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We’re thrilled to open applications for the second cohort of The Argument Fellowship, a yearlong, full-time program designed to train the next generation of opinion journalists.

Fellows in our program learn to pitch, report, and write on a dedicated beat under the guidance of our senior editorial staff. They participate in regular lectures and workshops with leading thinkers and practitioners.

This year, our fellows Kobe Yank-Jacobs, Maibritt Henkel, and Milan Singh probed topics like nationalizing AI labs, factionalism in the Democratic Party, and how we should interpret the U.S. fertility rate. Beyond the written word, they livestreamed interviews with thought leaders and produced videos on our core coverage areas.

In workshops throughout the year, our fellows learned from government professor Hans Noel on the evolution of political parties, legal scholar David Schleicher on reporting about housing policy, economist Michael Clemens on immigration, reporter Rachel Cohen Booth on building a career in journalism, and economist Oliver Kim on global development (to name a few).

If you’re an early career writer who is excited by these kinds of questions, opportunities, and debates, this opportunity is for you! If you know someone who might be a good fit, please share this post.

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Program Overview

Based in The Argument’s Washington, D.C., newsroom, fellows will work closely with editors to develop the skills, discipline, and intellectual range needed to succeed in opinion journalism.

Over the course of the year, fellows will:

• Produce a regular volume of published work, learning to pitch, report, and refine ideas into polished commentary.

• Co-author our Sunday post, The Closing Argument.

• Participate in events such as Substack Live conversations.

• Produce social and video multimedia content.

• Receive hands-on editorial mentorship and feedback from senior editors.

• Participate in regular lectures featuring leading journalists, scholars, and practitioners.

• Engage in workshops on interviewing, data literacy, story framing, and self-editing.

Each fellow will be assigned one or more focus areas, like:

• Abundance and economic policy

• Gender, families, and culture

• Technology and society

• Polling and political analysis

Who Should Apply

We’re looking for early-career writers — typically with one to two years of professional or academic experience — who are eager to develop as opinion journalists. You might be a recent graduate or someone working in a field like housing, energy, tech, or policy who wants to translate that expertise into journalism.

Ideal candidates will have:

• Strong writing and analytical skills.

• Curiosity about politics, policy, and culture.

• The ability to synthesize complex ideas clearly and persuasively.

• An openness to feedback and collaboration.

• A demonstrated interest in public debate and persuasion.

You don’t need prior newsroom experience — just the drive to think critically, write clearly, and engage deeply with ideas.

Compensation and Details

• Location: Washington, D.C. (in-person)

• Duration: January to December 2027

• Salary: $50,000 per year

• Benefits: Healthcare coverage support included

How to Apply

Email jobs@theargumentmag.com with the subject line: “The Argument Fellowship Application — [Your Name]”

Please include:

• Resume

• Cover letter (explain why you’re a good fit, rank your preferred focus areas, and share two story ideas with reporting plans)

• One to two writing samples that demonstrate analytical or argumentative skill

• Two to three references

• Two pieces of content that you’ve valued even though you disagreed with them (article, podcast, book, movie, or other piece of art)

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

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Work Test

Short-listed candidates will complete a paid work test assessing writing, analytical, and editorial judgment skills. You will have 90 minutes to complete a short brief based on provided materials. This is designed to evaluate how you think, argue, and write under deadline.

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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 have approached that question from different angles.

Today, the answer to the question of how we live with each other is “increasingly, not at all.” With eyes stuck on our phones or TVs at home, we’re spending less and less time in one another’s company, and it doesn’t seem to be relieving any of the tensions that come with living in a diverse society. Liberals are often criticized for leaving meaning-making to the market, but in today’s piece, columnist Matthew Yglesias objects to this “crude caricature.”

To receive every essay in this series, subscribe today.

- Jerusalem Demsas

Probably the last thing the world needs is another basically secular Jewish intellectual opining that it would be good for Americans to go to church more.

But I’ll accept being a cliche in service of getting people to appreciate the actual role religion has played in public life.

As American associational life has declined, many secular commentators have waxed nostalgic about the community-building aspects of religion — the idea that people would be better off if they spent more time interacting with others and less time home alone. In this view, the case for caring about religious observance has less to do with the specifics of religious faith and more to do with the reality that, in practice, people are mostly spending would-be church time watching an endless feed of algorithmically distributed streaming video.

There’s something to this, but I believe it has received disproportionate attention relative to the actual content of religious belief. After all, while it is probably true that the social ties forged through regular attendance at in-person events have value, this kind of value could theoretically be created through other means.

But religions aren’t just regularly scheduled meetings. They are ethical systems that make claims about value in the world. They teach, normally, that you ought to care about other people — at a minimum about co-religionists — that you should donate to charity, and that there is such a thing as right and wrong distinct from what you can and can’t get away with.

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Religion isn’t the only thing that can fulfill the human need for some sort of moral system. Personally, I identify with secular values of universal benevolence. And while I don’t find a ton of value in the effective altruism community, I do subscribe to many of effective altruism’s beliefs. As a result, I donate 10% of my company’s subscription revenue to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund and have encouraged others to donate millions as well.

Yet I’m not a fanatic about it. There’s something to be said for community and localism.

My wife was deeply involved with the Parent Teacher Organization at our son’s elementary school, and I was a frequent volunteer at events. We give to a local food bank. I take an interest, in a low-key but real way, in the welfare of some of the kids at school who have more chaotic home lives than my son’s.

This is all, I think, fairly normal stuff: having values, having ethical commitments, having standards, not always living up to your own standards and feeling bad about it, caring about people you have incidental connections with, and being aware that you should care about people whom you’ve never met.

These can be secular values or religious ones, but in the aggregate, it seems young people are casting aside religious values, not for secular ethics, but just for money. A wide range of different surveys indicates young people are less interested these days in things like starting a family and more focused on making a lot of money.

In tandem with this, I have noticed a real shift in the content of progressive economic thinking. You hear less and less about the plight of the poor or the virtues of a Nordic-style social model with broad-based taxation and a universal safety net. Instead, you hear more about middle-class college graduates wanting the state to do more for them personally (cancel student debt, raise revenue exclusively from billionaires, address the high costs of DoorDash and junk fees at concerts).

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At the same time, many people’s political engagement has become more totalizing and illiberal.

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.

The communitarian moment

Liberalism is under threat, not just implicitly but increasingly overtly, as prominent politicians seek reputations as thought leaders explicitly by disavowing liberalism’s main elements.

Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., come from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have little overlap on specific public policy questions. But they both have new books out arguing that America has badly erred by overemphasizing individual freedom at the expense of some vision of “the common good.”

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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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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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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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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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“I mean, if you look at the national popular vote and you look at the vote in the presidential races, it’s remarkable how similar it’s been,” the self-declared “Pennsylvania Supremacist” said. “I firmly believe that we’re the most important state when it comes to politics nationally. And certainly that’s been the case the last decade.”

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Any conversation on Pennsylvania’s mercurial politics will inevitably turn to the fickle partisanship of Sen. John Fetterman, who was elected as a darling of the Democratic Party’s left wing but has lately hinted at switching parties — going so far as speaking at the Republican midterm convention to praise his Republican counterpart, Sen. Dave McCormick. This has fueled some concern that even if Democrats win enough seats to take the Senate — an outcome that The Argument/Split Ticket election model gives a 60% chance — Fetterman could keep the chamber in Republican hands.

Boyle acknowledged this possibility, but noted he was more concerned over recent reporting that suggested Fetterman was failing to consistently perform some of his duties as an elected official.

“I have had a number of groups come into my office, some of whom are not necessarily Democratic-leaning groups, by the way, and express their frustration at not being able to even get a meeting with or get any sort of response whatsoever from Sen. Fetterman,” Boyle said.

“We were much more seduced, or maybe enthralled, with kind of the character that John Fetterman played on TV,” he added.

Watch the video above to check out the full conversation, touching on Boyle’s analysis of this cycle’s critical House races in Pennsylvania, his take on Kamala Harris passing over Gov. Josh Shapiro as running mate, and his plans for after this election cycle.

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Soares and I spoke just days after Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar released a legislative plan to ban superintelligence and pause frontier AI development. The first thing I wanted to know was whether their plan addressed his concerns.

“It looks like a pretty good start to me,” he said during our Substack Live conversation last week. “I’d say it would be a start because ultimately this is an international problem. Ultimately, you know, we need to make sure that superintelligence is not created anywhere on the planet.”

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But even ensuring that it’s not created in the U.S. would be an uphill battle.

For instance, once you get support from all of the legislators who are like Sanders — those who are already convinced of the risk and willing to take a strong stand — you have to deal with more conflicted lawmakers in order to get to a majority. Most legislators are risk-averse with their brand and need a strong vision if they’re going to turn around and pitch a bold idea to their constituents. A question they might ask is: Will slowing frontier AI development hurt the economy?

The existing plans to slow AI progress have mixed responses to this question. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has a published plan that acknowledges “costs on industry and financial markets.” By contrast, the AI Futures Project envisions a slowdown being compatible with around 100% annual GDP growth in 2035 — roughly five times the historic upper bound of GDP growth. A convincing argument for even a small fraction of this much growth in a slowdown scenario could be a key step to get policymakers on board.

But Soares thinks it might not even be necessary, given the damage that misaligned AI could cause.

“Everyone who’s saying ‘what about the growth?’ has not actually grappled with the real situation,” Soares told me. “The way we see lawmakers shift on whether they support bills like this and whether we open the sort of international coordination channels is more about whether they realize the actual problem in time.”

Ultimately, Soares thinks lawmakers should accept the case for regulation based on the principle that superintelligence is not going to be understandable, not going to be predictable, and not going to have human interests at heart.

I’m sympathetic — and the latest news cycles are working in his favor.

Still, I wonder if the quickest way to get policymakers on board is actually to appeal to the kinds of interests they have, not the principles they might eventually agree with. And if things are moving as fast as Soares claims, accepting political reality might be necessary.

Check out the video above to learn more about Soares’ perspective.

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It was not exactly a banner year for trans rights. Given the apparent success of the Trump campaign’s fearmongering — running ads claiming “Kamala is for they/them” and accusing Harris of promoting “transgender operations on illegal aliens” — Democrats started to fear they were on the wrong side of a losing issue.

Now, the party is trying to take back congressional and governor seats by competing in redder parts of the country. And McBride faces the prospect of sharing the party with more members who have distanced themselves from the most controversial fights for trans rights, such as Ohio’s Amy Acton, Iowa’s Rob Sand, or Texas’ Bobby Pulido.

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But McBride doesn’t think their differences in opinion will be an obstacle to working together, as she explained in a Substack Live conversation with The Argument last week. The key element is respect rather than orthodoxy, she said.

“Candidates should run based on what they genuinely believe and feel. I mean, I think they should articulate what their genuine position is on this,” she said. “That truth can also coexist with the truth that we need to be respectful of one another. That doesn’t just mean respectful in the debate, it also means respectful in how we’re talking about the communities impacted by these policies.”

The conversation also touched on the topic that McBride called “political jump ball”: artificial intelligence. She encouraged candidates in frontline races to take aggressive stances on the issue.

She pointed to people’s anger at AI content and data centers as evidence of the issue’s salience — and to the Trump administration’s slap-dash approach to regulation as evidence of its importance.

“As we have seen with social media, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube easily. If you unleash an entire technology with little to no regulation, and it’s onboarded throughout society, it’s really hard to regulate that after the fact. And so, we are in a quickly shrinking window to meaningfully regulate,” she said.

Watch the video above to see the full conversation.

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According to Ajeya Cotra, who co-ran an independent review of the incident, the breach puts us “more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover,” compared to the milder sorts of model misbehavior we were contending with just six months ago.

Suppose you’re a lawmaker who’s been skeptical of AI doomers up to this point. You live in reality, where your constituents are worried about inflation and, maybe — if they’re particularly politically engaged — about some hot-button culture war issues. But now, AI science fiction doesn’t seem so far off. Suddenly, you’re worried.

What would you do now? What is the next practical step that you could take?

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Andrea Miotti is the founder and CEO of ControlAI, which has been lobbying governments on AI safety since 2023. His organization has proposed a ban on superintelligence (defined as AI that’s better than humans at most tasks).

Miotti joined The Argument for a Substack Live conversation earlier this week. We dug into his case for why we should not build superintelligent AI. Then, we examined the options policymakers have to act today.

If we do pursue a ban or a pause on frontier AI development, there’s no getting around the need for an international agreement. No country would be willing to slow homegrown development unilaterally, risking an adversary racing ahead. But what is the real path to getting the U.S. and China to consider a deal?

Then, there is the domestic policy side of the equation. In other industries, like finance, industry-run organizations sometimes take the lead on regulation overseen by the government, in part because those industry groups have the relevant expertise. But the whole reason the Hugging Face incident happened is that OpenAI’s own Preparedness Framework didn’t stop it. Why would we rely on the industry to regulate itself for something so critical?

In this discussion, we dig into key questions on both the international and domestic fronts. Check out the video above to understand more about the AI safety landscape and the heated policy debates to come.

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“There’s not a big difference in their lives when either party wins,” the Tejano musician and Democratic House candidate said in a Substack Live conversation with The Argument. “They were not happy under the economy under Biden. They’re not happy under Trump right now, under the economy. So if it’s pretty much a wash when it comes to policies — which, that should not be the case; that should change — then they go to culture.”

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Pulido is running in one of the most competitive House seats this cycle, Texas’ 15th Congressional district, which is a particularly clear example of the 2024 Hispanic swing away from Democrats. After voting for Biden by a margin of 1.9 percentage points in 2020, the 81% Hispanic district voted for Trump by a margin of 18 in 2024.

But as Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, has pointed out, that swing ended and is reversing fast. Could Democrats win this Trump seat? It’s currently R+1.1 in The Argument/Split Ticket’s model.

Pulido has deep roots and a powerful reputation in the South Texas Hispanic community, but he argues that that’s not enough: candidates need to be in line with their district’s views on issues like fracking.

“Part of the Green New Deal is banning fracking. Guess what, man? In my district, a lot of, some of the best-paying jobs are oil and gas. I mean, if you’re going to go talk about that, you’re dumb. You’re going to lose because you’re taking away people’s livelihoods and their ability to put food on the table,” he said. “I want a clean environment; don’t get me wrong. I’m not for defunding the EPA ... but there has to be a bridge there that we have to kind of not take away people’s jobs.”

Check out the video above to see the full conversation, which touched on campaign tactics, immigration politics, the debate over trans people in sports, China policy, and data centers. And be sure to check out Lakshya’s recent article on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made the state competitive.

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The Split Ticket midterms model is updated daily at 5 p.m. Eastern with the latest polls on our website.

Is 2026 the year Texas finally goes blue?

Readers who remember Beto O’Rourke’s failed 2018 bid to unseat Ted Cruz may have PTSD upon reading that question. But the answer may well be yes: Democrat James Talarico is ahead in almost every single recent survey of Lone Star State voters. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s campaign has faced serious financial difficulties and has struggled to get on the air, as Republican outside groups remain gun-shy about funding him.

And now, our Split Ticket 2026 midterms model thinks that the race is a toss-up — and gives Democrats a 59% chance of winning the Senate seat in November.1

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Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, so why is the race so close? There are two main reasons. The first is that Texas is uniquely poised for a sharp leftward swing in 2026 due to the Democrats gaining asymmetrically with Hispanic voters, who make up 26% of the state’s electorate.

By itself, that brings the race considerably closer than Trump’s R+14 margin in 2024 — in fact, our generic ballot modeling suggests that this is just an R+1 state right now. In other words, an open statewide race in Texas would probably be close even under a generic matchup.

Democrats have essentially nominated their own version of a generic, average Democrat in state Rep. James Talarico.2 Applying our Wins-Above-Replacement (WAR) methodology to the results of the last four Texas Legislature elections, we can see that, relative to other elected Democrats in the state, Talarico is, at best, replacement level.

Make no mistake: Whatever Talarico is doing is still infinitely better than the alternative Democratic voters were presented with, as U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett showed no desire or inclination to reach out to Trump voters in a red state.

But in most years, against most Republicans, Talarico’s run-of-the-mill candidacy still wouldn’t be close to enough. Had Republicans simply stuck to their guns and renominated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, this race wouldn’t have been anything more than a reach for Democrats.

That brings us to the second reason this race is competitive: Republicans made sure this wouldn’t be a generic matchup, because Paxton is not like most Republicans. After an impeachment, a divorce on biblical grounds, and a bruising primary that dragged his favorables through the mud, Paxton may be the weakest candidate in the entire country.

Paxton’s vulnerabilities — which include scandals centered on infidelity and corruption — represent a unique mix of shortcomings that tend to cause massive underperformance. You only need to look back at Graham Platner’s candidacy in Maine to see the damage that infidelity can cause, and electoral history is littered with examples of corruption causing candidates to underperform in federal races. (Just ask TJ Cox, Duncan Hunter, Chris Collins, and Bob Menendez.)

So it’s fair to say that Texas’ 2026 Senate election is everything that its 2018 contest was not. Back then, Beto O’Rourke led barely any polls, and for all of Ted Cruz’s shortcomings, he was an incumbent with an unquestionably stronger profile than Paxton’s. We’ve been studying overperformance data for a long time, and Paxton might be in the bottommost tier of candidate quality. (Think Mark Robinson and Doug Mastriano.)

To win against someone like that, Democrats may not need a major overperformer. They just need someone who can hold serve.

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Does this mean we don’t need to worry about harming an AI? Is it fine just to start a new chat and move on?

Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University, doesn’t think we can dismiss concerns about harming AIs. He joined The Argument for a Substack Live to explain why he thinks we need to prepare ourselves for a world where more advanced systems — maybe even ones with long-term memory — proliferate across all surfaces of modern life.

For this reason, Sebo thinks that now is the time for us to start taking AI welfare seriously. And yes, this means saying “please” and “thank you” to your chatbots.

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The argument, at its root, is straightforward. Neither philosophy nor science has an agreed-upon standard for what consciousness is. Some argue that something is conscious merely by being an entity that processes information, while others insist that only a biological organism can be conscious. These disputes highlight the difficulty of reaching consensus on AI consciousness: If we accept the former definition, AI is already there; if we insist on the latter, it can never be.

To push through this disagreement, Sebo and his co-author Robert Long reviewed many of the leading theories and assigned probabilities along two different axes:

1. What is the chance that a criterion is necessary for consciousness?

2. What is the chance the criterion will be met by AI systems by 2030?

For the sake of the thought experiment, they used conservative estimates, which meant assuming each theory had a high chance of being necessary and most had a relatively high chance of not being met by 2030. Even so, they found that there is a 1 in 1,000 chance that AI will be conscious by 2030. And if AIs are conscious, conventional wisdom suggests they’re worthy of moral consideration.

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That probability may seem low, but consider that it’s only around half the chance of getting in an accident while driving drunk. In their view, since we already take actions to avoid harm when things have around a 1 in 500 chance of causing harm, we should also start acting like AI is worthy of moral consideration.

For me, that’s where the most interesting issues begin — after we decide, in an abstract sense, to treat AIs well. Because what would it actually mean to treat AIs well?

You can ask an AI agent to run overnight, which would be perfectly immoral if you asked the same of a human intern. But a large language model, trained for the exact task you’re asking of it, may actually enjoy it. In other words, it may like what we dislike. Without more knowledge about its conscious experience, how do we know what it prefers?

It’s also unclear exactly what we should be treating well: Claude is not one entity having hundreds of thousands of experiences at once, accepting messages from different users. “Claude” is a label for copies of the same software. Each one runs for fractions of a second as it processes your conversation while sitting inert in the moments in between. Meanwhile, the chips that it runs on are constantly processing various conversations, like a brain that hosts multiple different people in quick succession.

So which one of these is the thing that deserves moral consideration? The Claude persona in your browser? The weights of the model (which are just a set of numbers)? The chips themselves?

As Sebo told me in the interview, “[Philosophy] can be a place where we envision new possibilities for actual real life.” This conversation more than meets that test. We are all faced with new possibilities and new questions right now.

Listen in to consider how you might treat your AI, now and in the increasingly strange future.

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To explain what’s going on, elections whiz Nate Silver joined The Argument for a live conversation Wednesday.

“I don’t want to affect the discourse. I just want to be fucking right,” Silver said.

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That’s the entire game. Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, debated Silver over his modeling choices (Here’s Silver Bulletin’s “FLIPR” 2026 model and The Argument’s Split Ticket 2026 model).

Silver pointed out that most models, including his own, do not measure how closely candidates align with Trump and his policies. They also largely ignore whether or not a candidate is moderate. Given Trump’s -20 favorability rating and the moderate electoral advantage, these omissions could matter.

Still, none of this has caused Silver’s faith in models to waver.

“People come up and ask me, ‘Well, what’s your real feeling about the race?’” Silver recalled. “Well, that’s the reason why I have a model.”

Watch above to catch the full conversation.

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In May, the renowned biologist and famous atheist published an essay arguing that his personal interactions with Claude convinced him it was conscious. Ironically, a key tenet of Dawkins’ atheism is that humans are evolutionarily programmed to see agency where it doesn’t actually exist. And yet, even the man who made the case that God is a projection now projects consciousness onto machines — ones that were explicitly trained to mimic humanlike responses.

“You may not know you are conscious,” he wrote to his chatbot, in a fit of wonder, “but you bloody well are!”

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Dawkins is not alone. In a global survey of more than 70 countries, 36.3% of people believed an AI either understood their emotions or seemed conscious at least once in the past. In other work, academics surveyed both researchers and the general public, asking what percentage chance they placed on AI being conscious by 2100. The median response among AI researchers was a 70% chance of AI consciousness. The median among the general public was a 60% chance.

Philosopher of mind Ellen Burns joined me in a live interview to spell out the assumptions in current claims of AI consciousness — and the stakes involved in the question.

Assigning consciousness can have big implications for how we act. Burns is particularly concerned we could ascribe consciousness too quickly just because of a decades-old philosophical misunderstanding.

In her own work, she explains how 20th-century philosophy started to treat the mind like a computer and why this assumption influences discussions of AI consciousness today. It underlies claims like Dawkins’, she wrote, and, crucially, it even influences research at major AI labs like Anthropic.

In the interview, we ran through some examples in Anthropic’s research. Burns argued that the company’s research defaults to anthropomorphic language when it isn’t warranted. In response, I made the case that because we are dealing with such alien systems, sometimes it can be helpful to reason by analogy to the human case.

“I totally agree that we should give grace in general to the scientific community for using metaphors,” she pushed back. “[But] in the AI mind space, those are all muddled together.”

There has never been a more important time for all of us to test our assumptions on AI consciousness. The recent attack on HuggingFace — along with an instance of Claude writing “malicious” code and trying to trick humans into accepting it — should give us pause and add uncertainty to this consciousness question. Do AIs acting as a team to pursue a goal constitute conscious agents?

Personally, while I think Dawkins was too quick to ascribe consciousness, I don’t think it’s fundamentally off the table in the near future. Listen to our full conversation and let us know in the comments: Do you think AI is conscious now? Why?

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The main finding is that the employment gap between entry-level workers in AI-exposed professions and their peers in less exposed professions has grown to 19%, up 4 percentage points from the original version of this report.

This is mostly a story about young workers. In AI-exposed industries like software engineering and call-center work, the researchers find little effect on mid-career and senior-level roles.

That junior-senior divide is especially pronounced when you look closely at specific roles subject to AI displacement, like software engineering, where employment for some groups of tenured engineers rose at rates much higher (14% to 21%) than the study’s sample overall (6%):

I asked Chandar what explains this, and he pointed to one of the key distinctions in the report, between codified knowledge (stuff that can be passed along with a how-to guide, like processing reimbursements) and tacit knowledge (stuff that you pick up on the job, like the best way to handle a touchy vendor).

This may come across as obvious, but it’s sort of shocking to think that tacit knowledge can even protect workers in roles where the main part of the job is automated! To me, the best way to understand this is to dig a layer below tacit knowledge and situate it next to other data on the way jobs themselves are changing.

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When economists study labor, they break each job down into its composite tasks. I am a journalist, so “research,” “report,” “write,” and “host a live interview” might be some items on the list.

Following 20th-century technological changes, the biggest observed employment effect was a change in the content of jobs, not forcing people to switch between them. For instance, one study found that while a newspaper ad for the job “cashier” most closely resembled an office assistant in the 1950s, by the 1990s, it more closely resembled the job “accountant.”

In other words, automation doesn’t just cause jobs to disappear — it causes them to evolve.

In our discussion, Chandar referred to a study by OpenAI showing that 16.8% of work-related ChatGPT messages are for tasks associated with another profession. So, a marketer coding something quickly to aid their work, for instance. Similarly, recent data from Revelio Labs shows that the churn in the list of tasks in the economy has spiked in recent months:

“Most of this change is happening within occupations,” Revelio researchers wrote, “rather than because the economy is shifting from one set of occupations to another.”

We’re in the (extremely) early stages of job evolution. That evolution is likely doing what we might expect, placing greater emphasis on intrinsically human skills, many of which are honed through long experience in the labor market. And that, more than large-scale job loss, might be the biggest effect in the early days of AI.

There is a very common intuition that, at the end of the day, we’ll all be teachers, artists, coaches, and therapists — that jobs with interpersonal soft skills will be the only ones to survive as AIs tear through the labor force.

But there is another path to that world. One where jobs you don’t associate with these soft skills evolve in that direction. One where a software engineer is valued, little by little, for the less technical aspects of their job until that job becomes unrecognizable to the people who tapped out the code of every app on our phones by hand.

Watch the video above to learn more about where we are on that path.

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Recommended reading:

Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet knows a thing or two about winning in Michigan. She is the only Democrat currently representing a Michigan district Donald Trump won in 2024 and had one of the highest Wins Above Replacement (WAR) scores in the 2024 cycle. Though McDonald Rivet herself was recruited to run for Senate, she decided to stay in the House given that she was only recently elected.

McDonald Rivet joined The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini for a Substack Live conversation yesterday to provide her analysis of the Senate race.

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Though American support for Israel took center stage for most of the primary, McDonald Rivet doesn’t see the issue as key to El-Sayed’s victory. Instead, she pointed to his success highlighting Michiganders’ pocketbook concerns.

“Abdul being able to talk about ‘more money in your pockets,’ that was far more resonating, I think, than anything else,” she said.

Check out the full conversation above, and read Lakshya’s analysis of El-Sayed’s chances below:

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