Old Bull: Recent Episodes
American Civics Exchange
From American Civics Exchange, Flip Pidot hosts your insider's guide to political prediction markets.
Video versions of most shows available at OldBull.tv.
This week, why we shouldn’t be afraid of using the other F-word: fascism, especially as the Right shatters political norms, turns citizens into public enemies, and politicizes the military. Rachel and Aaron discuss a Democrat who joked about violence, a Republican who preaches it, a billionaire who builds it into the algorithm, and a movement now summoning generals for loyalty oaths. Plus: The political strategies and public polling behind the government shutdown. Who, exactly, is getting the blame?
LINKS:
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France24: Elon Musk: The voice of the far right in Europe?
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Stephen Miller’s cousin on Facebook: “the face of evil”
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The Cycle - Substack: We’re Deep in the St Now: The Only Way to Win the Shutdown Was Not to Play
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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This week Rachel and Aaron discuss the Trump Administration’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death, his martyrdom, and what’s next on the march into authoritarianism. Plus, a trip to the front lines of Trump’s tariffs: rural America. Why are farmers are feeling the pinch first? And Trump crosses a thin red line by ordering the U.S. Department of Justice to target his political enemies, facts be damned.
LINKS:
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Substack - The Cycle: From Goebbels to Google: Same S**t, Different Century
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Truth Social: Trump says opponents are “guilty as hell” – without evidence
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Hot Mic: “Our brand is in crisis”
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Imperial March in Washington, DC
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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With Labor Day behind us, Trump’s honeymoon is over and his march into fascist authoritarianism is in full force. This week Rachel and Aaron look at his latest distraction from a nosediving economy and the Epstein Files: an armed, federal invasion of America’s third-largest city. Plus, market instability rocks America’ farmers as Trump’s tariffs take a toll, a grilling for RFK junior (and no, we’re not talking about his face), and Gov. Newsom’s master class in political mockery looks awfully familiar.
LINKS:
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Substack - The Cycle: A Blue Tsunami is Headed for Virginia and New Jersey
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Substack - The Cycle: Democrats Want to Run on Affordability: Here’s How to Do it Right
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American Soybean Association: ‘A trade and financial precipice’
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Thank you Joe Jones, Maureen Drews, Dianna Richardson, Mary Detweiler, and many others for tuning into my live video with Susan Wagner! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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Why are Republicans trying to give themselves an edge in Congress? In the words of one GOP lawmaker: “Because we can.” This week, Rachel and Aaron separate the facts from JD Vance’s alt reality as some Democrats prepare to fight fire with fire. Plus: Trump takes federal control over Washington DC. And South Park sends up America’s most notorious puppy killer.
LINKS:
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YouTube:President Trump holds news conference on plans to address D.C. crime
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Gavin Newsom to Trump: ‘You Are Playing With Fire’
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The Cycle (Substack): Appeasement Didn’t Work Then; It Won’t Work Now
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Facts are stubborn things, at least two of Trump’s predecessors have said. And for Trump on the economy—and Jeffrey Epstein–-there’s nothing to see here. This week Rachel and Aaron look at what the latest job numbers mean for Trump 2.0. Plus, Trump is making his own list… of political enemies. And secret documents in a secret annex at FBI Headquarters? Pssh.
LINKS
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New York Times: Until Trump Fired Her, She Was an Economist With Bipartisan Support
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ABC News: Joe Rogan slams Trump administration over Epstein investigation: 'Trying to gaslight'
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The Breakfast Club: Charlamagne Responds To Donald Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ Post About Him
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The Cycle (Substack): The Anatomy of “Othering”: How Authoritarians Build Permission for Violence
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game’
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This week Rachel and Aaron stick to the one scandal that’s finally sticking to Teflon Don: Jeffrey Epstein, and the Trump Administration’s spectacular inability to control the narrative. Rachel dives into the need to “politicize everything.” A look at how Trump 2.0 is using immigration to destroy democracy with quiet bureaucracy. And why are some Dems demanding to fight “fire with fire” after the latest GOP effort to retain control of the U.S. House?
LINKS:
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The Cycle (Substack): Politicize Everything: A Blueprint for a Party that Fights
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YouTube: 'You’ve got no rights’: teenage US citizen records violent arrest by immigration officers
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The Guardian: How Trump has supercharged the immigration crackdown - in data
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YouTube: 'Epstein Partied With Trump': Texas Congressional Candidate Dragged Out Of Hearing
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YouTube: California's Newsom Calls To 'Fight Fire With Fire' As Texas Considers Redistricting
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Surrounded (Jubilee Media): 1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan)
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50501: Rage Against the Regime | August 2, 2025
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The National: Convicted US Felon to Arrive in Scotland
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This week, as Trump’s FEMA struggles to answer questions about consequential budget cuts in the aftermath of Texas flooding, Rachel and Aaron look at how the Republican Party deliberately turned climate change into a conspiracy theory. It’s MAGA thought control. Plus, the FBI tries to go after thought crimes. And the Epstein Scandal threatens to unravel MAGA, despite Trump’s best efforts to move on. Which of his allies aren’t letting it go?LINKS:
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The Cycle (Substack): The Big Ugly Cuts to Climate Science
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Nancy Pelosi & Newt Gingrich Climate PSA (2008)
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Frontline: Climate of Doubt
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New York Times: The F.B.I. Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials’ Loyalty
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KOCO-TV (Oklahoma City): OSDE introduces 'America First Assessment' for teachers moving from certain states
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Megyn Kelly & Charlie Kirk on Epstein scandal
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The Hill: Bannon warns GOP could lose 40 House seats over Epstein files
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Vox: Why everyone runs for president these days
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Live Free. Die Fast. Get Digested… slowly. Welcome to “Alligator Alcatraz,” America’s first concentration camp. Plus, Rachel and Aaron explore the future, or not, of Elon Musk’s new “America Party.” Why, exactly, is America stuck with a two-party system? Meteorologists show us how cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service impact weather disaster warning systems. And Jeffrey Epstein’s client list has broken MAGA.
LINKS:
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The Cycle on Subtack: Elon Musk announces a new party
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KXAN-TV (Austin, TX): Head of local weather warnings takes early retirement as NOAA cuts continue
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Oxford Reference: Duverger’s Law
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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What the hell is happening with Iran and Donald “No Wars” Trump? This week Rachel and Aaron break down the confusion, and the rift it’s causing in MAGA’s alt-reality. Plus, Rachel has an important lesson for the news media about the difference between rioting and protesting. How decaying democracy has opened the door to political violence and… who told “Whisky Pete” Hegseth to “be a man” during a hearing on Capitol Hill?
LINKS:
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New York Times: Shifting Views and Misdirection: How Trump Decided to Strike Iran
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Tucker Carlson: Tucker Confronts Ted Cruz on His Support for Regime Change in Iran
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Sen. Slotkin to Hegseth: “Be a man”
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The Cycle: Monday Memo (Substack): Welcome Back to the ’70s, Baby!
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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Folks,
Today we’re living history with Joe Walsh—-Tea Party congressman to Never Trump activist, to an card carrying Democrat!!
I’m excited to announce that last week Joe decided to put a ring on it and officially become a Democrat.
And here is one thing that makes him a fairly unique Democrat, the very kind we desperately need: he’s a fighter.
I hope you’ll agree with me, these the days for heroes and I for one and ecstatic to add Joe and his arsenal of rhetorical weapons to the party.
In fact, I welcome everyone to go read through some of the content on Joe’s Substack The Social Contract with Joe Walsh.
The Republican Party’s propaganda machine has done an excellent job of defining democrats, a party dominated by moderates, as a party of extremists.
There is nothing more extreme than pretending an election was stolen and then trying to sick a mob on the Capitol to violently seize power after his party-wide coup plan failed.
Now, if you are member of Joe’s audience, and not mine, I am a former political scientist turned political analyst/strategist who has devoted her entire life to trying to get Democrats to make electoral war, not love. You can check out my work and order by book at here.
Ok, back to this Living History episode. Living History is based on the idea that the present now will later be past. Future historians will be writing books about what we’re living through RIGHT NOW. So its important to both record and make history ourselves right now.
When the books get written about America in the early 21st century, lets make sure the books are about the true Patriots who stood up to stop fascism.
-Rachel
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This week we bring you into the strategy driving Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and the marines into LA. Rachel compares the fiery I.C.E. protests with how the Nazis rose to power in 1930s Germany, plus how does Elon’s and Don’s Big Beautiful Breakup threaten the President’s tax cuts for billionaires? We also unpack the DOJ’s fishy case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
LINKS:
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Newsom to Defense Secretary Hegseth: Rescind National Guard Order
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LA Protesters Angry w/ Mayor Karen Bass & Governor Gavin Newsom
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Justice Department documents re: Kilmar Abrego Garcia
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The Cycle Monday Memo: Something Wicked This Way Comes (Substack)
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POLITICO: ‘You essentially destroyed any chance I have,’ DNC chair told David Hogg in private meeting
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Folks!
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Living History pod. I’m excited to bring you this unique conversation with Don Lemon, former anchor at CNN but current anchor of his new independent media project The Don Lemon Show on YouTube.
And Don is covering all his new media bases, offering his content via youtube, X, Bluesky, Insta, and Subtack.
The premise of the show is that we’re living through extraordinary times, a time period future historians will write books about.
Thus, it behooves us all to keep records of what it was like to live through this, from a variety of different perspectives: journalists, authors, politicians, and others who each bring their own distinct perspectives to assess what we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
The present now, will later be past. Its important that we capture this moment in time.
We’re living history.
Rachel
PS: I hope you enjoy this free premier of Living History!
If you like the concept of the show, let me know what you think in the comments.
Want these interviews to run a full hour or do you like the 30 minute format?
Do you have people you’d like me to bring on to the show? Let me know!
The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
This week Rachel and Aaron follow Elon “Black Eye” Musk out the door as he whines about the American political system he destroyed. Plus: cracks in the ice when it comes to criticizing Donald Trump and the Big Ugly Bill, a weird reminder of death from a U.S. Senator (and a weirder “apology”). What happens when you call a fascist… a fascist? And we take a hard look at the Great Replacement Theory through the lens of Tucker Carlson.
LINKS:
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New York Times: On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama
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Associated Press: Musk put a spotlight on federal spending, but cut less than he wanted
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Elon Musk interview on CBS This Morning
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Sen. Rand Paul on Face the Nation
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Sen. Joni Ernst: “We’re all going to die”
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Ernst makes sarcastic “apology” in graveyard
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Woman calls out Rep. Mike Flood as a fascist
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Trump confronted by TACO Theory
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Tucker Carlson interview with Canadian MP Maxime Bernier
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Trump throws 500-word hissyfit about Leornard Leo and the Federalist Society
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The Cycle on Subtack
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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This week Rachel and Aaron translate Trump’s Marie Antoinette “Let Them Eat Tariffs" moment. Plus, an alarming shakeup in the national intelligence community with echoes from history. In Trump’s DOJ if you can’t charge ‘em, shame ‘em.
LINKS:
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Trump post: Wal-Mart should ‘EAT THE TARIFFS’
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Associated Press: Gabbard fires 2 top intelligence officials and will shift office that preps Trump’s daily brief
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NBC’s Meet the Press: Interview with Mike Pence (May 18, 2025)
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Fox: Sunday Morning Futures: Interview with Kash Patel & Dan Bongino (May 18, 2025)
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USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on Trump banner
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NBC News: DOJ 'weaponization' group will shame individuals it can't charge with crimes
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CNN: James Comey’s ‘weird’ social media approach lands him in hot water
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VIDEO: Rep. Swalwell presses HS Secretary Noem on doctored photo
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The Cycle on Subtack: Trump's Executive Orders Serve One Sinister Purpose
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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My conversation with Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke and contributor on Project 2025 is one of the most important conversations I’ve had on this show.
Important for you and important for his audience too.
If you want to know why I say that, you’ll have to give it a listen because I’m way too smart to lay it out here for you!
You’ll learn from the conversation Hanania’s break with the Trump Cult over the insanity of DOGE and Trump’s tariffs has produced a predictable backlash from MAGA.
There is only one rule of MAGA Fight Club and its never, ever insult the boss or admit he’s wrong.
Last week Hanania put up a really compelling article on his own Substack you can find right here titled: What I Got Wrong About Trump.
Again as a political behaviorist, let me reiterate that two things are particularly hard psychologically for anyone to do (and most can’t do at all) and those two things are:
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admitting you got something wrong
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Breaking with your own “tribe” to do so.
Show Richard Hanania some grace folks, and give his mea culpa a read:
Get content you won’t find anywhere else.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Trump pushes socialist price controls for pharmaceuticals, refugee status for white people and free flights out for everyone else. Rachel and Aaron also dive into the effort to suspend the U.S. Constitution, and compare how Trump’s chaotic presidency parallels the rise of Vladimir Putin. Plus…Da Pope offers inspiring words for the world.
LINKS:
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Trump wants drug price controls (
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Trump bashes price controls on Truth Social (August 2024)
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White House: TO ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS: BOOK YOUR FREE FLIGHT NOW
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Cardinal Prevost (Pope Leo XIV) tweet re: JD Vance (Feb 3)
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Bannon’s War Room: Marjorie Taylor Greene
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Rachel on white South African refugees
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OANN on Twitter
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Pope Leo XIV: “Evil will not win”
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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The Cycle on Substack
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
History is certainly echoing now!
Folks, I’m returning to my conversational pods with interesting people talking about interesting s**t. I’m kicking things off by living by example and doing a crossover show with THE Mr. Beat, who hosts a very popular You Tube channel.
There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t engage with or see any of the political content that are the staples of our lives.
AND that world is much, much bigger than our world.
This is why we’re seeing a concerted effort by Democrats to do something they have always feared: have real conservations with real people on media people actually watch.
Don’t forget, the average daily audience of MSNBC is 700,000 people. That’s about .000000001% of the country watching Deadline, in case you’re wondering why people voted for fascism.
In fact, on Monday you’re going to get a very important announcement about the future of The Cycle and the cool s**t we’re going to be dropping as the year progresses.
Anyhoo, Mr. Beat was kind enough to come have a conversation with me about what my new major thesis: American history is actually just one book with different chapters, those chapters being:
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The Great Compromise (AKA: The Constitution
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The Expansion of the American West
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Civil War
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End of Reconstruction and the introduction of Jim Crow
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The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s
ANNNNDDDD Chapter 6: Whatever the F**k it is That This MAGA Thing is Going to End With.
Because that book is still be written. Right now. By us.
Now, before any of you get too excited about that you should know this is what I’m noodling on in terms of my next book proposal: preemptively titled as Living History. Once I go to sell it, it will end up with a 15 word subtitle so I’m going to enjoy my two word title until they pay me money to get over it.
As subscribers to The Cycle y’all are the very first people to hear about this new project which is still in its early planning stages.
Back to Mr. Beat, who figured out he could make more money swinging history videos on You Tube than he made after 11 years of being a high school history teacher (which you should read as a testament to how shitty teacher pay it is).
He is also a published author of The Power of Our Supreme Court: How Supreme Court Cases Shape Democracy and you should check it out!
I hope you enjoy our crossover conversation!
You can subscribe to Mr. Beats You Tube You right here!
AND of course you can share and subscribe to The Cycle here!
Did you learn something new from today’s conversation? Don’t be a knowledge hoarder!! Hit share!
Do you appreciate my fusion of political science, data, history, economics, and culture?? Subscribe now!!!
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This week Rachel and Aaron investigate the three words that hit hardest from Donald Trump’s recent interview on Meet the Press, and the one word missing from the New York Times’s editorial criticizing his first 100 days. Plus the Lord of the Shadows, Stephen Miller, wants you to know MAGA has BIG plans for your children and grandchildren. Don’t miss an eye-opening comparison between Trump’s “Lord of Shadows” and the Nazi Party’s youth indoctrination programs.
LINKS:
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NBC’s Meet the Press: Full interview with Donald Trump
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NBC News: Fact-checking Donald Trump’s May interview with ‘Meet the Press’
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60 Minutes: How law firms targeted by Trump are responding to White House pressure
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Marc Elias: Democracy Docket
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SNL: ‘Lord of the Shadows’
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Stephen Miller: ‘Children will be taught to love America’
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New York Times: Editorial: There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
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Mike Pence Receives JFK Profile in Courage Award
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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The Cycle on Substack
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As another texting scandal jolts the Pentagon into “full-blown meltdown,” Rachel earns national attention for her internet sleuthing skills and gets vindicated in the aftermath of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Plus, she and Aaron take a close look at the first rule in fighting tyranny… and share a masterclass from a European internet troll.
LINKS:
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Politico Opinion: Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside the Agency
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The Daily Beast: Rachel catches bad White House photoshop job
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George Carlin: Methods of Execution
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SplitTicket.org tweet: The story of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election was turnout
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Timothy Snyder on Substack: Obeying in Advance
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European Parliament Member Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy trolls Trump’s New York
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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The Cycle on Substack
The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
This week Rachel and Aaron change up the format to take a deep dive into the arrest and deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, imprisoned in El Salvador without due process despite a U.S. Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return.
The case has chilling parallels to what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This is a warning from history worth understanding.
In Nazi Germany the Gestapo didn't even have to watch everyone: your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even family members had the power to destroy you. Much of the terror came from not knowing, you know, who was watching or listening. History doesn't replicate like DNA but it does repeat.
LINKS
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The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945
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Full news conference: Trump and President Bukele of El Salvador
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Rep. Steven Horsford blasts U.S. trade rep after Trump tariff pause
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Trump’s planned destruction of America’s economy is a pivotal political moment. This week Rachel and Aaron offer advice for “normies” who are just now waking up to the mess. Plus, a reading of the tea leaves after the recent special elections, how to send us your best signs for this month’s next nationwide protests, and why was this week’s show a little late? We’ve got an exciting reason!
LINKS:
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The 50501 Movement (April 19th protests)
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Sen. Rand Paul’s resolution to “Reassert Congressional Authority Over Tax Policy”
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Project 2025 Tracker
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
It's Election Day! Will it be a difficult one for MAGA in Wisconsin and Florida? Plus, Rachel and Aaron get into the nitty gritty over Third Term Gate… and Signal Gate. The Trump Tax, er “Liberation Day,” prompts Aaron to move up his car shopping timeline. Musk gives away millions. And what's the one issue voters associate most with the Democratic Party? The answer may surprise you...
LINKS:
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NBC News: Trump won’t rule out seeking a third term in the White House
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The Intercept: In Trump’s America, You Can Be Disappeared for Writing an Op-Ed
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The Tufts Daily: Op-ed coauthored by Rümeysa Öztürk
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The Cycle on Substack: Voters Have No Idea What Democrats Stand For
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The New York Times: Marine Le Pen Barred From French Presidential Run After Embezzlement Ruling
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
This week Rachel and Aaron chase the firetrucks to the dumpster fire of the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress who’re trying to defend it. How do you explain an unprecedented security breach involving secret war plans accidentally shared with a news editor? Where do voters draw a line in the sand? Plus, a closer look at why Elon Musk is trying to break the Overton Window. And are spring breakers really this… dumb?
LINKS:
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The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
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New York Times: Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts
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Campaign Website: Judge Susan Crawford for Wisconsin Supreme Court
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Greenland’s Prime Minister: “Taking over our country over our heads”
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CNN: Angry voters confront GOP lawmaker at town hall in Washington
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LibertyHangout.tv on YouTube: Spring Breakers Fail American History Trivia
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Rachel at The Cycle: What is the Overton Window and Why is Elon Musk Breaking It?
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
This week Rachel and Aaron explore the good, the bad and the ugly. Why is Schumer’s vote to keep the government open an important political move? What prompted a pissed-off federal judge to issue an order from the bench? And what do the latest poll numbers mean for Trump 2.0? Plus: adios, habeas corpus. And we drop into a fiery town hall meeting in North Carolina’s bright red 11th Congressional District.
LINKS:
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Rachel on The Cycle: Never Interrupt Your Enemy When They Are Making a Mistake
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MSNBC: ‘A sham: Federal judge blasts Trump admin on improper firings of federal workers; orders rehiring
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Quinnipiac University Poll: Voters’ Ratings on Economy and Trump Dip
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NBC March 2025 Poll
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Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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As the Trump administration tanks the stock market and sends prices soaring even higher, Rachel and Aaron examine the stupid in “it’s the economy, stupid.” Europe reconsiders a new world leader while here at home, Republican politicians become snowflakes. Plus, a chilling observation from the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, and how would Rachel have responded to Trump’s boring Joint Address to Congress?
Do you appreciate my fusion of political science, history, data, and current events? I can’t make this content without YOUR support. Support Indie media by subscribing to The Cycle- On
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This week Rachel and Aaron cut through the noise as Elon's "Chainsaw for Democracy" cuts thousands of federal jobs, and as Steve "Prison Toady" Bannon massacres the Constitution--surprising even a fellow neo-Nazi. Trump's honeymoon is over though, according to public polling (surprise! Americans don't seem to care about DEI). And members of Congress face the music at public town halls, even in deep red districts.
LINKS:
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NPR: DOGE released data about federal contract savings. It doesn't add up
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Washington Post poll: Many of Trump’s early actions are unpopular
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CNN Poll: Americans worried by Trump’s push to expand power
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Wyomingite gives master class in "pivot, belittle, attack"
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Alarming scene from Republic of Gilead (Coeur d'Alene, ID)
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Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
This week Rachel and Aaron go behind the Resolute Desk with Elon, Donald and "X Æ A-XII." They untangle a "very weird 20 minutes" from failed comedian JD Vance in Munich, start the clock on Marco Rubio's tenuous tenure as Secretary of State, and shine light on the plain-sight quid-pro-quo between Trump's Justice Department and NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Oh... and how does Trump's controversial "Napoleon Dynamite" tweet compare to Hitler's rise in Fascist Germany?
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This week, Rachel and Aaron keep up with Trump 2.0's strategy of flooding the zone, resulting in a chaotic political and media environment that can only be described as "everything, everywhere, all at once."
They explore the parallels of what's happening now to the rise of Nazi Germany, particularly the "golden age of culture"--which MAGA America desperately wants to control.
Rachel and Aaron also discuss the threat of democracy falling apart when the Executive Branch refuses to listen to the Judicial Branch... at the encouragement of Vice President Vance. Buckle up!
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Checked In for the Checked Out
This week Rachel and Aaron take a tumble through the spin cycle of Donald Trump's second full week in office, which included chaos and confusion, a stock market nose-dive, another off-the-rails news conference, pissed off allies, economic uncertainty and threats of a new consumer tax. They also take the temperature on batshit crazy Senate confirmation hearings and share some thoughts about the incoming leader of the DNC.
Links:
Letter to senators from Caroline Kennedy re: her cousin Bobby
Our Book: Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game (Crown, 2024)
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This week Rachel and Aaron dive into the deliberately exhausting 'shock and awe' strategy by Trump 2.0, drawing comparisons to the "Working Toward the Fuhrer" strategy of 1930s Germany.
They also discuss a powerful warning from the New York Times, coffee, inflation, shrinkflation, what you need to know about ongoing confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, and some tough love from... The Daily Show.
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History does not replicate like DNA, but it echoes.
It's echoing now.
Welcome to This is America
Episode 1: Oh s**t, there goes the neighborhood
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If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.
As Dr. Taylor points out in our interview about his book The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy, for all the attention January 6th received, a key part of that story has been largely ignored.
Along with bear spray, confederate flags, and combat gear, Christian nationalist iconography was all over the insurrection.
In fact, you might remember watching this motley crew of Trump loyalists anointing their violent take over of our nation’s heart of democracy with a group prayer.
You may also remember the 2023 reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew something called The Appeal to Heaven Flag many of us were introduced to for the first time on January 6th flying at the highest peak of the Alito family flag poll at various points since 2020.
Even worse, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson flies on on his office door right there in Capitol Hill.
And worse yet, our likely Trumpian Defense Secretary is an out and proud Christian Nationalist who, I s**t you not, is a fan of the Crusades. THE CRUSADES.
So what in the hell does it all mean??! What are these religious fanatics planning for the rest of us?
That’s why I’ve brought Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies on for a conversation about the Christian Nationalist movement and what we should expect from them as they ascend to power for the first time in American history.
Don’t miss this conversation because the survival of the separation of church and state depends on it.
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Today’s pod is with Rachel Maddow producer and editor of Maddow Blog Steve Benen and his important new book Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republican’’ War on the Recent Reality.
Benen’s important book documents how Republicans managed how to rewrite the history of recent events like January 6th and COVID to make millions of people believe in a false reality for something they saw with their very own eyes.
Despite the deserved attention on Republicans efforts to white wash American history, very little scholarship has explored how Republicans use their propaganda system and coordination to shape public narratives that have no basis in reality. That makes this work critical.
Although the presidential race remains a toss up, advantage Harris, I for one think it is prudent to consider a Trump win scenario and what it might mean both in the short and long term.
I want to be clear, by acknowledging Trump can win, I am not suggesting he will win, but as my good friend Edna says “luck favors the prepared.”
Benen’s book documents how Trump and MAGA media disappeared recent history for millions of Americans, right before their own eyes and will be a valuable tool for that brave new world should we end up living in it.
Catch our conversation and buy the book!
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Its Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Not only did Hitler and his Nazis murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, its HOW they murdered them you should know more about.
After first being dispossessed of their businesses and homes, then being "ghettoized," the Jews began to be "deported East." Deported East meant being packed like sardines into a cattle car sometimes for a week or more with NO WATER, let alone food. People died standing up and the trains were full of excrement.
Once they arrived they walked into a carefully laid trap. They didn't know it, but they faced the first of what would come to define the life of the people who ended up with the Auschwitz tattoos: selection. At Auschwitz, between 10-30% of each train load was "selected for work." The rest, men, women, children, and babies were "selected" to be gassed.
At its height in 42/43, the German's killing machinery was performing at its peak, murdering and burnings thousands of humans a day. To make their murder machine work, they needed to keep their victims docile. So, using Jewish prisoners to unload and process those "selected for death" into the gas chambers, these "Sonderkommando" were forced to calm those condemned to death with lies about getting showered and deloused and about what would happen next. If they did not, they would be immediately murdered themselves.
The Nazis actually staged the train platform with fake "to the showers" signs and even went so far as to tell people with just seconds left to live to fold their clothes and make sure they can refind them. Anything to get their 1,000 or so victims to walk willingly into the shower room with its fake faucets. If you were "lucky" in the Holocaust, the Nazis selected you to be worked till death. Selected for work was what stood for "luck" in Auschwitz.
The most important thing you need to remember this year is that what happened to the Jews happened by the intentional "othering" of the Jews by a tyrannical despot. There was nothing special about the millions of Germans who became silent accomplices to the near total destruction of European Jewry. There was nothing special about the Germans then, or us now. We must stop Donald Trump and his MAGA movement here, now. The whole world is watching.
In Episode 2 of Shadowboxing the Apocalypse Ep. 2: How the Nazis Seized Power I bring historian and author of The Death Democracy Benjamin Hett back onto the pod to discuss how Hitler went from being sworn in as a weak chancellor on January 30, 1933 to suspending the German Constitution and outlawing the opposition in less than 60 days.
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Some of you may know I am also using twitter (which is by far my biggest audience) to try to draw attention to the parallels between our current crisis and the fall of democracy in Germany. This work, which I call Project 1933 is tied to the Republican Party’s Transition to Autocracy plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Manual for Leadership, more commonly known as Project 2025. I’ve been tweeting the Nazi’s quick rise to fascist autocracy in real time as events unfold in Germany in 1933. Please check it out if you are not already and if you are already, PLEASE RT THOSE TWEETS!!
(Editors Note: If you are not familiar with Project 2025 yet, please AT LEAST read this which will cover the most important points).
Have you read my book, which is reshaping how Democrats do elections?! Well, what are you waiting for?!
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https://arkansasadvocate.com/2022/10/05/study-more-republicans-than-democrats-likely-died-of-covid/
Researcher Max Taves closes his analysis in David Cay Johnston’s DC Report by asking a very important question:
“Republican politicians can talk all they want about how pro-life they are, but these data defy and belie their rhetoric. Facts are stubborn things.
So what does it say about a political party which incessantly promotes its respect for life and yet whose states’ policies overwhelmingly and repeatedly produce the highest rates of death from cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, influenza, diabetes, traffic accidents, guns, workplace accidents, suicides and murders?
How pro-life can Republican states be when their own constituents literally get less life?”
Taves’ analysis comparing health and death outcomes between Red and Blue states reveal a shocking and inescapable conclusion: Republican policies kill people.
Pick any metric, from covid death rates, to heart disease and diabetes, cancer, car accidents, to gun suicides, Taves shows that Red State’s offer their residents a plethora of ways to die younger and poorer than folks in Blue States.
As I always say, the data don’t lie.
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As soon as Heather Cox Richardson’s new book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America came across my algorithm I reached out and invited America’s favorite academic back onto the show.
HRC’s newest book lays out how a small group of wealthy men financed and developed a right wing propaganda machine that 54+ years later, stands to topple America’s nearly 250 year old democracy.
But perhaps even more importantly, Cox-Richardson lays out how marginalized Americans of the past have risen up to meet their own historical moments and saved the American experiment in the process.
Heather’s right: if you have ever wondered what you would do during the Freedom Rides, WWII, the fight to end segregation, or the effort to hold America together during the Civil War, Heather deftly reminds us all: you’re doing it right now.
Folks!
We’re down to ONE WEEK before Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game is released and I have BIG NEWS for you!
Penguin Random House has given me special permission to give YOU a special preview of the book! Watch for that in the coming days and pre-order your copy RIGHT NOW!!
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Like all good lefties, I cut my teeth in progressive politics learning all about the horrors of America’s massive military industrial complex.
In one of my very first college classes ever at the local community college, a passionate instructor who spent his spare time organizing peace marches against the Iraq War made sure each of his students left his class well-versed in America’s overinvestment in defense spending and underinvestment in well, everything else.
20 years ago I had zero appreciation for the reasons why America had amassed such tremendous military might. Like everyone else, I found America’s disproportioned military budget to be one of our country’s greatest sins.
It was only 18 years later, after I undertook my exhaustive study of world history that I came to fully understand the antecedents that led American presidents of both parties to leave something called isolationism behind and lead America into creating by far the world’s most powerful military.
Instead, administration by administration, America fully embraced the concept of internationalism by building and continually reinforcing a military apparatus larger than the next ten countries combined. One large enough to “police” the entire world.
So, before before you dig into this incredible conversation with Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward about his new book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump I want to be sure you have a solid working definition of both these concepts:
Isolationism: a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.
Interventionism: Interventionism is characterized by the use or threat of force or coercion to alter a political or cultural situation nominally outside the intervenor's moral or political jurisdiction.
In short, in the early 20th century, isolationism became the dominant attitude among Americans who came to believe U.S. involvement in World War I was unnecessary, a product of messing in affairs isolationists believed had no impact on Americans and killed thousands of American men.
The use of the word ‘believed’ here is intentional because as appeasement (isolationism) failed to stop Hitler’s aggressive plans to occupy and rule Europe it became obvious how war and turmoil abroad impacts Americans. Then the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor put a finer point on it: America ignores the rest of the world at its own peril.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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Throughout 2024 I plan on highlighting core grassroots organizations working on the frontlines of the Democratic Party’s messaging revolution.
Now, maybe you think the word “revolution” is too strong, but trust me, moving a party away from approaching voters with wonky policy appeals and achievements to focusing on making sure regular Americans know what the modern GOP has planned for them is no small reform. It requires a revolution of thought based on the cold, hard, realities of the American electorate i lay out in the book.
In my forthcoming book Hit Em’ Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy By beating Republicans at their Own Game I highlight the other massive problem that hampers Democrats in terms of message distribution.
You can have the greatest messaging in the world but it doesn’t do s**t if no one sees it and folks, as I keep using google trend data to show how little Americans care about news and politics, no one sees it.
This is the fundamental flaw behind the White House’s efforts to lift Bidenomics: paid ads, speeches, and social content will never replace the ability of the right wing echo chamber to propel things, even false things like Joe Biden has dementia, to top-of-mind awareness which is what Democrats would have to accomplish to make voters responsive to Biden’s record.
Yes, message distribution is a tough nut to crack because it requires money, lots and lots of it. Which is why I want to talk to you today about something I call digital direct mail, but what you likely call memes and gifs.
Direct mail is a staple expenditure for competitive campaigns and often voters in swing contests receive plenty of it even if you never do.
In the book I highlight how much better Republicans tend to do with direct mail because they understand the target, the average voter, knows next to nothing about civics, cares even less, and will give the same direct mail your team agonized over for hours about 3 seconds of a glance before it is tossed directly into the recycling bin.
Republicans understand voters and have constructed their direct mail to deliver the main message in just that one glance using very little copy.
A rigorous direct mail campaign, one that targets voters with the multiple contacts research says voters need to actually show up and vote, easily runs l into the tens of thousands. It is expensive to produce and then distribution direct mail through the USPS.
But when you strip down direct mail to its purpose, delivering a message, it is easy to see that the internet creates a massive message distribution advantage if campaigns choose to see it as such.
That is why I’m delighted to introduce you to the Freedom Writer’s Collaborative and one of their dedicated grassroots volunteers, marketing strategist Yvonne Brandon. Yvonne joins me to talk about the ready-to-use messaging toolkits created with the also awesome folks at DemCastUSA where the meme that leads of this post was pulled from.
I hope you will consider using these toolkits, and even more importantly, getting your friends, family, and followers to do the same.
Whether your network is 150 people, or 150, everyone is an influencer. FWC makes it easy.
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The first time I posted about the harsh reality of America’s collapsing democracy, it seemed like many folks were genuinely surprised to see that America is not actually the Greatest Democracy on Earth.
According to the democracy index compiled by the EIU and published annually by The Economist, America is actually a “flawed” democracy.
The United States was downgraded from “full” to “flawed” democracy after half of America handed the keys to the White House to a wannabe dictator-con man who immediately began to roll back civil liberties and ignore the rule of law.
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Sadly, America’s not even the best “flawed” democracy.
Technically we’re only the 6th best “flawed” democracy, one spot behind Israel (a state folks who have been mainlining antisemitic propaganda from Hamas for the past decade describe as an “apartheid state” of “colonizing” “oppressors” committing “genocide.”)
That’s why the very second I saw the topic Steve Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s latest book, Tyranny of the Minority I knew I had to get them onto the show.
In Tyranny, Levitsky and Ziblatt, who are both professors at Harvard and are also the authors of another important book you should definitely read titled How Democracies Die, have put their fingers right onto the pulse of something you need to understand: America’s institutions are failing and must be reformed for our democracy to ever flourish again.
Our institutions were brilliant constructs of an 18th century world and a newly born country with one common fear among its creators: too much consolidation of federal power.
Thus, America’s Constitution was constructed to remove the creation of policy from the direct control of its chief executive, which is why most Americans are familiar with the terms “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” even if they’d be hard-pressed to specify what it means exactly, or how it actually works, in any meaningful way.
So concerned with the centralization of national power were the Founding Fathers that they codified checks and balances and separation of powers within each branch of government too.
As America is painfully learning right now, the House of Representatives was given sole “first mover” power in the appropriations process even though the “power of the purse” was granted to Congress at large. We can not fund the government without the House of Representatives which is why having it closed for 3 weeks while the Republican Party fights over custody of the kids is so damaging to our domestic and foreign policy interests.
Its why federal judicial appointments and treaty approval power belongs solely to the Senate.
Its why Chief Justice John Marshall wasn’t laughed out of the room when he asserted that the judicial branch had a “right of review” of actions taken by the legislative and executive branches in what went on to be called “judicial review.”
Yes, the Founding Fathers were positively OBSESSED about centralized power and did everything they could to gum up the works and force compromise in a system designed with one main goal in mind: to avoid creating a tyranny of the majority.
American institutions are designed to have a bias against action. It is very easy to propose legislative goals and very hard to actually enact them. This was true in America’s best of times and this, my friends, is not the best of times.
Fast forward 236 years and the very same institutional checks and balances that were supposed to protect us from a king have left America all but paralyzed on policy formation. Name a pressing policy problem and you’d be hard pressed to find Congress effectively legislating it despite robust public opinion begging for action on issues like immigration reform, climate change, and gun safety.
So what happened? Why have the institutions that served our young Republic so well, for so long, suddenly feel like they’re in danger of collapse?
Listen and find out.
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What if I was to tell you the Republican Party’s villain-in-chief, the main protagonist in the Republican Party’s “Democrats are socialists” Big Lie, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is an ideological moderate serving in a likewise still moderate Democratic Party?
Understandably, you wouldn’t believe me, so I would have to present some pretty compelling evidence to change your mind.
Enter that evidence: VoteView.
What is VoteView?
VoteView is a data analysis tool built by a group of now famous political scientists that measures the ideological behavior of members of Congress, from it’s very first session to the current 118th.
It does so in an innovative way. Rather than look at members’ campaign platforms, policy position memos, ads, and stump speeches for their stated ideology, VoteView populates its ideology scores using the non-unanimous roll call votes of members of Congress.
Each vote, on each contentious bill, by each member of the House, and each senator, enters a model as a series of meaningless 0s and 1s which indicate whether each member who voted on a vote voted yeah or nay.
This means the model calculates an ideological score without even knowing who the member is, what each vote was about, which party the member serves in, or whether they serve in a swing or safe seat.
The scores range from -1 to 1 with -1 being the most liberal score and 1 being the most conservative. I
It is important to understand how to interpret VoteView scores. -1 to +1 is a narrow scale, the difference so between a 0.5 score and a 0.8 score is substantial! In VoteView a score equal or less than 0.5 (positive or negative) is a “moderate” score. A score like positive or negative 0.8 means the member is a strong ideologue.
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Unlike member scores from GovTrack, VoteView is blind to the topic of the vote AND (and this is very important) plots ideology for each member as they relate to every other member of both parties.
This means that we can get a full, largely unbiased, measurement of each member’s ideology, but we can also measure ideological change across both time and chamber of Congress (House or Senate). In plain English, that means we can compare how polarized Congress has been across different points of America’s 236 years of constitutional history.
As you can see from the graph below (which does not yet include the current 118th session) the ideological distribution of each party in the House and Senate has changed considerably across time. The gaps between the red line (Republicans) and the blue line (Democrats) have narrowed and enlarged at different points of American political development. A large gap between the red and blue lines means high levels of polarization.
Now, look closely at the two yellow loops I marked out and you will see we are currently as polarized as we were in the 1850s heading into Civil War.
Good times!
You should also be able to see that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. The data don’t lie: Republicans have polarized more than Democrats in Congress.
Mapped Ideology of the Legislative Branch: 1st session to the 117th Session
Now, lets take a look at what VoteView data can tell us about the ideological make-up of the 118th Congress, our current Congress.
Ideology of the 118th House of Representatives
Ideology of the 118th Senate
What you are seeing above are two plot graphs that show the ideology scores for each of the 435 current members of the House and 100 members of the Senate. Again, the blue dots are Democrats, the red dots are Republicans.
The axis of relevance here is the X axis (the bottom axis) which displays a dot for each member of each respective chamber to show where they fall along that -1 to 1 ideology score range.
Two things that should stand out are the number of red dots versus blue dots that are on the respective ellipses (ends) as well as proximity of each cluster of dots to the middle of the plot because that middle reflects ideological scores close to 0 (perfect moderation) while the ellipses are scores that max out as very conservative/very liberal.
If you look closely, you should see a clear asymmetry between the parties in terms of ideological extremism.
Here’s a fun fact: there are 7 Republican senators who are more conservative than Elizabeth Warren is liberal (Schmitt, Tuberville, Paul, Lee, Vance, Cruz, Braun) and although Warren is by far the most liberal Democrat in the senate (liberal score of -0.752) she is nowhere near as liberal as Mike Lee and Rand Paul are conservative (0.891, respectively). She is an outlier, they are an entire caucus.
As for AOC?
AOC is just the 180th most liberal Democrat in the House of Representatives. Given that there are only currently 212 Democrats, that’s pretty damn moderate!
Now, you might be wondering, “Rachel, what does this even mean?” It means that America doesn’t have a “both sides” problem, it has a Republican Party problem.
And that, my friends, brings us to my conversation with David Corn about his recent book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which is the feature of this Finally Back from Summer pod.
As many of you know, Corn is the DC Bureau Chief of Mother Jones magazine and an intrepid investigative reporter who’s so inside the Beltway he’s outside it. What you may not know is that David offers a newsletter called Our Land which you can subscribe to here.
So, how exactly did the Republican Party go crazy?
It’s a long story that begins…
BIG NEWS!!!
My magnum opus Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game(Crown 2024)is available for pre-order RIGHT NOW!
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I first learned about Way to Win when they published an analysis after the 2020 cycle empirically demonstrating the weakness of the Democratic Party’s messaging strategy against the GOP’s in the 2020 cycle.
While Republican’s focused on branding Democrats as dangerous socialists intent on destroying America, Democrats were branding Republicans as good friends they just couldn’t wait to work with it!
The poll-tested value of telling swing voters how great the other party is and how much you can’t wait to work with them is pretty high, but the electoral viability of such a strategy is low, very low.
In 2020, Democrats running on bipartisanship underperformed in “down ballot” elections losing 13 seats in the House and dropping winnable senate races in North Carolina and Maine that would have given Democrat’s the power to reform the filibuster.
So, heading into 2022, I was hyper-focused on getting Democrats to understand that because most Americans don’t follow the news, especially not political news, if you want them to know the Republican Party has collapsed into a dangerous cult that’s coming after their health, wealth, and freedom, you damn well better tell them yourself!
Way to Win is on the frontline of groups working to bring that exact message to the masses and played a key role in helping to push Democrats to run on the Supreme Court’s evisceration of Roe.
In this episode I talk with Jennifer Ancona, co-creator and VP of Way to Win, about Way’s MUST READ analysis of 2022 midterm messaging and how new messaging strategies helped Democrats defeat the Republican Party’s “red wave” against all the odds.
If you want more Democrats to find a Way to Win, donate to support Way’s CRITICAL work right now!
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If you want to get someone out of a cult, Dr. Steven Hassan is your man.
Inspired to a career focused on cults by his own personal experience being tricked into joining one, Dr. Hassan has spent decades researching, writing, and talking about cults and is skilled at getting folks out of them.
In fact, he literally wrote the manual on understanding and breaking cult allegiance, Combating Cult Mind Control (4th edition), which I strongly urge you to check out, ESPECIALLY if like me, you’ve lost friends and relatives into the Cult of Trump.
Dr. Hassan has also created an excellent free resource called Freedom of Mind Resource Center which provides a wealth of information on how to help someone escape a cult. Especially compelling is Dr. Hassan’s recent Ted Talk How to Tell If You’re Brainwashed where you will learn some easy to implement techniques to bring your MAGA relatives back to reality.
Please keep in mind, our Republican friends and relatives are victims of a targeted, intentional, well-funded multi-decade propaganda operation. They are NOT going to fix themselves.
As the good Dr. points out, the only people that can save victims of the Republican’s propaganda system are the people they have long term personal relationships with.
In other words, if not you, who?
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Two years or so again I began an extensive research project into the totalitarian movements of the 1920s and 1930, with a heavy emphasis on Germany and Italy whose totalitarians regimes hailed from the political right.
When I started this research project I knew very little about the process by which the National Socialists actually rose to power, this despite holding both a college degree and a PhD in political science. My general knowledge was limited to the major battles of WWII and what was by far the Nazi’s worse crime: the systemic slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
With the tail end of the chaos of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party’s attempt to seize power after the 2020 election, what I wanted from my research was to feel better about the durability of democracy in America.
Instead, it made me feel worse. MUCH worse.
Turns out, how fascism rises is a tale as old as time, and its one that has profound implications for America’s current democratic woes.
That means it’s a tale that must be told.
This is the first in a series of episodes designed to bring what I’ve learned the past two years to you and hopefully from you, to your friends, relatives, and other associates. To assist with this effort, I’m teaming up with real experts on the Third Reich and on authoritarianism to talk about different aspects of how exactly, the Nazis seized power.
Today’s expert is Benjamin Hett, Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, author of the must-read book The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.
Whether it is the Weimer Republic in Germany, pre-Mussolini Italy, modern Hungary, or most Cold War Russia, the common thread behind every successful totalitarian movement is underreaction by the rest of society while there is still time to stop them.
Once the crisis is obvious to everyone, it is already far too late.
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Leigh McGowen, of IamPoliticsGirl and The Politics Girl pod fame, intrinsically gets the purpose, the proper forms, and the distribution realties of modern messaging.
That’s why I was jazzed to bring my fellow messaging (and messy bun) aficionado onto The Cycle to talk about her rise as one of the Democratic Party’s brightest and best messaging stars.
Leigh has launched Politics Girl on YouTube so PLEASE SUBSCRIBE NOW. You’ll find links to all of her great messaging content in one convenient space!
So, what happens when you bring two fiery suburban mom messaging reformers together in one pod? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Spoiler Alert:
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If you find polling interesting or frustrating (or both!) this is the episode for you!
U-Mass Amherst pollster and Associate Professor Alex Theodoridis is on the pod to talk about challenges facing modern polling and how to properly conduct and present survey results given the impacts on mass behavior of hyperpartisanship, which you should think of as partisanship, but on steroids.
In addition to the above conversation I want to make damn sure you see Alex’s data drop from their latest poll, which quite clearly illustrates the effect propaganda is having on rank and file Republicans (and ONLY on them) in regards to mainstreaming the very dangerous Great Replacement Theory. Right wing media has been working hard to lay down the antecedents to the same type of dehumanizing “othering” perfected by Joseph Goebbels for the Nazis and folks, IT’S WORKING.
What you are looking at is data being properly reported out to account for the reality that political survey data must now be analyzed broken down by party, with each party’s independent “leaners” added to the pool of admitted partisans. You see “All respondents” which is the collective responses from everyone surveyed, followed by the responses by party group.
The poll question, “Do some elected officials want to increase immigration to bring in obedient voters to vote for them,” is derived from a narrative increasingly common on top-grossing Fox News shows such as Tucker Carlson’s show.
The first graph, subtitled “all respondents” shows the collective opinion of all people surveyed and finds 37% of all respondents agree, or strongly agree, with the statement.
It is important to note that Alex and team, quite shrewdly in my estimate, left their question free of a partisan “nudge.” There is nothing in the survey question that provides a partisan “clue” as to which party is for, or against, the viewpoint because partisan cues are so powerful I once used an experimental survey design to demonstrate I could move support for cap & trade by 40 points among Republican respondents simply by telling respondents Republicans proposed the policy!
Thus, this pool of respondents were given NO HINT of the “proper” partisan position. This is why the data reported is especially notable because as we look at the responses broken down by party, nearly half of Republicans and their leaners STRONLY AGREE with the statement. The best point of comparison is the “pure” independent pool (no leaners) where just 21% of respondents strongly agree.
Two main takeaways here, folks. One, Great Replacement Theory is now a mainstream, near majority, attitude among rank and file Republican voters That’s REALLY bad because as we’re already seeing that when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking your facing an existential race crisis, you do crazy s**t like armed insurrections and ordering drive bys on Democrats.
But its also important because it quite clearly quantifies what I will call the GOP’s propaganda effect. It is real, it is measurable, and it is coming for democracy.
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When you have to google the spelling of “cuckold",” you know you’re about to drop a hot pod!
The Liberty Way reads like some kind of modern Footloose, forcing students to adhere to a moral code so strict, you expect the punishments to include stoning.
That’s why the revelation that when “America’s largest Christian university’s” President Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki Falwell have a “cuckold” itch, they sneak off to South Beach to scratch its a REALLY BIG DEAL.
And because Falwell Jr. had the good sense to be exposed as the world’s biggest religious hypocrite during the heavy news cycles of the Trump Administration he helped create by handing America’s evangelicals to Donald Trump on a silver platter, this particular scandal may have slipped past you.
That’s a damn shame because it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person, which is why I’m deeply grateful to Miami filmmaker Billy Corbin not only for making a doc about Falwell’s sex scandal, but making it so compelling you have to watch it all.
And as Billy says, “good night and good cuck.”
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Did you know that in order to advance in ‘degrees’ in the Proud Boys you have to vow to stop jacking off so you can unleash your pent-up violence on your innocent victims?!
That’s why you NEED a copy of Andy Campbell’s new book: We Are Proud Boys: How A Rightwing Street Gang Ushered In A New Era Of American Extremism.
I haven’t had a chance yet to present the sum of my research into the collapse of democracies and the rise of totalitarians, but rest assured, I intend to spend the next year of my life impressing upon you just how far down the fascism rabbit hole America has already slipped. Especially in the formation of the violent, right-wing domestic terrorism groups American law seems hapless to preemptively address.
We’ll kick off our year-long effort with a look at Nazi militias like the Proud Boys, which Republicans have spent the past few years normalizing and legitimating. The “extremism” beat is usually a lonely beat, but that was before the American Republican Party decided to collapse into a fascist cult. Now it is one of the most important, and dangerous, beats in contemporary journalism. That’s why you should give Andy Campbell an immediate follow and pick up a copy of his book, RIGHT NOW!
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In this short, but spirited conversation, Tom Bonier of Target Smart and Simon Rosenberg of NDN and host of the With Democrats, Things Get Better series, joins me on the pod to laugh at the Republican Party’s red tinkle.
Target Smart, it is the Democrat’s premier voter targeting firm and creator of the incredible Target Early tool, which allows users to easily and quickly access critical information such as registration and voter turnout.
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I’m excited to bring you this conversation with Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor at the School of Library Info and Library Science & senior researcher at the Center for Info, Tech, and Public Life at the venerable UNC-Chapel Hill. We discuss her new book, The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy, which is a deep dive into how the Right dominates social media.
This book and pod is a must read/listen for anyone involved in social media, from big time influencers to regular digital activists looking to maximize their online reach.
I’ll leave it at that.
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Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow opened her now famous speech on the floor of the Michigan senate by calling out the reason her Republican senate colleague chose to target her in a fundraising email that is part of a party-wide effort to brand Democrats as child groomers (proof positive of QANON’s continued influence in the modern Republican Party).
McMorrow knew why she was personally targeted, saying it is “because I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme because you can’t claim you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of quote ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up to say no.”
Sadly, McMorrow is right that it matters she is a “straight, white, Christian, suburban mom” because above all else in 2022, Democrats must convince white suburbia that the modern Republican Party is not fit to govern a democracy and disqualify their structural predisposition to ‘change’ which is the mechanism that drives the midterm effect among swing voters.
To win in 2022, Democrats need to drive their own coalition of voters to the polls to dominate the turnout game, while simultaneously pushing the small, but critical, pool of swing voters away from casting ballots for Republicans-any Republican. If Democrats fail to do so, control of Congress will flip to an anti-democratic, fascist-curious Republican Party who as of today, intends to use that power to help reinstall an insurrectionist into the most powerful office on Earth.
What McMorrow then dished out to her Michigan Republican colleagues was precisely the kind of offensive, matrix-breaking, moral outrage messaging Democrats up and down ballots and across America must bring to bear in their own campaigns if they hope to defeat a radicalized, frankly dangerous, Republican Party this fall.
Though “the speech” is well known, what is lesser known is the story behind the woman who gave it. Activated by the election of Trump Mallory McMorrow rode her “incandescent rage” from being a postcard-writing grass-roots activist, to flipping a Republican-held state senate seat in 2018. I love her story so much because it could easily be yours. We need 1,000 Mallory McMorrows out there on the stump. If we had them, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Maybe YOU are the next one?
Redistricted into a safe seat, McMorrow is now lending her considerable political talents and her small, but mighty, war chest to one of the most important offensive efforts for Democrats at the state legislative level in the 2022 cycle: flipping both chambers of the Michigan state legislature.
Thanks to the ballot initiative process and Michigan’s voters, Republicans must face free and fair districts for the first time in decades in Michigan leaving them uniquely vulnerable to defeat this cycle. SO
Give Michigan some love!
Editors note: “Democrats are child groomers” emerged as one of the most often cited rationales by Trump supporters for their “anything goes” tolerance to the boss’s behavior. It is designed to win elections, of course. But it is also serves to dehumanize Democrats in order to justify past and potentially future acts of political violence.
It is critical for everyone working for democracy to understand what will be coming at Democratic candidates already running against hostile in-party fundamentals this fall, and why the GOP has settled on such a noxious line of attack. Whatever strategy Democrats ultimately settle on, it will have to compete against the Republicans’ no-holds-barred approach to 2022.
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If “guilt by association” also works for “coolness by association” I have officially arrived!
Its not every day that I get someone who has interviewed the President of the United States to come onto the pod (though I should probably note I’ve had at least 3 on here) but STILL! She’s an academic so it counts for more!
When THE HCR (as some of her fans refer to her) agreed to come onto The Cycle I was….
I was especially keen to talk to Heather about America’s current democratic crisis which has half the country at least fascist-curious. BUT, I also wanted to give you folks a glimpse into Heather herself- what motivated her efforts to bring her scholarship to a mass audience and why its resonated with so many people.
If you somehow haven’t heard of heather until now, I strongly recommend you subscribe to her #1 substack, check out her pod cast Now & Then, and check out her SIX books on American history.
Like this podcast? Consider subscribing to support its production and sharing it with your friends!
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Welcome to Political Behavior 454! Today I am going to expose you to one of several research books that have come out in the past few years that help explain modern political behavior, which is distinct from political behavior of previous decades in several measurable and important ways.
Dr. Jonathan Weiler, Director of Undergraduate Global Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and co-author of Pick Up or Prius: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain American’s Great Political Divideis on the show today to help you understand just how profound the “divide” between the Left and the Right is.
So exactly what are these 4 questions that are so powerful they can “explain our political divide?”
You’ll have to listen to find out!
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I’ve had a lot of fascinating conversations with my Cycle guests, but this pod with David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of what Politico Mag calls “the thriller that predicted the Russia Scandal,” is one for the record books.
His new book, Laboratories of Democracy: A Wake Up Call From Behind The Lines takes you into the complex world of state politics- a strange new world with new life, and new civilizations that pass legislation via simple majorities.
When you agree with the legislative agenda of the party controlling your state and a “simple majority” system is everything the federal system is not: responsive, efficient, competent.
Federalism and simple majority requirements allows states to serve as what Justice Brandeis "called “laboratories of democracy.” Some of America’s best policies have been grown in these labs. But now, the Republican Party, is using states to pass a veritable smorgasbord of radical, even fascist policies aimed specifically at giving conservatives direct control over modern American culture.
Why? Because by the late 1980s it was clear to the Republican Party’s oligarchs the “culture” ship had already sailed, stranding them at port. So they devised a new strategy. Instead of fighting culture, they’d simply criminalize it.
The Republican Party spent more than 20 years building the power and infrastructure it needs for this moment. You can ignore it, but I promise it won’t ignore you.
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Listen now (30 min) | Ryan Busse's Insider Account of the Radicalization of the Gun Industry
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Mary Trump has been very busy since she first emerged on the national stage after sacrificing much to share thousands of personal records documenting Trump family corruption with investigators from the New York Times.
She doubled down on her gift to America by next releasing audio of Trump’s federal judge sister admitting his entire schtick is an immoral long con. In other words, Mary Trump is one bad ass motherf*cker.
Two books later, and a podcast you should be sure to check out, Mary is making her 2nd appearance here on The Cycle to discuss her latest book, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal. Enjoy!
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When I first spotted the title of my friend Tom Nichols’ new book I knew it needed to serve as the opening pod cast for season 2. Why? Because Tom’s excellent thesis, that 80 years of peace, prosperity, improving life conditions, and tech have led us to what I call a “decadence" issue. Put simply, Americans are so comfortable, and so far removed from past tribulations, they have done what comfortable people do: turned their angst both inward, and towards the respectively trivial.
In short, we’re fat, happy, comfortable and charging head first into a self-imposed chaos mostly out of boredom. I refuse to tell you anymore about his book, if you want to know, you’ll have to listen to this short, but critical conversation on why Americans have become Our Own Worst Enemy.
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Polymarket recently debuted a new market category tied to the price of non-fungible tokens NFTs).
They became a quick hit, offering traders a new way to speculate price direction and collectors a potential hedge against their holdings in some of the most popular NFT collections.
Today, three Polymarket pros join us for an inside look at the brave new world of NFT futures trading.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrQJA5NMqU0.
The stage is set for the final week of the Polymarket trading tournament, with AE News facings off against Lance Upper.
AE himself, the perpetual underdog-cum-finalist and Crunch Wrap Supreme, tournament proprietor, join us live to discuss the final week's action and how you can join these ultra-elite traders on the road to Polymarket riches.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Political scientists of the future will no doubt burn a lot of digital ink trying to identify where things went off the rails in 21st century America.
Like the first shot of the Civil War, the near-collapse of our democracy in 2020 and 2021 stand out as pinnacle moments in what is, at least for now, a “cold” Civil War.
With the rule of law under severe strain from the full-frontal assault against it by President Trump and his Republican Party peers, the GOP is increasingly using control of government at the state level to codify their anti-democratic efforts.
As my friends Cornell Belcher, Kurt Bardella, and I tried to make as clear, a country in which one of its two ruling parties is changing laws to consolidate power and to undermine democracy’s most sacred tenet, free and fair elections, we have moved way beyond a Susan Collin’s “very concerned” and into
So, to say that author Brynn Tannehill’s in her new book American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy is timely is an understatement. Tannehill adopts a “watch what they do, not [just] what they say” approach to her meticulously researched book to answer THE core question of our time: is the modern Republican Party developing into an Americanized version of german or Italian fascism?
The fascism label may sound like nothing more than the same type of rhetorical red meat thrown about by the Right accusing Democrats of “socialism.” But two things make contemporaneous concerns about the Right adopting fascism distinct and very different than the Right’s accusations of socialism on the Left.
The first is the GOP, unlike the obscure and powerless socialists of the far left, is now controlled by its radical factions. Extremists now hold critical party leadership positions at both the state and federal level. The second distinction is the GOP is already using unilateral control in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, to redefine government- allowing governors to usurp local authority implementing legislation to undermine free and fair elections.
Al Gore called impending climate change from man-made activities an “inconvenient truth” in his seminal lecture of the same name, presented as a documentary in the early 2000s. The collapse of America’s conservative party into fascism is our second “inconvenient truth.” Gore’s clarion call about climate change failed to provoke action.
Will we make that mistake twice?
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Flip Pidot sits down with Global Guessing founders Clay Graubard and Andrew Eaddy to discuss their new prediction market newsletter & podcast Crowd Money, the secret recipe to superior forecasting, and why the industry is on the cusp of much loftier heights.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Listen now | (Spoiler Alert: Via Strategic Planning)
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Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Avi Eisenberg rounds out our July crypto triptych, with parting thoughts on his enormous EIP-1559 win and the still-elusive fate of Iron Finance as that market hurtles toward its dramatic resolution.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/sxEhZENAdT4.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Ohio’s 11th Congressional District will hold a primary on August 3rd. Bernie-backed Nina Turner was once the heavy favorite for the Democratic nomination, but Shontel Brown is now hot on her heels. J. Miles Coleman from UVA’s Center for Politics/Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Ray Nava from the Election Center help us break it down.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL6bxmEt0-s.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Avi Eisenberg returns for an update on Iron Finance's prospects and the timing of the implementation of Ethereum's EIP-1559.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/mEn5fFlCFxA.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Last month, multi-billion dollar DeFi protocol Iron Finance suddenly collapsed in crypto’s "first large scale bank run."
Will the newly resurrected Iron Finance v2 suffer the same fate? Our guest today made a killing in Polymarket’s first Iron Finance market by predicting the collapse. He’s here today to tell you how to play the new market.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/QRhkg_qgggE .
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Inflation just reared its head in a big way, coming in way hotter than economists expected. Today’s guest saw it coming though, as did his subscribers. For the 2nd month in a row, anyone following Chris Brunet’s inflation playbook scored big on Polymarket.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/cnx7Bah7y64.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
The NYC mayoral race remains in a rowdy state of flux, thanks in no small part to the ongoing buffoonery of the Board of Elections. Mayoral candidate and serial noticer of BOE mistakes Aaron Foldenauer joins us to break it down.
And Polymarket trader "AE News" offers an updated outlook on the race and how to trade it from here.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/kIpLI8xG_1Y.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Iabvek's here to tell us how he and few fellow traders managed to mint a small fortune on yesterday's ranked vote report showing Kathryn Garcia in spitting distance of overtaking putative frontrunner Eric Adams.
And City and State NY political reporter Jeff Coltin helps us make sense of the colossally incompetent way the BOE befouled its own election results.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/_aqHGCncoxU
It’s been a week since the NYC mayoral primary and 1st round leader Eric Adams has seen his price steadily erode ever since. Traders are increasingly wondering if absentee ballots and ranked choice voting might tip the race to Kathryn Garcia. Jeff Coltin, political reporter from City and State NY, joins us to discuss.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/OG9qmOBC6z8.
Welcome to Polymarket Insiders on OldBull.tv, your source for live coverage of the global information markets platform.
Today, host Flip Pidot is joined by Insight Predict's Chris Brunet.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/NYI9myBk39s
The NYC mayoral primary is Tuesday, with Eric Adams, Andrew Yang, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia still in the running. PredicIt's got a slug of high-volume markets on the race and more could be on the way. Paul Butler from ranked.vote and Logan Phillips from racetothewh.com are here with your crash course on New York's ranked choice voting system and what to expect on Tuesday.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMSimXTWKP4
We’ve got your 1st look at the surprise return of polling markets. After a year in the wilderness, the wildly popular series returns today with a weekly market on Biden job approval. We've got a panel packed with polling market pros to get you up to speed.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/eMfuQE0UjKY
We’ve got your 1st look at the new market on Ilhan Omar losing her committee assignments. Plus, a recap of last night's awful New York mayoral debate.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxe-gIYlmKY
(Apologies - guest audio is choppy at first, but it evens out.)
Will Trump run for Congress in 2022, be elected Speaker of the House, orchestrate the simultaneous impeachment of Biden and Harris and thus find himself back in the White House ahead of schedule?
The architect of that plan, Wayne Allyn Root, is here to explain. And Robert Martin from Lean Tossup returns to the panel.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/XZa8eZyQdSk
We’ve got your 1st look at today's new markets, Chaz Nuttycombe from CNalysis predicts tomorrow’s Virginia primaries, and we try to count the votes for Biden’s 1st judicial confirmations.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1vJ1jk6nfI
We’ve got your 1st look at today's new markets and Iabvek sets you up for Sunday’s presidential election in Peru.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/RfYIaJO5go8
We’ve got your 1st look at today's new market on the Senate China bill vote.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/LfxEE4nTFaY
We’ve got your 1st look at today's new market on the NJ GOP gubernatorial primary and Paul Krishnamurty on how to play the upcoming Batley and Spen by-election.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/wHITlAhniQw
We’ve got your 1st look at today's new market on the House vote on a January 6th Select Committee and how to play today’s special election in New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
When UC-San Diego political science Associate Professor Seth Hill and his co-authors dropped their latest article in the journal Science Advances, the title immediately caught my eye.
That title was “Not by turnout alone: Measuring the sources of electoral change, 2012 to 2016.” Now, having spent the better part of 2 years arguing with people about the role of turnout on electoral outcomes, my immediate thought was, “why are they burying the lead here?”
That’s because from my perspective, the novel finding is turnout does, in fact impact election outcomes. That a small portion of Independents, largely the 5%-10% of the electorate we call “pure” Independents switch from one party’s candidates to the other party’s candidates, often cycle-to-cycle, is what I consider the status quo.
But demonstrating turnout rates of various demographic groups within each party’s coalition (what the authors call “composition” explains at least a portion of the variance in party electoral performance cycle-to-cycle? Let’s just say that before that became the new conventional wisdom, it helped make me a pariah on Election Twitter after I waded into an ongoing “this not that” debate I was previously blissfully unaware of.
Its not just that the authors of this analysis deploy a really artful research design to tease out “conversion” versus “composition” effects on vote outcomes in the 2012 and 2016 cycles. That alone makes this research some of the most consequential political behavior work to be released in the last few years, at least in my biased opinion.
What really makes this analysis interesting is that the authors demonstrate party asymmetry in “conversion” versus “composition” impact. Republican vote share is more influenced by “conversion,” while Democratic vote share is more heavily influenced by “composition.”
But wait, that’s not all! The authors also discover that a state’s status as a “realigning” versus “dealigning” state also matters. In states moving towards competition for Democrats such as Georgia, the composition effect is more powerful. But in states moving away from competition, like in the Midwest, conversion is more powerful.
And that’s with just 2012 and 2016 data before turnout really juiced! This led me to ask Seth Hill, the guest on this episode’s pod about what he expects the 2020 data to look like. And a whole lot more interesting questions that you definitely don’t want to miss!
Rachel
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We’ve got your 1st look at today's new markets (the censure of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the New York Republican gubernatorial primary), new panel picks, and a gruesome picking through the smoking wreckage of the Jan. 6 Commission debacle.
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVz7tIDbaH4
Meet Kevin Paffrath: realtor, investor, YouTube star, candidate for California governor, and (now that his staff has discovered PredictIt), the hottest contract on the site.
Judging by his market price, Paffrath has by far the best chance to unseat Gavin Newsom in the recall election. But can the million-strong "Meet Kevin" army do for Paffrath what the Yang Gang, the Bloomberg Boosters and the Romney Whale failed to do for their candidates?
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All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/itkiTPjJA_s&T=2S
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, Gaeten Dugas and Pratik Chougule join Flip Pidot to handicap the Senate vote on the January 6th Commission and bring you a first look at today’s new markets.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1XHaCNvVvg&t=2s
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, we’re counting Republican defections in the still-unfolding House vote to establish the January 6 Commission and the brand new market for the subsequent vote in the Senate.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1eMA1C11zc
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, host Flip Pidot is joined by Pratik Chougule from Star Spangled Gamblers. New markets include tomorrow’s House vote on the 1/6 Commission.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM64I7EUA4o&t=22s
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, host Flip Pidot is joined by panelists Paul Krishnamurty, political betting consultant for BetOnline and Betfair, Pratik Chougule from Star Spangled Gamblers and Robert Martin from Lean Tossup. We're discussing tomorrow's ballot referendum in Pennsylvania, the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor of Virginia, the 2024 GOP presidential nomination (Trump, DeSantis, Pompeo?), and which world leader will be next out of office.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
In his very first podcast, Professor Emeritus at University of California, San Diego and prolific political scientist Gary Jacobson previews the 2020 updates to his longitudinal research on key voting behaviors of the American electorate.
If you’re wondering what it means to say America’s politics have “nationalized” Jacobson’s research has you covered.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Check out the video version at https://youtu.be/4xHzIPsRZpA
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, host Flip Pidot is joined by panelists Pratik Chougule from Star Spangled Gamblers and Gaeten Dugas to discuss how to play the Atlanta mayor race, Matt Gaetz keeping his seat on Judiciary (or in Congress), and how Gaeten made a killing on the Stefanik vote.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZahkJgv4SFc&t=71s
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
Welcome to PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Today, host Flip Pidot is joined by panelists Pratik Chougule from Star Spangled Gamblers and Paul Krishnamurty, head of political betting at BetOnline.ag.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Check out the video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOu0rCqUjSQ&t=14s
Get started trading with a free $25 deposit match at http://predictit.org/promo/OldBull25
It’s the premiere of PredictIt Live on OldBull.tv, your exclusive source for real-time coverage of the stock market for politics.
We’re bringing you the news moving prices, picks from top traders, a first look at today’s new markets, and answers to your live questions.
Host Flip Pidot is joined by panelists Pratik Chougule from Star Spangled Gamblers, Robert Martin from Lean Tossup, and pro trader Gaeten Dugas.
Follow us at http://twitter.com/oldbulltv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. Hosts and guests may hold and/or plan to trade positions in the markets being discussed.
Listen now | Can We "Break the Social Media Prism?" It's Complicated.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Friends,
I hope you’ll listen to my conversation with fellow political scientist and political behavior expert David Moscrop. In addition to his impressive scholarly research, Dr. Moscrop has also written a very accessible book that explains why humans are poorly-suited for democracy.
Titled Too Dumb For Democracy? Why we make bad political decisions and how we can better ones documents the limits of human decision-making, noting in particular how decision-making deficiencies are particularly pronounced in the political context which us political scientists understand as perpetual contests for power and resources.
Now, because David is in Canada I used this opportunity to not only highlight this insightful and important research into our mental and psychological limits for fair, equitable, and healthy self-governance, but also to emphasize how determinative a country’s institutional design, rules, and regulations are for conditioning human democratic behavior.
In places like Canada, where the political institutional structures, rules, and regulations rein in ideology, hyperpartisanship, and “tribalism” democracy is far healthier.
Our political institutional structures, rules, and regulations do the opposite, setting us up for failure.
Enjoy!
(Enjoy this pod? Consider supporting it with a paid subscription and/or telling your friends & followers about it!)
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Friends,
What happens when a political scientist with specific expertise in presidential nominations and general elections joins up with two of Washington’s best sourced “stump” reporters to talk about their tell-all “What Happened” book on the 2020 cycle?
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
We all know political polls are increasingly unreliable. That's why forecasting outfits like 538 aim to separate "the signal and the noise" by assigning grades to pollsters and weighting their forecasts toward those with the best grades.
It seemed like a good plan. So why did it backfire so spectacularly?
Flip Pidot, Peter Hurford and Harry Crane investigate Nate Silver's utterly failed attempt to distinguish good pollsters from bad.
This episode was cross-posted from our sister podcast at the Open Model Project.
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world (and gain exclusive access it before anyone else), please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
It's a special crossover episode with the Season 2 kickoff of Graft (graftpodcast.com), your favorite podcast devoted to New York political corruption.
With scandals continuing to pile up, could covid prom king Andrew Cuomo's days in Albany be numbered? Traders on PredictIt have him at 60% to make it through the year. We think that might be generous...
Follow us at @oldbulltv and @graftpodcast.
Subscribe at oldbull.tv and graftpodcast.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
From our sister podcast at the Open Model Project. Subscribe at OpenModelProject.org.
Flip Pidot and Peter Hurford take a fresh look at the New York Democratic mayoral primary (where we're getting ready to field our first ranked choice poll) with a particular focus on the underloved candidacy of Maya Wiley.
Later, Peter shares a rather gloomy theory about potential systemic error in polling of Americans' covid vaccine hesitancy.
With your help, maybe we can do better...
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world (and gain exclusive access it before anyone else), please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. Defense Department was putting the finishing touches on an intelligence project that would shortly be flogged and lambasted by the media and members of the U.S. Senate as "assassination and terrorism futures." Pearls were clutched, careers were ended, and one of the most interesting and ambitious prediction markets of all time was scuttled.
Today, we hear the real story of the Policy Analysis Market, as Flip Pidot sits down with none other than Robin Hanson, the legendary prediction market pioneer that DARPA tapped to build it.
Follow us at @oldbulltv and subscribe at oldbull.tv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Listen now | Like many of you, the realization that Democrats would have majority control of the Senate after the improbable victories of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5th was electrifying! I imagine that for one of my personal heroes, Stacey Abrams, it also came with a deeply satisfying “see! we told you this electoral strategy would work!” as we saw how modernized electioneering can pay dividends even in some of the harshest electoral environments.
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Flip and Peter are joined by City & State NY senior reporter Jeff Coltin for a look inside the campaigns of the 5 (maybe 6) top tier candidates for mayor of New York.
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world, please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
Flip Pidot moderates a fierce debate between Peter Hurford and Liam Donovan over whether election forecasters should purge polls from their models once and for all.
Liam says send the pollsters packing.
Peter says mend it, don't end it.
Who wins? Listen and find out!
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world, please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
It's Episode 3 of the OMP Podcast. To subscribe to the new standalone pod, check out https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-model-project/id1547340798 and find us on the web at OpenModelProject.org.
We asked you to vote on what race you wanted next and it wasn't even close. The New York Democratic mayoral primary, set for June 22, is our next stop.
With incumbent Bill de Blasio term limited, a huge and growing field of would-be successors are lining up, most prominently 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Complicating NYC's already byzantine electoral landscape is the first-even rollout of ranked choice voting, where voters get to pick their 1st through 5th choice candidates, who are then sorted through rounds of instant runoffs until someone in the crowded field scrapes together a majority.
How do you campaign in this kind of race? How do you poll it? How do you even begin to model and forecast it?
To help us get a handle on things, we've brought in ranked choice voting expert Paul Butler, creator of ranked.vote.
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world, please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
Big thanks to our latest (truth be told, also our first) patron Zachary Cramer, who as a "Pollster" level supporter will be enjoying early access to our in-house polling, VIP access to our Discord server, and other behind-the-scenes goodies.
If there is one other person out there more bullish than I am regarding Donald Trump’s capabilities for Mussolini-like behaviors, it’s his niece Mary Trump. Mary made a splash when her tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man released.
The book was unique because it combined an autobiographical account of Mary’s family history as a Trump and her various interactions with the man she simply refers to as “Donald,”with detached psychoanalysis of the various Trump relatives covered in the book via her education and training in psychology, which includes a Ph.D. from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies. Thus the book is captivating- combining clinical diagnoses of various Trump family psychoses with Mary Trump’s personal anguish, loss, pain, and decades of crushing disappointment not only with Donald Trump, but with multiple members of the Trump clan.
In our convo, Mary and I decompress from Wednesday’s Capitol siege, where her crazy uncle unleashed a throng of “deplorables” on Article II to try to physically keep them from certifying Joe Biden as the next president of the United States and seize control of the government on his behalf. Like many Americans, Mary & I are frustrated at the lack of security that was provided to the Capitol Building even when the threats being made against Congress were well publicized (as you know, yours truly devoted two episodes of this pod to potential violence in D.C. on July 6th and Trump’s efforts to amass a MAGA Army).
Mostly, we spend an hour ranting about Donald, radicalism in the Republican Party, worrying about sustaining democracy in America, and having the same conversation many of you have been having this week: can America survive the final week of Trump’s presidency?
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
It's Episode 2 of the OMP Podcast. To subscribe to the new standalone pod, check out https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-model-project/id1547340798
So how'd our prototype do in the twin Georgia Senate runoffs?
Polling: bad. Forecast: not so bad.
Hey, it's a process. It's also lots of fun. So join us as we vivisect the model and ponder how best to monkey with the assumptions, weights, and screens, as eye upcoming ballot brawls like the (possible) Newsom recall and the NYC mayoral primary.
In the episode, we reference Northwestern data scientist Thomas Miller's supremely accurate Georgia forecast. You can follow Miller on Twitter at @virtualtout.
Follow along with our interactive polls and forecasts at OpenModelProject.org. Follow us on Twitter at @OpenModelProj.
If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world, please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
Wednesday the 6th will be Trump-driven shitshow in D.C. when Republicans in Congress will turn a mere formality with the Electoral College certification process into a clown show. Thanks to an initial “toe-in-the-water” by senator and 2024 hopeful Josh Hawley, support for the circus in the senate, the chamber supposedly for grown-ups, quickly ballooned to a dozen (now 13) Republican senators. The effort already had robust enthusiasm in the House. Nearly 70% of that chamber’s Republican caucus, including their rudderless “leader,” Kevin McCarthy will vote against certification.
Trump’s effort to steal the election, which has unfolded almost entirely in plain sight and is being done using a classic GOP methodology of “gaslighting:” accusing the victim of the very crime being perpetrated against them by making his rallying cry “Stop the Steal.” The irony of their effort to commit election fraud at a massive scale via making erroneous claims of voter fraud seems entirely lost on President Trump and most of his Republican enablers.
With about half of the Republican Party devolving into what Steve Schmidt has dubbed a pro-authoritarianism faction (after all, if Republicans got what they wanted, democracy would end in U.S., Trump would be installed as a leader or an authoritarian state, and one party rule would commence) the events of the past two months are new chapters in a crisis that has been playing out within the Republican Party for the past decade.
I had come to think of the wart within the GOP as over since Donald Trump not only won the Republican primaries in 2015, but more importantly, became formally nominated by the Republican Party at their party’s nominating convention in the summer of 2016. Until that event, the party still had power to stop Trump’s candidacy, and given his “outsider” status and clear lack of the behavioral requisites to perform the job, legitimate rationales for doing so.
Such a move, while being accepted by the country’s middle, would have been seen as provocative by the progressive base of the Democratic Party and would have provoked a mass implosion within the Republican base. That would have surely written off the GOP’s chances of reclaiming the White House in 2016- a situation that too many elites found untenable after 8 years under Obama. Ultimately, this is what led the party to accept Trump as their standard bearer, even though many of them had devoted the months previous to arguing with their peers that nominating Trump would not only destroy the Republican Party, but likely the very country itself.
Once Trump won the general election though, and became transactionally useful to Republicans the fight for the soul of the Republican Party felt over. Trump had clear control over Republican voters and because elected Republicans in Congress share his constituencies, four years of obedience ensued, leading to the least disciplined presidency in the country’s history that has already locked in “worst president” before the COVID19 crisis rolled in to allow Trump to leave his competitors so far in the rearview they can’t be seen anymore.
MAGA became the modern version of the Republican Party (the 2020 Republican national convention was a great demonstration of what this means, but it can be summed up in one word: Trump) and current members of the party had just a few options to avail themselves to: conform proudly, acquiesce silently, or flee the party. Despite perceptions, the great majority of current Republicans, at least as of the onset of COVID19 were quite pleased with MAGA Republicanism, even the intentional cruelty, a fact that the other half of America, at some point, will have to allow themselves to confront.
Yet, here we are, once again looking at a Republican Party being forced into a choice by Donald Trump: support authoritarianism one-party rule under Donald Trump or continued democracy. So far, because of Mitch McConnell and several other Republicans like senator Pat Toomey and Tom Cotton who remember what being a small c conservative is supposed to mean (it doesn’t involve acty of radicalism like sedition!) and like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, the anti-authoritarians within the Republican Party are maintaining the upper hand. McConnell’s anti-authoritarian faction are set to stand with senate Democrats on behalf of democracy and the rule of law on Wednesday. It’s not hyperbolic to note that the fate of 243 years of democracy hangs on McConnell’s ability to deliver their votes.
Fortunately, because we’re still seeing additions to McConnell’s faction, and pro-democracy activism from Dick Cheney, this suggests the votes will be there on Wednesday. This is thanks, in no small part to to the shiny example that Raffensperger is setting for his fellow Republicans. By standing stalwartly against Trump’s illegal power grab, even in the face of extreme pressure, Secretary Raffensperger has single-handedly done more to subvert Trump’s anti-democratic coup than anyone else. Because keep in mind, Trump alludes to having made similar calls to the one Raffensperger shared with the public. Yet, we have learned of only the one.
The President has cooked up a bit of political theater for the streets of D.C. to correspond with the drama inside the Capitol building. He means to stage a show of support for the country’s “rightful” king. Trump has demonstrated time and again a total lack of regard for the public’s safety, as the illegal clearing of Lafayette Square Park showed. He’s hoping to lure to D.C. clashing factions: his “team” of racists, “Proud Boys” neo-nazis, and other “deplorables” against “antifa” protesters.
Whether MAGA world actually believes, or not, the totally fabricated story Trump and his team tells to convince people that Joe Biden didn’t really win the 2020 election by 7 million votes and robust margins in eight swing states (the most narrow were WI, GA, and AZ but all three of those have been recounted multiple times and thus verified extensively thanks to Trump’s efforts) is moot. They will never admit one way or the other. So long as they pretend to believe it, they can continue to wield it like a weapon and try to drag American democracy down with them.
So what can be done? Having both the truth and the law on your side is not inconsequential. What people can control is the truth. The true timeline, narrative, and facts of the election leaves zero room for Trump’s thesis to be true: and at some point, the truth and the law are coming for MAGA world and Trump’s tenure as president.
As Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling explained in his latest news conference, truth is immutable. Trump’s fantasy world and the real one are on an inevitable collision course. There is a firm date, time, and location for this crash: January 20th, 2021 at high noon. Once the clock runs down to that moment, Trump world’s evasions will no longer work and as Brett Baier challenged senator Hawley last night in an interview on Fox News, Trump voters that are being led-on about the prospects of a Trump second term are going to get a harsh dose of reality.
The question then becomes, what will happen then? Given last week’s podcast looking at lethal mass partisanship, the willingness of partisans to tolerate, even crave, physical punishment for the opposition party’s leaders and or even voters, it seems reasonable to worry about, and be wary of, the potential for political violence this month. Far worse than the fact that Donald Trump behaves irresponsibly with his rhetoric and seems incapable of appreciating the power of the presidency’s “bully pulpit” to incite violence, is the fact that he does get it. That he understands this power just fine. Indeed, watching Trump’s actions over the 5 years of his presidential experience, it’s not unfair to say that at times, Trump has intentionally tried to provoke violence- knowing full well what he was doing and frankly, enjoying the hell out of it.
But what Trump has artfully arranged in D.C. goes far beyond treatment of counter-protestors at rallies, or the treatment of arrestees by police. What Trump appears to have been up to over the past two weeks is an effort to convince the public that the election was literally stolen from him and that people should come to D.C. on Wednesday, January 6th to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly, the KellyAnne Conway’s of Trump World would shoot these allegations down, asserting that of course Trump means to only have peaceful protestors come to D.C. to protest the election and would discourage any violence in his name. But watch Trump talk about the protests and about people coming to D.C. and it’s clear- Trump vision for these protests is an angry mob, pitchforks waving, demanding their rightful ruler be reinstalled to his rightful throne.
The question is, what types of people will answer his call, and what level of devotion will be they be willing to bring to the cause? With the potential for violence and unrest high, does that make it more, or less likely, the type of crowd forms that is conducive to violence? Certainly, the bulk of Republicans who have been made to be upset about Trump’s loss and have been lied to in order to convince them that the election is being stolen would want to come to D.C. to engage in peaceful protest and would have no interest in violence or mayhem.
But it would be naive, after Charlottesville and the events of the past few years not to assume that neo-nazis, white supremacists, and other violent groups are currently descending on D.C., as are “antifa” protestors deploying to counteract them. Security in the city will be a mess and there is no way I’d suggest heading to D.C. on Wednesday if your interest is in peaceful assembly. So it begs a question- will people be willing to subject themselves to potential harm on behalf of Donald Trump?
To understand who and why might be willing to do so, I invite physician and sociologist Dr. Jonathan Metzl onto the show. He made a huge splash last year with his book and it’s provocative title, Dying Of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. As I told Jonathan, the second I saw this book I KNEW it would resonate with my own research and with the political science literature on polarization and hyperpartisnahip generally. I’ve been “dying” to talk to him about his research for a long time, especially given that the COVID crisis came along and at a mass scale, “horribly vindicated” his thesis.
We have a great chat about his work, talk about whether Trump’s base might be willing to “die for Trump” Wednesday, and bemoan and worry over our current collapsing democracy while musing over possible ways to save it.
Given that today is the Georgia runoff, Dr. Metzl and I are hosting a live Zoom event tonight at 6pm (ETA) in honor of the release of the pod & in conjunction with tonight’s nerve racking election. The Zoom Q & A is open only to paid subscribers, who will receive an invitation email to the event later this afternoon.
Happy Listening!!
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
The Open Model Project is an initiative of American Civics Exchange, aiming to bring radical transparency and crowd-based wisdom to traditional election modeling.
In this sneak peek at the 1st episode of the OMP podcast, Flip Pidot sits down with pollster/forecaster Peter Hurford to discuss the inspiration behind the project, why we think it may help fix what's broken with black box forecasters, and what it all means for the Georgia Senate runoffs.
Follow us at @openmodelproj and get your hands on the model at openmodelproject.org.
Finally... we intend to poll a bunch of overlooked races in 2021, which gets expensive. If you'd like to see more independent forecasting and unbiased polling in your world, please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/openmodel.
In the premiere episode of The Election Whisperer on The Cycle- On Substack the show’s first in audio-only format, Rachel recaps (as quickly as possible!) the months that have passed since the show went on hiatus.
The post election period has been marked by the whole of the Republican Party enabling Trump’s democracy-destroying multiple coup attempts. Senator Josh Hawley has gone so far as to commit to “objecting” to Biden’s win on January 6th when the Senate meets to approve the Electoral College- a process that is a mere formality for the Senate, but will likely underwrite Hawley’s 2024 presidential bid. With bodies piling up by the hour from COVID and Biden being stonewalled by key agencies for the transition, tensions are mounting as the clock continues to tick down to January 20th.
As such, Rachel brings an all-star team of political scientists onto the show-experts in political polarization perfectly suited for this moment. Their areas of expertise are negative partisanship and something called partisan schadenfreude. What is partisan schadenfreude? Put simply, it is the desire to harm or to see your political opponent harmed.
Political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe argue that in America, polarization and hyperpartisanship have created a lethal mass partisanship- a negative partisanship that is so deeply negative, it has the potential to lead people to tolerate or committ themselves physical violence for partisan ends. Steven Webster, who along with fellow political scientist Alan Abramowitz introduced the concept of negative partisanship into the polarization and voting behavior literatures, also joins the conversation with a discussion of his new book, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics.
A good time is had by all!
Get full access to The Cycle- On Substack at thecycle.substack.com/subscribe
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
With (most of) the 2020 dust now settled, Eric, Jared and Nick take you on a coast-to-coast tour of the new electoral landscape.
From the critical midwestern states that Biden managed to flip, to Democrats' dashed hopes in places like North Carolina and Texas, this super-sized episode brings you all the biggest upsets and letdowns, from the top of the ticket on down to the state legislative races that will help determine how the maps will get redrawn next year.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Emerging from the rubble of the U.S. elections, Sarbjit and Matthew welcome Mandu Reid, Leader of the UK's Women's Equality Party. Having taken over as leader earlier this year, Reid is also her party's candidate in the 2021 London mayoral election.
And Reid's doing everything she can to put her party out of business.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Mandu Reid, Leader of the Women's Equality Party @ManduReid
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv.
This live episode aired at 10:30 at ET on Old Bull TV on November 4th.
We're live once again with Rutgers professor of statistics Harry Crane to review the bonkers prediction market tape from last night, to sift through the absolute wreckage left by the pollsters & forecasters, and try to get a handle on what happens next.
Follow us at @oldbulltv and subscribe at oldbull.tv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
The live episode aired at 9 pm ET on The Cycle on November 3rd.
Rachel Bitecofer is joined by Jessica Post and Flip Pidot for a live look at the wild election results pouring in as polls finally closed across most of the country.
For more, check out https://thecycle.news.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv.
The live episode aired at 5 pm ET on Old Bull TV on November 3rd.
Rutgers professor of statistics Harry Crane sits down with Flip Pidot to break down the election day numbers and compare the final forecasts of prediction market traders vs. data journalists.
Follow us at @oldbulltv and subscribe at oldbull.tv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
In the electoral home stretch, one question looms large for every party and candidate on the ballot: how do we get our voters to vote?
Turnout is always critical, but in this highly peculiar cycle, it stands to play an even larger role than usual.
Rachel Bitecofer has assembled a panel to reveal what progressives are doing in 2020 to convert supporters into voters.
Guests: - Alex Morgan, executive director of Progressive Turnout Project - Diana Patiño, lead strategist of Sisters United Alliance - Jaime Mercado, consultant for Sisters United Alliance
Subscribe to the show and submit your questions for Rachel at https://ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out https://electionwhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Why should swing states have all the fun?
This week, Eric, Jared and Nick are in a New York state of mind.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
In this special episode, Sarbjit and Matthew are joined by a panel of professional political bookmakers, traders, and analysts, for an in-depth look at the U.S. presidential election, and which markets offer the best opportunities for traders.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Patrick Flynn, Smarkets Political Analyst @patricksmarkets
Flip Pidot (guest) @FlipPidot
Paul Krishnamurty @paulmotty
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
This week, Sarbjit and Matthew host Rob Ford, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester and co-author of Brexitland with Maria Sobolewska, due out this Thursday.
They discuss Ford's new book, whether Trump still has a chance, and how emotional bettors on both sides can skew prediction market prices.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Rob Ford (guest) @RobFordMancs
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
In the final installment, Rachel Bitecofer is reunited with two-time co-host Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX-20) along with Wendy Davis (candidate in the 21st District), Mike Siegel (10th) and Julie Oliver (25th).
The incumbents in these three red districts all won by single digits in 2018, so this episode may be jam packed with soon-to-be representatives-elect!
Subscribe to the show and submit your questions for Rachel at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
It's the one you've been waiting for! The Map Room is off to Ohio - long-reigning king of the bellwethers, which broke red in a big way in 2016. Despite its large contingent of Obama-Trump voters, however, polls suggest Ohio is squarely back in play in 2020.
Eric, Jared and Nick explain all you need to know about Ohio politics: the divide between the urban and rural areas, the large number of metropolitan areas (ranging from Cleveland to Cincinnati to Columbus), the strong white working-class vote, and the surprising Republican edge at the state level. They also discuss most of the major races this century and the presidential trends going back decades.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
In this installment, Rachel Bitecofer is joined by 3 of Texas' grassroots political leaders - the get s*** done club!
Guests: - Carrie Collier-Brown, founder of Blue Action Dems. - Sherrie Matula, founderof Sisters United Alliance. - Diana Patiño, lead strategist of Sisters United Alliance.
Subscribe to the show and submit your questions for Rachel at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Matthew and Sarbjit welcome Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics at the University of Kent and author of Sunday Times Book of the Year National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.
They break down what populism and polarization mean for upcoming election cycles in the UK, the US and beyond.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Matthew Goodwin (guest) @GoodwinMJ
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel Bitecofer's Texas Spectacular rolls on, with a dazzling dozen guests vying for seats in the state house this fall.
Cari Marshall from "Flip the Texas House" serves as assistant emcee, as Rachel chats with Sharon Hirsch, Lorenzo Sanchez, Lydia Bean, Alisa Simmons, Akilah Bacy, Celina Montoya, Brandy Chambers, Ann Johnson, Angela Brewer, Jennifer Skidonenko and Elizabeth Beck.
PLUS: A crash course on the Texas gerrymander with the Lizard Man!
Subscribe to the show and submit your questions for Rachel at ElectionWhisperer.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric Cunningham and Jared Stone continue their tour of crucial swing states in Wisconsin (Nick Morris will be back next week). Long part of the Democratic “blue wall”, Wisconsin has experienced a Republican trend recently culminating in Trump’s 2016 win.
So how will the Badger State vote in 2020?
The hosts explain all you need to know about the basics of Wisconsin politics: its strong divide between Milwaukee, Madison, and the rest of the state, the staunchly Republican WOW counties (including crucial Waukesha County), and the ancestral Democratic support in the driftless region.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
This week, Sarbjit and Matthew are joined by Michael Dugher, chief executive of the UK Betting and Gaming Council, former Labour Party Member of Parliament and Chief Political Spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
They discuss Jeremy Corbyn's unlikely rise to Labour Leader, whether a different leader could've prevented Brexit, and whether the Westminster Bubble pays attention to prediction markets.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Michael Dugher (guest) @MichaelDugher Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric Cunningham and Jared Stone continue their tour of crucial swing states in Wisconsin (Nick Morris will be back next week). Long part of the Democratic “blue wall”, Wisconsin has experienced a Republican trend recently culminating in Trump’s 2016 win.
So how will the Badger State vote in 2020?
The hosts explain all you need to know about the basics of Wisconsin politics: its strong divide between Milwaukee, Madison, and the rest of the state, the staunchly Republican WOW counties (including crucial Waukesha County), and the ancestral Democratic support in the driftless region.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel Bitecofer's Texas Spectacular kicks off with Beto O'Rourke, revealing his plan to turn the state blue in a key redistricting year through his organization Powered By People, and how that would "forever reorder the political landscape of America."
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Matt Singh, founder of Number Cruncher Politics, joins Sarbjit and Matthew to discuss the glaring split between the markets and modelers on Trump's reelection chances, the uncertainty of uncertainty, and who's leading the hypothetical race for President of the U.K.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Matt Singh (guest) @MattSingh_ Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric Cunningham, Nick Morris,and Jared Stone discuss once Republican-leaning Virginia, which flipped to Obama in 2008 and hasn’t really ever flipped back. The hosts explain all you need to know about the basics of Virginia politics: its current Democratic edge, a strong Democratic decade in statewide offices, and the effect of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric, Jared and Nick are on the road to Pennsylvania.
This incredibly competitive rust belt state flipped to the Republican column in 2016 – but it’s more complicated than that!
The hosts explain all you need to know about the basics of Pennsylvania politics: its strong history of ticket-splitting, historic Democratic lean, increasingly shifting coalitions, and much more.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv.
(See the end of these notes for an important update on Iowa.)
This quick episode is full of astounding and improbable morsels we've uncovered and assembled from the quixotically scorched earth of Kanye West's campaign trail. It's a special crossover episode with Keendawg from Star spangled Gamblers, so strap in.
You can also trade Kanye making the ballot in these 3 states on PredictIt. If you're not yet signed up, use this link for up to $50 free to get started just for being part of our audience.
Follow us at @oldbulltv and subscribe at oldbull.tv. It's free. What are you waiting for?
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice. ... UPDATE This Twitter thread represents our updated thinking in light of the full text of the 2nd objection in Iowa, which was made available to us after the episode went live, but the IA SOS. Short version: take the 33% gain and sell those No positions if you entered them on our recommendation a few hours ago. https://twitter.com/OldBullTV/status/1299426394280284161
Back from hiatus, Sarbjit and Matthew are talking politics and ultimate fighting with Dr. Rosemary (Rosi) Sexton, one of the candidates in the UK's ongoing Green Party leadership election.
Sexton, a mathematician, musician, computer scientist, osteopath, retired MMA/UFC fighter, and most recently a Green Party Councillor, intends to transform the party into something more than a "lifestyle movement for white middle class vegans."
If you like her chances, you can get in on the action at Smarkets, where she's trading at 29% as of publication time. The election wraps up the end of August.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Rosi Sexton (guest) @RosiSexton Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
It's the first installment of The Election Whisperer's "Go Ahead... Make My Data."
These are shorter-form, number-heavy episodes where Rachel Bitecofer takes you inside the data behind the politics.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric, Jared and Nick take you through the crucial swing state of Michigan. Too often typecast as a rust belt state that flipped red in 2016 like the others, the Great Lakes State is far more complicated than that. In this episode, the mappers break down the state's federal partisan lean, its gerrymandered House map, and its unique demographics, with large populations of African, Dutch, and Arab Americans. Plus, can 1st term Senator Gary Peters fend off formidable challenger Republican John James?
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
The thrilling conclusion to Rachel Bitecofer's DNC special is an interview with Guy Cecil, chair of Priorities USA, the largest Democratic super PAC.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Part 2 of Rachel Bitecofer's DNC special features a conversation with Ezra Levin (Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible) and Shannon Watts (Founder of Moms Demand Action), plus a furry cameo.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel Bitecofer's DNC special kicks off with an interview with Jessica Post, President of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel Bitecofer hosts an all-star lineup of campaign strategists, operatives and activists for a truly gargantuan episode as the 2020 Democratic National Convention gets underway.
-
First up: Jessica Post (President of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee)
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At 37:45: Ezra Levin (Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible) and Shannon Watts (Founder of Moms Demand Action)
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At 1:08:35: Guy Cecil (Chair of Priorities USA) - At 1:39:50: Rachel's concluding remarks and a preview of what's next.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out ElectionWhisperer.com/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
Eric, Jared and Nick are re-united and headed back to swing country, namely Eric's home state of North Carolina.
The state's historic east/west divide may be giving way to a different political dynamic, but its demographic and geographic diversity seem likely to keep NC up for grabs in this and future cycles.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel Bitecofer welcomes Zerlina Maxwell, author of "The End of White Politics" for a discussion on 2020 messaging, identity politics, and the right way to pick a running mate.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out oldbull.tv/pod.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Kathy Peach is the head of the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta.
She knows the secret to making prediction markets smarter. It's really simple and really elusive.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Kathy Peach (guest) @KathyPeach Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
This week, Eric and Nick are joined by their Elections Daily colleague James Newton as they chart a course to New Hampshire.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport James: @JimNPol
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Prediction markets and polls are on different planets when it comes to Trump's chances in November. Are traders/bettors seeing something pollsters aren't? Or are the markets behaving irrationally, setting you up for easy profits?
(Here's the presidential winner market on Smarkets for reference.)
Sarbjit and Matthew break it down with the help of Paul Krishnamurty, professional gambler, Betfair Exchange analyst, and proprietor of politicalgambler.com.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Paul Krishnamurty (guest) @paulmotty
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv
PredictIt sharp Jason Pipkin wants to pay you good money to make a few political predictions. No joke!
And if you're into free money and election forecasting, we'll get you started on PredictIt with up to $50 of real money just for being one of our viewers. Sign up at predictit.org/promo/oldbull50 and get a deposit match up to $50 to start trading.
Follow us at twitter.com/oldbulltv. Email us at oldbull@amciv.com.
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Funkorama" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv
In honor of long-awaited launch of Augur V2, we managed to blow the cobwebs off our lost episode with Forecast Foundation co-founder Joey Krug.
If you caught the sneak peek in January, you'll know it's woefully overdue. But then again, so is V2...
As one of our earliest recordings, it initially came out a tad buggy and needed much TLC in the editing bay. So bear with us if you catch sight of the spit and bailing wire now and then.
Still, it was a fascinating conversation with an innovator on the DeFi & political forecasting frontier, & in light of the launch, we were determined to get it out!
Follow us at twitter.com/oldbulltv. Email us at oldbull@amciv.com.
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Funkorama" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at oldbull.tv/maproom.
With Houston and Dallas in the rear view mirror, Eric and Jared bring you the final leg of our Texas triptych.
- What's really behind the state's blue shift?
- Does "demography = destiny" apply to the Lone Star State?
- And what's a dummymander?
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
The UK's Liberal Democrats are about to hold a twice-rescheduled leadership election. Acting co-leader and establishment candidate Ed Davey is being challenged by Layla Moran.
In this episode, Sarbjit and Matthew are joined by Lib Dem Federal Board member April Preston, a Moran backer whose parsnips Davey isn't buttering.
They explore the curious disparity between the polling for this race and the pricing in the UK betting markets (e.g. this Smarkets contract), which might sound familiar to U.S. presidential election watchers.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
April Preston (guest) @AprilPreston_
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version at electionwhisperer.com.
Rachel gets an assist with the hosting duties from Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX-20) for a conversation on Latinx voters with Chuck Rocha from Solidarity Strategies and Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of Equis Labs.
Plus, Rachel reveals the winner of the Question Of the Week swag challenge (yes, somebody won this week)!
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
For the podcast version, check out electionwhisperer.com/pod.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
But this is pretty close.
(If you're 18+ and in the U.S., sign up for PredictIt using this link and get a deposit match of up to $50.)
Follow us at @oldbulltv and subscribe at oldbull.tv. It's free. What are you waiting for?
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Some important parts of Texas have trended blue in recent cycles, but that's not the whole story. So how real are Democrats' statewide dreams?
The Map Room lays it all out in its continuing series on the Lone Star State.
This week, Eric, Jared and Nick are off to the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Betting markets around the world still give Trump a fighting shot (and then some). Pollsters and forecasters have it all but locked up for Biden. Who's got it right?
Sarbjit and Matthew are joined by elections and campaigns expert Rodrigo De Paz to sort it all out.
Also on the agenda:
- The impact of nationwide mail-in voting
- Whether Biden can carry Texas
- The role of Hispanic voters in 2020
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Rodrigo De Paz (guest) @rodrigodepazp Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
It's the first in a series of extra-deep dives into the aspiring battleground state of Texas.
Eric, Jared and Nick trek across gargantuan Harris County, home of Houston and the heart of the 5th largest metro area in the country.
Follow your hosts on Twitter:
Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Sarbjit and Matthew welcome Dr. Alice Lilly, from the Institute for Government think tank, for a chat about UK & US politics, whether prediction markets can make government more efficient, and whether bookies can (or should) offer bets on dead candidates.
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Welcome to the first-ever Election Whisperer mailbag special.
Nothing but Rachel Bitecofer answering your questions.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Rachel Bitecofer welcomes Wisconsin Democratic state chair Ben Wikler, for an (uninterrupted!) discussion of the state's pivotal role in the 2020 presidential election and the stunning upset they pulled off this spring.
Plus, Rachel answers your questions and reveals who (if anyone) won the inaugural Question Of the Week swag challenge.
Subscribe to the show and submit a question of your own at ElectionWhisperer.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Matthew and Sarbjit are joined by Robert Martin, founder of the forecasting website Lean Tossup, to discuss how his predictive model works and why it may be superior to traditional forecasting methods in the impossible-to-model 2020 cycle.
Also on the agenda:
- The impact of 2016 PTSD on 2020 predictions
- Why forecasters and prediction markets disagree so dramatically on Trump's reelection odds
- How to profit by fading the conventional wisdom
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Robert Martin (guest) @LeanTossup
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Like some other midwestern states, Iowa has been trending red in recent cycles at the statewide level. But peel back a layer or two, and there's something more interesting afoot.
Eric, Jared and Nick reveal the Hawkeye State in all its electoral splendor.
Follow your hosts on Twitter: Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Matthew and Sarbjit enlist the help of University of Edinburgh Professor of Political Science Aisla Henderson for a master class in Scottish politics.
Henderson heads the Scottish Election Study, co-directs the Future of England Survey, and serves as deputy chair of the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland for local and Holyrood (Scottish Government) elections, as well as commissioner on the Boundary Commission for Scotland for the Westminster elections. They examine the current state of the Scottish political parties, the two dominant Scottish political axes, and the parties' relations with Westminster. Also on the agenda: * How Scotland's path to independence compares to Quebec (and Texas). * Henderson's work on the boundary commission (the UK's non-political redistricting process).
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Professor Ailsa Henderson (guest) @ailsa_henderson
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
We'd hoped this episode from about 100 years ago (April) might be less relevant by now. Alas, it's even more so. We also have a mightier horde of subscribers than we did then (welcome!), so we hope our new friends find this one of interest.
Original show notes follow...
COVID-19 is wreaking havoc not just on its hundreds of thousands of biological victims, but on the very viability of the global health care infrastructure, financial markets, and the daily routines of billions of people.
Can prediction markets help humanity even the score? Could they help policymakers and the general public anticipate and respond more quickly and effectively to unfolding emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic?
Yes.
But should they?
Also, yes.
Follow us at @oldbulltv. Email us at oldbull@amciv.com.
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Funkorama" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
This week, Rachel's joined by the Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson to examine how the Republican Party has consistently out-campaigned Democrats, notching win after win even states where they're heavily outnumbered (looking at you, Florida).
Can Rick and his elite crew of former GOP heavyweights use the party's devastatingly effective playbook against it in their 2020 messaging? And which party is best positioned to win the vote-by-mail war?
Plus, Rachel briefs you on a key rating change in her Electoral College map and answers a whole bunch of viewer questions!
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
The famously powerless District of Columbia kindly requests its due recognition as the 51st state. In an initial step toward realizing that dream, the U.S. House has just obliged with its passage of the Washington, D.C. Admission Act.
So what exactly would it take to stitch another star on the flag? And what would it means for the balance of power if the swamp had voting members in Congress?
NRO's Dan McLaughlin has all the answers.
Check out Dan online at https://www.nationalreview.com/author/dan-mclaughlin and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/baseballcrank.
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Funkorama" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Matthew and Sarbjit sit down with Maurice Mcleod (social commentator, vice chair of Race On the Agenda, and Labour Councillor) to weigh the odds of black Conservative Party candidate Shaun Bailey toppling incumbent London mayor Sadiq Khan in the upcoming election.
If Bailey can't do it... could Stormzy? Or Prince Harry?
Also on the agenda:
- How will London's ranked choice voting system affect the outcome?
- And how long will Boris Johnson last as Prime Minister?
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Maurice Mcleod, writer, commentator, Labour Councillor @mowords
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
With some money in their pockets, Eric, Jared and Nick are rockets on the 4th of July!
Las Vegas' native son Jared leads the mappers on an electoral expedition through the Silver State.
Follow your hosts on Twitter: Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
It's the premiere of Rachel Bitecofer's "election nerd Disneyland."
The Election Whisperer is a weekly exploration of Dr. Bitecofer's political analysis and election forecasts, packed with data-driven deep dives, in-depth interviews with the best and brightest election modelers and campaign strategists, and answers to viewer-submitted questions.
This week, Rachel sits down with Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics to talk veepstakes.
If you're watching during the premiere at 6 pm ET on June 24, stick around after the show for an exclusive Q&A with Rachel in the live chat.
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us a favorable ratings and reviews, and check out our other shows at OldBull.tv.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Sarbjit and Matthew are joined by Ipsos MORI pollster Keiran Pedley to discuss whether new UK Labour Leader Keir Starmer may be able to ride his record-high approval ratings to electoral victory.
Also on the agenda:
- Is there room for a durable 4th party in UK politics?
- What would the balance of power look like if Scotland were to exit?
- And just how generic a Democrat is Joe Biden?
Your hosts:
Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Keiran Pedley, pollster for Ipsos MORI @keiranpedley
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us favorable ratings and reviews, and check out all our shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Minnesota is a political odd duck.
It hasn't gone to a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon, yet it swung slightly to the right of the country in 2016 for the first time since the 1950s.
It's not quite a swing state yet, but it features the nation's only split state legislature and a surprising number of competitive Congressional seats.
As the home state of one of the 2020 Democratic presidential finalists, now a focal point of civil unrest, and going forward potentially a legitimate tossup, Minnesota is a quizzical state that election forecasters need to understand.
Eric, Jared and Nick have you covered.
Follow your hosts on Twitter: Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
In a special crossover episode, OldBull.tv and Star Spangled Gamblers offer up a comprehensive quickstart guide for the aspiring political trader.
You'll learn:
- What political prediction markets are
- How to interpret market prices
- Avoiding rookie mistakes like ideological investing and long-shot bias
- The best (and worst) sources market analysis
- How to arbitrage market inefficiency using "negative risk"
- Whether or not you should read a market's rules
Email us at oldbull@amciv.com and follow us at @oldbulltv.
Our guests are on Twitter too:
Keendawg: @keendawgssg Pratik: @pjchougule
Check out Pratik's e-book.
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Funkorama" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Sarbjit and Matthew bring in Chris Terry from the University of Manchester to discuss the upcoming French presidential election and the impact of comedians and coronavirus (among other things).
Also on the agenda:
- Which European leader is the favorite to be next ousted from office?
- Parliamentary redistricting in the UK.
- What's the deal with the Isle of Wight?
Your hosts: Sarbjit Bakhshi, head of political markets at Smarkets @sarbjit_pol
Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes @shadsy
Chris Terry, PhD student at University of Manchester @CJTerry
Be sure to subscribe to the show, please consider leaving us a favorable ratings and reviews, and check out our other shows at OldBull.tv.
Cold Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.
Video version here.
Eric, Jared and Nick head west to explore the potential presidential tipping state of Arizona.
Can Trump keep the Copper State in his column? Does appointed incumbent Senator Martha McSally stand a chance against Mark Kelly? And what does the state's ongoing demographic shift mean for its electoral future?
Follow your hosts on Twitter: Eric: @decunningham2 Jared: @jstonepolitics Nick: @tossupreport
Email us at maproom@amciv.com.
All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.