2024’s overperformers
The industrial north, betting markets go big, dating in the Trump era, tribal primary electorates, the marriage gap isn't what you think, ad spending on X
No. 347 | January 31th, 2025
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🇺🇲 2024
Republicans barely won the House even as Trump won 230 Congressional districts. This thread with maps goes further than any I’ve seen in breaking down the reasons for these Democratic overperformances.
Split Ticket also released an update to their Wins-Above-Replacement (WAR) model that can also help us understand this issue better.
“Our new model learns from the state-level environments in a much more controlled and targeted fashion. Through a combination of demographics and generic ballot context, it recognizes that Democrats in Wisconsin broadly did extremely well across the board — and it correctly infers that this is because of a bluer statewide electorate than other states experienced, at least relative to 2020 vote. That’s why the new model believes that a fairer expectation for Johnson was to win by 1.4% (which is more in line with the standard incumbency boost), and that makes the new WAR for the 2022 Wisconsin Senate race D+0.4.”
Downballot underperformance is an issue I also covered in my Michigan Memo yesterday, along with shifts in the state since 2020. Here’s one of several graphics in the piece you’ll get access to as a paid subscriber:
The Center for Politics releases a deep dive at the key counties in the industrial north.
2024 was the year that betting markets made a splash in the presidential race, including the Polymarket whale who made $85 million based on polling the “neighbor question.” Now Kalshi is letting you buy prediction contracts directly from brokerages.
Kalshi is expected to announce on Friday that users will now be able to buy into its prediction markets directly from brokerages, just as they can purchase stocks or cryptocurrencies.
“Over time, integrating with brokers will enable the 160 million Americans who own stock to access prediction markets,” Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Kalshi is committed to growing prediction markets into a trillion-dollar asset class — and we are not going to stop building until we do.”
🗣️ Public Opinion
The election has put a strain on dating life..
🗺️ Data Visualization
A detailed breakdown Federal revenues and expenditures from 2024.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
It’s time to stop dismissing the staying power of AI, argues Nate Silver. Even if it doesn’t go much further than it has now, it’s still the equivalent of a major earthquake.
Some of the AI early adopter types I spoke with for my book thought AI would be a significant axis of political conflict in the 2024 election. It pretty clearly wasn’t. But 2024 was probably the last election for which this was true. AI is the highest-stakes game of poker in the world right now. Even in a bearish case, where we merely achieve modest improvements over current LLMs and other technologies like driverless cars, far short of artificial superintelligence (ASI), it will be at least an important technology. Probably at least a high 7 or low 8 on what I call the Technological Richter Scale, with broadly disruptive effects on the distribution of wealth, power, agency, and how society organizes itself. And that’s before getting into p(doom), the possibility that civilization will destroy itself or enter a dystopia because of misaligned AI.
In the last few weeks, AI models have started to feel a lot more useful to me. They might finally be ready for prime time.
🔬 Academia
A recent paper looks at the correlations between different primary elections in Pennsylvania.
How to read this is that Democratic primary electorates are more tribal than Republican ones.
The decline in marriage isn’t really among college-educated professional woman, but among women with no college degree.
📰 Media Habits
The $25 million in political ads on X in 2024 leaned heavily Republican.