iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

anyway, that’s all. you can dig thru the crosstabs yourself if you’re the same kind of person as me maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/u...

maristpoll.marist.edu

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another issues question that surprises me: 18-29 year old voters believe gun control laws are more important than gun rights by more than a 2:1 margin. that drops off immediately for the next cohort (who also went to school doing shooter drills). not sure what’s going on there but it’s interesting

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on the flip side of that, 69 percent of texans think that “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient,” and that includes 59 percent of texas democrats, so the idiosyncrasies run both ways

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another one for your “texas isn’t what you think it is” file: two-thirds of those polled say that they believe undocumented immigrants should have a path to stay in the country, and even 37 percent of republicans believe that. my hunch is that this question is less abstract here than elsewhere

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just a staggering difference here: two percent of democrats say they have an unfavorable view of james talarico. TWENTY TWO PERCENT of republicans have an unfavorable view of ken paxton. wild choice to nominate that man

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okay, this one is cute: they asked if those surveyed consider voting a DUTY or a CHOICE (caps in the question). both democrats and republicans said duty over choice by exactly a 72-28 margin (independents, predictably, view it differently).

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i believe it is possible to get there by 2056

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also, for context: back in 2024, republicans held a 7-10 point advantage on the generic ballot. don’t think i’ve seen a poll where dems held the advantage overall. (texas has long been more closely divided than the decades of gop domination and our lopsided congressional delegation would suggest)

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that’s how i think about it too- the “a pox on both their houses, i’m staying home” people are probably fewer in number than the ones who just didn’t get around to voting because they were preoccupied by things other than politics, or who turned around cuz there was a line, or whatever

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interestingly, less than one percent of texas democrats say they’d vote a republican to the house; eight percent of republicans would vote for a democrat, though (and independents favor dems by 13 points). not used to seeing that discrepancy between party-line voters

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on the generic congressional ballot, texas voters surveyed favor dems 49-46. even so, best case scenario for dems is probably that republicans make up 2/3 of the delegation come january, given how wildly gerrymandered the state is

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i’ve got an internal memo from the abbott campaign from august about data centers that is wild and absolutely detached from what i was seeing and hearing in west texas even as early as may; people out west are really dissatisfied and are running out of people to blame besides the ones they voted for

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doesn’t say but my hunch is that it’s the latter, just because of how people tend to interpret a question like “do you think you might change your mind” after “who do you support.” not-voting is a less active decision for a lot of people, i think

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(my hunch is that if abbott does indeed lose, we are going to talk a lot about the hubris of running for governor in four (4!!!) consecutive elections, especially in a time of widespread voter dissatisfaction)

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okay, this is fascinating: abbott has better numbers in the governor’s race than paxton has overall, but he actually does worse with small-town and rural voters- which is consistent with things i’ve heard out in west texas, but which i’ve had a hard time believing as someone who’s been here a while

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fittingly, while a full 50 percent of texans surveyed plan to vote for talarico, only 43 percent of them expect him to actually win, which tells you a lot about how texans view politics in their state

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also! talarico supporters are fifteen points more likely to say they strongly support their candidate than paxton voters, a full third of whom opted to say they “somewhat” support their guy. (notably, neither candidate has many voters in the “might change mind” category)

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second-most interesting: for small-town/suburban voters, there is a 26-point swing from paxton to talarico by gender! a whole lot of husbands may be surprised to hear who their wives plan to vote for

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for talarico/paxton, most interesting split is that paxton is winning rural voters in the poll 61-36. seems like a lot! but ted cruz won rural texans 73-27 in 2018 and still only beat beto o’rourke by 3 points. haven’t done the math but it’s hard to imagine paxton winning if that’s the final margin

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trump’s “strongly approve” number is above fifty percent with just three groups in texas: republicans; non-college-educated white men; and white evangelicals

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lots of interesting stuff in the crosstabs here but let’s start by highlighting trump’s eighty (80) percent disapproval among voters under 30

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i will always honor a director’s pretentious affectations! in this case it’s also probably the most interesting thing about the movie

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dan solomon @dansolomon.com · 20/09/2026

i had the same experience rewatching it. i actually think it would have been 100x more effective if it didn’t show us that the vvitch was real until the very last scene. the way he did it, it’s a very straightforward “how to satanically torture a puritan family” procedural that isn’t about anything

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the legend of tyson bagent begins next week

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dan solomon @dansolomon.com · 20/09/2026

the legend of tyson bagent begins now

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dan solomon @dansolomon.com · 20/09/2026

was driving across texas yesterday and saw a billboard that said “there are only two sexes in texas” and it immediately felt like the walter white “jesse what the fuck are you talking about” meme. wild to have your opponent go all-in on that messaging and not just let them be the only one saying it

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dan solomon @dansolomon.com · 18/09/2026

was trying to decide if this counted as a poem but the last stanza did it for me

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dan solomon @dansolomon.com · 18/09/2026

years ago, in texas, the gop identified trial lawyers (a big source of dem campaign funding) as a political enemy, and incorporated capping lawsuit damages into its political philosophy mostly as a means to restrict the money they had available for political contributions

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i don’t think i have ever seen sub-$2 ground beef in all of the years i have been old enough to buy my own groceries

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no tech ceo would ever describe his users as his equal

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i don’t even care anymore if these people are really trying to build an ai that will kill us all but can they please do it QUIETLY

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breaking: just updated my top four movies on letterboxd for the first time since the last fed rate hike

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[whispers] i wonder how jamie naughright feels when she hears all the sports media people talk about how arch manning disgraced his family's pristine name

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if that’s also impossible and i’m a sucker buying into the hype, please let me know! it’ll help me sleep

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honestly i don’t care if the bad AI is a rogue superintelligence or if that’s impossible and it’s just a chatbot programmed by sociopathic nihilists who think it’s supposed to be able to kill us all and it can fly drones, launch missiles, and shut off power grids. the question isn’t that interesting

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specifically, it’s that even if this thing is highly unlikely to kill us all and end the world, the chances of that happening go up quite a bit if that is baked in as something that’s absolutely inevitable by the people making it, just because their conception of what it should be is so warped

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it brings me no pleasure to say that i have another position on AI, which is that people who are convinced that they are building something that will kill us all and end the world should simply not be allowed to build that thing

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i don’t think any of those things are inherently conservative tbh!

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