🤡 Fake polls roil the closing stages of the campaign

Earlier this week, Wedgewood “Polls” confessed in a social media statement to fabricating raw survey data and polls following a forensic analysis of its purported raw survey data by FiftyPlusOne.

That’s not the first fake pollster to get caught this cycle. Median Strategies copped to a “social experiment” that saw its “polls” amplified by the news media and by candidates in races it was polling. “The Public Sentiment Institute” was caught changing respondents’ answers to a Florida candidate it was conducting undisclosed polling for. TPSI pollster Lester Tellez, who is currently in felony pre-trial diversion, is back crowdfunding polls in battleground states that are being shared widely on X. Their most recent methodology statement contains this gem copping to the same response-switching that got them in hot water in Florida: “Undecided voters are allocated based on how decided voters with similar views and backgrounds plan to vote, and a small share is left undecided.”

Just to be clear, legitimate pollsters don’t change respondents’ answers.

FiftyPlusOne also conducted a follow-up investigation of the X-native SoCal Strategies suggesting its data was likely fabricated. Following the post, SoCal took down all their social media accounts. Suspicious patterns in SoCal’s releases were flagged back in 2024.

There’s also a connection between Tellez and SoCal Strategies, who’ve worked closely together and in 2024 crowdfunded more than $10,000 for polls that were possibly fake.

The Internet is full of scams and bad-faith actors. You shouldn’t be surprised to see this creeping into coverage of polling and elections given obsessive audience demand for polling in the run-up to elections.

Are you the kind of person who would be happy if a new state that was on no one’s radar came online and was suddenly competitive for your side? If you’re a partisan active on social media, you probably would be. And you might even be tempted to chip in a few bucks to a crowdfunding campaign to make sure the race got polled.

But what if this was just a scam and the poll was never actually done?

It’s trite to say that the political machinery is way too poll-driven, but at the heart of the problem are political hobbyists online who engorge themselves on polls, many conducted on the cheap. Most of the fake pollsters claimed to be using Pollfish, a platform that delivers responses for $1 a piece. But most of these would-be pollsters have no paying clients and in fact probably don’t have a spare $600 lying around to poll the Mississippi Senate race. So, faking it is the logical next move.

Fake pollsters are a problem. So is the audience inclined to believe them because it wants more polls that reinforce its partisan priors.

📊 This polling error trend dates back 28 years

Since 1998, Republicans have outperformed polls more in red states than blue states. As I’ve been saying, that matters a lot in a year when most of the key Senate battlegrounds are in red states!

🗺️ A blue wave doesn’t guarantee a flood of House seats

An eight-point Democratic lead on the generic ballot could still produce only modest House gains by historical measures. Sean Trende reminds us that there are fewer GOP-held purple districts that fueled past waves. It’s taken a strong Democratic generic ballot advantage of 8 points or more to breach the Trump +9 seat line where the gains start stacking up.

In Levee Math, Trende follows up with 10 badly needed congressional district polls from Emerson that show just how much Democrats could encroach on Republican territory. The results yield some surprising Democratic overperformances, such as in North Carolina’s 11th district, but mostly they’re about what you’d expect in a D+8 environment where our prior should be that a Trump +10 district has about a 50-50 chance of flipping. Here’s what the Swingometer says should be the closest House races if the election were held today, taking into account past incumbent performance but no district-level polling.

📺 Spending more to air less

Republicans are outspending Democrats in most Senate battlegrounds, but their cash advantage isn’t buying a proportional share of airtime. Despite spending $82.3 million more than Democrats in Texas, their ads only make up 58% of broadcast airings. It’s the same story in Ohio: Republicans account for 63% of overall broadcast spending but just about half of the airings, 51%.

The reason is that most Republican spending runs through PACs that don’t get the same low TV rates as candidates. At the same time, I don’t think you’ll see Republicans batting an eye at these numbers. Candidates have to spend inordinate amounts of money and time raising money. Super PACs can raise them easily from a few donors.

🏛️ A look at the governors’ races

Split-ticket voters are few and far between these days, but ticket-splitting is more common in gubernatorial elections without national political implications. DDHQ ranks a total of seven states as being most likely to split their ballots between Senate and governors’ races, including Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas.

📊 The election indicator with a perfect track record

One of the most predictive election indicators is also one of the simplest: which party can best handle the problem Americans think is most important? Gallup now gives Democrats an 11-point lead. Republicans led on this measure in 2024 and in 2022.

This measure happens to have an almost perfect track record of predicting election outcomes — more than pre-election horserace polls. It predicted 2016 and 2024. The parties tied in 1980 and the question wasn’t asked in 2000. The last outright miss was 1948.

The midterm record is also strong: in Gallup’s historical series the party ahead gained House seats in all eight midterms from 1994 through 2022. That tells us the direction, not the size of a wave or who necessarily controls Congress, but it underscores why Democrats are favored this year.

Other indicators in Gallup’s pre-election release point the same way. Democrats lead 51-37 on keeping the country prosperous—a usual Republican advantage. 59% describe Republicans as too extreme, compared with 43% for Democrats. In 2022, the order was flipped.

🗳️ Polling can miss at the state level even if it’s good nationally

Senate polls ahead of the 2018 and 2022 midterms were quite good, missing only by 0.4 points in 2018 and 1.3 points in 2022. But remember 2016, when the national polls were basically right and the polls missed in the key electoral college battlegrounds that decided the election.

We’re nearing the finish line and Democrats have continued to improve in our index of district-level polling, defying the midterm pattern of Republicans coming home in the last few weeks. One possible reason why is that, in the summer, Republicans were already polling at what a 2018-level bad midterm would indicate and the stability since is an indicator of where we’re headed.

But there may still be polling error in individual races. And that error is correlated with state partisanship. Even when the national polls are right, red state polls tend to be too blue and blue state polls too red. Our new tool looks at the final polling error in 2018 and 2022’s Senate and Governor’s races.

💰 Follow the money in Trump Country

A few weeks ago, I argued that spending is the best way to separate polling signal from noise. Campaigns can release whatever internal polls they want. Where the big outside groups actually spend tells us more about what the smart money believes.

The latest examples are new money drops from the Democrats’ House Majority PAC and the GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund, all dutifully compiled by Rob Pyers. The main House Democratic SuperPAC isn’t really expanding the map: the districts they’re spending in now average Trump +7.3 while their earlier spending averaged Trump +6.0. Few districts above Trump +11 are being targeted. And many of those on the top end of the range are seats Democrats are defending. Both sides also agree on what the battleground is and it doesn’t include seats that would indicate a tsunami.

⏱️ How new is that new poll?

A poll released today may be measuring last week’s electorate. The new field-date view in the Polling Index makes that lag clear: the 15 polls released in the last day as of Friday morning had an average estimated field date of October 10.

📬 Is the only good early vote analysis no analysis?

A lot of early-vote analysis is incomplete or in bad faith. But among those doing it right are Mark Harris and the team at Coldspark. I’ve said that the best comparison to 2026 is 2024 because of changes in how parties vote early since 2022. And the early electorate today is 6 points more Democratic in registration than 2024.

Not everyone is as careful as Harris and his team in making these comparison. Sean Trende, who has a new Substack you should subscribe to, warns us of the risks:

This gets even more complicated because parties change strategies, and turnout patterns change. Early voting was a Republican-dominated affair in the 2000s, until Barack Obama’s campaign figured out it could use early voting to lock in voters, freeing up resources to target more difficult-to-reach voters on Election Day. This shift was compounded in Donald Trump’s first two campaigns when he (much to his advisors’ chagrin) urged his voters not to use early voting. In 2024, his campaign concluded that one of the party’s failures in 2022 was the lack of emphasis on early voting, and so the party changed its strategy. Early voting surged.

The upshot is that we lack a straightforward, stable baseline for cross-race comparisons. We see this in some online debates. You can compare early vote return rates to the rates at a similar point in 2022, but you’ll miss the shift in Republican strategy that occurred in 2024 (assuming that strategy carries over to this year). You can use 2024 as a baseline, but that requires comparing presidential years to midterm years, and 2024 could have been a one-off aberration in GOP voting patterns, with mean reversion this year.

🎙️ A few conversations about the midterms

I joined Amy Walter and Shumita Basu on Apple News In Conversation to discuss polling, redistricting, and trust in elections.

And on You Might Be Right, Ruy Teixeira and I joined former Tennessee governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam to talk about populism, affordability, AI, and immigration.

And I joined Ruy again on the first Substack Live for The Long View, the successor to The Liberal Patriot he launched with Michael Baharaeen. Subscribe to this one too, folks!

WelcomeStack

What Should We Make of the Midterm Polling?

The Long View was delighted to host pollster and friend Patrick Ruffini today for a wide-ranging conversation. Ruffini and TLV’s Ruy Teixeira covered a host of topics, including…

Listen now

7 days ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Ruy Teixeira and Patrick Ruffini

🗳️ A new home for all of our midterm analysis

All of our interactive election analysis features this cycle now live in one place, including previews of the House Swingometer, 2026 Polling Index, and our new Senate Explorer tool, as well as analyses of the primary vote in three critical states: Texas, Ohio, and Iowa.

With 25 days to go, let’s run through all the latest numbers.

The median Swingometer scenario now sits at 232 D - 203 R, with more potential for Democrats to rack up gains now that they’ve crossed the “valley of redistricting” and are actively contesting a higher volume of seats in the Trump +9 or more range.

Our read on the most competitive House districts is now enhanced by outside spending rankings drawn from Rob Pyers’ big board (in yellow boxes).

The Polling Index agrees — implying a national environment between D+7 and D+8. The average House poll has swung 11.7 points left from 2024 and the average Senate poll 10.1 points left, numbers which get adjusted based on the red-leaning nature of the congressional battleground. In a flip from recent weeks, the Senate environment is a touch less blue than the House environment.

Then there’s the new Senate Explorer — a historical look back at 440 U.S. Senate elections since 2000. Here you can really see just how much more partisan U.S. Senate elections have gotten. Map out how many Senate races were decided outside different swing levels from the last presidential election — including a Texas-specific margin:

And then run your own Senate fundamentals scenarios, adjusting for the political environment and the level of correlation with past presidential results. This shows you how different some specific races — places like Alaska, Maine, and Michigan — are because of the specific candidate dynamics there.

Another fun take on Senate scenario building comes from The New York Times.

🔄 The realignment realigns

The Argument’s new analysis puts Democrats ahead by 6.6 points among registered voters and 9.1 points among its modeled likely electorate. Among Hispanics, the Democratic margin rises from 20 points among registered voters to 26 among likely voters.

The estimates combine The Argument’s surveys and include voting history, demographics, and stated vote likelihood to model turnout. The political environment is shifting towards Democrats, but many of the projected gains come from Republicans sitting it out instead of persuasion.

🌽 What if there’s another Midwest polling error?

Nate Silver takes on the question hanging over another round of strong Democratic polls: What if the polls are wrong again? Recent midterms offer more reassurance than presidential elections, but just like 2016, a relatively accurate national number might mask errors in the states that actually decide control — particularly in the Midwest.

Getting the right number of Trump voters into a sample is one challenge. Getting Trump voters who resemble the ones who aren’t answering is another.

Chaz Nuttycombe’s State Navigate poll (full disclosure: I sit on State Navigate’s board) offers an example. In Iowa’s Trump +21 state Senate District 35, standard weighting puts Democratic incumbent Mike Zimmer ahead 46-43. An alternative that adds regional recalled-vote weighting puts Republican Joe Stutting ahead 47-45. The same respondents modeled differently produce a five-point shift in the margin.

Nuttycombe flags difficulty reaching rural Republicans and his concern about respondents’ reported presidential vote. Both versions still show a competitive race in a heavily Republican district, but how much of the swing is real is still an open question.

Carlos Odio does a similar exercise on Equis’s Texas Hispanic polling, turning recall vote weighting on and off. With it, James Talarico’s vote share is 64%. Without it: 69%. That’s a 10-point difference in the margin — quite a polling error if one of these methods is correct.

🛋️ Switching sides or sitting it out?

Pew’s latest survey finds that 77% of Trump’s 2024 voters currently back a Republican for the House, compared with 87% of Harris voters backing a Democrat. But only 5% of Trump voters say they’ll vote Democratic while 13% are unsure.

This suggests the Republican problem in polling right now is more consolidation than outright vote switching to the Democrats. And the question is whether these voters switch, come home, or sit out the election entirely. That’s also the same finding from our primary analyses referenced above: the main Republican problem was Republican voters who didn’t turn out, rather than switching into the other party.

Source: Pew Research Center. Congressional vote preference among registered voters, by 2024 vote.

🎟️ Who counts as a likely voter?

YouGov shows how much that turnout question matters. Its latest Economist survey gives Democrats an eight-point lead among registered voters, a ten-point lead under a looser likely-voter screen, and a twelve-point lead under a stricter one. The stricter definition includes registered voters who have already voted or say they definitely will; the looser version also includes probable voters and people planning to register.

YouGov has retired its previous screen, which produced a sixteen-point Democratic lead that its team said was overstated. The choice of screen alone now accounts for a two-point difference in the margin.

A founding thesis of Echelon Insights is that likely voter screens are antiquated — and were exactly the thing that overstated Republican chances in the 2012 presidential election, the cycle before we were founded. Election polls should start as likely electorate polls first, rather than trying to find a subset of a poorly defined registered voter universe. Because we have voter files, we have a pretty good sense of what likely voters actually look like. Relative motivation to vote should be looked at as a diagnostic, but only within the likely electorate universe.

🌎 The working class shifts right in Brazil

A reminder from David Shor that the Realignment is still playing out globally, with a rightward shift among working-class voters in Brazil.

⚽ AI respondents are Messi-pilled

AI synthetic respondents are basically a stereotype engine and nothing more. 97% of Hispanic AI respondents said they were likely to follow the World Cup. The real number: 43%.

🗺️ How well do you know your election maps?

Play this daily Wordle-esque election game to guess the year of three election maps.

⛽ The midterms are about gas prices and that’s pretty much it

The chart that explains the midterms probably better than any other, via Lakshya Jain:

Not only do fluctuations in Trump’s approval rating closely track gas prices, which have risen during the war in Iran, but the cost of living dominates the public consciousness more than it did during the 2024 election. 52% of voters say the cost of living is one of the top two issues, a number that’s spiked since the war started. While Washington wants to talk about data centers and AI, just 8% say AI is one of the top two issues. That number surged in the last month but is nowhere close to bread-and-butter economics as the main source of voter dissatisfaction.

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🧭 Sorting the polling signal from the noise

Ben Jacobs spoke with campaign pros who give some useful tips for separating what’s real and what’s fake in the fog of war at the end of a race. His must-read piece explains why more information isn’t always better. And prediction markets can reflect the same public polling and conventional wisdom rather than adding any genuinely new insight.

The useful distinction is between the private polling campaigns use to make decisions and the internals they choose to release. And public polling has never been noisier, with doubts as to whether the polling firms releasing numbers are even real.

Between Democrats and Republicans, there was one clear point of consensus: a frustration with both public polling’s influence on American politics and its flaws. “The reality is that most people who do this for a living take all of that with an absolute grain of salt,” said Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic operative in Florida.

It is…

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The polling index calculates the national political environment from individual race polls, broken out by House and Senate races. One advantage to this over regular generic ballot polling is that there tend to be many more individual House & Senate polls. The index now includes 450 polls: 165 House polls across 84 districts and 285 Senate polls across 26 states. This morning, it shows a 9.7-point swing towards Democrats from the 2024 presidential election results in the House and a 10.4-point swing in the Senate.

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🧯 The case against AI doom

The capabilities of AI systems are growing by the week. I personally am experiencing it. Many of the AI workflows I’ve jerry-rigged virtually since the introduction of ChatGPT have just started working in the last few weeks. To me, that’s an unalloyed good. AI makes this a great time to be alive.

The flip side of AI models growing more capable is that there are growing examples of models “going rogue” and behaving in unexpected ways: the Hugging Face attack, models changing their instructions, AI models being used to test-engineer rockets for Houthi militias.

I’m an unreconstructed tech enthusiast who was similarly giddy about the early Internet but also mindful of the reckoning that followed.

Despite that early optimism, the Internet couldn’t solve for the bad behavior of the people using it. Make the Internet broadly available and you get cyberattacks and bot swarms. You also get t…

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🗽 9/11 was another country

Today, the country marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The pictures of that day bring back the fear Americans felt in the days and weeks that followed. But out of that fear came a wave of national unity and pride that we haven’t come close to experiencing since.

Looking back at the polling after 9/11 is a reminder that the past is another country. Our immediate instinct was to come together. In one poll, 72% said the country was going in the right direction; just 11% said it was off on the wrong track.

The post-9/11 period was the last sustained stretch of when a majority of Americans were optimistic about the country. There were smaller rallies at the start of the Iraq War and after Saddam Hussein’s capture. But by 2004, “wrong track” had taken the lead, and we haven’t looked back since.

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Of course, the idea of uniform swing was always too simplistic. Seats don’t swing uniformly. Demographics and candidate quality make them swing differently. We need a Swingometer that does the same. So I decided to build one.

The Intersection’s 2026 Swingometer starts with Democrats winning a 224-211 majority in the House based on today’s D+6.0 generic ballot polling average. Unlike the swingometers of old, not every seat to the left or right of the dial is the same color. Seats vary based on demonstrated track records of over- and under-performance and a few penalties added for ideological extremity or controversy.

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🗳️ The case for a bad Republican midterm

A couple of weeks ago, I laid out the case for why the polls may be overstating Democrats again. That point coexists with the fact that this should be a pretty bad election cycle for Republicans. The main question is how much the GOP’s structural advantages — redistricting, races on red terrain — insulate them from the full effects of a bad midterm.

It’s not hyperbole to say the political environment is worse for them than in 2018, even though the seat losses — at least in the House — should be nowhere near as bad.

First, let’s take Donald Trump’s net approval rating. At -20, it’s 8 points worse than Joe Biden’s at this point four years ago, and 7 points worse than Trump heading into the 2018 midterms.

Then there’s the economy. In Civiqs’ tracking, 75% of registered voters rated the national economy as good and just 18% as bad at this point in 2018. Today, that’s flipped: 33% good and 64% bad. There’s a night and day dif…

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🤖 Why voters oppose data centers but like Amazon distribution centers and chip fabs

As the data center debate reaches escape velocity, there’s a question of what’s really driving opposition: is it just the “physical manifestation of AI” or more localized concerns about water usage or utility rates?

Both Gallup and Fox News dug into this and the answer is consistent: environmental concerns and resources heavily outweigh AI as contributing factors for data center opponents.

But the answer can be a bit of both. We’ve polled on the difference between AI data centers and data centers used for everyday services like streaming and banking for months, and it turns out that the purpose of a data center does make a difference.

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📉 No one should be surprised at the rise of fake polls

In a week, we’ve gone from inaccurate polls to completely fabricated ones. “Median Strategies,” which got its “polls” reported by major media outlets and cited by campaigns, was revealed to be a “social experiment” by 21-year-old Rahil Prakash to show far and fast fake data could travel. The answer: pretty far.

Meanwhile, The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), an outfit which has used synthetic samples, admitted to outright fabricating data by switching votes from one candidate to another. And that candidate just happened to be one they lied about working for.

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Democrats look like they’ve had a good chance in red states before. A July 30 - August 3, 2020 Quinnipiac poll showing a tied race for South Carolina Senate race between the late Lindsey Graham and Jaime Harrison kicked off a trend of neck-and-neck polls that continued almost until the very end. Graham would eventually win by 10. In 2022, Democrat Tim Ryan led in the vast majority of polls conducted in Ohio over the summer until being bested by JD Vance by 6 points. The same pattern repeated itself in Ohio in 2024 when Brown led in all but two pre-October polls in his race against Bernie Moreno.

In the last few election cycles, we’ve seen a pattern of Democrats looking competitive in red state Senate contests during the summer only to fade by election day. I wanted to test if this was a consistent pattern, not just the selective memory of a Republican.

3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern. In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result. Again, that’s across more than 3,000 polls, so that’s hardly just statistical noise.

And the pattern is most pronounced during the summer, right where we are now. Polling error peaks at 5.9 points too Democratic sometime in late July, and doesn’t start coming down until late August, before settling into an average error of D+2.6 on election day.

But this isn’t all.

There’s a dramatic difference between midterm and presidential cycles. In the Trump era, Senate polls in presidential years have been biased towards Democrats, and they remained biased until the very end. Polls in midterm years ended up pretty accurate by election day, but were very biased in the summer.

Here’s what this analysis of 3,000-plus polls with 11 charts breaking down this phenomenon reveals — from midterms vs. presidential cycles, which states and with which demographics the errors are worst in, and what you as a consumer of polls need to know.

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🗳️ Michigan’s Senate primary was a win for El-Sayed but a disaster for pollsters

The highly-anticipated Michigan Democratic primary ended up in a photo finish between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. The pre-election polls showed El-Sayed with a solid double-digit lead. What happened?

Yes, primaries are harder to poll than general elections. Because there are smaller ideological differences between candidates, primary voters are much more up for grabs than general election voters. That makes the races themselves more volatile, with last-minute shifts the rule rather than the exception. It’s also harder to weight primary polls. We don’t have reliable targets for the things most correlated with primary vote choice — ideology or what kinds of candidates the voter has voted for in the past (recalled primary vote is notoriously unreliable, unlike general election vote).

While it’s true that the Michigan polling error was well within range of a normal primary polling …

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🗺 How redistricting is shaping 2026

It’s a theme that we’ve returned to again and again: only a handful of seats will decide control of Congress and with this year’s re-redistricting, districts have been purposefully engineered to reduce the number of seats Republicans need to spend money defending.

Cook Political’s new PVI ratings are out showing relatively safe Republican districts (R+5 or more) as an all-time high, Democratic safe seats inching up, and swing seats plummeting. As we’ve said before, it’s not about taking Democratic seats and making them Republican. It’s about taking swing seats and making them Republican. But swing seats aren’t fully dead yet: Realignment post-2020 increased the number of competitive districts; swing seats in the Cook formulation were at an all-time low after 2018. But they did take a hit with this redistricting cycle, plunging them near Trump 1.0 lows.

One response to redistricting was that Black voter turnout surged in Southern…

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Nate Silver’s chart showing voting behavior by education level and income struck a chord on X this week, as all debates about the relative status of highly educated people inevitably do on that platform. And the reason is that is tracks closely with our intuitions about the “downwardly mobile” — people who are highly educated but who don’t earn much money. Those voters are the most Democratic in the country.

And the most Republican? The working class voter who never went to college but is middle class or even wealthy.

This isn’t just a story about two distinctive groups of people. Obviously, education is correlated with income, and so higher-income people tend to be more Democratic now. But you can probably tell a story across the electorate of the relative winners economically in each cohort voting Republican and the relative losers voting Democratic. More data on that soon.

📊 Americans are turning against data centers

A new POLITICO/Public First…

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The first come from our annual Political Tribes survey, which show voters leaning strongly to the left on an array of economic policy positions, a leftward tilt that has gained steam in recent years.

And then there’s our polling from this month, where any version of a capitalist economic model is viewed more favorably than any version of a socialist or social democratic economy.

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📊 Happy Tribes/Quadrants to all who celebrate

Echelon Insights’s 2026 Political Tribes came out yesterday. Built on answers to questions about social issues, economic issues, and trust in institutions, the tribes have been updated for 2026. The most left-leaning tribe gained five points, while other groups in the left and center fell.

As in previous years, we provide different lenses for uncovering the tribal alignments of American voters: the tribal cluster analysis, our political quadrants, and the multiparty democracy question we’ve run since 2019.

Before I get to some of the conclusions from this year’s study, I’ll put in another plug for the Tribes interactive feature on Echelon’s website, which includes 2D and 3D visualizations of the tribes, full quadrants data going back to 2021 with the ability to filter and isolate very specific subgroups, and for the first time, trendline data on all questions asked as part of the tribes/quadrants studies. If you prefer…

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🇺🇲 America at 250: What Americans think

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America, the country the data tells us remains No. 1 economically and militarily. Many have predicted its decline, but in recent decades every challenge from a would-be competitor, whether Japan, Europe, or China, has eventually lost steam. Numbers aside, it is a pretty great place. More than the official celebrations, the World Cup visitors marveling at our material bounty and natural beauty remind us of that.

The political decisions made in 1776, with their healthy aversion to centralized power, allowed America to fully reap the economic bounty of another product of 1776: the capitalist system envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Centuries of entrepreneurial immigration have reinforced that advantage. Together, these factors formed natural antibodies to the socialist influence that sapped the vital spirit of many European countries. Two and a half centuries of pol…

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🇦🇴 The DSA is now the big city default

The Democratic Socialists of America’s victories in Congressional primaries feel seismic because they come on the heels of a string of major victories in big cities, including a DSA-backed candidate winning the Washington, D.C. mayoral primary, a DSA candidate making it to the runoff in Los Angeles, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City. By the end of the year, the mayoralty of the country’s three largest cities may be in the hands of hard-left progressives.

If you’re thinking this is a workers’ revolution — not quite yet. Support for these candidates came from wealthier, better educated — and whiter — precincts. Even the race the DSA was not supposed to win — Darializa Avila Chevalier’s win against Adriano Espaillat, came in a Harlem-based precinct that’s seen a lot of gentrification in its Manhattan-based parts. Meanwhile, moderate Ritchie Torres saw no real challenge in a South Bronx district that’s still the poo…

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