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Jacob Montgomery

@jacobmontgomery.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.2K following 1.1K posts

Political (Data) Scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Data science, social media, American politics, and grumpy Bayesian. All opinions my own.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Jacob Montgomery
Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Done without Congressional approval and with no one in charge who is congressionally confirmed
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Andrew Selbst @aselbst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
They’re making the same mistake journalists have. It’s not partisan to speak out and defend your institutions against threats, even if those threats are partisan in nature. If you’re in university leadership, doing so should be considered part of your job, not something to avoid.
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Universities have been going for the “insiders strategy” of trying to lobby quietly without making public waves. Counterfactuals are hard, but I would say the strategy has been a complete failure.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
~Approximately no one in the general public knows because the leaders of the R1 research universities - whose budgets, programs, & personnel are entirely or significantly dependent on federal funding - have been totally absent from the public square in explaining & collectively protesting this.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/09/2026
"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."
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Tom Pepinsky @tompepinsky.com · 16/09/2026
the hardest thing for the politician-bureaucrats to understand -- but which NSF staff *absolutely do* understand and always have -- is that you actually make scientific progress by giving young people money and promising not to bother them
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I’m so glad this rule was halted, and so angry at the huge waste of time and stress dealing with has been for so many on campus www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/u...
nytimes.com
Judge Blocks Trump Rule Aimed at International Students and Journalists
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV wrote that the administration’s reasons for a rule limiting the length of stay for academics and journalists were “exceptionally weak.”
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 15/09/2026
I pretend to teach; you pretend to learn; everyone gets an A.
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
People who keep saying science is broken sure do seem to use a lot of the outputs of science all day every day.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/09/2026
When we talk about how science is broken, maybe at least consider how a huge collaboration measured the ripples in spacetime resulting the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, as counterweight the guy who had to fake his data to show that people who procrastinate fall behind.
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Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
🤖 Can transformer-based language models deliver accurate text classification at a low cost? ➡️ Cecilia Y. Sui shows how pretrain-finetune models can classify political text with modest labeled data and computing resources, using toxicity in US Senators' X conversation threads doi.org/10.1017/psrm...
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Interesting new research on the effects and content of Instagram Reels and podcasts ceciliaysui.com/files/Influe... preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-g... link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
making the Turing police real
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I really feel like the entire set of norms surrounding APSA have eroded to the point where it is almost not a useful conference. Papers cancelled, late, or not shared with discussants. Panel chairs ghosting. Papers thrown together or even never written. What are we even doing?
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Forthcoming paper with @umariqbal.bsky.social and @haofeixu.bsky.social on Google AI Overviews (AIO) is cited in this new piece from NPR. www.npr.org/2026/08/30/n...
npr.org
We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda. They did surprisingly well
In a test, popular AI chatbots mostly debunked falsehoods spread by other countries and avoided uncritically spreading falsehoods better than search engines. AI summaries above search results fared wo...
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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 30/08/2026
It is under-appreciated just how catastrophically bad this number is. Biden bottomed out at 32 among registered voters in 2022 when inflation was 9%. Gallup had Bush at 28% in Sept 2008 wavepolling.com/results/2026...
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Not to worry. Trump's legacy -- the person who has done more damage to the United States, its people, and our national interests in a century -- is totally locked in.
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Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Now Tim Curry?! Have mercy, gods
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I need you to know that Dolly wrote a song about the 19th Amendment .... because of course she did. open.spotify.com/track/0hRmD9...
open.spotify.com
19th Amendment
Dolly Parton · 27: The Most Perfect Album · Song · 2018
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Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
23% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
Graph of visas issued to students per month in 2024 and 2025
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Whatever you think about Data Centers on policy grounds, opposing them seems like a clear winner this cycle and every Dem candidates should probably do so right away. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...
washingtonpost.com
Some Texas conservatives are breaking ranks and pledging to vote Democratic
Republicans who are angry at Gov. Greg Abbott’s refusal to block data centers are giving his Democratic challenger hope for an upset.
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Anodyne @anodynesix.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
"If a student reaches the end of their visa's limits before they finish their degree, a university can still say that the student is making appropriate progress and needs more time – but ... the U.S. government will also have to agree that the student can remain enrolled and stay in the country."
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Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
*nods sagely*
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Very obviously the outcome of people mobbing those who publicly admit they use AI is everyone continuing to use it but hiding it
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Can't say gay and bisexual people were killed in the Holocaust in the core curriculum *at an American university* www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/u...
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William Adler @williamadler78.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
It is shocking how so many tech startups these days seem to be, "Hey, remember that dystopian sci-fi book/movie? Let's do that!"
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
So we know that data centers are increasingly unpopular with voters. But what is the best research out there on *why* they are unpopular? (Looking for actual survey data/experiments here rather than hot takes.)
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Cas Mudde @casmudde.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
When the state goes after the antifascists rather than the fascists... Solidarity with @heidibeirich.bsky.social ✊
edition.cnn.com
Exclusive: Former employee at Southern Poverty Law Center arrested on fraud charges | CNN Politics
A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of White supremacist groups, one of whom she was a...
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Ryan Enos @ryanenos.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
These are people who legally entered this country and now, because of ancestry and a conspiracy theory pushed by an aspiring politician, are being pursued by the government and fitted with special monitoring devices. This should remind of the darkest events in history.
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Ok but this could be a good thing right? Students use AI to complete assignments. Universities use AI to generate and grade assignments. We finally achieve the goal of higher education administrators and convert money directly into degrees without all of the overhead of paying professors!
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
This left wing crackdown on free speech is getting out of control www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/u...
nytimes.com
U.S. Investigated Left-Leaning Groups During Minnesota Immigration Crackdown
The government conducted expansive surveillance, infiltrated group chats and obtained financial records of organizations never accused of crimes.
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Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com · 13/08/2026
Academia was so much better before Woke. Sure, David Hume was never able to secure an academic job because he might have been an atheist. But at least no one made him use the singular "they"
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Micah @rincewind.run · 04/08/2026
the intentional abdication by Congress of nearly all of its constitutional responsibilities is at the core of most of our problems as a nation
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Drew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
+1 for adaptive inventories to increase precision and save survey time. An introduction from @erinrossiter.bsky.social and @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social for anyone interested: www.cambridge.org/core/element...
cambridge.org
Adaptive Inventories
Cambridge Core - Research Methods in Politics - Adaptive Inventories
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Meredith Conroy @meredithconroy.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The "Year of the Woman" keeps happening — just not for Republicans🧵 meredithconroy.substack.com/p/the-year-o...
meredithconroy.substack.com
The "Year of the Woman" keeps happening — just not for Republicans
44% of Democrats' nominees in primaries so far are women; just 18% of Republicans' are. What gives?
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Timothy McBride @mcbridetd.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I "almost finished" a book this year. Can I get credit for that?
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
In a similar way, I am "semi-done" with my summer writing goals. www.cbsnews.com/live-updates...
cbsnews.com
Live Updates: Trump says U.S. only "semi-negotiating" with Iran after Tehran sets demands to reopen Strait of Hormuz
President Trump signaled he would be piling economic pressure on Tehran as the stalemate continued and Iran laid out new conditions to re-open the Strait of Hormuz.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
This is going to be one of the worst foreign policy failures in all of American history.
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Dan Baldassarre @evornithology.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
This dude gets it @devonderaad.bsky.social #AOS26
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
The Republican Party is starting to look like Odysseus if he had tied himself to the mast and then just sailed directly onto the rocks. www.economist.com/interactive/...
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Hive mind: I am thinking about writing a lab manual for my research group. This is not something I have seen much in Political Science, but I think might be useful. If you have one you can share --- whether for politial science or another social science --- I would love to see it.
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Timothy McBride @mcbridetd.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Senior State Department official Mislabels Several African Countries on Map at AIDS Conference Nigeria Mozambique Ivory Coast Uganda Malawi Cameroon www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/u...
nytimes.com
U.S. Government Mislabels Map of African Countries at AIDS Conference
Nigeria, a coastal country in western Africa, was landlocked in the Sahara, among other errors. The department said it had been “hastily altered.”
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Endnotes
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Sanjay Srivastava @sanjaysrivastava.com · 30/07/2026
Please spread the word far and wide that MANOVA is terrible
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Publishers: Would you like to write a textbook? Me: Maybe. Will I get paid a lot? P: Not at all. M: Oh so it will be affordable for students? P: Also no. M: But at least I can easily make edits after release? P: Definitely not. ….
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Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
This is my sleeper issue for 2028. This industry is totally out of control
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