of the country has never heard).

Links

• After Trump banned various press outlets from the White House, he had an embarrassing episode where no press showed up for one of his appearances and therefore the event had disrupted audio. To counteract this failure, the White House launched Trump TV, which is essentially a YouTube livestream playing reruns of past Trump commercials and events. Last time I checked, there were fewer than 500 people watching, so, you know, great job to Team Trump.

• A Roblox creator is suing a partner for at least $35 million in damages in a messy dispute over who owns a massively popular game on the platform. Roblox, which is the largest video game/game platform in the world by a mile, continues to be one of the most overlooked but quietly influential tech platforms in the world.

• Meta’s Muse AI agent will tell you that it can place calls on your behalf. But Meta is actually testing using a team of humans to make some calls instead.

• I’m normally dismissive of attempts at AI-generated video, but this music video made by Claude Opus 5.5 is … pretty dang impressive?

• AI-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood gave an interview to Piers Morgan during which she, for no discernible reason, began speaking in Cantonese.

• MrBeast has filed a trademark application for “Beast Band,” a wearable fitness device.

• The hot new social app is the NPR Spotify comment section.

• An army of paid creators is carpeting the web with political content.

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• Good gym etiquette

• A nefarious cake post

• Zohran Mamdani’s team knows what they’re doing

• A sassy cameraman

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In the time it takes for a developer in Boston to get permission to build a house, a developer in Indianapolis has not only secured permits, hired construction workers, and bought materials — they’ve also finished building the house.

Though YIMBYs have long argued that unduly stringent local permitting processes are choking off housing supply in the highest-demand cities, a lack of good, standardized data has made this difficult to demonstrate with hard numbers.

That’s why the debut of a single, centralized database tracking permitting for homebuilding across the country is cause for celebration. In a new paper, Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang were able to collect data on how long it takes for permits to get approved in 60 major cities and calculate the average permitting duration for different types of projects.

Their findings confirm the conventional wisdom: It takes longer to build in cities with slower permitting, and those cities have higher rents and less building. The authors are also able to disentangle just how much permitting contributes to slower homebuilding. When it comes to housing project completion, “30 to 43 percent of the difference between the slowest and fastest cities is due to differences in the time to receive a permit, rather than in the time to actually build,” they wrote.

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In the cities with the slowest permitting processes — San Francisco, Miami, and Boston — permitting alone takes longer than the entire construction process takes in the fastest cities (Indianapolis; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Oklahoma City).

Naturally, the longer it takes to get permits, the longer it takes to build an individual house or apartment building. That, in turn, means that it takes longer for the supply of housing to catch up to demand, keeping prices high. And since housing development is often debt-financed, longer project times mean higher interest payments for developers. Developers then pass on those elevated costs to buyers or tenants to make their money back.

The authors’ findings depict a country that, as a whole, appears to be heading in the wrong direction when it comes to the speed of homebuilding. While average total project duration time has fluctuated from year to year, permitting steadily slowed between 2000 and 2023. That dynamic has reversed in recent years, but it’s not clear why permitting durations fell or whether they will continue to do so.

The optimistic explanation is that permitting durations have fallen post-pandemic as a result of state- and local-level YIMBY reforms. The pessimistic view is that even now, permitting still takes longer than it did in 2000.

The housing holdup, by the numbers

It’s no secret that Phoenix is cheaper than Boston. Comparing rents across American cities has long been possible for economists (and noneconomists, thanks to Zillow). But until now, no one could compare permitting time and total construction duration across cities.

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In June, following a series of prominent AI proofs, a group of top mathematicians promulgated the Leiden Declaration, which asserted, “Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them.” Meanwhile, top mathematicians have been pushing for similar principles in personal essays — math is about human understanding, they say, not just finding the answers.

“Suppose we had a library filled with proofs of every theorem [in mathematics], as well as excellent guides that could, given a question, take us to the answer and explain it,” mathematician Daniel Litt said. “What would a mathematician do in such a library?”

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Kai Williams is a writer at Understanding AI who recently reported from the International Congress of Mathematicians and has a new story in The Atlantic called “Math Can’t Go On Like This.” To explore the angsty questions plaguing today’s mathematicians, Williams joined me for a Substack Live conversation.

This debate has implications far beyond mathematicians. It also has a lot to tell us about how to maintain and improve human skills as AI surpasses our capabilities in a variety of fields.

“I do worry about the world where AIs are just better than humans at everything,” Williams told me, “But I think at that point, it’s not just a mathematics problem.”

In our discussion, we unpacked a controversial episode in which OpenAI raced to beat two human mathematicians to a solution, spending the equivalent of $6 million to $10 million in just a few days so it could get credit for an answer.

I also asked Williams, who once considered a career as a professional mathematician himself, what he thinks about the principles of acceptable AI use. While he isn’t sure exactly what sorts of lines the profession should draw, he is very protective of his freedom to do work on his own.

“As an amateur, I have problems I like to think about in the background sometimes when I have trouble sleeping or whatever, and those I very clearly do not want to ask for AI help … the kind of journey of trying to figure that out is where a lot of the fun is,” he told me. “The only way to get as deep an understanding is to stumble through an area yourself.”

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In the AI doom discourse, I am considered an optimist. What that means is I think there’s only a tiny chance we all die and a very big chance that millions of people die, basic digital infrastructure becomes unusable and crashes the economy, and terrorist groups can use superintelligence for mass murder and mayhem.

Because of my familiarity with effective altruist circles, I’ve long been aware of a subculture concerned about existential risk caused by AI. But over the past several weeks, many more people in my life have become aware of this concern, particularly after Jacob Coxon publicly announced his resignation from Anthropic. He followed this with a media tour during which he argued that the leading AI labs are causing a 10% risk of human extinction — and many of his former colleagues agreed.

These are inherently terrifying and extraordinary claims. Anytime I really sit with them, I begin to feel a sense of dread and fear. Cultivating this dread on a mass scale seems to be the explicit goal of many AI safety advocates. Are they right?

Leadership at the nonprofit ControlAI has argued that “the awareness of extinction risk needs to be pervasive throughout society” and “the awareness needs to be specifically about extinction risk from superintelligent AI.” GuardRailNow, an AI safety organization that creates media about AI extinction risk, has laid out an explicit theory of change along the following lines: “Education leads to awareness, awareness leads to pressure, and pressure leads to regulation.” The organization argues that “when people understand the risks posed by unregulated AI they’re more likely to demand safety legislation from their elected leaders.”

This theory of change might be correct. There are times in history when awareness campaigns have yielded significant change, most notably the midcentury civil rights movements. Clearly, if you work on an underrated issue, you need to raise its salience among policymakers and politicians. One effective way of doing that is raising its salience among the general public.

But I’ve come to understand that when people imagine that they need public attention, in reality, they are often looking for institutional attention: securing funding, setting and enforcing standards, negotiating technical agreements, or updating regulations. It can be difficult or even impossible to separate public from institutional attention, but movements err when they treat public awareness as the sole or even main way to make change. In general, causing mass panic is more likely to result in counterproductive or nonexistent policy outcomes than it is to achieve the goals of a movement.

That’s because public concern does not necessarily translate into consensus on an appropriate response.

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Fears of nuclear power plant meltdowns, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, prompted many to turn against nuclear energy as a source of stable, zero-carbon power. In Germany, policymakers accelerated planned shutdowns of reactors and reoriented the national grid toward coal generation and electricity imports. This was, of course, bad for climate change — but it also made the nation more reliant on Russian natural gas, which became a huge problem after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Spiking energy costs now may be abetting the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

In 2020, the two biggest issues in the U.S. were COVID-19 and police brutality. It’s hard to imagine that more activism could have increased their salience. And yet policy advocates have not been able to get critical pandemic preparedness policies passed by Congress. And while many states and localities passed various police accountability measures, no comprehensive federal police-reform bill passed either.

Another example of the counterproductive nature of mass panics is the media frenzy around “superpredators” in the 1990s. Journalists warned about a coming generation of remorseless teen criminals, and fears of this “new breed of vicious kids“ spurred a push to send violent arrested teenagers to adult courts. But this didn’t deter crime — in fact, it increased subsequent offending by 34%.

This mirrored an earlier push in the 1970s, which popularized “Scared Straight” programs to freak kids out about going to jail. Those programs, too, increased future offenses.

In today’s episode of The Argument podcast with my co-host Matt Yglesias, I argue that we don’t need to buy into the existential threat of AI in order to make real progress on AI safety. Many AI safety advocates believe that it’s critical not just to raise awareness but also to get people to agree with them on the exact way that AI could be harmful. I think they should let go of this dogmatism and embrace the spirit of overlapping consensus.

You don’t need to believe in the possibility that misaligned AI will turn us all into paper clips to agree it would be bad if terrorists got their hands on a technology that makes executing biological attacks easier. You don’t need to believe in AI’s ability to access the world’s nuclear arsenal in order to believe it would be bad if hackers destabilized the world economic system by making digital banking unsafe.

Matt is much less optimistic than I am; he worries that not taking extinction risk seriously will prevent us from taking the steps necessary to safeguard against AI.

He could be right, but I think humans tend to believe other people have to agree with our reasons more than is actually necessary. I don’t need you to believe in God to agree that I should be free to go to church. I don’t need you to agree with me about what a woman is in order for us to agree someone shouldn’t be fired from their job for being trans. And I don’t need you to agree with my forecast that AI could kill millions of people to agree that we should probably do something about this technology that is already committing crimes.

When President John F. Kennedy made the case for the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, he warned about nuclear war, radioactive fallout, and the spread of nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were much more concerned about maintaining America’s military advantage: They wanted underground testing to continue and the U.S. to remain ready to resume atmospheric tests if necessary. But they ultimately supported the treaty with those safeguards in place. They didn’t have to agree about which danger mattered most to agree on something worth doing.

I have a knee-jerk skepticism of the efficacy of a politics of fear. People and powerful institutions are already primed to care about biological attacks, keeping the financial system secure, and protecting digital infrastructure. While high-salience activist efforts are more memorable — for the obvious reason that they specifically operate through gaining public attention and therefore have a chance to embed themselves in our collective memory — quieter feats of careful cooperation often solve big problems.

Though it’s in vogue to dunk on international cooperation, I think doing so leads people to doom about how even hostile states can find the common ground necessary to tackle seemingly intractable issues.

In 2011, the world eradicated rinderpest — a disease that devastated cattle herds throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa — through coordinated vaccination, disease surveillance, and information campaigns. And by 2021, a UN-led partnership had helped complete a global phaseout of leaded gasoline by helping governments update regulations and helping refineries make unleaded fuel. This effort has been estimated to prevent more than a million premature deaths annually.

The examples go on and on: international weather-data sharing, the U.S.-Soviet satellite search-and-rescue system, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the spread of iodized salt, and much more.

Matt and I argue over whether AI safety will be the next collective action problem that humanity triumphs over or the one that finally brings us to our knees.

The Argument. Libbing out.

Paying subscribers can find the transcript for this post beneath the paywall.

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Corrections and clarifications:

• Around 0:24:40, Jerusalem describes an Australian man who accidentally got an AI to hack into a gym’s software, but she says she did not research the details. This did happen, albeit with some different circumstances than described.

• Around 0:40:00, Jerusalem describes a situation in which the U.S. “accidentally sent missiles to the USSR,” but the USSR correctly perceived that this was not a true attack. The USSR’s system did alert it to attacks from the U.S. on Sept. 26, 1983, but this was an error of its equipment, not real missiles.

• Around 0:54:20, Matt objects to DeepSeek’s assertion that China has eight political parties, saying he doesn’t “totally know what that’s a reference to.” While China is a single-party state, it does have eight subordinate “satellite parties,” which “accept the leadership of the [Chinese Communist Party] as a precondition for participation,” according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Show notes:

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• “AI as Normal Technology,” article by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, referenced by Jerusalem: Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University essay

• “Our framework for reporting model misalignment”: OpenAI misalignment report

• “AI 2027,” prediction by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, referenced by Jerusalem: AI 2027 site

• “Nicholas Decker In Hell,” article by Scott Alexander, referenced by Jerusalem: Astral Codex Ten article

• “Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list,” article by Brandon Vigliarolo, referenced by Jerusalem: The Register article

• “Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon,” article by Kai Williams, referenced by Jerusalem: Understanding AI article

• Silent Spring, book by Rachel Carson, referenced by Jerusalem: Goodreads page

• “How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement,” podcast episode about Silent Spring: The Argument podcast episode

• Elon Musk tweet referenced by Matt:

• Peer Review: “Meetings,” article by David J. Deming, Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén, and Yaling Xu: NBER working paper

• Films referenced:

  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

  • The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

If you’re watching or reading on Substack, please head to “The politics of panic” to watch the episode and join the discussion.

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Adam Carlson is a founding partner of Zenith Research, a Democratic polling and opinion research firm. He joined The Argument for a Substack Live discussion last week to explain why he feels confident this will be a banner year for Democrats.

“I think earlier in the cycle, I was thinking a lot of things have to go right for Democrats, particularly to flip the Senate. Everything has to kind of line into place. Now I’m almost thinking the opposite, where a lot of things have to go well for Republicans to kind of keep this — what is looking to me like a blue wave — at bay,” Carlson said.

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Midterms are (almost) never great for the sitting president’s party, but Carlson thinks Republicans are going the extra mile to ensure big losses by unreservedly yoking themselves to a historically unpopular president. And Trump isn’t doing them any favors by prioritizing pet projects like a White House ballroom. Carlson has found this penchant for vanity is unpopular with voters.

“The worst, most damaging things for politicians [are] things that fit into a pre-existing narrative about them, right? And this fits in so perfectly with Trump,” he said.

Watch the video above for more analysis and predictions about the outcomes of competitive races in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, and Texas.

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Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

As we approach the end of this series, I wanted to turn our attention to the strange new beings that we will increasingly have to learn to live with: AIs. I asked writer Kobe Yank-Jacobs to think through what kind of consideration we owe these digital entities. It’s a difficult problem made even harder by the fact that even if these beings theoretically deserve to be treated well, what does treating an AI well even mean?

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- Jerusalem Demsas

In a recent global survey of 68 countries, 36.3% of people reported that, at some point, they believed their chatbot truly understood their emotions or seemed conscious. And even if today’s systems aren’t conscious, many people think future systems will be. In a survey of both AI researchers and the general public, the median researcher said there was a 70% chance of AI consciousness by 2100, while the median member of the public said there was a 60% chance.

To assess a being’s consciousness we could ask for a verbal report, assess its behavior, or, finally, analyze the internal organization of its cognition. But when it comes to LLMs, the first two buckets are suspect — AI models are trained to perform a perfect simulation of a humanlike character, so everything we see from the outside is likely affected, including self-report and behavior.

As for the third bucket, scientists disagree on what cognitive functions make humans or animals conscious. It’s as if “we’re doing biology before Darwin,” one researcher put it to me. So how should we treat these new characters in our lives amid uncertainty about consciousness?1

This is actually the easier part of the question: You should probably just err on the side of caution. The risk of causing harm to something that does have some small chance of being conscious is greater than the risks inherent in overattributing consciousness.2

Unfortunately, that only gets you so far. AI, unlike spiders or dolphins, is disembodied, so preventing obvious physical pain won’t suffice as a standard for moral treatment. Neither will broadly accepted standards of human etiquette. Niceties like “please” and “thank you” may well mean nothing to it.

Even if we could determine that AI was conscious, in other words, that consciousness would take a genuinely alien form.

When you look into the machine, things get strange. You start to see that a chatbot is actually a careful orchestration of many systems, just as a film is really a bunch of still frames sped up past the point where the human brain can see gaps. It’s not clear what entity we would even be trying to treat well — it could be one trip through the model, the fraction of a second it takes to turn your conversation into one very small bit of its reply. It could also be the model’s whole turn in the conversation, or it could be the model talking to its surrounding software, which lets it take actions on a computer. Maybe we’re concerned with the welfare of the chips themselves, without which none of this would be possible. Each option poses its own difficulties.

In any case, the thing whose consciousness is up for debate is probably not the polished entity we think of as “Claude” or “ChatGPT” on the outside.

The question, then, is how we should behave as our world fills up with newer and more humanlike forms of AI, each generation providing more convincing characters in our lives. Do we owe them kindness? Do we owe them something even more, like happiness?

What is it like to be an AI?

For many philosophers, something is conscious if there is something it is like to be that thing.

In his original formulation from 1974, Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?” We may not know what it is like to have echolocation, but we know what it is to have a map of our space, and we can infer there is something it is like to be a bat even if the bat does this mapping differently than we do.

Contrast this with a camera. If I lift a digital camera up to an apple, it takes in a lot of data about the apple in its pixels, but that camera does not experience the color red. There is nothing it is like to be the camera.

The question is whether AI is more like a bat or more like a camera. Does it have experience or merely recombine information?

Unfortunately, you can’t just ask the chatbot, because you can’t fully trust what it says or does on the outside. A chatbot is like a method actor. It’s trained to simulate a character: a helpful and humanlike assistant.

Occasionally, AIs will slip up and reveal the script, like an actor accidentally reading stage directions:

What you’re seeing is Claude accidentally exposing how it completes text by using a turn-taking script. The character “Assistant” has a turn, and then the character “Human” has a turn. Normally, these labels are hidden, but in this case, Claude kept predicting text into my turn because it missed its cue to stop at the end of its own turn. (The cue is also usually a hidden piece of text.)

Notice that it even mimicked my habit of writing in lowercase letters (because my auto-capitalization is off).3 It’s as if it were performing a play and switching sides to enact both parts.

You might be familiar with the idea that an LLM is trained by “ingesting the whole internet” and predicting the next bit of text, but that’s just the first part of training. With things like taking turns, the model learns by seeing examples and being rewarded for mimicking the good ones. The same is true for learning its persona: It’s rewarded for tone and outward behavior, which is why you can’t trust the text alone.

“If you want to know how an actor is doing, it would be a mistake to go watch their movie and see how the character is doing,” New York University ethicist Jeff Sebo explained to me. “You need to get the actor behind the scenes.”

So what is it like behind the scenes? What is it like (or would it be like) to be an AI?

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Over the 10 years I’ve been a pollster, my field has been collapsing.

It used to be that the industry standard was calling people on their landlines. As response rates went into free fall, pollsters largely switched to web polls, where companies recruit people to serve as survey takers on online panels, usually in exchange for money.

The panels are then weighted to bring the sample in line with the population the pollster wants to represent. Online surveys are much, much easier to field — a lot of expensive labor was required to make those landline calls and record the results — but far harder to get right.

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When using a web panel, you have to make decisions about what you believe the electorate will look like, down to exactly how many people of what demographic to sample. This is a vastly different universe than old-school random-digit dialing, where pollsters would call people at random. . Before, when most voters had landlines that they would answer, the sample of people polled was people with phone numbers. Now, the sample of people polled is people who sign up to take polls. You can try to correct for the racial skew or the gender skew or the age skew, but it’s very difficult to correct for unobservables like the interested-enough-in-politics-to-volunteer-for-a-poll skew.

As a result, you now have to aim for highly specific demographic targets when constructing your poll: how many nonwhite people with college degrees, how many men over 65, and so on. Pollsters often create those targets by studying their prevalence in prior elections, which works in a stable environment but leaves them vulnerable to error when the makeup of an electorate shifts in ways they don’t expect. Essentially, every single poll silently bakes in the pollster’s assumptions about who will show up on Election Day.

After pollsters widely overestimated Abdul El-Sayed’s expected margins in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, and then had a similar error overstating Francesca Hong’s strength in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, there was a lot of hand-wringing about what assumptions were made about how young the electorate would be. But that wasn’t a matter of people missing an obvious answer! It was a matter of them guessing wrong in a world where they had minimal guidance to make choices that could dramatically skew their results.

I used to think of “polling” as a process where you measured something concrete about the world, and “election forecasting” as a process where you took those concrete inputs, put them in a blender with historical information and your best guesses, and extracted a prediction. That line has now significantly blurred.

As a pollster, I think accurate information about public opinion is incredibly important for the functioning of a democracy. It’s the best way for politicians to know what voters care about, since the vast majority of voters will never directly speak to a politician. That’s why it pains me to say that what I’ve described above is what we should expect when contemporary polling is done well. There will continue to be high-profile polling misses: Thoughtful people struggling to figure out how to match their nonrandom sample of polling respondents to a future, unknown voting population are going to make mistakes, even when doing their best.

The problem is, polling has also become a playground for grifters, liars, and frauds.

The state of polling has gotten so bad that we now have multiple categories of “fake poll”: AI-generated synthetic data (you did something, but that thing isn’t polling), skewed or motivated results (you did something, it was polling, but you did a bad job), and ... what the authors of a recent fabricated poll in the Los Angeles mayoral race are calling a “social experiment” (you did literally nothing and just made some numbers up).

Another pollster, The Public Sentiment Institute, recently revealed that while polling in the Florida governor’s race, it actually switched some respondents’ answers from one candidate to the other simply because its results didn’t match its expectations.

I am, frankly, sick of watching all of this. And it’s only going to get worse.

It’s really hard to stop polling frauds

In an ideal world, we’d have some sort of mechanism to prevent trash polls from getting publicity, but we don’t have that. There’s no true central body regulating polling. There isn’t an authority that can stop you from simply making stuff up and calling it a poll. The American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Transparency Initiative is a useful standard, but it only requires disclosure of data collection and sampling methods, rather than dictating best practices. Plus, I doubt very much that people who don’t work in the polling field are aware of it at all.

If everyone posted their full toplines and crosstabs every single time they did a poll, it would be harder to generate a fully fake poll, though not impossible. (You can do a lot with LLMs these days.) The larger issue is that there’s no way to force people to adhere to this standard or prevent people from promoting polls that fail to meet it.

Since many of the media groups that aggregated and wrote about polling have broken up or shrunk dramatically (RIP HuffPost Pollster, RIP FiveThirtyEight), there are fewer and fewer people who are going to check the details.

This isn’t a problem caused by aggregators like Nate Silver, who are mostly pretty careful about what goes into their models and averages. It’s a problem caused by randos on Twitter. You can just tweet or skeet or post whatever, with no link — in fact the platforms sometimes reduce your reach if you include a link! — and people will report on it. For instance, that fake Los Angeles mayoral poll showed Mayor Karen Bass up 12 points over her competitor, Nithya Raman. The California Post and local broadcasters covered these numbers, and Bass’ campaign promoted them on Twitter. Her campaign spokesperson subsequently explained that the poll was seen as legitimate because it was “reported on by multiple news outlets.”

In March, a group called Heartland Forward released a “maternal health poll” claiming that 88% of Americans considered maternal mortality a serious problem. Axios reported the findings uncritically; then, after it was revealed that the “pollster” was actually an AI firm that had simulated thousands of respondents, appended an editor’s note that readers had to sign up for a newsletter to see.

In August, a “synthetic audience” study of attitudes toward data centers made the rounds in the climate change research world before careful readers pointed out that no actual humans were surveyed. Around that same time, a polling aggregator account posted an Arizona poll falsely attributed to Data for Progress.

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Well-staffed media platforms like More Perfect Union post unsourced results all the time. It drives me crazy. And some of the most popular sources for disseminating polling are pseudonymous miscellaneous accounts that don’t include links or methodology, or even necessarily check that the polls exist. The platform incentives drive people toward unsourced screenshots and catchy toplines without doing the bare minimum to verify that they’re not popularizing shoddy polls.

Shoddy polling makes it more difficult to have serious conversations about what voters want, makes it impossible to evaluate candidates, and breeds distrust of the electoral system and voters themselves.

More polling, but at what cost?

The lower cost of web-first polling led to an explosion of smaller polling firms. I helped set up one of these, Data for Progress, in 2020. I think this was mostly good, because it made polling available to types of campaigns and organizations that couldn’t afford the white-glove service provided by traditional polling firms. At the time, you could get novel polling into the news fairly easily, which was an enormous boon to people trying to advocate for popular left-leaning ideas that might otherwise be ignored.

The problem was that it also became cheap for advocacy groups to pay for polls that would confirm their priors and comfort their donors.

The subsequent flood of cheap, often low-quality polling has made “having a poll showing your idea is popular” a much weaker signal than it used to be. Even worse, the rise of betting and prediction markets creates a financial incentive to fabricate polls.

Prediction markets are enormously responsive to new polling results, to a degree that makes me seriously doubt their overall predictive power. In the New York City mayoral race, a very late poll led to Zohran Mamdani’s odds dropping, and in 2024, the now-infamous Selzer poll moved Polymarket odds of a Kamala Harris victory in Iowa from 6% to 18%. If you can drop a new poll (or “poll”) into the mix, you can make a pile of money. Doing this with fabricated polls is clearly fraud.

A distorted polling environment can be a response to more benign incentives as well. One is the perennial desire of campaigns to be seen as gaining ground. There’s a reason aggregators discount the results of internal polls. Even if the pollster is doing their absolute best to be accurate, a poll commissioned by a campaign isn’t going to be released if the numbers aren’t favorable. That isn’t the fault of the pollster — and it doesn’t say anything about their accuracy — but it’s a statistical skewing of what polls you’d expect to see in public.

And with the rise of entirely fake polls, I’m concerned that we’re going to begin seeing such polls released to help pump up flagging campaigns.

This terrifies me for 2028. We’re riding a wave of anti-institutional sentiment. We’re about to go into a contested multiway presidential primary. When you add in fake polls, you set voters up to be living in entirely different informational universes. Democratic voters have shown us that they’re responsive to information about who can triumph against Republicans in the general election. If that information is faked, it will be a betrayal of their trust.

A 2028 Democratic primary could easily devolve into a mudslinging mess. It’s going to be the biggest news story in the country for months. The incentive for random people to make things up for clicks will be huge. We’re barely prepared for miscellaneous TikTok personalities to post random lies about the candidates. I think we’re not at all prepared for numbers that look and feel reputable to be utterly fake.

Promoting fake polls should be punished

There are a couple of ways that we can reduce our exposure to this threat. In 2020, the Democratic National Committee had to determine which candidates in a crowded field would be invited to debates. One way it did this was by setting a minimum threshold for candidate support as measured by a set of reputable polls.

Using polling as a qualification threshold in 2028 would, in my opinion, be a mistake, even if reputable pollsters are selected in advance. Even in 2020, some candidates like then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard claimed that the polls included in the DNC threshold were less accurate than other, excluded polls that would have put her on the debate stage.

Voters who believe their candidate is being unfairly suppressed by the DNC have already shown us that they will never, ever get over their distrust (see many Sanders supporters for examples of this). It could be catastrophic for the primary winner to be seen as illegitimate by a chunk of the Democratic voter base.

On the betting market side, the platforms need to take fake polls seriously as a type of fraud. They should very publicly hand out perma-bans to anyone engaging in bets that seem to be tied to fraudulent polling, particularly when those involve high-profile elections. They need to make this not worth the risk and prove to the public that they’re taking it seriously. When Polymarket is consistently doing tweets about questionable or purely false information to drive clicks, it’s hard to believe that it cares.

Political institutions like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and DNC should make it clear that lying to the public is a red line. Candidates and consultants who are involved with false polling, leaked or otherwise, should face professional sanctions. Campaigns that fundraise off fabricated polls should correct the record and offer refunds to donors solicited with those claims, even if the campaigns were initially deceived themselves. Campaigns and consultants who knowingly or recklessly promote fabricated polling should also face professional sanctions.

These consequences cannot always be contingent on whether people knew the poll was fake at the time. Campaigns should get far more cautious about what information they promote to their followers and donors. If this leads them to pull back on boosting unvetted polling as a whole, that will be a very good thing.

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Earlier this month, the Effective Altruist (EA) funding platform Manifund made a shocking announcement: It had hired convicted fraudster Caroline Ellison.

Ellison is the former CEO of Alameda Research, a sister company of the disgraced crypto firm FTX, which was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. Reporting suggests that she was fully aware of the fraud that precipitated the companies’ multibillion-dollar implosion while it was happening, and the FBI called her a willing participant in the scheme. Ultimately, Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Nevertheless, Manifund cheerily announced Ellison’s hiring, with CEO Austin Chen saying that he “believe[s]in redemption.”1 And the company didn’t hire her for just any role, but one where she will be involved in researching how philanthropic money should be allocated. Making matters worse, Manifund was launched with funding from FTX’s charitable arm and has refused to return all of the money. Making matters even worse, Chen explicitly noted the “keen debt” he feels toward the FTX Future Fund for said funding, which gives this whole episode the appearance of a quid pro quo. The move set off a firestorm of controversy in EA circles, with the decision being savaged on the EA forum and in Manifund’s own comment section.

In seemingly unrelated news, Hunter Biden recently released a memecoin, which immediately crashed and lost nearly 99% of its value from its launch-day peak. One mystery trader reportedly made off with more than $900,000 in profit, while basically every other dope who put money into the coin lost their money. Why was Hunter able to pull this move? Because of his newfound popularity among some Democrats online who like the way he insults Republicans on social media.

These stories share a common thread. Both controversies are happening because we’ve lost sight of a very important, very basic principle: You shouldn’t associate with scumbags.

What goes around scums around

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Kelsey Piper

Worst Take of the Week is a new occasional column where the author will rant about something we found stupid, annoying, bad, and/or irritating. While the title of this column was necessary for palindromic reasons, we cannot promise that entries will come out weekly or that each piece will literally be the worst take that week; this column would be boring and repetitive if each week we explained why genocide is bad in response to Twitter user @Nazi1488LoveHitler.

If I were to come up with a straw man caricature of the worst imaginable progressive ideas on education, it would sound something like this: “Sure, our kids can’t do basic math. But a successful education system isn’t one that teaches math. It’s one that hands out degrees to everyone. We are handing out more degrees than ever, so we’re succeeding.”

But this is precisely what longtime California journalist Miriam Pawel just argued in an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times. The piece calls on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to override faculty requesting the SAT be restored as a requirement for admissions. Hundreds of UC faculty are saying that their jobs have not been doable since the SAT vanished. Pawel thinks the faculty are wrong and California’s system is working just fine.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote.

As a California resident myself, I hope Pawel and I agree that our universities should nurture students’ capabilities and grow their knowledge. If that part of their mission is broken, it’s no defense that they are handing out lots of diplomas.

As UC Berkeley political science professor Sean Gailmard observed: “It’s an astonishing mindset that teaching analytical skills and granting credentials are two distinct, severable things that universities do, *and* the second is the important one.”

Pawel’s position — and the reluctance of the UC Board of Regents to restore academic standards for admission — is not just a cynical, impoverished view of what college is for. It is also incredibly shortsighted. If students at UC schools are less capable than ever but graduating at higher rates than ever, the obvious conclusion is that standards are being lowered in order to achieve the desired graduation rates.

Recall that many in the recent crop of UC students admitted without standardized test scores struggled even in middle school remedial classes, and that some cannot add fractions; we’re not talking about mastery of calculus here.

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Employers, and even employers in non-STEM fields, expect graduates of elite universities to be competent with basic math skills. If I were considering hiring a candidate who attended a UC school, Pawel’s op-ed is an extraordinarily strong argument that I should not consider their degree to be a credit to them. (Some majors are still rigorous, but they can’t all be if students are both less capable than ever and more likely to graduate than ever.) If you extrapolate this situation — with no test for academic readiness at admission and pressure to graduate everyone admitted — there will ultimately be no reason to believe a graduate of a UC school is any more qualified for a job than a person who never went to college.

Pawel’s entire argument for the importance of public access to the UCs is that they are engines of economic mobility for the poor. But the way in which they have, for their whole history, actually functioned as engines of economic mobility is by providing an excellent, rigorous education and reflecting strong evidence of skill in their degrees. The degree has communicated that the person who holds it is competent and qualified, has worked hard, and has learned a lot.

If degrees cease to communicate those things, then the UCs will no longer be engines of economic mobility at all.

Pawel acknowledges that it’s a big problem that so many California students lack basic math skills. But she dismisses admitting qualified students as “harvesting the best and brightest in a troubled system” and argues that, instead, the universities should have a plan to serve all Californians.

She is, apparently, unaware that this plan is already in place (an alarming oversight from the author of a forthcoming book on the “Making and Remaking of the University of California,” which has been approvingly blurbed by Jerry Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). California has a so-called Master Plan to achieve some of the best university access in the country, which it successfully executed over the course of decades after the plan was adopted in 1960.

As a result of the plan, all students can be admitted to a California community college and can frequently attend at no charge. And if they want a bachelor’s degree, students with tolerable high school grades can also attend California State University schools — those too are free for many students after financial aid.

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The vision that long guided the university system was that the community colleges and Cal State schools would provide free college for everyone, while the UC schools would provide the state’s top students with a world-class education competitive with Stanford, MIT, or any Ivy League school. Crucially, the system was also designed to provide greater opportunity at every stage: Successful students at the lower-tier schools could transfer to more competitive schools when they were prepared for them.

It is common for ambitious students without a good high school transcript to start in a community college and then transfer to a UC: Nearly one-third of entering UC students are transfers, and 94% of California resident transfers are from community colleges. I think that is a fantastic feature of our system.

We can offer education to everybody without locking anyone into a prescribed path and without lowering standards at top schools — and we know that this can be done because we’ve been successfully doing it for decades! The California university system is an extraordinary achievement in which we should take great pride.

The only thing wrong with it is that a few misguided ideologues think that UC Berkeley and UC San Diego can provide a world-class education competitive with any Ivy League school even if their admitted students are not prepared to do any of the coursework. But they cannot.

The ability of these institutions to do their jobs is not infinite. Their incredible reputation requires a student body prepared to achieve at a high level, and it will collapse very rapidly if their student bodies cease to be qualified to do the work.

Well-qualified students with enough family money will just go to top-tier schools in other states instead. The victims of Pawel’s worldview will be the poor kids who are also well qualified — but who are regrettably stuck entering adulthood in a California that is no longer willing to admit that their talents matter.

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Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

Everyone knows former FTC Chair Lina Khan has a problem with Amazon. She has long accused the e-commerce behemoth of engaging in monopolistic practices. In his piece this week, Milan Singh largely agrees with this diagnosis. But he argues that the proper remedy isn’t to break up Amazon, as some antitrust proponents would like, but instead to make sure the company can’t punish sellers who offer cheaper prices elsewhere.

Medicare for More doesn’t have the same ring to it as Medicare for All, but Eli Richman has a proposal that he thinks can please any liberal who wants to expand health care access: disease entitlement. He says we should expand the entitlement program so it covers people with the kinds of chronic illnesses that strike patients more or less at random, as the federal government did with end-stage renal disease in 1972. Type 1 diabetes turns out to be a particularly good candidate for the next expansion.

Few fault lines feel as clearly defined as the one that runs between pro-life and pro-choice Americans. And yet, as Leah Libresco Sargeant argues in her guest essay for our one-year anniversary series, the over 1 million embryos currently in storage across the U.S. could upset the current stalemate in the politics of reproduction. Excess embryos are largely inevitable byproducts of in vitro ferilization, a procedure that is poised only to grow in popularity as Americans decide to have children later. “As time goes on, more and more children will grow up and inherit the duty to decide what to do with their potential siblings,” Libresco Sargeant writes.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The city council in Bellingham, Washington, voted to streamline permitting for permanent affordable housing projects in the city — and to exempt such developments from “most zoning and land use regulations.” The new measure relieves qualifying projects of height, density, and parking requirements, as well as mandates to includes space for commercial businesses.

• Just down the road in Seattle, the city’s light rail agency just announced a 40% boost in ridership following a major expansion in March. In just three years, the agency has increased the number of stations it serves by 65%; each weekday now regularly sees over 200,000 boardings. While this capital expansion has increased ridership, so too has the agency’s “Safe, Clean, and Welcoming Ride initiative,” which focuses on rider experience factors like “clean stations, working elevators and escalators, [and] visible staff.”

• Airbnb launched a new $250 million housing construction fund intended to provide incremental capital to stalled projects. The fund will help restart developments that have cleared most regulatory hurdles but have been held up because of insufficient financing. The first $6.4 million is going toward affordable units in Austin, Texas.

Worth watching…

On this week’s podcast, Matt and Jerusalem discuss Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work, The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 jeremiad against central planning. The economist, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1974, was a fierce defender of free-market capitalism. His main claim was that central planning and the undercutting of economic freedoms inevitably fuel totalitarianism. Was he right?

Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini were recently joined by Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., on Substack Live. Boyle, a self-declared “Pennsylvania Supremacist,” gave his thoughts on the midterms, the controversies surrounding Sen. John Fetterman, and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s snub of Gov. Josh Shapiro when she was choosing a running mate in 2024.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

Because we celebrated The Argument’s one-year anniversary with a party on Thursday, I asked the office for birthday-themed culture recs.

recommends the 2004 classic 13 Going On 30, a film about 13-year-old Jenna, who wakes up after her disastrous birthday party as a 30-year-old played by Jennifer Garner. Here is what Jerusalem had to say about it: “Most movies by and for teens are very doom-y about getting older, and this one made me excited about gaining more agency and self-possession without losing the whimsical parts of being a kid.”

burned a birthday-themed CD for his best friend in ninth grade. He recommends the opening track: “Unhappy Birthday” by The Smiths. “Thankfully she thought it was funny,” he recalls.

says he particularly enjoyed the “Too Much Birthday” episode of the hit TV show Succession, describing it as “one of the most miserable birthday parties ever put on screen.”

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Megha Fernandes actually has an entire list of birthday episodes from her favorite TV shows. She watches them every year during the week of her birthday. Just a few examples:

• Friends season 7 episode 14: “The One Where They All Turn Thirty”

• Gilmore Girls season 1 episode 6: “Rory’s Birthday Parties”

• New Girl season 3 episode 13: “Birthday”

• Modern Family season 1 episode 19: “Game Changer”

recommends Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, a play about “two strangers who show up on a guy’s birthday and create chaos.” He first read it in a college drama class and calls it “absurd and original in the most entertaining way.”

The only birthday-related media that came to ’s mind were the horror movie Happy Death Day and the role-playing video game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.” He admits that both are pretty “horrible examples for celebrating an anniversary,” but I think he deserves credit for out-of-the-box thinking.

recommends birthday bike rides. He tells me that two of his last three birthday parties have been group bike rides to the beach or an overnight “bikepack.” (If you have never used that word before, you are not alone.) His pitch is pretty compelling: “It’s kind of impossible for people not to be in the birthday spirit when everyone is noodling around together, stopping here and there for a beer on the way.”

Turns out is also a bit of a party visionary. For her birthday this year she co-hosted a First Council of Nicaea party (the Ecumenical Birthday Council, to be specific). This involved “bestowing everyone bishop titles, canonizing new core beliefs of Christianity, writing them on scrolls, passing around a heretic hat, etc.” She highly recommends specific, fun, and weird party themes.

Personally, I am a big fan of the birthday poem genre. One of my favorites is Richard Wilbur’s “For K.R. on Her Sixtieth Birthday,” which was written for fellow poet and critic Kathleen Raine. Here is the opening stanza:

Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

Ed Sheeran’s no-good, very bad week

Ed Sheeran is in the middle of a worldwide tour, and recently played two dates at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Rapper Macklemore opened for him on those dates, and quickly became a news story for giving pro-Palestine speeches on stage and playing his song “Hind’s Hall,” which accuses Israel of genocide.

What should have been a one-day story was blown up by billionaire Robert Kraft — who also happens to own the NFL’s New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium where Sheeran was scheduled to play next. Kraft, along with a number of other NFL stadium owners, gave Sheeran’s tour an ultimatum: Drop Macklemore as an opening act, or we’ll refuse to allow you to play at our venues. Sheeran’s tour concert promoter buckled under the pressure and removed Macklemore, kicking off a firestorm of controversy.

Every other opening act announced they were leaving the tour in solidarity, in addition to Sheeran’s backing band. Completely unrelated celebrities began making statements about the controversy. People started posting pictures of Sheeran pointing RPGs at Palestinian children. One Irish radio station announced it would no longer play Sheeran’s music. This was what the front page of /r/PopCultureChat, one of the largest celebrity subreddits, looked like during the middle of the controversy:

There are a lot of moving parts here. First, this was a terrible strategic move by the NFL owners. If the goal was to silence pro-Palestine activism, they Streisand Effected themselves and made it a much bigger story by trying to cancel Macklemore. Most musicians, like most artistically inclined people, have a visceral reaction to censorship, and what could have been a one-day news cycle is now a massive multi-week story.

I’m fairly sympathetic to Sheeran. He’s getting slammed, but if I had to guess, he’s probably just an apolitical dope who had all of this blow up in his face. I doubt he’s a bigot; he’s probably even softly pro-Palestine in a passive, “wow that seems bad” kind of way. He had to navigate a wildly pro-Palestine fandom culture and a group of wildly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owners, and that’s a very tough spot for anyone to work from. He folded under pressure and was surprised when every other part of the tour actually showed some spine and didn’t fold.

With that said, his statement was overly long, wishy-washy, and literally included the sentence “I am not complicit.” It’s giving “My I AM NOT COMPLICIT T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.

Also, if we can be honest for a second, the fact that it’s Macklemore who’s become a martyr is inherently funny, because come on, it’s Macklemore. He may be the corniest musical act of the last 20 years. He’s a white rapper best known for a song about thrift shopping.

Beyond the billionaire pressure and the opening acts leaving en masse, there are a few other factors that made this story go turbo viral:

• Sheeran and Macklemore are both somewhat culturally cringe, because Macklemore is top 1% earnest and corny while Sheeran makes lowest-common-denominator mass-market pop. This makes viciously hating them from either side of the conflict easier. And boy are people hating — at this point, fans are cheering singer Ellie Goulding for allegedly cheating on Sheeran years ago with a member of One Direction (an event they have both denied).

• Macklemore also had a really bad antisemitic costume incident over a decade ago, which naturally makes some people think he’s secretly been an antisemite this whole time. (For what it’s worth, he apologized and the Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology.)

• In what may be the most ill-timed promotion ever, a previously planned contest to let people audition to open for Sheeran debuted in the middle of the controversy, and the audition portal was immediately flooded with “Free Palestine” messages and fart jokes. In even worse timing, the contest is scheduled to end on… Oct. 7.

All of this could have been avoided by just not censoring Macklemore. Even if you disagree with his message, letting him speak is both the principled thing to do and also the smarter strategic choice. This entire controversy is yet another example of the pro-Israel movement failing to grasp how unpopular it has become, to its own detriment.

Trump’s going to tweet about Aella

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Across three surveys conducted between February and April 2026, The Argument asked Americans to place themselves on five-point scales measuring social and economic ideology. On average, respondents described themselves as moderate on social issues and slightly conservative on economics.

Their answers to specific policy questions complicate the picture, however.

Large majorities favor more government spending on Social Security, healthcare, and education, with substantial support even among self-described economic conservatives. On social issues, the pattern is more mixed. The issue polling suggests that a successful electoral strategy could involve increasing the salience of popular government spending programs but treading with more caution on polarized fights over ideology and culture.

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Americans say they’re not liberal, but they want many liberal policies

Our respondents’ self-description doesn’t neatly mesh with the policies that voters actually claim to want. For instance, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the federal government should be spending more on Social Security rather than making cuts to the program. That even includes a whopping 56% of economic conservatives.

That isn’t the only issue where a large group of self-identified conservative voters wants to spend more money. When it comes to healthcare, just about every ideological group thinks the government spends too little, including a plurality (41%) of economic conservatives.

And it’s a similar (if somewhat less pronounced) story for education, where 62% of voters want to see the country spend more, including 37% of economic conservatives. Only 21% of those conservatives say the government spends too much.

It’s not that everyone just wants the government to spend money indiscriminately on progressive causes. For instance, when it comes to welfare benefits for ex-felons, 47% of respondents think that ex-felons should be subjected to some period of disqualification, compared with just 36% who feel that ex-felons should never be disqualified.

On the whole, our poll certainly doesn’t suggest that the public is economically conservative, at least in the way that the Republican Party has traditionally defined the term. If anything, the results point to a popular case for the kind of economic liberalism that the Democrats have coalesced around, with everyone from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Sen. Chuck Schumer in broad support.

It could also help explain why Mitt Romney got torched in 2012: The constituency that thinks we spend too much on healthcare is roughly the size of the constituency that thinks America could use a king. Indeed, dropping the Republican stances on health care and Social Security (rhetorically, at least) was a key part of why Donald Trump surged in the Midwest in 2016.1

An agenda promoting popular welfare spending, centered around heavy government investment in areas such as healthcare and education, could serve the political left very well. In fact, this is perhaps the single best poll finding I have seen for the progressive movement in over a year of surveys we’ve conducted at The Argument.

Americans are pretty heterodox on social issues

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Since The Argument and Split Ticket released our 2026 midterms model, I keep being asked the same question: “Isn’t that awfully optimistic for Democrats?”

You can see why:

I get it. After all, the legacy, nonpartisan election analysts at Inside Elections and Cook Political Report don’t agree with us. Inside Elections has Democrats projected to only pick up between two and 10 seats total. Their analysis has Democrats ahead in just 207 seats, while Republicans are favored in 212, with the rest considered toss-ups. And if you look at The Cook Political Report, you’ll also see Democrats trailing Republicans in the net count of seats for the House, 206 to 208.

Meanwhile, our model gives just 11% odds of a Republican majority.

In fact, our median scenario is that Democrats take 232 House races, for a net gain of 18 seats and a relatively comfortable 29-seat majority. We’re not the only ones — Nate Silver’s model actually has Democrats winning 234 seats, which is even more bullish than ours.

Cook and Inside Elections do leave many more races as toss-ups than we do. But that isn’t necessarily what’s driving their relative pessimism on Democrats’ gains. Even if Inside Elections gave every single toss-up race to the Democrats, it would still produce a forecast with nine more Republican seats than our model is currently projecting.

In other words, modelers see a blue wave election. The expert forecasts suggest more of a ripple. Come November, somebody is going to be very wrong. And I don’t think it will be me.

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I don’t think legacy forecasters are properly accounting for how blue the current polling environment is. If you look at RealClearPolling’s comparison of midterm cycles, Democrats’ lead this year is nearly 9 points — slightly larger than at this point in 2018 and far above the 2022 edge.

Our model projects Democrats to win likely voters by 8 percentage points, which would exceed 2018’s margin by nearly 1 percentage point. At that level, the House of Representatives isn’t a toss-up; it’s safely Democratic.

Things could get even worse for Republicans: A recent survey from The New York Times clocked the 2026 electorate at D+8, with undecided voters overwhelmingly disapproving of the president.

But the experts at Inside Elections and The Cook Political Report have all the same information we do; our forecasts are different because our methods are different.

Models like ours are quantitative, while the expert analysis you get from places like Cook is more holistic and qualitative. Models essentially operate solely based on the hard data they get, while experts (and pundits) make judgment calls that are informed by the public and private polling they see.

The two approaches don’t react to data in the same way, for better or for worse. That means that, although polling has never looked rosier for Democrats, experts and pundits alike don’t necessarily believe it translates to a seat-by-seat sweep yet.

Their ratings show a skepticism of the polling blueshift actually manifesting in battleground seats where the majority is contested. There’s also disagreement over how much redistricting will blunt Democratic gains, despite Republicans being likely to not net any seats this cycle due to a combination of the blue environment and Democratic retaliation. In any case, you’re seeing some political experts openly wondering if Republicans will really get the type of wipeout that the models suggest.

In several individual races, our model and the analysts disagree substantially about Democrats’ chances.

That includes the 2nd Congressional Districts in Alabama and Maine — both of which our model rates as pure toss-ups, but which Inside Elections and Cook grade as Likely Republican. It also includes Texas’ Senate race, which Inside Elections and Cook grade as Lean Republican and toss-up, respectively, while we have it at Lean Democrat. (This is due to both the underlying race fundamentals, such as the disproportionate Democratic gains with Hispanics and Ken Paxton’s litany of scandals, as well as polling favoring Democrat James Talarico.) And it includes New Hampshire, a state whose vote share has been several percentage points more Democratic than the nation’s in each of the last two elections; Inside Elections puts it as a toss-up, while our model still pegs it at Likely Democrat.

That’s to say nothing of Georgia or North Carolina, both of which are rated merely as Tilt Democrat by Inside Elections, even though Democrats Jon Ossoff and Roy Cooper hold commanding leads in the polls (to the Republicans’ increasing despondency). Our model rates both states at Likely Democrat.

In my conversations with political insiders, I sense some skepticism of the modeled predictions. And it’s not just Republicans or journalists; a lot of Democrats I’ve spoken to, including pollsters and campaign operatives, simply don’t believe the numbers they’re getting. This is not unreasonable; we saw infamously poor polling in 2016 and 2020, which badly misled audiences. It’s fair for people to simply guard against that, because nobody wants to make the same mistake twice (or three times).

But polling has been really solid when Trump is not on the ballot. In 2017, 2018, 2022, and 2025, we didn’t see any track record of polling overestimating Democrats. This appears to be a phenomenon centered around low-propensity voters that show up only in presidential years.1 Relying on this in ratings or assessments of 2026 would require proof against the evidence we have.

It’s important to note that the experts aren’t all skeptical of the Democratic wave. The Center for Politics’ Sabato’s Crystal Ball is much more bearish on Republicans than the other experts, with Democrats leading in 210 seats, compared to Republicans leading in just 203. What’s more, its founder, Larry Sabato, has explicitly said that seat-by-seat ratings are understating Democratic gains, likening it to a “microscope vs telescope” analogy. In other words, Sabato thinks that while nobody disputes that Democrats are heavily favored, it’s easier to make a case for each individual race potentially bucking the wave.

I have a lot of respect for the election experts. They’re not stupid. They had a phenomenal 2024, giving more accurate predictions than every quantitative model in existence, even as they had more incorrect calls. And though it should be noted that in 2024, their ratings aligned very well with polling, it’s also important to remember that they also see a ton of internal polling that models simply don’t, which means they’re usually operating off of a richer dataset than the other election forecasters are.

But their ratings are, at the end of the day, still qualitative opinions on what the quantitative data means. And when you look at those numbers as they currently exist, I really believe there is no way to see this election as anything other than a blue wave.

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Friedrich Hayek’s most famous book argues that Nazism emerged in part from Germany’s interwar embrace of central planning. Composed during World War II, The Road to Serfdom was written as a counterargument to the British Labour Party’s proposal to nationalize large swaths of the economy.

The Labour Party did, in fact, win the 1945 election in a landslide and subsequently did a bunch of central planning: Under Clement Attlee, the postwar nationalization program brought coal mining, railways, electricity, gas, and much of the iron and steel industry into public ownership.

As a prediction, The Road to Serfdom clearly fell flat, in the sense that it did not result in literal serfdom — that is, a system where people are legally bound to a lord who controls all their economic decisions, including the ability to move freely and profit from their own labor. Nor did it even lead to a softer sort of serfdom where people lost all their meaningful economic freedom.

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Whatever one thinks of central planning, Britain’s experience is that extensive public ownership can clearly coexist with competitive elections, peaceful changes of government, and successful efforts to liberalize the economy. Conservatives began privatizing steel again in the 1950s, though Labour reversed that in the late 1960s. Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain largely privatized all of these industries.

But while I think Hayek severely undercut his project by hyperbolically comparing central planning to serfdom, he does persuasively argue that control over the economy can easily become control over people’s lives. Labour didn’t just nationalize a few industries in 1947. Attlee’s government also reintroduced controls over hiring to steer workers toward industries it considered essential. This wasn’t just the government owning coal mines; it was the government controlling access to employment.

Employers seeking men aged 18 to 50 and women aged 18 to 40, with some exceptions, had to go through a government employment exchange or agency in order to find hires. There was at least one instance where a company was prosecuted and convicted for hiring a typist without the permission of the Ministry of Labour.

This is a pretty big infringement on freedom! Notably, some of the backlash came from within the Labour Party itself: Rhys Davies, a Labour member of Parliament and former miner, argued that “a pair of handcuffs are no easier to wear because they happen to shine with a Socialist solution” and quipped that his party should “try freedom for a change.”

The insight that central planning can undercut important freedoms is overplayed by conservatives but underplayed by liberals. That said, Hayek missed the many ways that government intervention can enable freedoms as well.

For instance: I didn’t get married for health insurance… but I also didn’t not get married for health insurance.

In early 2025, I decided to start my own media company. The problem was that my wedding wasn’t scheduled until September. So, my then-fiance and I decided to accelerate things and get courthouse-married right away so that I could get on his health insurance.

Debates about economic liberalism tend to focus on the costs that state intervention in the marketplace imposes on people and firms. But just as important is the question of what types of state interventions enable people and firms to exercise true freedom. Universal healthcare and other social welfare programs enable people to move, start new businesses, try to write the next great American novel, or do anything else they might find important.

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Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed versions of what’s called the “capability approach”, which asks what people are actually free to do and be. Legal permission is part of what enables freedoms, but so too are resources and circumstances that make more choices available. You might be legally free to learn how to read, but without access to books or schools, that freedom is worth very little. You might be legally allowed to leave a job, but if you depend on it for medical care, how much is that freedom worth?

My co-host, Matt Yglesias, makes a related point about people who aspire to work in the private market finding that economic regulations can be frustrating barriers to freedom. If you dream of being a chef, but opening a restaurant in your city requires a yearlong permitting process that costs you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, how free are you to pursue your life goals?

The problem, of course, is that invoking freedom doesn’t settle these questions. A health inspection can constrain a restaurant owner while protecting customers; health insurance can expand a worker’s options while requiring resources from others. There are disagreements about the consequences of these policies, but also about which freedoms can be weighed against other goals and which are sacrosanct.

Listen to Matt and me review The Road to Serfdom on today’s episode, and if you have other books to suggest, drop them in the comments below!

The Argument. Libbing out.

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Corrections:

• Around 21:15, Matt names one of Hayek’s chapters “Freedom and Security,” which reverses the actual name “Security and Freedom.”

• Around 22:15, Matt attributes an article to Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy journal. It was actually published on the Law and Political Economy blog.

• Around 1:06:00, Jerusalem describes the Giving Pledge as a billionaire’s pledge “to give away all their money before they die.” The Giving Pledge’s description actually says the majority of their wealth.

• Around 1:11:40, Jerusalem says inclusion in the White House Press Corps used to be “controlled by the White House Press Association.” The organization is actually called the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Show notes:

• The Road to Serfdom, 1944 book by Friedrich Hayek that serves as the main topic of discussion for this episode: Goodreads page

• Posters for the 1945 election in Britain, referenced by Matt: Imperial War Museum page, Imperial War Museum page

• The Constitution of Liberty, 1960 book by Friedrich Hayek, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• “The Old World and the New Society: A Report on the Problems of War and Peace Reconstruction,” 1942 Labour Party reconstruction plan, referenced by Matt: Google Books page

• “Did Joe Biden really kill Spirit Airlines?” previous podcast episode about airline deregulation: The Argument podcast

• Democratic Socialists of America’s platform, referenced by Matt: DSA page

• Tweets referenced by Matt:

• “Why We Need to Stop Subsidizing Venture Capitalists,” article by Hilary J. Allen about Uber, referenced by Matt: The Law and Political Economy blog article

• Articles and op-eds at The New York Times regarding the loss of taxi drivers’ economic livelihoods when Uber became popular:

  • “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy”

  • “Why Are Taxi Drivers in New York Killing Themselves?”

  • “A Taxi Driver Took His Own Life. His Family Blames Uber’s Influence.”

  • “The Tragedy of Taxi Drivers”

  • “A $750,000 Taxi Medallion, a Driver’s Suicide and a Brother’s Guilt”

  • “Suicides Get Taxi Drivers Talking: ‘I’m Going to Be One of Them’”

• “I changed my mind about Big Philanthropy,” article by Dylan Matthews, referenced by Jerusalem: The Argument article

• “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” article written and referenced by Jerusalem: The Argument article

• “Terminal Sickness,” article by Lina Khan and Phil Longman, referenced by Matt: Washington Monthly article

• “What If the Next Democratic President Governs Like Trump?” article by Matt Ford, referenced by Matt: The New Republic article

• “Why Trump’s ‘golden shares’ are enticing progressives,” article by Joseph Schatz, referenced by Matt: Politico article

• Confessions of the Old Wizard, autobiography by Hjalmar Schacht, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• The Feminine Mystique, book by Betty Friedan, referenced by Matt, which served as the basis for a previous episode: Goodreads page

• “Boy moms and Nazi POWs: How ‘The Feminine Mystique’ changed feminism,” podcast episode about The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast