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This could be coincidence, but it could also be that the campaigning is doing an effective job of linking the gas prices to Trump.

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Change in gas prices and Trump approval since the Iran war began. The slope is steepest in states with a Senate contest.

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Hegseth fired 10% of the generals and redirected to these guys.

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politicalanalyticsconference.com

Tickets are still available for the Political Analytics Conference next week. (Complementary for academics - be in touch with me). politicalanalyticsconference.com

Political Analytics 2026

are the numbers on the wall?   October 8th & 9th, 2026 | Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. More details & registration information to follow

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Also, hardly the point, but Hegseth probably doesn't know that more people from Harvard have died serving their country than any other college besides West Point.

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I had missed this one. But it's a real, real problem. Hegseth is setting up the personnel of the military as in opposition to other elements of American society. It is shameful and dangerous (and also sorta just repeating lines from A Few Good Men). bsky.app/profile/atru...

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I occasionally point out that nobody looks at, say, Raytheon or Boeing, and claims because they win federal contracts that it gives the government the right to control their internal ideology.

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I admire you having your SLR at the ready, I am often too lazy to pull mine out and miss such opportunities.

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I was at the last game in the Yankees series in May when they were swept and Cora got fired the next day and it felt like the season was over. Then they went on that incredible run. Then two more losses to the Yankees and the season really is over.

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Textbook competitive authoritarianism. No ambiguity about it.

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say more about what you used for that shot.

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I'm mostly trolling, but I do think the Sox overperformed for a good chunk of the season and that gave fans unrealistic expectations. They happened to be coming back to earth in the latter parts of the season.

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Occasionally, I like to point out that the closest I ever came to being canceled in academia was for suggesting that we shouldn't rely so much on Mechanical Turk.

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AP NORC: Trump approval at 31 points. A majority of Americans, 51%, *strongly disapprove*. AFAIK, strong disapproval crushing overall approval by 20 points is unprecedented. There is no political downside to opposing authoritarianism.

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The problem with the Red Sox this season is that they were never very good.

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There is a real war going on with real casualties and real consequences for the American economy and the rest of the world and the person in charge of our military his spending his time doing this.

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Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It should alarm us that the civilian head of the military gathers together troops to give them a political speech in which he calls the free press treasonous. He should be removed from office for doing so.

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Reposted by Ryan Enos

This is a picture of senior academics holding up a result from their classic 1997 paper as the be-all and end-all on the topic.

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One meta-comment is that this is another small sign that the gravity of American higher-education is continuing to slide toward warmer climates.

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Have these long-distance expansions really worked out well for universities? What is it that they can do in Miami (besides go to the beach) that they can't do in Pittsburgh? Imagine what $3 billion could do if invested in their current campus and surrounding area...

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I'll say again, for a guy that actually was an officer, Hegseth has the most 3rd-grade school-boy vision of the military and war fighting imaginable. He thinks winning wars just means being able to blow stuff up bigger than the other guy. www.militarytimes.com/news/pentago...

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But Carnegie Mellon is going to build a campus in Miami????

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This photo is amazing (I guess props to Senator Kennedy for helping hold the incriminating evidence...)

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Also, pour one out for the staff member that's going to get fired over that debacle.

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Klobuchar with the steal! bsky.app/profile/klob...

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There was also something cosmic in the cultural milieu that meant Caitlin Clark had to be invoked.

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Elise Stefanik thought she had a career-making moment doing this stuff, but, alas, all glory is fleeting and look where she ended up.

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This partly reflects the broader social-media-driven nationalization of politics, whereby Schmitt thought he was going to get a profile boost from this. But it also reflects the personalistic control of Trump, whereby they know his attention is grabbed by Fox News sound bites.

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Note that there is little evidence that this worked in 2024.

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Like Paxton, Ramaswamy is an awful candidate whose only virtue was fealty to Trump. Despite claims otherwise, Trump is also a bad politician with terrible campaign and legislative instincts. He will have left a legacy of destruction for the Republican Party.

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Deterrence is one of the logics of punishment generally. As a society, we just have to decide what the efficacy of deterrence is and how to balance it against other costs.

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But more generally, the reason mercy is a virtue is that it takes courage to show mercy to people who you don't want to show it to. It is easy to show mercy to the blameless, but hard when it comes to people who have done awful things, and we shouldn't shame people who show such mercy.

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On a practical matter, the "weak on crime" political attack is arguably what led to the extreme prison population we have in the United States, including many people who would not be locked away in a sane system. This is also true of maintaining a system of capital punishment.

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A Tough Ad Reminds Nebraska Voters About a Brutal Crime and a Pardon (Gift Article)

I sincerely understand why people would want to see this man in prison and would are angry he was pardoned. But shaming politicians (and judges, prosecutors) for showing mercy is a dangerous path that can lead to untenable outcomes and I wish we didn't do it. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/u...

nytimes.com

A group supporting Dan Osborn, the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, is airing an ad attacking Senator Pete Ricketts, a Republican, for pardoning a man convicted of sexual assault.

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Although if one is going to do these ecological studies, state is generally not the level to do them on.

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it survives age and income controls (don't know about obesity, but I imagine that is correlated with income).

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good question, controlling for median age or percent 65+, on top of the other controls diminishes the coefficient a bit, but it still remains the strongest predictor.

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can't imagine having that kind of time on my hands...

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Also, controlling for percent Evangelical based on Pew survey data does not undo this relationship (in fact, percent Evangelical loses conventional statistical significance in a multivariate regression with testosterone searches).

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One note about this, because I was curious: remarkably, the state-level explanatory power of Google searches for testosterone and Trump vote survives controls for education, income, and rurality.

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Because he's shredded all norms and only sees the world as friends or enemies, Trump has been using taxpayer $$$ for political propaganda long before putting those ads out this weekend. What do you call it when Natalie Harp (a government employee) is pushing pro-Trump slop on social media all day?

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