If you just subscribed after reading this week's Thomas Edsall column in the New York Times that quoted me at length, welcome! Happy to have you here. I hope you stick around. To ensure you do for at least a little while, I'm releasing today's post without a paywall. It will be back next week, so at that point you'll need to become a paying subscriber to finish reading what I have to say. But for today, don't worry about it. Most of my archived posts have paywalls in them, but those from the first six months or so, from June 1, 2022 until around the end of that year should be free and clear. So please read whatever you want from back then without charge. Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement'in George Wallace's populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan's potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush's bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 to Donald Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged....

Mamdani won the general election with 50.4% of the vote, a larger share than was predicted by most polls, and his get-out-the-vote campaign has received some of the credit. Mamdani claims that his campaign had over 100,000 volunteers knocking on doors across New York City. Particularly during that time period, online platforms have been a major focus of political campaigns and campaign research. Targeted advertising and new media strategies are increasingly viewed as central to campaign success. So is coverage of the campaign by legacy and social media more generally. Moreover, solid empirical evidence of the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing is limited. Recent work finds very few effects of in-person canvassing, except in very specific circumstances. One recent paper suggests that door-to-door canvassing by the candidate can make a difference to election outcomes. But in a race in New York City, it is not likely that Mamdani himself was able to reach enough voters to make a difference....

In the months leading up to last year's presidential election, more than 2,000 Americans, roughly split across partisan lines, were recruited for an experiment: Could an AI model influence their political inclinations' The premise was straightforward'let people spend a few minutes talking with a chatbot designed to stump for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, then see if their voting preferences changed at all. The bots were effective. After talking with a pro-Trump bot, one in 35 people who initially said they would not vote for Trump flipped to saying they would. The number who flipped after talking with a pro-Harris bot was even higher, at one in 21. A month later, when participants were surveyed again, much of the effect persisted. The results suggest that AI 'creates a lot of opportunities for manipulating people's beliefs and attitudes,' David Rand, a senior author on the study, which was published today in Nature, told me. Rand didn't stop with the U.S. general election. He and his co-authors also tested AI bots' persuasive abilities in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland'and the effects left Rand, who studies information sciences at Cornell, 'completely blown away.' In both of these cases, he said, roughly one in 10 participants said they would change their vote after talking with a chatbot. The AI models took the role of a gentle, if firm, interlocutor, offering arguments and evidence in favor of the candidate they represented. 'If you could do that at scale,' Rand said, 'it would really change the outcome of elections.'...

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee's Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat. Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a 'BIG Congressional WIN,' but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans. Van Epps underperformed Trump by 13 percentage points, a sign that the party is vulnerable heading into the 2026 midterms. If Democrats could replicate that shift everywhere next year, they would gain upwards of 40 seats in the House and take back the Senate. But last night's outcome also offers Democrats a cautionary tale. An off-year special election in December is precisely the kind of low-turnout situation in which the party's highly educated base currently dominates. In such races, Democrats probably need to run up the score by even more than 13 points before they can have a real shot at winning both houses of Congress next year. And if they'd nominated a more moderate candidate, they probably would have....