“It’s not just _, it’s _”

AI seizes the House of Commons, 2024 by precinct, New York City polling experiments, views on crime and vaccines, a housing crisis, the rising populist right, quarterback ratings

Sep 19, 2025

No. 375 | September 19th, 2025

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

AI is being ruined because everyone uses it and that means everyone now recognizes AI writing. Have you recently come across the negative parallelism “It’s not just _____, it’s ______”? That was very likely written by AI.

You can tell everything you need to know about its impact on any field by the explosion in the frequency of terms used in everything from academic abstracts to speeches to national parliaments.

Recently, this phenomenon was documented in the British House of Commons.

Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat calls this out in a Commons speech:

Will AI become the bar that’s so popular that no one goes there anymore? Or will everyone just agree to stay in on the joke — not calling out someone else’s use of AI and if they don’t call out yours?

ChatGPT receives around eight times more monthly visits than its next closest competitor.

🇺🇲 2024

2000 me would have cried tears of joy if something like this existed: demographic-level 2024 results for every precinct in America. Congratulations to Zachary Donnini and the team at VoteHub for the release of this.

More ecological inference FTW: estimating pro-Trump swings among Hispanic subgroups. Dominican, and Ecuadorian, and Salvadoran Americans trended most toward Trump.

🗽NYC Mayor

Even if all other candidates were to drop out, Zohran Mamdani would lead Andrew Cuomo. And the polls themselves underestimated Mamdani in the primary, as he did manage to reshape and expand the electorate.

It’s rarely ever as simple as higher turnout being good for one candidate, and lower turnout for another. It matters who the electorate is expanded to include. So while low turnout in the primary was thought to be good for Cuomo, because the 2021 electorate favored him, an expanded electorate might help in the general because the definition of high-propensity voters has been expanded to include the new Mamdani 2025 primary voters. Nate Cohn runs the numbers:

Mr. Mamdani’s slight lead over Mr. Cuomo in a head-to-head matchup is among likely voters, but things would be different if everyone voted.
In fact, Mr. Cuomo, running as an independent, actually leads Mr. Mamdani among all registered voters, 46-45.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you probably know that Democrats have done better among the highly engaged voters who vote in low-turnout elections, but that’s not what Mr. Mamdani’s edge is about.
Mr. Mamdani, for instance, trails the hypothetical head-to-head matchup by six points among the survey respondents who voted in the 2022 midterm election. He trails by 10 points among those who voted in the 2021 primary. He does lead with the high-turnout 2024 general electorate, but only by one point — less than his four-point lead among likely voters in the poll. With this persistent disadvantage among those who have showed up in recent low-turnout elections, Mr. Mamdani would be expected to be at a relative disadvantage among likely voters in November.

Poll question wording shows the gap between the Mamdani policies people “support” and what they think the government “should” actually do.

As a general rule, merely asking about “support” in isolation, without acknowledging the opposing side, inflates the “support” number. That’s also true when tradeoffs to different policies are explicitly considered.

📊 Public Opinion

Partisanship rules everything around us, including perceptions of crime. The gap in partisan perceptions of crime is at an all-time high — along with pretty much every other thing having to do with partisan perceptions.