Join us live on Nov. 17 at 1 p.m. ET as The Argument’s Kobe Yank-Jacobs hosts a Substack Live debate between philosophers Nick Bostrom and Ned Block: Can AI be conscious?

Bostrom imagines a universe populated by billions of digital minds. Block is skeptical that consciousness can happen on computer chips at all. The two eminent thinkers will make their case, and Kobe will press them on where they disagree and why it matters.

Add to your calendar here

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 the Jensen Huang scandal, the prevalence of foreign influence campaigns on social media, whether or not young men are normal now, and how platforms keep losing the battle to declare their design choices as speech.

Jensen Huang’s very bad week

Over the past two weeks, Jensen Huang, the longtime CEO and co-founder of chipmaking giant Nvidia, has gone from arguably the most powerful man in AI to ousted from his company in a sordid sex-and-espionage scandal. Huang had been doing some, ahem, parallel processing with Alice Huang,1 who U.S. officials say is a Chinese spy.2

Even before the potential espionage revelation, the affair mattered for reasons beyond personal impropriety. Alice Huang was an executive at AI infrastructure company Megaspeed, which was under investigation for allegedly smuggling advanced Nvidia chips into China in defiance of U.S. export controls. The New York Times has reported that the Commerce Department investigation had to be transferred to the Justice Department after it was compromised by, you guessed it, Nvidia.

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It paints a troubling picture: Jensen Huang has a relationship with a Chinese spy, then his company coincidentally happens to sell advanced chips to several companies she’s linked to, and those chips end up being smuggled into China in violation of federal law. On its own, this might be enough to topple Huang from his perch at Nvidia, but adding fuel to the fire, the Times reported Wednesday that Huang had a second affair with one of his direct reports.

And as a wise man once said:

Sure enough, Reuters is now reporting a third affair (and I’d be surprised if that’s where it stops). Huang has since resigned.

There are too many angles to this story to cover in one article, and rather than try, I’ll link you to a few good resources: a complete timeline of events, a discussion of what this means for China hawks and AI safety, and an analysis of how the episode exposes the weaknesses of Silicon Valley’s “cult of the founder.”

But this being The Weekly Scroll, there is one angle in particular that I think is worth covering: When the story first broke, I noticed a number of odd accounts with unusually strong pro-Huang takes. According to Tyler Johnston of the Midas Project, these were part of a network of hundreds of sock-puppet accounts all using the same talking points to defend Huang’s reputation.

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Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, and staff writers (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.

Today’s Mad Libs grew out of the firestorm over the publication of The Argument’s Maibritt Henkel’s “My weekend with the ‘sex-realist’ feminists” late last month.

No issue divides liberal feminists from their sex-realist counterparts quite like — you guessed it — gender. Sex-realists emphatically reject the idea that womanhood has anything to do with identification, arguing instead that it has everything to do with biology.

For sex-realists, feminism begins with the bodily differences between men and women. For liberal feminists, the point of feminism is to make those differences matter less.

So we invited Elizabeth Grace Matthew, a sex-realist feminist who writes the newsletter Restoring American Adulthood, to debate Maibritt directly on how feminists should think about sex and gender.

Mad Libs is for paid subscribers, so subscribe to get more content like this in your inbox!

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- Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

Elizabeth Grace Matthew:

As a sex-realist feminist, I believe both that women are fundamentally, intrinsically equal to men and that women are definitionally, biologically different from men.

Right-coded anti-feminists reject the first principle in deference to the neopagan misogyny of gender essentialism; they believe that men are superior to women and that the sexes must have distinct roles. Meanwhile, left-coded mainstream feminists reject the second principle in deference to the pseudoscience of gender ideology; they cannot define the word “woman.”

This dominant form of feminism today rejects the reality of sex difference. In so doing, it makes three mistakes:

1. It abandons protections and accommodations for women on the mistaken belief that sex exists on a spectrum.

2. It conflates recognizing biological differences between men and women with believing those differences should determine how men and women behave.

3. It aspires to make men and women more alike rather than allowing each woman to flourish on her own terms.

Sex is not a spectrum

Approximately 0.018% of newborns are intersex (i.e., cannot be classified as male or female or observed classification is inconsistent with chromosomal sex). Until quite recently, the American Psychiatric Association estimated that up to 0.014% of adult males and 0.003% of females manifested gender dysphoria (i.e., experienced distress due to the incongruence between their “gender identity” and biological sex). Among children, presentation of gender dysphoria typically occurred between ages two and four.

The recent spike in gender dysphoria (especially among adolescent females) is a costly, dangerous social contagion. Broad adoption of terminology that attempts to treat these aberrations as norms (e.g., “sex assigned at birth”) is insidious propaganda.

Acknowledging that this emperor is wearing no clothes (and that if his imaginary outfit were a dress, he would still be a man) does not and must not mean failing to treat the small number of people with these conditions humanely. Perhaps no one has been clearer about the totality of that moral reality than the late Pope Francis, whose compassion for people struggling with gender dysphoria did not equate to acceptance of gender ideology.

Sex realism does and must require recognizing, and ordering society to accommodate, the binary reality of sex: In comparison to men, women are on average more sexually vulnerable as well as smaller, weaker, and slower. So, no male, however he identifies himself, should have access to a women’s prison or locker room, or compete on a women’s sports team. As the WNBA recently (unwillingly) demonstrated, to maintain otherwise is to maintain that women’s prisons, teams, and locker rooms have no reason to exist.

Moreover, women alone menstruate, gestate and birth babies, and breastfeed. So, sexual mores, parental accommodation, and infant care should not reflect perfect sameness between the sexes. To maintain otherwise is to embrace a disembodied fantasy.

Sex realism is not gender essentialism

“Gender” is a useless, sophistic concept. It refers to aesthetics and activities that are normed in our culture by sex. “Norms” would suffice.

Anti-feminists weaponize gender to lionize rigid, sexed roles: Men should be breadwinners, and women should be homemakers. Meanwhile, many mainstream “trans-inclusive” feminists weaponize gender to reject the unique physical and sexual vulnerability of women and accept the fallacy of “gender identity” (heedless of the attendant homophobia).

While it’s true that many sex-realist feminists acknowledge the sexes’ overlapping distributions of personality traits and preferences, believing men and women are different doesn’t mean believing women belong in the kitchen. Indeed, sex-realist feminists differ in our own societal and domestic roles.

Sure, many sex-realist feminists believe that if we had a women’s movement that acknowledged and supported both women’s biological distinctness and our holistic equality — and that called both women and men to complementary care work accordingly — there would be more early marriages and big families. Amen.

But sex-realist feminism does not require this belief. It requires only a reality principle and an investment in women’s genuine well-being.

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Freedom is not androgyny

Mainstream feminists do not trust women with real freedom; their goal is not to facilitate women’s interests but to perpetuate a norm of androgyny. They know that, blessed with the economic and cultural freedom to do so (as I have been), many smart, educated, ambitious women will prioritize hands-on motherhood (as I do).

Sex-realist feminists, by contrast, trust women with actual agency. Women are not pawns in the left’s crusade against an erstwhile patriarchy, and liberation is not a contest to see how much like men we can become.

Women are also not foot soldiers in the right’s war on feminism, with victory measured by how many of us return to traditional gender roles. Our goal is every individual woman’s full flourishing via equality of opportunity that does not measure success by sameness of outcome.

I can advocate for economic and cultural policies and practices that support working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. I can say “Godspeed” to every girlboss and to every homemaker, irrespective of the national percentages of each.

I believe in each woman’s holistic equality. And, with it, her true liberty to fulfill her own unique vocation.

Maibritt Henkel:

The term “sex-realist feminism” implies that other feminists are unrealistic about sex, so let me clarify where I stand on biology.

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But while the campaign is finally over, the battle to define the midterms has just begun.

Jerusalem Demsas was able to drag her co-host Matt Yglesias out of the Twitter trenches just long enough to record a podcast about it. They discussed why Republicans are blaming the midterms entirely on Iran and whether Democrats will follow through on their affordability promises.

Check out the full episode for more takes. You can listen to the ad-free version of this episode here if you are a paying subscriber or listen with ads wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Corrections:

• Around 10:25, Jerusalem says that Faiz Shakir founded the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). He actually co-founded a different progressive group, More Perfect Union, and later served as interim executive director for AELP.

• Around 53:35, Jerusalem suggests that Democrats won Nebraska’s elections. While they did flip Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, they lost all the statewide races.

• Around 54:05, Matt says we had “flips of governor’s mansions in two states that have banned abortion.” In 2026, Democrats flipped the governorships of Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, and Nevada. Of those, only Texas has a complete ban on abortion. Georgia and Iowa both have strict bans after six weeks of pregnancy.

• Around 1:08:27, Jerusalem says that Elon Musk has set up contracts to avoid leaving his wealth to his children. Musk has asked the mothers of his children to sign agreements with confidentiality clauses, and he has said that he doesn’t intend to automatically leave shares of his companies to his children. But the agreements themselves do not contain anti-inheritance clauses.

• Around 1:11:49, Matt says the period studied by the peer review paper is 1850 to 1950. The examined period actually ends in 1940.

Show notes:

• “Long tweet” by JD Vance referenced by Matt:

• Abundance, book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson referenced by Jerusalem: Goodreads page

• S.5653 - Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026: Bill text

• “Voters Say It Is Their Top Concern. Why Aren’t Politicians Acting on It?” op-ed by Matt: The New York Times article

• Bo French tweet referenced by Matt:

• “The Indian Question,” podcast with Chris Rufo and Lomez referenced by Matt: YouTube video

• 60 Minutes episode in which Ross Douthat recently interviewed President Trump: Transcript, video

• H.R.6644 - 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act: Bill text

• Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy, book by Isabella Weber referenced (derisively) by Matt: Goodreads page

• Peer Review section: “The Rise and Fall of the Economic Elite,” study by Priti Kalsi and Zachary Ward: Working paper

• “What is the True Rate of Social Mobility in Sweden? A Surname Analysis, 1700-2012,” study by Gregory Clark referenced by Matt: University of California, Davis, study

• “Nonsense and Sensibility,” article by Jerusalem Demsas: The Argument article

• Sense and Sensibility, book by Jane Austen that had a recent cinematic adaptation: Goodreads page, IMDb page

• “Why Is There No Jacquerie in “Pride & Prejudice”?” article by Brad DeLong referenced by Matt: Grasping Reality article

Transcript

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Was the 2026 election a referendum on moderation?

In the week since the biggest blue wave in a half-century, takes have flown fast and furious. Moderates like Third Way say that moderation made the Democratic majorities, while more progressive academics say that its impact was near-nonexistent.

I think both of these takes tell an incomplete story.

We won’t have full results for a while; ballots are still outstanding in several states, after all. But current tallies of the 2026 vote give us a fairly comprehensive picture — one in which moderation does seem to systematically advantage a Democratic candidate by as many as 3 percentage points. This advantage absolutely helped Democrats build their majority: In races like the Mississippi and Alaska Senate contests, which are close enough that they haven’t been called yet, a 3-point swing would probably have resulted in a Republican hold.

But while moderation still clearly helped candidates from both parties perform better than they would have otherwise, moderate politicians may have had less of an advantage than ever before.

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There’s a metric Split Ticket has developed over the years called Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Similar to its baseball analogue, WAR for elections tells you how strong or weak a candidate was relative to a race where a generic Democrat squares off against a generic Republican.

For instance, take Texas, where we estimate James Talarico’s WAR against Ken Paxton to be in the neighborhood of D+5. That means we would expect a generic Democrat to do 5 points worse against a generic Republican than Talarico did against Paxton.1

This has turned out to be a pretty robust metric that demonstrates predictive power when we incorporate it into our modeling. It not only significantly improved our 2024 and 2026 projections relative to earlier forecasts — it also improved our past forecasts when we apply it retroactively.

And in every election where we’ve looked closely at WAR, moderate politicians have consistently overperformed by quite a bit, compared to generic Democrats (let alone progressives). Between 2018 and 2024, the most conservative Democratic caucus did nearly 5 percentage points better than the most liberal one (the Congressional Progressive Caucus).

In 2026, however, the effect shrank. The moderate Blue Dog caucus did a little over 3 points better than the progressives. And while candidates supported by the left-wing group Justice Democrats still underperformed the party’s baseline, they also did better than ever before.

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Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, the anniversary of the 1918 ceasefire that ended the fighting in World War I. Now, it’s a holiday to thank the people who served our nation in the armed services. If that’s you, thank you for your service.

I also like remembering that that the date itself marks the day that a group of nations that had collectively killed more than 15 million people finally agreed to stop. Most of our disagreements are, thankfully, lower stakes than one of the deadliest conflicts in world history. Still, it seemed like a good day to revisit — and in some cases unpaywall — the ambitious series we recently concluded on how different people can live with each other.

— Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief

Reasonable people disagree with each other about a lot. Some people think the path to a good life requires a college degree and 2.5 kids. Others believe in stay-at-home moms and deep religious conviction. Others still would prefer living on the open road and never saving a dime.

Liberalism’s core purpose is to figure out how to set up a society where lots of people are going to disagree. In that vein, The Argument launched 15 months ago with a simple question: How do we live with each other?

All factions of American politics have, in different ways, rejected the premise of reasonable disagreement. The left has tamped down free speech and flirted with central planning, the right has turned to moral authoritarianism and out-group persecution, and the center has defaulted to splitting the difference.

In a series of 15 essays published over 10 weeks (and collected together for the first time below), we asked prominent contributors from the left, right, and center — including regular writers of The Argument Matt Yglesias, Derek Thompson, and Kelsey Piper, plus outside contributors such as Cassie Pritchard and Leah Libresco Sargeant — to tackle this question from different angles:

How do we secure rights for those whose very identities are objects of suspicion, as is the case for many trans people? How can American and liberal ideals of equality survive the intense magnification of difference that the digital revolution has made possible? Can tolerance survive the realities of residential segregation? How can difficult questions about birth and death be peacefully resolved when liberal subjects disagree on the nature of life itself?

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The full series is summarized and linked below, and most of the essays are now available without a paywall for the first time.

If you would like to access the full range of this debate — including paywalled essays by Matthew Yglesias, Derek Thompson, and Leah Libresco Sargeant — please consider becoming a paying subscriber today.

Your subscription helps us prove that disagreement doesn’t mean giving up on each other.

Join us — we’re libbing out.

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The series began with trans democratic socialist Cassie Pritchard, who argued that a winning strategy for trans freedom and security emphasizes a civil rights framework that appeals to the mass public, rather than philosophical red lines about the nature of gender.

Most Muslim or Mormon Americans don’t premise their rights and dignity on everyone necessarily sharing their religious convictions, but on a mutual ethic of noninterference and nondiscrimination. If trans people can make the same kinds of arguments — that we have a common interest in mutual respect despite different beliefs about gender — we stand a chance at rebuilding the coalitions we need for our security.

The series’ next entry came from the right: Economic historian (and 1619 Project debunker) Phil Magness dissected why postliberals such as Vice President JD Vance are so skeptical about economics.

Vance latches onto this age-old criticism of GDP (one that economists have long acknowledged) not because he wants to engage with the decades of debate over the best way to measure an economy’s health but because he wants to inoculate his political project from criticism — criticism that the world that he wants to usher us into will be a poorer one.

While the liberal conception of human rights is based on the idea that all people are created with equal worth, the uncomfortable fact is that people are highly unequal in ability. In other words, not everyone can be Taylor Swift. Rather than try to drag everyone up (or down) to the same level, we should embrace a certain kind of inequality that can make everyone better off, The Argument staff writer Kelsey Piper argued.

The more we build a world that promotes positive-sum cooperation, the easier it becomes to tolerate the inevitable kinds of inequality. We shouldn’t be trying to build a society in which everyone’s life outcomes are the same, but a society in which we wouldn’t even want that, because it is sufficiently evident that when our neighbors are stronger, so are we.

Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor-in-chief of The Argument, offered a rebuttal to those on the left and right who want politics to bring meaning to people’s lives. Orienting public policy around a curiously yet-to-be-defined “common good” sounds nice — but in a society with so many disparate and contradictory worldviews, politics should really just make space for people to find their own meaning in life.

A liberal order begins with the presumption of freedom and then requires public justification when the government chooses to intervene. The cult of the common good reverses that presumption. It begins with an Official Version of the Good Life and then treats the law and politics as the way to direct people toward it.

Milan Singh, one of The Argument’s writing fellows, argued that we should consider the imperative to live together more literally: His essay shows that mixed-income neighborhoods provide a variety of benefits that ease the work of liberalism.

When it comes to low-income housing, location is not just another amenity like in-unit laundry or plentiful natural light. That’s because research suggests that whether poor families can achieve upward mobility largely depends on where they live.

Staff writer Jeremiah Johnson then gave us his analysis of how well we’re living with each other online. His diagnosis is not positive, but he finds pockets of hope in online forums.

Simplistic good-versus-evil narratives are easier to communicate quickly, and they’re more likely to provoke the behaviors that platforms measure: clicking, liking, sharing, and replying. Illiberal politics thrives in this kind of environment, where the distinction between an opponent and an enemy is collapsed.

Immigration has destabilized liberalism in the Western world more than perhaps any other issue. “Import the third world, become the third world” has become MAGA’s rallying cry. But as columnist Joseph Politano pointed out, immigrants who come to America are self-selecting for… liking American values:

The cumulative picture is of the world’s more pro-democracy citizens responding to rising authoritarianism in their birth countries by trying harder to immigrate to stable democracies. These people are not activists per se; primarily, they are just workers with high ambition, a taste for freedom, and a preference for risk-taking.

Are we witnessing, as a recent cover story for The Atlantic suggests, the “end of reading”? And does the end of reading mean the end of democracy? Writing fellow Maibritt Henkel answers with an emphatic “no”: Liberalism, public reason, and debate existed long before the era of widespread literacy; there is little reason to believe that they now depend on it.

The slump in American literacy is sad and concerning for many reasons — one of those simply being that Americans express wanting to read way more than they actually do. But how much someone reads does not determine how liberal they are. Respecting democracy, celebrating pluralism, and giving moral primacy to the individual do not rest on a Great Books education.

The AI boom is poised to unleash billions of dollars in philanthropic giving as it mints new millionaires and billionaires — many of whom have, let’s say, idiosyncratic views about the world. Dylan Matthews, a onetime skeptic of big philanthropy who is now a program officer at the major philanthropy Coefficient Giving, considers the dilemma of billionaire giving from first principles. (Disclosure: Coefficient Giving is an investor in The Argument.)

Implicit in the critique that philanthropy conflicts with democracy is the notion that decisions about the distribution of wealth and power should be made principally by the government, not by private actors. I believed this to be true in 2019. But now I think this is mistaken — and, indeed, somewhat illiberal. No single entity, including the government, should monopolize these decisions.

The presence of children in America’s inner cities has evaporated — one reason for this is decades of anti-urban school siting policy. In this entry, Emily Hamilton and Yonah Freemark argued for the pro-social benefits of more city-forward school policy.

How kids get to school shapes families’ daily lives. Students who switch from active to passive modes of transportation to school get less exercise in general. Kids’ loss of unsupervised time with friends at the bus stop or on the walk to school may negatively impact their mental health. Parental quality of life, too, can be diminished by the need to shuttle their kids to school each day.

Pro-life feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant turned the series’ focus from present to future children. She argues that discarding viable embryos during in-vitro fertilization will be the next flashpoint in the pro-life movement’s battle with the reproductive rights movement.

As IVF becomes more widely used, there will be more and more uncomfortable questions about whether the embryos on ice are property or people. Every day, more and more embryos are banked that will not ultimately be carried by their parents. The families with spare embryos are unsure of what to do with these excess children.

As AI models get more sophisticated and human-like, many people are asking themselves… is this thing alive? Writing fellow Kobe Yank-Jacobs doesn’t think so, but he argues that shouldn’t stop us from at least trying to treat AIs well.

AI is probably not conscious, but being wrong about that would come with a heavy cost. Luckily, moral behavior has intrinsic value, independent of the machine and its possible experience. It is ugly behavior when someone yells at a GPS, though it doesn’t affect the GPS.

Columnist Matthew Yglesias returned to the question of whether and how people should find meaning in politics. Though he agrees that liberals are right to worry about the government prescribing the common good, he doesn’t think that should stop them from offering their own perspectives on what a good life looks like.

Liberalism leaves people free to decide what makes life worth living, but those of us who defend it need to take more responsibility for helping people find compelling answers. We should be making the case for commitments beyond personal enrichment and building communities that help people live up to them. Keeping the government out of the business of prescribing a good life is good. Keeping liberals out of the business of prescribing the good life is an abdication of power to the illiberals snapping at our heels.

Meanwhile, columnist Derek Thompson offered his take on how liberal societies should confront technological disruption. While many technologies offer unambiguous benefits in the long run, only politics can save us from their short-run turmoil.

Even if the tech accelerationists are right and the existential freak-out over AI is completely misguided, that doesn’t translate exactly to “calm down.” Even “normal” general-purpose technologies are initially volatile and dangerous, even those we come to think of as unalloyed goods.

To close out our series, senior editor John Thomason considered his own return to liberalism, which he credits with providing him the intellectual freedom to change his mind about climate change.

Liberalism’s critics sometimes act as though liberalism is the enemy of conviction. But liberal political systems have welcomed more strong and disparate convictions into their citizenries than any alternative systems in history. No, if there is an intellectual orientation that is the enemy of liberalism, it is not conviction, but ideology.

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You may have heard that Texas went blue last week.

While some of my Texan friends are delighted, the Texans I follow through my work as an education reporter are miserable.

“They’re overthrowing school choice in Texas,” mourned National Review’s Caroline Downey. “The ONE policy that is the best shot we have at reversing abysmal education outcomes. It’s literally a civil rights issue.”

Downey was responding to Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa’s victory speech, in which she promised to fire the Republican-appointed commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Mike Morath, on her first day in office. She also suggested she would end a $1 billion voucher program to help Texans pay for private school.

“On Day One, I will fire Mike Morath and we will work tirelessly to repair the damage of the Texas vouchers scam and end an era in which our schools are sold for parts,” Hinojosa said.

Now, I don’t think that Downey is right that school choice is the one policy that improves educational outcomes — and I don’t think Texas’ voucher program was a particularly good way of providing school choice. But I agree that poor educational outcomes are a civil rights issue, and that some kind of school choice program can offer a remedy.

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So while I am not very enthusiastic about what Texas has done to date, I think it’s incredibly important that the Democratic Party have an alternative positive vision, rather than just an opposition to programs that were supported by Texas Republicans.

Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of frequently putting ideology above results for children: Democrats by opposing any way to check whether kids are learning, and Republicans by mixing their good ideas (such as knowledge-rich curricula) with illiberal ones (such as insisting on putting the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms and finding reasons for all Islamic schools to be ineligible for the voucher program).1

Hinojosa and the (likely) new Democratic majority on the Texas State Board of Education have the opportunity to do this right. They should build a pluralistic and liberal school system, rather than just rolling back the ways that Republicans built an illiberal one. And while the voucher program itself might be too expensive and unpopular to maintain, they should keep in mind that it’s a real injustice if rich families have educational options and poor families don’t.

Public schools can still offer choice

The hottest topic in Texas education for the last year has been vouchers. In 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott got a $1 billion state voucher program passed by the state Legislature; it gives low- and moderate-income Texas families around $10,000 per child to spend on private school.

Critics have pointed out that most of the families that took it were already sending their children to private schools, and only 17% had transferred from public schools; Hinojosa campaigned on ending the voucher program and said she would block its proposed expansion. She could also veto voucher funding in the next state budget.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about vouchers. Private schools are not, on average, better than public schools at educating kids.2 Some liberals treat that as a knockdown argument against school choice, but I’m less convinced — after all, parents don’t care about average educational outcomes; they care about the outcomes of nearby schools they could plausibly send their kids to. If they have the choice of several schools, they will want to choose the best one available to them.

In this sense, public schools are always competing with homeschooling and private schools. The task of liberals is to make sure public schools are actually an appealing choice rather than a last resort.

I’ll go further:

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In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and xAI CEO Elon Musk all called for “pacing” AI development amid growing fears about the technology going rogue. One voice was conspicuously absent from this chorus: Mark Zuckerberg.

Altman and Amodei spent the 2010s publicly worrying about the right way to safeguard against runaway AI. Whether you consider them compromised by their business interests or not, they at least have a long record of concern.

Zuckerberg is a different case. He spent that decade turning up the dial on political extremism and addicting teens to his social media platforms with little apparent thought for the consequences. At various times, he would justify his decisions with high-minded rhetoric, depending on which way the political winds were blowing, pivoting multiple times between an avowed commitment to policing misinformation and vague paeans to “free expression.”

Now Zuckerberg is bringing the same flightiness to an even more consequential technology. In September, he argued that markets create perfectly fine incentives for AI companies to keep their products under control. And in an August essay, “The Future is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg reached for uplifting rhetoric about the decentralizing forces of technology without any sense of irony about the fact that his company is one of just five that own two-thirds of all the compute in the world.

His support for a freewheeling approach to AI oversight might have been inconsequential at an earlier time, when Meta was seen as lagging behind its AI competitors. But Zuckerberg has since spent billions of dollars to reorganize the company’s AI division, and those efforts have just started to pay off. In September, Meta released one of the first popular AI personal assistants. And last month, Meta’s newest model release — Muse Wonder — was rated one of the top models in terms of capability.

Zuckerberg has also had the ear of the second Trump administration. In fact, he was the author of the toothless AI safety statement the lab CEOs signed at the White House in September, which President Donald Trump called “morally binding” at the announcement.

AI progress is, for better or worse, a race. For years, Anthropic’s strategy has been to make it a “race to the top.” By developing the best AI systems with the highest standards, Anthropic is betting that it can make safety a competitive standard that other companies have to match. If a major rival can gain ground by prioritizing speed and scale over safeguards, companies that try to commit to safety risk falling behind.

Meta is now capable enough to create precisely that pressure, and its unscrupulous founder seems poised to pull us in another direction.

Zuckerberg’s war of all against all

Whenever Zuckerberg muses about high-minded concepts — like free expression or the decentralizing force of technology — it always seems to carry the whiff of both teenage naivete and minimally concealed business interest.

He began 2018 with a promise to fix Facebook by taking a more active role in cleaning up abuse and defending the platform from foreign political influence. By 2019, he had already pivoted to a different argument: that the real threat to free expression was platforms like Facebook taking too much responsibility for deciding what people could say. He retroactively rationalized this about-face in a rare speech at Georgetown University, in which he laughably recast the company’s roots. Instead of Facebook arising out of Facemash, a site Zuckerberg designed as a Harvard sophomore to allow his peers to rate each other’s attractiveness (the true story), he claimed the company was inspired by his feeling that open debate might have stopped the Iraq War (what?).

“I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently,” he mused vaguely.

Now, in the thick of the AI era, Zuckerberg has latched onto a new stock phrase from the democratic lexicon to justify Meta’s actions: “checks and balances.”

“People and institutions with competing interests naturally check and balance each other to lead towards positive outcomes,” Zuckerberg wrote in “The Future Is for Everyone” this August, asserting that “the best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone.”

In other words, what will keep us safe is the fact that everyone — good, evil, or ambivalent — will have something like a machine god in their pockets.

As with his 2019 “free expression” speech, there are at least two ways one can read Zuckerberg’s new essay: as a cynical cover for his business interests or a sincere but misguided expression of confused values.

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The Verdict by Kelsey Piper

The leading AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, have both said that they are focused on achieving recursive self-improvement (RSI). RSI is a possible next stage of AI development, in which humans turn over control of AI development to AIs themselves — and, by implication, making human oversight an increasingly marginal part of the process as AI grows faster and more powerful.

Many people working in AI, including respected senior scientists, think RSI could be a disaster for humanity. But the leaders of the AI labs tell us that they’re hard at work on this in part because, if they don’t do it, someone else will. “We focus OpenAI research towards RSI as we believe it is the only way to remain at the frontier of AI research moving forward,” OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote in a September essay.

This week, we got significant new information about the state of the race toward RSI. Well, sort of: We got a report from the third-party AI research nonprofit METR on this topic, but much of its contents are redacted at the request of Anthropic because they’re “commercially sensitive.”

But what we do know about the report is this: Anthropic says that it expects RSI very soon. METR estimates, with substantial uncertainty, that on well-specified tasks, progress that used to take a full year now happens in roughly six months. Anthropic and METR see no signs that anything will slow this process down. Crucially, this isn’t just a matter of spending more money, but by the increased ability of AI itself to hasten research.

But we have to take their word for it, because almost all the evidence of this in the report was redacted.

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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 looking at Anakin memes, the downfall of MAGA’s cultural influence, and why the vibes are so bad at Netflix.

Anakin Skywalker and the end of MAGA

The biggest news story this week has obviously been the midterm elections and the enormous blue wave that saw Democrats retake control of both the House and the Senate. Most polls and forecasts predicted a bad night for Republicans, but almost none predicted a wipeout on this level (although polling by The Argument and modeling we built with Split Ticket came about as close as anyone).

So how did the online right spend their last few days before they were wiped out? Posting memes about Anakin Skywalker, obviously.

Why Anakin? Many young conservatives identify with the wayward teen who would later become Darth Vader — he’s a lonely, misunderstood, angry young man. He feels betrayed by a Jedi bureaucracy that’s unfairly keeping him from his rightful place in society. He’s convinced that a corrupt system has denied him opportunities that he deserves, and he turns to a dark alternative to get what he wants.

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If you don’t swim in the murky waters of the online right, you might not believe how seriously this simple meme was taken. This was not just a joke: MAGA influencer Kangmin Lee called Anakin the “archetypal disenfranchised chud” and “perhaps the most profound piece of right-wing media in sci-fi form.” Another MAGA influencer claimed, “It cannot be overstated how culturally significant Anakin poasting is. I dont think you could engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in lab if you tried. [sic]”

This bled directly into politics and into the midterms. Right-wing shitposting account “Beff Jezos” suggested that the Anakin edits might turn the tides of the midterms. Katie Miller (the former spokesperson for DOGE and current wife of newly appointed White House chief of staff and aspiring Nosferatu cosplayer Stephen Miller) dressed up as Padme for Halloween and posted “Find the Anakin in your life.” The Department of Education started Anakin-posting. Elon Musk posted an AI-generated image of Anakin-as-imperial-patriarch with the caption, “This is what they stole from us.”

It’s obviously absurd that this was the right’s online obsession in the days leading up to a crucial election. But, hey, the Anakin story does actually illustrate modern right-wing politics pretty well.

In the Star Wars prequel films, Anakin is an impressionable young man who is tricked by a cackling, elderly tyrant into undermining democracy, after which he has children who hate him. Then, in the original trilogy, he loses and dies.

So, you know, not the worst analogy.

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If you’re a Democrat, the term “energy policy” may as well have been “environmental policy.”

Should we expand natural gas? Let’s figure out how much this will increase or decrease emissions.

Should we shutter a nuclear plant? Consider the risks of radioactive waste.

Should Congress pass a permitting bill to make it easier to build infrastructure? Time to consider the impact on endangered species.

With the midterms in the rearview, ascendant Democrats face their first major policy opportunity of the new era: the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). BAAJA may be the most ambitious regulatory overhaul of our lifetimes, and the debate on the Democratic side about whether to support it has at times seemed mostly focused on its implications for the climate.

BAAJA, which not only has bipartisan congressional support but also the president’s backing, would overhaul federal permitting procedures, set the stage for faster interstate transmission build-out, and curb the ability of judges to block infrastructure projects indefinitely (a concern that extends beyond energy into the realms of industrial policy and public transit). We think that it would be a net positive for the climate. But evaluating this bill solely on its climate impact is like evaluating a car solely on its fuel efficiency, without considering safety, reliability, or cost.

Cheap, clean, and consistent: It’s hard to get all three

Traditionally, energy policy has been a delicate balance between three objectives: affordability, reliability, and sustainability, the so-called “energy trilemma.” Different sources of energy can fare better on any one or two objectives, but they often struggle to excel across all three.

For centuries, energy access has been enabled by the relative affordability of coal energy, at great cost to the physical environment (our air quality). Nuclear power is uniquely clean and reliable, but efforts to affordably construct new capacity have been a historic challenge. Wind and solar fare well on sustainability and on local estimates of affordability, but making that power more reliable when scaled comes with steeper system costs.

For the past two decades, that emphasis has shifted in the Democratic Party, where the dominant paradigm has become sustainability — narrowly understood in terms of restricting fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Consequential policy decisions have been shaped without sufficient consideration of affordability and reliability goals.

One major example of misplaced priorities came in late 2015, when President Barack Obama determined that the Keystone XL pipeline — which would transport Albertan crude directly through to the plains states, ultimately reaching Gulf Coast refineries — did not serve the national interest and denied its permit. The move was largely driven by pressure from climate activists, who described the project as a “carbon bomb.”

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You can listen to the ad-free version of this episode here or in your preferred podcast player if you are a paying subscriber or listen with ads wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Corrections and clarifications:

• Around 26:27, Jerusalem says that she and Elizabeth Holmes incorrectly pronounced Amanda Seyfried’s last name as “sig-freed” and that it should be “say-freed.” She and Matt continue to pronounce it “say-freed” throughout the podcast. Her name is actually pronounced “sigh-fred,” and it was incorrectly pronounced as “see-freed” during the film.

Show notes:

• You Can See Everything, 2026 film that serves as the central source of discussion for this episode: IMDb page

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, book by John Carreyrou referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• The Dropout, 2022 mini-series referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• Nathan for You, 2013-2017 tv show referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• This Hour Has 22 Minutes, tv show started in 1993 referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• Citizen Kane, 1941 film referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• The Social Network, 2010 film referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• War and Peace, book by Leo Tolstoy referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• The West Wing, 1999-2006 tv show referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• JFK, 1991 film referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” poem by Wallace Stevens referenced by Matt: University of Pennsylvania page

• Primetime, 2026 film referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• To Catch a Predator, 2004-2007 tv show referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• The Rehearsal, tv show started in 2022 referenced by Matt: IMDB page

• Peer Review segment: “Why Do AI Models Tell Left-Wing Voters to Support the Communist Party? AI Voting Advice in Japan’s 2026 General Election,” study by Sho Miyazaki and Andrew B. Hall: Andrew Hall site page

• “Federalism and State Democracy,” study by David Schleicher referenced by Matt: Texas Law Review study

Transcript

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You Can See Everything has taken the world by storm, and we are not immune. In particular, the film deals with many themes about how people deceive and are deceived, which is unfortunately extremely relevant to our contemporary politics. Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias discussed this and other aspects of the film in our latest podcast, recorded in the lull before the midterms. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen at their podcast provider of choice.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

A modern reader looks at the title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, and sees two words that mean pretty much the same thing. But to readers in Austen’s time, they were opposites. “Sense” meant judgment or reason, just as it does now. “Sensibility,” however, meant the capacity to feel (and to feel in the body specifically).

Austen came down firmly on the side of sense. But the director of the latest film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility doesn’t want to take a stand either way.

“It’s not one or the other,” Georgia Oakley said of Sense and Sensibility in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Nightly. “That’s what is so lovely about the story because neither one nor the other way of being is right or wrong.”

Austen would be surprised to hear her own novel described in this way.

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Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, whose father’s death leaves their family financially vulnerable. As a result, the sisters’ prospects for marriage are severely constrained, a challenge they respond to very differently. The elder, Elinor, feels deeply but prizes restraint, judgment, and duty; Marianne, on the other hand, believes that true feeling should never be suppressed. She recklessly throws herself into a relationship with the man she falls in love with, Willoughby.

Austen’s last word on Marianne Dashwood — the sister who is a conscious embodiment of the cult of sensibility — is that she “was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.”

Oakley’s new adaptation, which was released in October and began streaming yesterday, equivocates on the fundamental moral question of the book.

Maybe that’s because Oakley knows that the zeitgeist is on the side of sensibility: “In this day and age, sensibility has essentially won over.”

The cult of sensibility returns

Your feelings are valid.

This therapeutic escape hatch has become a fixture in contemporary vernacular. Valid does not just mean “real” in this usage; it means “well-grounded or justifiable,” “logically correct,” and “appropriate to the end in view.” We live at a time when the expected response to someone’s emotional outburst is not mere comfort but affirmation.

The implication is that feelings are not only to be experienced or named or investigated — they are definitive evidence of something true about the real world. In Oakley’s interview, she framed sensibility’s victory in therapeutic language: “We understand that talking about one’s emotions and being true to who we really are is healthy.”

But the problem Austen was probing is, well, what if your feelings are wrong?

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When The Argument and Split Ticket did our final pre-election update of our 2026 midterm model, we projected an 11-point Democratic advantage among likely voters. That was among the most bullish projections in the business, but Democrats appear to have done even better. They won upset Senate victories in Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, plus a commanding impending majority in the House of Representatives.

While we’re still analyzing what happened on Tuesday night, the full implications can’t all be captured by vote tallies. Here are The Argument writers’ key takeaways from results around the country:

The party of compassion won

Jerusalem Demsas: There’s been an enormous amount of discourse about how Democrats need to become more combative, more irreverent, and more extremist. But polling The Argument conducted in the weeks before the election suggests that voters viewed last night’s victorious Democrats as “compassionate,” “moderate,” and “caring about people like me.” Meanwhile, Republicans, who were routed across the country last night, were associated with words like “bold,” “strong,” and “extreme.”

Just take a look at the messaging of some of the star Democratic candidates — ideas like love and respect were pervasive in campaigns from James Talarico in Texas to Adam Hamilton in Kansas to Rob Sand in Iowa. Meanwhile, the Republican Party leaned into a politics of grievance, aggression, and dominance.

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There’s a lesson here for both parties: The American people are boring and non-ideological. The candidates who just ran the table were mostly normies.

Fear of a blue Texas

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To fully take in all the results and their implications, The Argument joined forces with Silver Bulletin, GD Politics, and Slow Boring to host a marathon Substack Live conversation.

Throughout the night, the hosts — Jerusalem Demsas, Lakshya Jain, Nate Silver, Galen Druke, and Matt Yglesias — were periodically joined by the most astute election analysts in the business, including Sean Trende, Dave Weigel, Larry Sabato, Clare Malone, and many more.

Check out the video above for the unedited conversation.

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If you went into a coma and just woke up, congratulations. You just missed the tsunami of the century. Not since the Watergate midterms of 1974 has an incumbent party been routed this comprehensively.

There’ll be a lot of time to dissect and analyze the results. We won’t even know the full set of outcomes just yet — in Mississippi, there’s a very real chance that Scott Colom could beat incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith to give Democrats a 55th seat, which could grow to 56 if Mary Peltola clinches the win in Alaska (as she looks likely to do).

But we do know enough to give you a brief postmortem on how the models and the polls did. In particular, for subscribers to this magazine, it’s probably worth running through our coverage and modeling from this cycle.

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Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, and staff writers (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.

Today’s Mad Libs was inspired by The Argument staff writer Kelsey Piper’s education coverage, which has pointed out, again and again, that American schools are failing kids in ways we already know how to fix. Piper has argued that illiteracy is a policy choice, that Mississippi’s much-ballyhooed reading gains are real, and, most recently, that we have known since the 1960s that direct instruction works.

Freddie deBoer, a committed education pessimist, is a frequent critic of our coverage. He thinks education “miracles” have a long history of turning out to be frauds, that no reform has ever reliably moved kids from one spot in the academic distribution to another, and that American schools were never the world-beaters we imagine they were.

When deBoer first responded to Piper, he wondered whether a magazine premised on the idea that “liberal good vibes can overcome every inconvenient fact and complication” would ever engage with his criticism. So, I invited him to debate Piper directly. You can read their exchange below!

Mad Libs is for paid subscribers, so subscribe to get more content like this in your inbox!

- Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

Freddie deBoer:

The Sold a Story podcast is only the latest vehicle advancing the notion that we could fix our schools if we only choose to.

This contention has been a constant in American educational debates for decades, exemplified by the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman” and its triumphalist narrative about charter schools. Unfortunately, this attitude runs into a stark reality: Schools and teachers just don’t have that much impact on relative student outcomes.

I’m afraid that the evidence shows that student academic talent is more or less static. Nothing is more predictive of a student’s future success than their past success. In large majorities, individual students gravitate to a given level of academic performance at an early age and tend to stay there throughout their academic life, as this 2025 meta-analysis demonstrates.

There are many other studies we can pull from. As far back as the 1960s, pioneering large-scale federal studies (like Project Talent, the Coleman report, and Project Follow Through) supported the notion that most students stay in the same performance band over time. Data collected the summer after kindergarten provides useful predictive information about how students will perform in high school; a student’s third-grade reading level is an effective indicator of who will go to college and who won’t. Standardized tests administered at age 12 or 13 tell us not only which students will go to college but which will earn a doctorate, hold a patent, or get tenure. The basic reality is that our rank in the academic hierarchy is largely fixed.

Douglas Detterman has summarized the research record by saying “only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers.”

Interventions that are often treated as transformative just don’t appear to matter. Promising early results inevitably fade out in educational research, and I use the word “inevitably” carefully.

Phonics-based reading instruction is currently undergoing a period of immense hype, but the advantages students see from phonics at age 5 are dramatically reduced by age 7 and nonexistent by age 11. For years, liberals championed pre-K schooling as a magic bullet, but study after study shows little or no positive effects as children age.

Past hype is no predictor of future performance. Class size reductions were ballyhooed, then over time their effects were revealed to be inconsistent at best. Many high-quality studies have shown that coveted “exam” high schools in large cities make no difference for student outcomes.

The result is a very bare cupboard when it comes to finding educational interventions that “work.” As Rimfeld et al. put it in a 2018 paper, “Individual differences in educational achievement are highly stable across the years of compulsory schooling from primary through secondary school. Children who do well at the beginning of primary school also tend to do well at the end of compulsory education for much the same reasons.”

You can change the school or type of school, and you can change the teacher. But what stays the same is the student. None of this depends on any wild theories or contrarian reading of the available data; perfectly mainstream educational research has provided evidence for these conclusions for decades.

Consider Harvard economist Raj Chetty. He’s been immensely influential among reformers, in large measure because his work gives people the optimistic read on schooling that they’re looking for — a better teacher leads to lifelong higher earnings for students.

I’ve written about the fundamental methodological problems with Chetty’s work in the past. But setting aside those issues, I think it’s essential to understand: Chetty’s work implies that teachers control very little of the variance in student outcomes!

Taking Chetty et al. at face value, a much better teacher (a full standard deviation better) raises a student’s test scores by about one-tenth of a standard deviation, which implies that the difference between teachers explains just 1% to 2% of the variation in that year’s scores.

Chetty’s work is known for its use of future student earnings as a dependent variable. It suggests that, by age 20, a student with a one-standard-deviation-better teacher is less than 1 percentage point more likely to attend college. By age 28, they earn only 1.3% more.

This is… educational optimism?

We could play the same game with CREDO, the influential Stanford University-based research project. CREDO has long been cited as the gold standard when it comes to making the evidence-based case for charter schools; politicians, think tanks, and commentators regularly refer to CREDO’s research to back up the notion that the average charter school is significantly better than the average public school.

Setting aside very real methodological concerns, once we translate from researchers’ absurd, invented “days of learning” metric, we find that charter schools make hardly any difference at all. Again, we don’t have to dispute their numbers; we simply need to express them in the terms that are used in almost all credible education research.

And that’s from a research entity that was hosted by a conservative think tank and funded by pro-charter money! This is a funny basis for arguing the importance of schools and teachers in student outcomes.

This is what frustrates me about the educational debate in our media: There’s no acknowledgment of the profound limitations of what schools can do. We insist on having a conversation that takes as given that schools and teachers have a major impact on student outcomes — an assumption the data just doesn’t support.

Kelsey Piper:

Education indeed doesn’t affect relative student outcomes much. I don’t really care.

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As Election Day approaches, Republicans are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately for them, that light increasingly resembles an oncoming train.

Election modeling by The Argument and Split Ticket has long forecast this outcome. And now, on the day before the election, disaster looks hard to avoid for the Republican Party. In the Senate, where the odds of a Democratic takeover once looked fantastical, Democrats now have a 77% chance of flipping the chamber, with a projected gain of six seats. If that comes to pass, Democrats will hold 53 seats to Republicans’ 47.

The House has long been projected to flip to Democrats. Some once thought midcycle gerrymanders in Texas and Florida would give Republicans a real shot at holding it, but the new maps haven’t insulated the GOP nearly enough.1 As a result, Democrats have a 92% chance of flipping the House of Representatives, with a projected net gain of 24 seats.

Republicans’ Senate odds have devolved rapidly, and it’s worth walking through the map in some detail.

How the Senate got away from Republicans

North Carolina’s Senate seat is the most likely on the map to flip. Former Gov. Roy Cooper has opened up a lead large enough for both parties to triage the race well ahead of the election. Our model rates his chances of winning at 98%. The real question is whether Cooper’s margin of victory will exceed incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia.

In Texas, James Talarico continues to hold on to a lead, even in the face of a fire hose of Republican spending bankrolled by Elon Musk. Talarico remains a favorite to flip the Lone Star State blue for the first time in over 30 years, thanks to a historically terrible opponent in state Attorney General Ken Paxton, plus a Hispanic rebellion against the GOP. As a result, our final model gives Talarico an 81% chance of winning, with the race rated Likely Democratic.2

His odds have only increased as the cycle has gone on. Several high-quality pollsters find a pretty sizable Talarico lead in its final survey — YouGov had him up by 4, CNN/SSRS found him leading by 6, and the latest New York Times/Siena College poll found Talarico leading by 7.

Megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, the Democrat challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, has led consistently in polls over the last month. What should have been a safe Republican hold is now looking like a potential flip, thanks largely to a series of scandals: Questions have swirled about whether Marshall actually lives in Kansas or Florida, whether he’s using taxpayer funds to run his campaign, and whether he sued patients at his OB-GYN practice for small, unpaid debts.

As late as a few days ago, our model thought this race was a coin flip. But with the latest high-quality polls from CNN/SSRS and The New York Times/Siena College showing a clear Hamilton lead, the model now predicts Hamilton is a narrow favorite to win a Kansas U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats for the first time since 1932.

In Iowa — a state 3 points bluer than Kansas in our modeling — Republicans have nominated a strong candidate in Ashley Hinson. Though she’s facing a tough challenge in Democrat Josh Turek, we consider the race a complete tossup.3

In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown has seized upon hostility to AI and data centers, allowing the Democrat to open up a small lead over appointed incumbent Republican Jon Husted. While polls in Ohio usually overstate Democratic support, Brown’s lead has shown up even in surveys done by Republican pollsters, who typically correct for that skew. We think the race leans Democratic — and virtually every poll and model agrees.

Maine and Alaska also lean blue, with Democratic odds settling in very similar places in both states: 71% in Alaska, 73% in Maine. It’s worth going into detail in both states.

Let’s start with Maine. A lot of liberal readers will have PTSD from years of Susan Collins victories, even in blue environments — and it’s true that polls have historically overshot Democrats in Maine.

But our model picks up on two important factors that look like they push Troy Jackson over the edge.

First, our generic ballot model shows that Maine is effectively a D+14 state right now. That’s the bluest it’s ever been.

Second, candidate quality for overperformers like Collins decays over time, especially as partisanship accelerates. Today, we have Collins performing 9.7 percentage points better in margin than an average Republican incumbent would, which is 3 percentage points worse than her 2020 overperformance. While this would still be more than enough in almost every other swing state, it’s not enough for Maine. High-quality surveys agree — YouGov, CNN/SSRS and The New York Times/Siena College all have Jackson ahead by a modest but notable amount.

In Alaska, meanwhile, our model predicts a flip, but I’m not so sure. In recent weeks, Democrat Mary Peltola has been dogged by an unfriendly wave of headlines: From allegations that she mistreated her staffers (which I don’t think matters) and the revelation that her campaign propped up a spoiler candidate with the same name as incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan (which I do think matters), my guess would be that Peltola slightly underperforms the model’s margins.

The long shots

That leaves two stretch states for each party to hope for an upset win: South Carolina and Nebraska for Democrats, and Michigan and Minnesota for Republicans.

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The Verdict by Jerusalem Demsas

The topline finding from The Argument’s latest national poll of 1,549 registered voters, conducted Oct. 21-23, is that Republicans have completely debased themselves in the eyes of the voters.

Democrats are leading by 9 points among registered voters on the generic ballot (and by 11 among the likely electorate), and likely voters say Democrats will do a better job on the issues that are most important to them, 49% to 38%.

But approval ratings alone don’t tell us what voters think the parties actually represent. Here are some of my biggest takeaways.

Democrats listen to the groups; Republicans are in a cult of personality

We asked who party leaders listen to most when deciding what policies to support. For Republicans, the answer is Trump and wealthy donors, whereas for Democrats the top answer is lobbyists and interest groups. Just 24% say Democratic leaders listen to “people like me,” but that’s a good deal better than for Republicans (17%).

The moderation wars continue

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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 looking at the war between European soccer fans and Chinese netizens, what’s driving recent French youth protests, and surprising digital political strategies in Brazil.

China vs. Mbappé

Greetings, readers of The Argument. This edition of The Weekly Scroll is coming to you from France, where I’ve been traveling this week. As you would expect, the baguettes are indeed much better than America’s, and the Vietnamese and North African food is outstanding. (The croissants are, oddly enough, no better than those I can get in New York.)

Most importantly, I’ve been getting served a lot more French content while browsing in Paris. And that means I’ve had a front-row seat for the pitched battle between French soccer fans and Chinese netizens.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about how Twitter’s automatic translation feature is leading to real-time, dynamic international discourse that wouldn’t have been possible in previous eras. In this case, the story begins with a very silly meme trend that puts French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé’s face on various dictators.

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The poll, fielded between October 21 and 23 shows Democrats with an 11-point generic ballot lead among likely voters — a margin you’d have to go back to 1982 to match. Lakshya walks Nate, Matt, and Galen through the data and fields their questions.

Watch the video above for more new findings.

On election night, The Argument will be livestreaming (with an accompanying liveblog available only to paid subscribers) with guests from Silver Bulletin, Slow Boring, and GD Politics starting at 5:30 p.m. ET.

RSVP for Election Night