AI's political bias
A new milestone in AI agents, the GOP's downballot transformation, PA voter registration under Trump, legislators more endangered in primaries than generals, Trump's approval, favorite pro athletes
No. 346 | January 24th, 2025
š» Artificial Intelligence
David Rozado with the Manhattan Institute quantifies political bias in LLMs. Across models, the language used is left-leaning.
2025 will the year of AI agents, starting with OpenAIās Operator. I canāt wait to see where this goes.
š The GOP
I have a new piece in Commonplace arguing that itās time for downballot Republican campaigns to get busy working to maximize Trumpās coalition in off-year elections, because this will be the GOP coalition for a long time to come.
āFor the first time in modern history, Republicans won the lowest-income voters outright. That was a remarkable feat considering the images of the parties that hardened during the 20th century: Republicans for corporations and the rich, Democrats for the working class. Trump had, of course, decisively won the lowest-income white voters ever since his arrival on the scene. But in 2020 and 2024, the shift of nonwhite working-class voters his way made it so that this familiar historical alignment was now fully inverted. In terms of income and education, Kamala Harrisās 2024 coalition now resembled Bob Doleās 1996 coalition more than āthe rising American electorateā that delivered Barack Obama two decisive victories.ā
šŗš² 2024
In case you missed it, you can download our detailed breakdown of how the Trump and Republican coalitions in the Senate differed over the last two cycles.
Nick Field takes a look at how Pennsylvania voter registration has shifted right under Trump.
Districts are now so uncompetitive that more state legislators are losing re-election in primaries instead of general elections.
šļø Congress
House crossover seats have been in a state of decline this century, accelerating after 2010.
š Public Opinion
Echelon is out with its first poll of Trump 2.0. Donald Trump has a 51-43 job approval rating, with 52-42 approval of Trumpās Day 1 executive orders.
538 is also out with its own assessments of Trumpās initial executive actions.
The Upshot takes a look at how Americans view Joe Bidenās legacy.
A useful primer on how advocacy groups who conduct polls usually get the results they want.
However, in the IMEU poll, āEnding Israelās violence in Gazaā is much more loaded, intense language than the rest of the planks. Imagine youāre taking this poll with no idea what itās about- youāre essentially being asked to choose between pretty neutral statements like āhealthcareā, etc, and āending violenceā. Thatās a strong cue as to which is the ācorrectā answer! As much as we can try to argue that polls arenāt pop-quizzes, there are no correct answers, etc, the experience of taking a poll for a politically unaware respondent is extremely reminiscent of a pop quiz. The industry has a variety of terms for types of bias introduced by respondents who would love nothing more than to get through this poll and get back to their day, including things like selecting āyesā the whole way through, answering randomly, etc. The broad category of bias induced by doing just enough to get through the poll is called āsatisficingā, but this specific phenomenon might be better called ādemand effectsā.
š« Demographics
Pew Research takes a deep dive into some demographic facts about the Black population in America.
š° Media Habits
How Americans ā and young people especially ā are getting news on TikTok.
š Sports
No more than 5% of Americans agree on who their favorite athlete is. Thatās a big change from 1998, when Michael Jordan was the favorite of 1 in 5 Americans.
No one born after about 1990 can fully grasp how big of a deal Jordan was.