There is a midterm election coming up soon, as you have probably heard, and I am hoping that Democrats will do very well in it.

One reason for this is that due to the way our political system is constructed, the Democrats I have the biggest doubts about are definitely going to win no matter what. Melat Kiros and Darializa Avila Chevalier are coming to Congress even if Democrats underperform the current polling by 11 points or whatever. But there are a whole bunch of people who I really like — Josh Turek, Mary Peltola, Adam Hamilton, Bobby Pulido, Johnny Garcia, Jamie Ager, just to name a few — who will win their seats if and only if Democrats win by margins about as big as what Nate Silver is forecasting. Indeed, the slightly stupid way the House speaker election works means that if Democrats have a huge majority, then Hakeem Jeffries will be installed with no problem, but if it’s a very narrow majority, then the hard left can block him and hold the caucus hostage to their nutty ideas. If Democrats flip the Senate, then the big story will be the senators who flipped Senate seats — Turek, Peltola, Hamilton, Roy Cooper, Sherrod Brown, and James Talarico — but if they don’t, then it’s the Abdul El-Sayed Show.

But the other reason is that I really would like to see the spell of Trump mania come to an end. I don’t hold to Obama-in-2012 delusions that “the fever will break.” But there are just tons of conservative ideological causes and policy positions that keep getting dragged down by Trump’s bluster, corruption, and incompetence. Yet the leaders of those causes have spent the past few years taking the bet that working with Trump to try to consolidate authoritarian power is their best chance forward. I think a good midterm drubbing is the best opportunity to talk them out of that and into the idea that they should try to advance a 2028 candidate who’ll stand for right-of-center policy ideas but not stand for slavish devotion to personality cult politics and endless assaults on the rule of law.

Anyway, on to your questions.

Trisha Jha: Is the idea that prices communicate useful information and we mess with them at our peril the most hated insight of Econ 101?

This goes back to something I’ve noted before, which is that it would be useful in many cases to have a clearer index of exactly what the conventional wisdom is. My sense, personally, is that the fact that we mostly don’t see a lot of price control policies being implemented is evidence that the basic point about the value of prices is pretty well-understood.

My personal vote for a widely underrated Econ 101 insight is the explanation of why a certain class of policy ideas doesn’t scale up.

I write a Substack. If you created a cumbersome licensing system before other people were allowed to launch their own Substack, that would be narrowly good for me. Similarly, if it was illegal for Americans to read takes written by foreigners, that might also be good for me. Anything you can do with regulation, trade policy, immigration, or whatever else to block the supply of new takes helps the existing stock of takesmiths. This is pretty widely understood, and you see lots of examples of different groups of people clamoring for various sorts of protections and often getting them — or at least getting a serious hearing.

What Econ 101 tells you is that each of these moves imposes very small costs on a very large number of people, such that the aggregate costs exceed the benefits.

This means that while you can boost the fortunes of any given occupation by creating barriers to entry, doing so across a large fraction of occupations will end up making everyone worse off than if you hadn’t done it. You can help auto workers by imposing tariffs on foreign-made cars, but if you put tariffs on everything, then everyone is worse off. If you block new housing on Long Island, you can inflate home values and increase the wealth of incumbent homeowners, but if you block new housing in every desirable suburb of every city, the whole country will be much poorer on average.

What makes this insight powerful is that the people pushing for specific protections aren’t “wrong.”

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When you’ve finished reading today’s post, I hope you’ll check out the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, where Jerusalem and I explore Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” and what artificial intelligence could mean for everything from the future of work to the purpose of human life. Paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free and read the transcript and show notes here. If you’re a free subscriber, you can catch the episode on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Arguing about electoral politics is annoying at times, so I thought today it might be more fun to go back into “One Billion Americans” mode and uncork some policy takes about how I think everything ought to work.

Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that one way in which I’ve become more politics-brained over the years is in recognizing that at a certain level of detail, it doesn’t make sense to hold too strongly to your policy opinions.

I believe my April take that dogs aren’t people has largely stood the test of time. But in the course of expressing the view that dogs and humans are different in politically and morally relevant ways, I got a little cranky about dog parks. And I don’t think what I said about that in particular really holds up. I don’t own a dog, so I don’t care about dog parks, and if it were totally up to me, I probably wouldn’t build any. But I don’t play pickleball either and yet we have pickleball courts. It’s fine if I’m outnumbered and people want to build recreational facilities I don’t personally use. Tastes differ and that’s okay.

So, some of the ideas below are going to be — deliberately — a little vague because I think a certain amount of vagueness is appropriate. We have a pluralistic democratic society, and there’s never going to be one totally definitive way to do things.

Still, I think we can say a few things about the United States pretty clearly:

The U.S. is a rich country with relatively poor public-health outcomes given our prosperity. The material living standards of the poorest Americans are shockingly bad given the overall high living standards. Health care has a lot of problems, but trying to fix them requires that we pay attention to a lot of fussy technical details. Housing, on the other hand, presents a lot of problems that are quite straightforward and relatively simple. Our long-term budget problems, which everyone’s grown bored of hearing about over the years, are in fact not so “long-term” anymore and need to be dealt with. We need to make policy in the national interest, but that interest is best advanced through openness to the world and especially through collaboration with other open societies.

Now, on to the takes.

Helping those in need

While the U.S. is a lot richer on average than, say, Germany, it’s still the case that poor Americans are worse off by many measures.

The simplest fix is to give unconditional cash benefits to kids (in effect, to their parents). The most politically expedient way to do this is to make the program relatively cheap by having an income phaseout. But I think the best way to do it is not to characterize this as a targeted anti-poverty program but as a universal transfer from non-parents to parents, just like public schools.

This should probably feature a big one-off payment when a kid is born (a “baby bonus”), followed by generous monthly payments for the first year (“paid leave”), then somewhat less generous payments for the next few years (a “child care subsidy” or a “home care allowance,” depending on what you do), then further reduced payments when the kid reaches school age. Finally, it should phase down for older teenagers on the expectation that they can get part-time jobs (with some provision made for disability and other relevant considerations).

To do this at reasonable payment levels would be incredibly expensive, but I think it makes a lot more sense on the merits than the current smorgasbord of family policy ideas that Democrats are proposing. And it scales up or down smoothly — you could do it just for kids under three and still accomplish a lot and then work for expansion to older kids over time.

The other big thing in this bucket is medical care.

Medicare for All has become this endless factional discourse object that only serves to make people angry at each other, but there ought to be a system whereby everyone can get free or nearly free health care at government expense.

This should be financed with a value-added tax, which would be progressive relative to the existing structure of health insurance premiums but also relatively efficient. The idea is that consumption of “stuff that is not health care services” would pay to subsidize a free tier of health care services. How high should the VAT be? How generous should the free tier be? I don’t think these questions have definitive answers; experts and voters will argue and go back and forth. Since this is a wealthy country, we should expect that most people will supplement with out-of-pocket purchases or private supplemental insurance. And we should also acknowledge that health outcomes are only very partially about health care services. But there is some sense of “necessary and useful medical care” that everyone should be able to get and that is provided by the public, just like roads and parks.

A healthier country

A lot of what makes life in America tough for the poor compared with life in other developed countries is that Americans — and especially low-income Americans — are exposed to a lot of violence. Beyond the lives and money directly lost to murder, robbery, and reckless driving, a tremendous amount of time and resources is wasted on avoiding these problems. Big strides have been made against crime over the past 30 years, but it’s still the case that the most dangerous city in France has a lower murder rate than low-crime rural states like Montana or Nebraska.

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Last week in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait hailed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a pragmatic moderate in his approach to governance.

I’ve toyed with this theme and basically agree with Chait’s points. But for the sake of offering a different perspective, I don’t think Mamdani’s pragmatic and moderate approach to doing the job of mayor means he’s not really a leftist.

The clearest precedent I can think of for the way he’s governing is Bernie Sanders as mayor of Burlington. Sanders won narrowly in a three-way race, thanks in part to support from the police union, and by all accounts gained support during his time in office.

As mayor, Sanders did not do socialism in one small New England city. He did really normal good mayor stuff, like deliver cost-effective city services, keep the streets clean and safe, and promote economic development. Being somewhat familiar with Sanders’s record as mayor, I found what I’d heard about Sanders offering advice and mentorship to Mayor-elect Mamdani reassuring.

Notably, though, Bernie spending eight years as a pragmatic mayor of Burlington didn’t mean he stopped being a leftist. He ran for the House as a leftist, moved up to the Senate as a leftist, and is obviously an extremely eager left-wing factional politician.

The reason a hardcore leftist can spend eight years being a pragmatic mayor is that leftists care a lot about building political power. Once they’ve won a mayoral election as a leftist, the best way to build leftist political power is to do a good job as mayor. The alternative, on display in Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, is to flounder and discredit the left.

Governing like a pragmatic moderate for the sake of leftist power-building is different than actually being a pragmatic moderate. In a lot of ways, the former probably works better in municipal governance because it means left-wing members of the media will criticize the leftist cranks who protest you when they might side with protestors against a more moderate mayor.

Which is all just to say that in a lot of ways, I think the fact that the center-left finds itself surprisingly pleased with Mamdani shows that while the divide between moderates and progressives gets a lot of coverage, there’s an under-discussed divide between politicians who have (mostly executive) jobs featuring real accountability for outcomes and the bulk of backbench legislators, who are basically just posting.

As a professional poster myself, I know full well that factionalism between posters gets intense. Actual governing, though, tends to produce consensus instead.

The reverse-Mamdanis of the U.S. Congress

You can really see this in action with politicians who’ve moved from executive office to Congress.

I believe Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and John Hickenlooper, all former governors, think of themselves as pragmatic moderates. And if you look at their records as governors, they clearly were pragmatic moderates. They won what were, at the time, tough races in swing states.

And while they were, of course, more progressive than their Republican opponents, they did not take huge progressive policy swings. New Hampshire, notably, continued to be a state with no tax on earned income under the leadership of Hassan and Shaheen. Hickenlooper refused to take a position on a 2011 ballot initiative to raise income and sales taxes to increase school funding. He fought with teachers’ unions about pensions, and he declined to push for a law that would grant collective bargaining rights to Colorado state and local public employees.

And when they became senators, it’s not as if they became wild-eyed leftists.

But as legislators, they don’t tangle with any progressive interest groups. They all (at least officially) endorsed the more expansive multi-trillion version of Build Back Better that was cut down by Joe Manchin into the Inflation Reduction Act. As governors, none of them were proponents of dramatic expansions of the social safety net, but as senators, they were.

Or look at someone like Abigail Spanberger, who as a House member was known as a “moderate” in the sense that she sometimes fought with the Squad, but she wasn’t a thorn in the side of party leadership or someone who refused to endorse major interest-group priorities. But when she ran for governor, she said she wouldn’t repeal Virginia’s right-to-work status because she believed it was good for the business climate of the state. As governor, she’s been fighting with the legislature about a proposal to do public sector bargaining because she thinks the way it’s been drafted is going to be bad for local government finances.

The basic difference is that if you’re a governor or a mayor, you need to brag primarily about things that are happening in your state. Kathy Hochul and Maura Healey, neither of whom are particularly moderate as a question of factional identification, are both trying to get new natural-gas pipelines built because they are worried about state energy prices. If you’re a legislator, you can brag just about positions you’ve taken.

A Democratic House member can talk all they like about taxing the rich and being pro-labor. But a governor or a mayor needs to sit down and really think through whether the outcomes of a particular policy choice are actually going to be good for the state or city. And while of course people disagree to an extent about values on the basis of overall political ideology, in practice I think they don’t actually disagree all that much. Mamdani doesn’t want Wall Street firms to close their New York City offices and send those jobs to New Jersey or Texas. Everybody brags when crime goes down and not when it goes up.

Reasonable people can and do disagree to an extent about which policies will generate good outcomes. But I think the existence of these reverse-Mamdani figures underscores that disagreement about the facts isn’t actually the main difference.

The difference is that the natural state of the safe-seat Democratic Party legislator is to say “yes” to a lot of different interest-group asks without thinking too hard about them or whether they’re contradictory. You figure that someone else is going to pick and choose what actually happens and that your job is mostly just to be a people-pleaser and coalition-manager.

President Senator vs. the strong mayor

For an executive, pure people-pleasing doesn’t work nearly as well.

That’s why, unless they only care about Israel, there’s a lot for moderates to like about non-moderate Mamdani and a lot to dislike about self-identified moderate Joe Biden.

A friend who spent years working in the Senate joked to me that Biden conducted himself as President Senator, very much declining to set priorities and say, “We’re going to do this and not that.” Nobody finds it particularly remarkable that Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester are just baseline Democrats who sign on to all the normal bills and don’t think very clearly about tradeoffs. That’s just life as a safe-seat senator. But from a president, it was actually quite odd. His team was aware that affordability was a pressing crisis, but nobody on the team was empowered to make any pro-affordability decisions that would get them crosswise with labor unions or environmental groups. They could care about the economic impact of international oil sanctions because green groups didn’t lobby on that, but they didn’t apply the same logic to the Interior Department’s setting of drilling fees since that was something those groups did lobby on.

Mamdani is more left-wing than Biden. He’s also a much stronger leader.

The City Council tried to bully him into giving public-school paraprofessionals a bonus, and he wouldn’t do it. Mamdani also fought, successfully, to delay implementation of a state-mandated reduction in class sizes that he’d voted in favor of as a state legislator. He ran on making the bus free and then appeased more technical transit advocates by revising it to “fast and free.” But actually doing free buses would cost a ton of money and not be very beneficial, so now he’s just focused on speeding up the buses, which is a better idea because it doesn’t impair his ability to spend money on other things.

He hasn’t reinvented himself as an anti-spending libertarian. New York City is still a very high-tax, high-spend jurisdiction, and he’s working to make spending higher.

But he does face fiscal constraints, and he wants to focus on a specific goal — expanding child care offerings — so he’s trying to not get sucked into other commitments. Activists want him to pick a fight with the police commissioner because that would build their political power, but it builds his political power to have a good working relationship with the governor (who likes the police commissioner), and there’s no actual problem with the N.Y.P.D. status quo, so he’s not doing it.

The ideological content of Mamdani’s administration is genuinely not that different from Bill de Blasio, who was mayor quite recently. But de Blasio, despite a number of admirable qualities, was a pretty weak Biden-like figure who was seen as delivered into office by an interest-group coalition and who in return governed largely by parceling out doses of interest-group slop. The equivalent 2025 figure would have been Brad Lander.

Mamdani emerged somewhat independently of the interest-group ecosystem and has more leverage to stand outside the system and insist on his priorities rather than accept slop. This is not exactly moderation — it’s all in pursuit of the larger goal of democratic socialism — but it’s not not moderation.

Posting versus governing

For 2028, I really want moderate Democrats — by which I mean people who admire the Blue Dog Coalition and think that Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries are too left-wing — to let go of their terror of a leftist winning the primary.

A big part of this is just that, to a large extent, I really do think fear is the mind-killer. My ideal 2028 outcome is that someone runs a smart moderate campaign based on a smart moderate critique of the Democratic Party establishment and wins. That would be great and, in my opinion, better than nominating Ro Khanna or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But I don’t want to panic and bandwagon behind some tired establishment figure like Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris just to box out someone from the left. If someone from the left wins, they’ll just end up stuck dealing with the same problems of practical governance.

Because the fact is, moderates are right about what the practical problems of governance look like. If President Ocasio-Cortez is sitting in the Oval Office in 2029, she’s not going to want to burn a bunch of political capital on a totally undefined ICE abolition agenda. She’ll achieve whatever is easy to achieve through new leadership and new orders and move on to trying to get Congress to act on her top priorities. She’s also not going to overhaul the entire $5 trillion-a-year health-care system in one fell swoop any more than President Newsom would. But she’ll get something done on health care, and hopefully progressives will be happy with it because they’ll believe she tried in good faith, just like they believe in Mamdani even though he’s delivering only a fraction of what he promised.

A lot of what passes for factional disputes between the establishment and the left right now is really just left-wing backbenchers doing posts.

“We should abolish ICE” or “the government should give everyone free health care” aren’t really plans for governing. It’s just posting takes. If you don’t actually need to set priorities or deal with recalcitrant legislators or stay within a fixed budget, you can fire off whatever takes you want. And I’m not per se opposed to people posting takes. I’m a takesmith myself. But I have all kinds of takes, such as “We should do a revenue-neutral carbon tax with the price set at the globally optimal social cost of carbon and the revenue used to offset regressive payroll taxes.”

Well, so what? I do think that we should do that. If you ask me in a mailbag or during the Q&A session at the end of a panel, I will offer that take. If it comes up in a referendum, I will vote for it. I also think we should “abolish ICE” and have a consolidated federal police agency.

But these things are not going to happen. They’re just opinions. As an opinion columnist, I think it’s important that I try to have correct opinions, and I like other columnists to also have correct opinions. But I find the impulse to assess politicians as if they’re columnists to be a bit perverse.

Legislators, after all, can accept the responsibility to govern. I don’t really agree with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s takes qua takes, but he sat down and did the work of negotiating a really good bipartisan energy permitting bill.

The truth, though, is that members of Congress have the option of having successful careers as politicians basically just by posting and never buckling down to the work of writing bills, aligning stakeholders, and setting priorities. Executives also can duck the work of governance, but when they try — like Biden in the White House or Johnson in Chicago — they tend to fail in obvious ways. There’s a kind of objective incentive for a mayor or a governor or a president to try to be responsible, while many legislators can get away with just posting.

Still, even backbench legislators can attempt to seize the wheel and participate in the governance of the country if they want to. Sometimes when they do that, they cook up ideas that are dumb. But just as the responsibility that’s inherent in executive leadership tends to push people to exercise better judgment, the practical need to count votes and make deals tends to force legislators to think harder about what they’re actually saying. Otherwise, they’re basically just out here doing my job — a job that I think should be left to me.

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Every so often I mention that I agree with many of the founders and technical employees at the major artificial-intelligence companies that their work stands a non-trivial chance of killing everyone.

When I do, I’m typically asked why, then, most of my posts are about other stuff — things like the upcoming midterm elections or the permitting reform bill that’s hopefully going to pass during the lame-duck session of Congress.

My answer is that while I completely respect people who feel like making a wild career pivot, most of us are going to keep working in our same basic professions. And I think that the best way that I can contribute to the world is to continue doing my job — the noble work of the generalist politics columnist — as best as I can. That means clearly stating things that I believe to be true (such as that existential risk from A.I. is real) but mostly trying to deliver a varied mix of content that is accurate and interesting and informative and induces people to continue subscribing to and sharing my work.

Intellectual influence isn’t achieved by just stacking up more words on a subject.

To influence important debates, the newsletter has to be successful. So whatever my views about what is and isn’t important, I still have to factor in considerations about running a successful newsletter.

But beyond the question of influence, there’s just something a little bit odd about believing that something is objectively very important and inferring that you must therefore try to situate yourself at the center of it.

I think sometimes about my two grandfathers who were both involved in World War II, one fighting in the Mediterranean theater and the other administering the footwear rationing system. As it happens, these turn out to have been pretty peripheral fields of endeavor in the grand scheme of the war. It would be “better” from the standpoint of being at the center of the drama to have participated in the Normandy landing rather than the invasion of Sicily.

But everybody can’t be doing the thing that is most important. The United States Navy did, in fact, need different people all around the world doing different things, not just doing the one specific thing that was most likely to get written up in the history books.

Similarly, all those troops who landed in Normandy needed boots. A whole elaborate system of shoe rationing was in place to make sure that there was plenty of rubber and leather available for military use. It sounds pretty comical to be waging war on Hitler from an office where your job is to tell civilian women how many pairs of shoes they can buy — they are definitely not making movies about those guys — but if everyone refused to do the random jobs, things would have been much worse.

It is good and correct to want to have a positive impact on the world, but an impulse to be at the center of attention or try to get your name into the histories isn’t really the same thing.

Situational awareness

To people who work on A.I. safety and just earnestly want to see it written about more because they care about it, I want to call attention to something that happened recently.

OpenAI employees used their voice and their implicit power to get Greg Brockman to stop funding the Leading the Future super PAC, which was spending against politicians who favor A.I. safety legislation and (more to the point) paralyzing a lot of legislators into not wanting to touch the subject.

Since that happened, we’ve seen OpenAI’s policy guy, Chris Lehane, making remarks on safety legislation that are really helpful and constructive. So it seems that a debate that happened inside the company about OpenAI’s political engagement has been quite fruitful and unlocked some bigger possibilities. Garrison Lovely reported that my writing played a small but real role in these debates:

On September 14, one employee revived the thread with a quote from journalist Matt Yglesias to suggest the storm wasn’t abating: “Nobody working professionally in American politics believes” that OpenAI wasn’t supporting Leading the Future.

That wasn’t just a random comment of mine.

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President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order directing federal agencies to cut mortgage and homeownership costs and pay more attention to manufactured housing. The order c…

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As we get closer to Election Day, it feels a bit like entering the event horizon of a black hole, at least from an analytical point of view.

Back in June of 2025, I think I was able to offer important and useful observations about the upcoming midterms. My key theme was that given the intensification of Donald Trump’s assaults on the pillars of the American republic, a 2018-style rebuke in which he actually gained Senate seats would not be sufficient to give us even momentary relief from the crisis.

The stakes were elevated by the fact that while it’s easy to look at the 2026 Senate map and simply proclaim it unfavorable for Democrats, the 2028 and 2030 maps aren’t any better. Given the American political alignment that emerged in the 2016 / 2020 / 2024 cycles, there simply are no favorable maps — even Joe Biden’s very strong popular vote performance in 2020 only carried 25 states.

There is no way to rescue the country without Democrats becoming meaningfully competitive in multiple states that Trump won three times in a row.

I argued that summer that to achieve that, Democrats would need both to be smart about candidate recruitment (which they basically have) and to reposition the national party’s image (which they really haven’t). I did not specifically discuss the possibility that Trump would fall into the surprisingly common G.O.P. trap of initiating an economically destructive war in the Middle East, though I did tell everyone in November of 2024 that Trump’s team seemed like people who would start a war with Iran.

From the standpoint of today, though, all I can really do is look at the polls, and all anyone really wants to know is whether the polls are correct.

And I just don’t know.

What I do know is that they’re annoyingly close. Marist’s latest Texas poll has James Talarico up by two. If he instead loses by one, they’ll say that they were pretty close. But if the current narrow Democratic leads in Texas and Alaska and Iowa and Kansas and Maine and Michigan all turn into narrow Republican wins, that’s a wildly different outcome for the country.

So which will happen? I don’t know. Do prediction markets give us strong evidence independent of the polling? Not really — the markets just tell us that assuming the polls are approximately right works pretty well on average. There’s just no further insight to be gleaned about the thing everyone wants to know.

What I do know, though, is that like many of you during these final weeks, Slow Boring HQ is being inundated with last-minute requests for money, including this rather absurd request from Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey:

There’s a broad spectrum of sketchy fundraising behavior, from outright scams to bad ideas, and I think this is something that Democrats should think hard about, structurally, over the next several cycles.

While the strong alignment of America’s billionaire donors behind the MAGA movement is a potentially enormous problem for Democrats, the saving grace is that Democrats do a lot better in small-dollar fundraising and, for various legal reasons, a contribution of $5 to Josh Turek accomplishes more than the $5 Elon Musk spends on behalf of Ashley Hinson. But to maintain this advantage, Democrats need to avoid exploiting or misleading their own small donors. People who make these kinds of contributions are not getting kickbacks via government contracts and need confidence that fundraising appeals are being made in good faith.

Do not give $5 to Maura Healey

I want to say first that I really like Governor Healey. Kate and I both went to college in Massachusetts and have affection for the state. I met Healey once and found her smart and charming and funny, and I think it’s too bad that she’s never “in the conversation” as an example of an interesting Democrat. She’s also quietly doing abundance (or at least as close as one can in New England), not just on housing but on natural gas, and she’s talking sense on rent control.

I’m a fan. I’m a booster. If she were actually facing a meaningful electoral challenge, I’d be all-in on helping her win.

But guys. MAGA Mike Minogue is not going to become governor of Massachusetts. If you’re doing small-dollar online donations, this is not the race you should be worrying about.

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Again, I like Maura Healey. I’m not here to hate. But she is someone who should be supported by good old-fashioned transactional donors. Are you a Massachusetts labor union? Be a good soldier and chip in. Do you work in government affairs for a company that has business interests in Massachusetts? Could be smart to make a donation. You’re an actual friend or acquaintance of the governor or a senior member of her team? Sure.

But there are tons of people in the United States who are — rightly — acutely frightened about the state of our country. Recall that in the winter of 2020-21, Donald Trump made a somewhat half-assed but fundamentally genuine effort to overturn the results of a legitimate presidential election. People committed crimes in pursuit of this cause! Trump is utterly unapologetic about the attempted putsch, pardoned the criminals who tried to carry it out, and has self-consciously staffed his second administration with people he believes are more personally loyal to him.

Democratic Party senators routinely embarrass appointees to executive and judicial branch jobs by asking them who won the 2020 election, and the appointees always dissemble about it. Trump has been doing political purges of the military officer corps and overtly abusing the prosecutorial functions of the federal government. And a large fraction of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in corporate America have chosen to bandwagon behind him.

The good news is that the public seems sick of Trump. The bad news is that the sickness really does seem to be largely contingent on things like gasoline and diesel prices, not revulsion at Trump’s hostility to democracy and the rule of law. Those of us who are revulsed by this incredibly alarming situation need to be smart with our resources, not throwing them at dumb stuff like defeating MAGA Mike in Massachusetts.

Waste, wishful thinking, scams and cons

Obviously I think this is the optimal list of people to give money to. But there’s a broad “reasonable people can disagree” range here. I want to see more candidates like Josh Turek in the future rather than more candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, so Turek is on my list and El-Sayed is not. If you have the reverse preference about future candidates, it would make sense to reverse those choices. If you’re indifferent, then both races are important and both could use money.

I’m also recommending campaigns that I think are underfunded at the margin. James Talarico is a monster fundraiser, so I didn’t put him on my list, but it’s not like giving him money is a mistake — I just feel confident that lots of other people are doing it.

Outside of the core battleground races, a lot of people have been urging some fairly undisciplined behavior.

I have no problem with Scott Colom, who’s running for Senate in Mississippi. But the idea that additional fundraising is going to help Democrats flip this Senate seat doesn’t seem remotely credible to me — this experiment was tried with Jaime Harrison in South Carolina and Amy McGrath in Kentucky in 2020. I’ve had to not recommend gubernatorial candidates I like, including Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in Alaska and Aaron Ford in Nevada, just because I don’t think the races have large strategic implications for people who don’t live in those states. But that’s a judgment call. If you have some connection to those states or candidates or think there’s some angle I’m missing about the larger significance of the races, then fair enough.

The gubernatorial races in Texas and Florida, by contrast, have big strategic implications in terms of redistricting and just the large size of the states, but putting money into them seems like wishful thinking to me. Still, while I don’t think any of these races are a particularly good use of money, these are things people of good faith can disagree about.

A lot of this is just misdirected enthusiasm. But there’s also the reality that people make money off of political campaigns. There are vendors and consultants who have contracts with David Jolly or Gina Hinojosa, and they benefit specifically from donations to those candidates rather than other candidates, even if other candidates would be a better use of your money. And most people — even highly trained professional political pundits like me — don’t have visibility into the web of financial relationships connecting different people and institutions.

And that’s to say nothing of outright scams, like PACs that say they’re supporting candidates but mostly just fund themselves. Take a look at Politico’s description of End Citizens United:

The group has continued to promise in fundraising appeals aimed at small-dollar donors that their money will go toward boosting Democratic candidates and fighting to overturn the Citizens United decision. But its primary PAC spent four times as much on operating expenses as it did on donations to candidates and independent expenditures during the 2024 cycle, according to a Politico analysis of data from the F.E.C. As of the end of March, it has spent more on fundraising costs than at this point in any previous cycle.

I think Adam Bonica’s pieces about “spam PACs” paint with way too broad a brush in collapsing the distinction between actual scams and just the basic architecture of online fundraising. But beyond the fact that some of these PACs are genuine scams, the broader point I would make is that I can’t think of any good reason why it would be better for a small-dollar online donor to funnel their political giving through a PAC.

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It’s not that all PACs are scams, but if you want to raise small-dollar donations for a finite universe of candidates, you just don’t need a PAC to do that. The Slow Boring slate (which I really do recommend you give to — yes, late money is still helpful!) is just a page with donation buttons for the candidates. All the money goes to the candidates we’re supporting; there’s no legal or financial entity between you and the candidates. There are plenty of valid reasons that people launch and give money to PACs, but these reasons involve large donors and lobbying machinations.

If you have modest sums of money to give and just want to help good candidates win, then give directly to those candidates.

I don’t know exactly what the party can do to crack down on bad PACs or fundraising solicitations from candidates like Healey who are way outside the “reasonable people can disagree” standard for optimal donations. But they’d better start thinking harder about it. Keeping the small-donor engine running is vital to keeping Democrats in the game electorally, and that means giving donors some assurances that their money is being well spent.

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This is the first election cycle during which I’ve been on X, and I’ve never been more tapped into polls. In past years, I knew generally who was polling well and who was tanking. This midterm cycle, though, I don’t believe that I…

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For anyone interested in both a career in journalism and the kinds of issues we cover at Slow Boring, our friends at The Argument are hiring for their next cohort of fellows — early-career writers looking to focus on abundance and economic policy; gender, families, and culture; technology and society; and/or polling and political analysis. Applications are rolling and interviews have already begun, so if you or someone you know is interested, read the full job description here and email jobs@theargumentmag.com to apply.

There’s a lot of Barack Obama talk in this week’s Mailbag, which reminded me of something that I think tends to get forgotten in assessments of Trump-era politics: It was Mitt Romney, not Donald Trump, who made a hard break with the Bush-McCain interest in some form of “comprehensive immigration reform” with a path to citizenship for the majority of long-resident undocumented immigrants. It’s true that Trump in his 2016 campaign amped up the rhetoric somewhat from where Romney was, but the actual policy gap between Trump and Romney on immigration was modest compared with the very large gaps between Romney and McCain on immigration or between Romney and Trump on Social Security or Medicare or marriage equality.

I bring this up because I think in a lot of ways the core difference between the Slow Boring worldview and the conventional wisdom among Democrats is that most Democrats see Trump’s success as a counterexample to the idea that moderation has political benefits while I see Trump as an illustration of the principle. He is dragged down by a lot of personal misconduct but boosted by having moved to the center to neutralize Obama’s best attacks on Romney. His immigration politics is way to the right of where Bush and McCain were but only modestly to the right of where Romney was.

Conversely, a lot of Republicans are convinced that Trump won where Romney lost because Trump is a scumbag and Romney was an honorable and decent man. This serves to rationalize all kinds of scumbag behavior when the simple truth is that Romney — or some other honorable and decent person — could easily have won if he had Trump’s views on Social Security and Medicare.

Greg M: Given that the least hospitable place on earth is 1000x more hospitable, manageable, more easily constructed, resourced, and populated than literally anywhere else NOT on earth, why the obsession with colonizing the moon or another planet?

Who is this question directed toward? I’m not moving to the moon, I’m with you.

I mentioned this in a totally different context in last week’s Mailbag, but I think your question is a great example of a topic where what I really want is a clearer index of what the conventional wisdom is. Are there a lot of people obsessed with colonizing other planets? Obviously Elon Musk specifically is very interested in this, but my sense is that he’s pretty idiosyncratic in this regard, just as you don’t see a lot of people who combine hard-right politics with enthusiasm for solar energy. But I might be wrong and tons of people are obsessed with colonizing Mars when they should really be thinking about why nobody wants to live in northern Canada instead.

Romulus Augustus: Could you suss out a bit on how Obama post 2014 election disappointed you? I feel the same way because I think he veered into a “proto Woke” policies on the sort of Kendist view that any disparity in school discipline was evidence of racism and his unliberal view on due process for young men accused of sexual assault on college campuses. I would also suggest he gave too much credence to the BLM narrative about the police at times during these years.

Are there other issues you had a problem with during those years and how do you rate him overall?

I might quibble on the margin, but I think the way the Obama administration handled B.L.M. was basically fine. Where I criticize late-Obamaism is on three fronts — all of which ended up making it a lot harder for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016.

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New episodes post every Thursday.

In an upcoming episode, Matt and Jerusalem will discuss Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition.” If you have thoughts or questions about the book yo…

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After you’ve read today’s post, I hope you’ll check out the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, where Jerusalem and I dig into the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), a bill that promises to make it easier to build energy infrastructure in America. Paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free and read the transcript and show notes here. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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The civil rights movement was the defining moral drama of 20th-century American domestic politics.

Its highest-profile leader has a monument on the National Mall and is one of the few individuals for whom a federal holiday is named. It was also a distinctively progressive moral drama. Contemporary American conservatives, of course, are not advocating for restoring Jim Crow. But it’s also true that the conservative movement as we understand it is downstream of an intellectual project explicitly dedicated to building an alliance between Northern pro-business interests and Southern segregationists.

So American progressives are both very proud of the civil rights movement and also very interested in it, for understandable and laudable reasons.

By the same token, it’s not surprising that arguments between moderates and progressives often conclude with the progressives busting out analogies to the civil rights movement as a kind of trump card. I taped an episode of the “Mehdi Unfiltered” podcast recently (it should be out soon), and Mehdi Hasan is a shrewd debater, so that’s of course where he goes in the end. Because if you admit that your so-called pragmatic approach to politics is in tension with the lessons of the civil rights era, you lose the argument.

I believe, though, that it’s sort of the opposite: The civil rights movement is the exception that proves the rule.

It stands out for being extraordinary rather than typical of political controversies.

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Progressives are often pattern-matching on the civil rights movement in a way that doesn’t make sense. For example, American politics in 2026 is very different from American politics in 1956. The specific dynamics of most public-policy issues are very different from the dynamics of civil rights. And the claim that the specific topic you’re working on has the same moral weight as civil rights is a bit dubious and, at a minimum, invites a debate with all the people working on different topics that they also believe are the modern-day civil rights movement.

I’m very interested in YIMBYism, housing policy, and land-use reform. These topics seem really important to me — and I think they’re more important than most people realize. But I don’t think it would make sense for YIMBYs to emulate civil rights tactics. Both because the moral stakes are not the same, but also because the entire situation is completely different. And the same is true for basically any cause today.

Midcentury politics hit different

The clearest difference between the civil rights era and today is the background structure of the American political system.

The 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s featured famously low levels of ideological polarization between the American political parties.

The classic illustration of this comes from the DW-NOMINATE spatial representations of congressional votes. You can see below how this model characterizes the 83rd House of Representatives, which was elected in 1952. Clustered up at the top are a bunch of Southern Democrats who represent maximum Jim Crow. But then you see that among the Southern Democrats, some of them are more conservative than many Republicans on basic economic issues. Others, though, are to the left of all the Republicans on economics while still being very racist. The Republicans themselves have a wide range of views on the civil rights dimension even though none of them are up at the tippy top.

Modern Congress isn’t like this at all to the point where it’s hardly worth bothering with a visual representation. The vast majority of members vote with party leadership almost all the time. Even among the handful of moderates on Capitol Hill, there’s no topic I can think of where Jared Golden or Henry Cuellar is actually to the right of anyone in the Republican Party.

Today we just take for granted that the most moderate conceivable Republican is someone like Susan Collins who sometimes breaks with the G.O.P. — usually when her vote isn’t decisive — while still being more conservative than every Democrat. But that 83rd House featured Republican Jacob Javits of New York, who, though he was arguably slightly conservative by the standards of New York State, was nonetheless more liberal than lots of Democrats from more conservative states.

This lack of polarization was a big deal for the civil rights movement in part because the non-polarization was specifically downstream of Jim Crow.

But note (per the Javits example) that depolarized midcentury politics wasn’t just a question of Southern segregationists. It was also a different conceptualization of how political parties should work. Midcentury parties were essentially state-first organizations where the primary mission was to win power locally. The state parties then confederated up to a national organization. Today, it’s inverted and state parties are more like local branches of a national operation.

Everyone pretty much understands that if the United States had totally different formal political institutions, you’d employ different tactics to effect political change. If we had proportional representation, these endless debates about ideological positioning’s influence on candidate electability would all go away and we would have a different series of debates about bargaining posture in post-election coalition talks. If the Senate didn’t exist, the quirky independent streak in the Alaska electorate would be unimportant since so few people live up there.

The shift from federated, state-centric parties with ideological overlap to nationalized, fully sorted parties isn’t something that happened with a formal constitutional reform. But it’s a huge change in how American institutions function, and it means that tactics that made sense in 1954 don’t typically make sense in 2026.

Democracy (or its absence) is a big deal

Speaking of institutional changes, a central aspect of the civil rights movement is that Southern African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote.

One of the movement’s main goals was to pass a Voting Rights Act, and there was grassroots activism around voter registration as well. These things, of course, interacted with each other. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters and got murdered for their trouble. The murders brought a lot of national attention to Mississippi, to the indifference of Mississippi public officials to murders that occurred on their watch, and ultimately to the fact that local law-enforcement officials were directly involved in the murders.

This was a genuine outrage that helped rouse elite consensus that something had to be done and impart momentum to voting rights legislation.

But the voting rights issue wasn’t just a target of legislative change; it was also a structural reality shaping everything that happened. You couldn’t really make incremental progress against segregation in Alabama by appealing to the median voter, because the whole electorate was wildly unrepresentative.

A lot of people miss that when Martin Luther King Jr. complains about white moderates in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” he’s responding specifically to a letter from white clergymen in Alabama.

Part of his point here is that the white moderates’ demand for incremental change is meaningless because no change is happening at all, because in the structure of Jim Crow Alabama, these white moderates were the extreme left of the electorate. They could represent themselves as favoring incremental change, but they were not in a position to deliver any change at all. The only way to get change was to get Northern white opinion invested in the struggle and overrule the local political system.

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Obviously if it had been possible to cut deals in the Alabama state legislature with moderate whites to enact incremental changes to segregation, King wouldn’t have pronounced himself satisfied with half a loaf of equality, but I think civil rights leaders would in fact have tried to get what they could cut.

Indeed, in Congress there was a Civil Rights Act of 1957 and a Civil Rights Act of 1960 before the big Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. Fair housing didn’t come in until the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It’s just the case that the normal way legislative change happens is through a frustrating and somewhat annoying process of bargaining with stakeholders. But in the Jim Crow South it was genuinely impossible to pursue normal politics, so you needed a set of tactics and strategies that were designed to cope with an unusual situation.

Salience on your side

It’s also notable that while there was obviously plenty of racism among the Northern white population, Northern public opinion was genuinely not in favor of Jim Crow. I certainly don’t want to minimize the problems — there was discrimination, there was bigotry, there was de facto exclusion.

But Northern African Americans could vote.

Edward Johnson was elected to the New York State Assembly from Harlem in 1917. The Black community of Chicago was especially politically influential and sent Oscar Stanton De Priest to Congress in the 1928 election. You didn’t have separate bathrooms and water fountains. Railroad companies would segregate and desegregate their passengers as trains passed through border towns:

In Southern train depots, African American passengers waited in Black-only waiting rooms — crowded, unsanitary and poorly lit. They boarded segregated Jim Crow railroad cars with cramped seating, no luggage racks, insufficient heating and poor sanitation. Blacks were required to take their meals after the white passengers were finished or, in many cases, were simply denied access to the dining car. Upon crossing into the North, African Americans were able to move to integrated cars with greatly improved facilities. On the return trip, passing through Southern cities like Cairo, Ill., Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C., train conductors would force Black passengers back into Jim Crow cars.

The rules were different in the North because Northern white people had different opinions about how things ought to work. Northern white people also mostly wanted the government to do things to help them rather than spend time and energy on fighting with Southern governments about the living conditions of African Americans. That’s part of why polling always showed annoyance with civil-rights-protest tactics and (later, when more stuff happened) misgivings about the pace of federal action.

But when push came to shove, if you forced white Northerners to offer their view, most of them thought Jim Crow was bad, which is why they didn’t adopt Jim Crow laws in their states.

As a result, a lot of civil rights work was dedicated to raising the profile of the issue, not because raising the profile of your cause is always a winning strategy but because it was a winning strategy for this particular movement in this particular situation. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t particularly welcome having a school integration controversy in Little Rock dumped on his lap, but forced to address it, he sent in the troops. The movement was radical in a sense — it asked for big federal-policy changes and used edgy tactics outside the normal legal and legislative process — but it was also fighting against a system that most people believed all along was unjust.

The slow boring of hard boards

Taking the dynamics of midcentury civil rights politics seriously really just overwhelmingly generates the conclusion that the leaders and activists involved are heroes who deserve our admiration but whose specific tactics almost certainly shouldn’t be copied.

The polarization and sorting of contemporary political parties makes for a totally different situation. It’s always worth considering the possibility of taking a calculated political risk for the sake of advancing a policy goal. But under conditions of contemporary partisanship, a risk you take to expand access to health care is a drag on efforts to secure abortion rights or address climate change or help the poor. A risk taken for the sake of climate is a drag on health care.

These are all important issues and I can name a bunch of others — immigration, the assault on USAID, America’s relationship with allies like Canada — that are also important. When people pound the table and demand bolder, more fearless action on whatever we’re talking about at the moment, they are in effect calling for sacrifice on every other issue. But that’s rarely what they subjectively mean and almost never what they actually say, because almost nobody is so egomaniacal as to really believe their specific issue is such a transcendent moral crusade that it warrants dismissing all others.

What props the whole thing up is the assumption that tradeoffs don’t exist.

That assumption is wrong, but it’s also not at all in line with the civil rights analogy. The civil rights argument is that it was a transcendent moral cause where not only was Jim Crow policy wrong, but the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South violated the basic concept of democracy and warranted extraordinary political tactics.

And the idea that the way to make progress was to stage dramatic confrontations — the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Edmund Pettus Bridge — was an analysis of a particular situation. Movement leaders had specific reasons to believe that Northern white voters’ first choice was for the government to ignore civil rights and focus on their problems but that their second choice was to overturn Jim Crow, a system that they genuinely did not support.

And they didn’t use this tactic all the time. There was a lot of successful low-key civil rights litigation in the 1940s that attacked edge cases of segregation and ultimately laid the groundwork for the Brown v. Board of Education case. Laws banning interracial marriage were considered politically risky to elevate and weren’t the focus of the big marches. The tactic of staging nonviolent but highly confrontational protests worked well, but it worked well for specific purposes. It was also undertaken in an extremely disciplined way, and when discipline broke down in the late 1960s and there was rioting, backlash was pretty severe.

The point of all this is that, yes, my general take on how politics should be pursued — cautiously, with a lot of attention paid to downside political risk, with a preference for non-polarized low-profile bipartisan bills whenever possible, and with overt messaging that is narrowly focused on small changes — is wildly at odds with the way the great progressive triumph of civil rights was achieved.

But that’s because the civil rights situation was really extraordinary. It’s sort of fun to imagine one’s own advocacy as the equivalent to this great moral drama. But most issues are not like that, and indifference to the partisan electoral implications of political interventions is not an attitude that makes sense in a very different party system.

Beyond that, we’re just not talking about a good and evil showdown where a huge share of the population has been disenfranchised. None of the main progressive causes of today — and none of the wonkier abundance causes either — are beyond the normal to-and-fro of political bargaining and piecemeal persuasion. Even the civil rights movement itself only sometimes operated in the register of its most famous moments, and the vast majority of politics is much more boring normal politics.

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Less than two weeks out from Election Day, Democrats nationwide are in a good, not great, position. Polling and vibes are in the party’s favor — they’ve bee…

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Let me tell you a little about my weekend.

For various reasons, we didn’t have our normal editorial meeting at work last week, so I spent a fair amount of time on Saturday logged on to X, scrolling around seeking inspiration for stories. Dominating my feed were images of the riots in France and, even more so, annoying takes on the riots in France.

I wasn’t even so much seeing people tweeting dumb takes about the riots as seeing sensible people executing good dunks on dumb takes about the riots. But I still had to see both the underlying dumb takes and also the under-underlying riot images. There was also plenty of discourse (some of which I ended up contributing to) in the broad space of “people who agree that Abdul El-Sayed winning is preferable to Mike Rogers winning but are fighting about El-Sayed.”

The France stuff I kind of find entrancing in a doomscrolling kind of way, but El-Sayed discourse is real catnip for me in terms of getting into it with other people. In both cases, though, X engineers are evidently pretty smart and good at their jobs and were successfully executing on their mission of keeping me engaged.

Did it make me feel happy and satisfied with my life? No. Did it help me execute on my actual goal in logging on to X? Also no. But it’s not their job to make my life better. Their job is to keep me scrolling — and mission accomplished.

It’s good to do things

Some other things that happened over the weekend:

I met up with two friends to see the new “Street Fighter” movie. It was incredibly dumb, but I have to admit that it contained individual scenes — from video game nostalgia to hearing White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” for the first time in years — that brought my lizard brain joy.

It was also good to see my friends, albeit briefly. I like those guys! Later I drove to a middle-school debate tournament where I was supposed to pick up my kid and one of his friends. It turned out that it was running late, so I went in to sit with my son and watch the handing out of awards. In the auditorium, I ran into a writer whose book I like but who I’d only met once before, and we chatted briefly. She introduced me to another dad who I’ve seen around the neighborhood but never met. I said “hi” to some kids who I know slightly, and one of them said something funny. Then I drove up to my kid’s friend’s house to drop him off while he and my son bickered in the back seat like an old married couple. Driving back to our house, my son and I listened to Stan Van Gundy on “The Zach Lowe Show,” and they were saying Boston is going to be good this year, so my son and I talked about how The Ringer spent the whole summer melting down about the Jaylen Brown trade but is now coming around to our view that the Celtics are in good shape for next season and the trade set them up with better flexibility for the future.

Soon after we got home, two adult friends of ours stopped by. They had plans, but one of them has two kids, and we’d agreed with them that the kids could hang out at our house while the adults went out. Our friends’ adult plans turned out to be a bust, so they came home early. All of us adults wound up hanging out while two of the kids played Minecraft and the third read a book. Eventually everyone went home, probably slightly late relative to everyone’s statutory bedtimes. But a good time was had by all.

What really struck me about all of this was that none of it was particularly perfect, or even planned.

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