Democrats losing registered voters

The rise of Zoomer Republican men, ScamPACs exploit the elderly, against Against Polling, A rating for Echelon, Substack movers-and-shakers, inside the Mitchellmander, just call it "AI"

No. 372 | August 22nd, 2025

📰 Data Journalism

Democrats lost 2.1 million registered voters between 2020-2024.

And that’s partly because young men are registering as Republicans in unprecedented numbers.

🔵 The Democratic Coalition

Soon.

A deep dive on ActBlue data looks at how Scam PACs exploit elderly donors.

Eric Levitz with a blistering takedown of John Ganz’s piece, “Against Polling.”

“Thus, anyone who finds community and identity in progressive politics — a group that includes a large share of Democratic operatives, staffers, and commentators — is liable to err on the side of underestimating the political utility of moderation. Polling and election data are the only real checks on such a bias.”

🗣️ Public Opinion

Every time someone releases new pollster grades, Echelon Insights ranks near the top. This is VoteHub’s new scorecard.

Echelon had an average percent error of 1.96% and a 1.02 relative error in 2024. Pretty good!

With the release of the ANES, friend of the newsletter Farrah Bostic looks at rising institutional distrust over the last several decades.

And, speaking of long-running academic studies, the Cooperative Election Study's validated vote dataset is out for 2024.

🇺🇲 2026

Geoffrey Skelley is now at DecisionDeskHQ. In his first post, he looks at ways that both Democrats and Republicans are stronger than normal heading into the midterms.

And in other exciting Substack news, the Cook Political Report now has a free weekly newsletter on the platform.

🗺 Redistricting

RRH Elections has a look at the Mitchellmander in California. IYKYK.

Is Massachusetts a gerrymander? Not necessarily, say XXX and Nate Cohn in The Upshot. While it’s very possible to draw a Trump-leaning district, you’d have to do so deliberately to maximize minority party representation. Such a district only gets drawn in 3 of 5,000 randomized simulations optimizing for compactness and not breaking apart towns and counties.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

There’s now AI directly in Excel with the new =COPILOT() function.

AI tools speed coding but require human oversight for quality.

From OpenAI, there’s a meaningful difference in the popularity of the terms “AI” and “artificial intelligence.” People don’t like that it’s “artificial,” and they quibble with the idea that it’s “intelligence.”

🗽NYC Mayor

Yale Polling is out with a postmortem on what they got wrong in their poll of the New York City Mayoral primary.

👫 Demographics

Pew reports that the illegal immigrant population reached 14 Million in 2023, though there are now signs that it’s back on the decline with stepped-up deportations.