David Turnbull

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

Per polling out of Michigan State University, Trump voters in this cycle, at least in Michigan, are much more likely to say that the country is “changing too fast, undermining traditional values” than they were in 2016, when researchers first found a strong correlation between aversion to social change and a vote for Trump.

That dividing line is gro... See more

The Democratic coalition really is tetchy and hard to manage. I’ve watched a number of Arab-American writers who disapprove of Biden’s approach to Israel but agree that Trump’s would be worse spend the final month of the campaign driving up the salience of an issue that they know is bad for Harris and being relentlessly negative about her approach ... See more

As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

Political Scientists Reassure Americans That Stripping Minorities Of Citizenship Usually Where Descent Into Fascism Peters Out

We talk a lot about a crisis of public trust in America today. But when we do we’re usually talking about Red America or what we might call Disaffected America — people lack trust in the press, in elections, in scientific or expert authority and big institutions. But there’s this other crisis of trust in institutions and people, rapidly catching up... See more

Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department.

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means i... See more