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Theo Landsman

@ordinalandsman.bsky.social
358 followers 271 following 1.4K posts

Senior Political Analyst at YouGov Blue, Political Science PhD candidate , Ranked Ballot Nerd, Map poster.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 9h
Having a problem with Claude right now where it has internalized my schtick too well and tries to check me if I'm interested in or doing anything remotely off brand. How do I tell it to let me be inauthentic.
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Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 02/10/2026
U.S. politics are better with MAGA getting a 32% vote share in a PR House than a MAGA-controlled Republican party getting 46–54% vote share in an FPTP system.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 13h
The weirdest thing about this is that vaguely messianic doomsday cults around Jewish men happen all the time, to scold people about thinking a doomsday cult is happening and not the people running the doomsday cult you have to have 0 feel for the false positive/false negative rates here.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
One thing that feels under-discussed about the Maine Senate race is that there was a specific theory of why Maine would be better off with Collins in 2018 (Senate appropriations seniority matters + Dems will win the Senate anyway) it was half right in 2018, and it's totally wrong now.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Nobody tells you this, but you can regain the feeling of being a hunter gatherer on the boundless frontier stalking his wiley and elusive prey by ordering pickup instead of delivery.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Obviously a tactic with a very problematic past but I don't get why countries like the UK dealing with ethno-regional secessionism don't try to Balkanize their secessionists anymore. Scotland wants to secede from the UK? Hit them with a northern Scotland secession movement, not so funny now is it?
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I was thinking about this again and struck by what an American and specifically Bay Area NIMBy vision of the end this is. Sure Skynet could just upzone its existing economic zones instead of destroying humanity but it’s concerned that might ruin the historic character of its existing data centers.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
As someone who was a kid in NY on 9/11 I have heard the NYC and DC stories a million times but what really fascinates me are the mass psychosis stories from places like Lincoln NE of people who saw the redirected planes and became convinced their office in a strip mall off I-80 was the next target.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
It's funny that 'vote for me and I will engage in vulgar and reckless blanket redistribution of the national income' is exactly the failure mode mid-century conservative theorists and social scientists were sure social democracy was headed towards, should have kept a better eye on their own people.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
42 States is the best number I've gotten to work.
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Nick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
B E C O M E U N D E F E N E S T R A B L E
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I can sort of get why you'd be a far right voter in the U.S. even if I think it's very dumb (machismo, luxury beliefs about racial homogeneity, etc), I really don't get why anyone would support the AfD when their entire pitch seems to be 'we are useful idiots for Russian imperialism towards Europe.'
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
There doesn't seem to be any appetite for Albertan independence right now even among Conservatives, but the idea that Trump's actions would increase demand for Albertan independence basically signals that Trump and co view the global right as literal human cattle.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Total unconditional support for the House GOP advancing a hopeless messaging bill that directly admits that expanding the Supreme Court is currently completely legal and would not even require a constitutional amendment.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I don’t think this is quite right, many Congressional ideologues have obtained enormous personal power at the expense of their chambers, what the founders assumed was that people would be cynically aligned with their chambers over pre-existing loyalties which is just dumb.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
One way I have been toying with of trying to steel man the Trump admin's recent actions Is that they are indifferent to their own polling and have accepted it will only get worse, but they are trying to make pulling this kind of move for the House and Senate GOP as difficult as possible.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Where are these guys getting the idea that anti-Canadian saber rattling is the secret sauce to riling up Republican voters? I can't find anything that suggests this moves the U.S. electorate at all, but it's certainly having an impact on Canadians.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Sailors aboard the USS Lincoln: I think it's imperative that you send us to New York to fight the bond traders sir, in fact, we should send a landing party to show you really mean business.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
One of the weirder RW derangements for the last year about polling has been complaining that we ask too many questions about Donald Trump. I don't want to be asking about Trump either! His whole thing is that he does big, flashy, things and people react, take it up with him not us.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
One thing about spreadsheets that I think is sort of underrated is that they format information in an intuitive two dimensional space whereas AI and to a similar extent regular software natively conceives of data as a kind of highly multidimensional plane in ways that are deeply alien and wrong.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The Ossoff stuff strikes me as very similar to going for a two point conversion when you're behind or only narrowly ahead late in the game (nationally, Ossoff in his own race seems fine). More Dems should try making discursive moves that are moderately risky but have positive expected value.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Probably not the intended takeaway here, but I wish the popular image of FDR leaned more into what a conniving asshole he could be, like why does this section of Jimmy Walker's wikipedia page read like it was carefully vetted by FDR's defense attorneys:
With New York City appearing as a symbol of corruption under Mayor Walker, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt knew he had to do something about Walker and his administration. Knowing that the state constitution could allow an elected mayor to be removed from office, Roosevelt felt compelled to do so but risked losing Tammany Hall's support for the Democratic nomination for president. On the other hand, if Roosevelt did nothing or let Walker off, the national newspapers would consider him weak.[13]

Facing pressure from Roosevelt, Walker eluded questions about his personal bank accounts, stating instead that the amounts he received were "beneficences" and not bribes.[2] He delayed any personal appearances until after Roosevelt's nomination was secured. It was then that the embattled mayor could fight no longer. Months from his national election, Roosevelt decided that he must remove Walker from office. Walker agreed and resigned on September 1, 1932.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
On the one hand, this objectively sucks, on the other, hard not to feel some schadenfreude over how colossally census officials mismanaged both the data management and political sides of this while telling social scientists their concerns were unwarranted. But the end result will be even less data.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
an act to limit the number of rounds of interviews for a position to a maximum of three
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Faeelin @faeelin.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
What are we but the remnants of Minoan Civilization?
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
One thing I don't really understand is why we don't see more slopulism about the type of stuff where the typical slopulist outcome 'do a lot of damage to various institutions without accomplishing notional goals' would be a net good. Slopulism about gambling, social media corps, etc.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
It's crazy that at this point the one hope for UK Labour is that Starmer was such a uniquely gormless leader that someone running the same playbook but with some semblance of decision making capability and vision can turn things around, wouldn't rule it out though.
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Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Someone just sent me this photo from Chicago, unbelieveable
Album cover photo of the Marina apartments in Chicago for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot CD
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Maine Senate thoughts: 1) The fight agency types are right that Dems should adopt a higher variance approach to candidate selection in races they've repeatedly failed to win including standing down to support Independents in states where a Dem winning is almost impossible.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
I am a sort of in favor of the SC drive to deregulate campaign finance because IMO they've fallen into the classic libertarian blunder of assuming that deregulation will lead to a laissez faire utopia when it will massively boost the advantage to the party with larger more effective organizations.
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Nick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
STRAIT IS OPEN
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
FWIW I think it's pretty clear that Mamdani betrayed Espaillat, but that's what politics is, sometimes you have to backstab people. The period of NYC politics between FDR becoming governor and becoming prez was basically 'FDR backstabs the entire NYC political class before they can backstab him.'
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
We joke a lot about rule by paradox gamers, but if Keir Starmer was a start in a paradox game there would be at least four totally distinct viable strategies for becoming one of the most impactful PMs of all time.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
I get the evangelical tyranny of small differences/heresy vs apostasy argument that Talarico being a lib protestant is worse than being nothing, but by the same logic the worst possible person is someone who claims to be the exact same kind of christian as you and is also a moral abomination.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Decided to lookup Paxton’s victory speech to see if there’s something redeeming about his performance that doesn’t come through in the stills where he looks like a frog someone stepped on, and somehow inexplicably he has NPR voice.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
IMO there is a fair amount of motivated reasoning that goes into scaling the data that creates this kind of chart, but a lot of people's reactions to this stuff just reflect having very bad intuitions about what it looks like when a group is negatively selected.
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Brandy Jensen @brandyjensen.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
not unrecognizable but he does look like if Belgium had a dictator
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
One thought I keep having re: Callais, beyond dummymander wish casting, VRA districts anchored Dems in the South to a specific vision of their state parties and their relationship to the national party. All gone now and we really have no idea how much the party in these states will change to adapt.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
One thing I've been thinking about since the election results, devolution in the UK is a little silly but it's wild how much structural experimentation the regional govts in the UK have done while U.S. states have stronger powers and fewer constraints but mostly choose to LARP as the US Congress.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Glad people are coming around and this is a good piece overall, but, I'm consistently shocked by how few American political scientists know that PR is *better* for local representation than single member districts when it's a consistent finding in comparative politics with a robust theory behind it.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Great story that covers some of the gaps in my understanding of the Platner story, basically: 1) National anti-establishment Dems discover and promote Platner, introduce him to local prog and union groups. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/05/01/p...
bangordailynews.com
Behind the scenes of Janet Mills’ US Senate campaign collapse
Mills led a poll released in December, but things changed dramatically after that. Earlier this month, reporters watched her speak with a few local officials on the second floor of a nearly empty Indi...
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Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I've been resisting it, but I think I've been @leedrutman.bsky.social pilled on proportional representation for america. It doesn't prevent democratic backsliding in all countries — and can sometimes facilitate it. But it seems like a uniquely appropriate solution for the US' current problems.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Old Soviet joke, man is arrested for waving around a sign that says 86-47. He explains to the Department of justice that he only meant peacefully voting out of office or impeaching 47 for his many crimes. DoJ replies: 'Don't be foolish, we all know the only way to 86-47. '
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JLRay @jlray.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Trump knows Vance wants to be president but thinks he should aim higher at being the world’s second catholic integralist astronaut.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
I went down a rabbit hole about messianism in the Haredi community recently and the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned it to orthodox and ex-orthodox people are some of the strangest talking points I have maybe ever heard about why something they’re clearly deeply alarmed by is a non-issue.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
I find this line deeply frustrating and tedious, impeachment as a method of holding govt ministers accountable barely worked and was abandoned in the UK, then never worked for 2+ centuries in the U.S., it’s not a scandal that something that never worked and was never going to work didn’t work.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Ok, serious poli-sci methods question, how common is running analysis in the cloud at this point. I have been optimizing something so it can run on <16GB of memory (ie actually run in R on my PC) and I want to hype this as a replication feature but worried I’ll get a lot of ‘just use AWS’ feedback.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
I totally believe that term limits erode expertise and move power from Congress to external party orgs and lobbyists. The thing is that there are still people outside Congress who would like Congress to do its job. There don’t seem to be many of those people in Congress.
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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
The disconnect about the Iran War and TACO is that TACO works because markets get to avoid a panic sell off and Trump retains agency to do the same thing again later, but Iran's leadership can't let up while that agency exists because they value being alive for longer than the next ~ two years.
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