#Benefits of Polls on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Section 16: How to Use Polls in Substack Newsletters

Summary of my Udemy Course “From Zero to Substack Hero.” Image source from the video location Purpose of this Series for New Readers If you are following this series, you can skip this intro and start from the next section. I have to introduce it to new readers as otherwise it will not make sense to them. This is a new series upon request from my readers. I recently developed a course titled…

[beardedmrbean]

As the 2024 presidential race enters its final stretch, former President Donald Trump appears to be gaining traction with at least some undecided voters. Two of those explained their reasoning on the latest episode of the Morning Meeting podcast.

Co-hosted by veteran political journalist Mark Halperin, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and political commentator Dan Turrentine, Monday's YouTube show explored why some voters who remain on the fence are now leaning toward Trump over Kamala Harris. Many of these voters cite concerns over economic instability and national security as key factors in their decision.

"Some of those undecided voters... have started to move toward Trump a little. That's why the number of undecideds is beginning to shrink," said Halperin, referencing recent poll numbers showing an improvement for Trump and explaining the shift among undecided voters.

The podcast featured insights from real voters, including Steve, a man from New Jersey, and Terry, a woman from Connecticut, with both finding themselves leaning back toward the former president as Election Day approaches. While neither expressed full support for Trump, they said they saw him as a more reliable option in uncertain times.

Steve, who voted for Trump in 2016 but did not support him in 2020, explained that his shift is driven by concerns over immigration and national security.

"It's a tough decision, but I'm leaning toward Trump," Steve said during the discussion. Although he still harbors reservations about Trump's behavior, Steve emphasized that issues like border security now take priority in his decision-making process.

Spicer, who served as Trump's first press secretary, emphasized the importance of personal persuasion in swaying undecided voters, downplaying the influence of high-profile celebrity endorsements that Harris has received over the past two months.

"The most impactful endorsement you can get is when a neighbor, a friend, a family member, or a coworker asks you to vote for someone," Spicer said.

Terry, another undecided voter from Connecticut, voiced dissatisfaction with the economy under the Biden administration. After casting a protest vote for Biden in 2020, she now feels "immediate remorse" for that decision. Her concerns focus on the financial struggles of lower-income Americans, particularly those who don't benefit from rising stock markets or retirement portfolios.

"Half of America—75 million people—do not have access to a 401(k) or a stock portfolio. We've got to help this segment... If we don't help the people without access to wealth, we're in trouble," she said.

The hosts also questioned Kamala Harris' campaign strategy as early voting continues. Halperin asked why Harris isn't doing more to engage voters in battleground states. "Why isn't she working harder? If you assume she's behind, why isn't she in three battleground states a day?" he wondered, suggesting that Harris' relatively limited schedule could be contributing to her struggles with undecided voters.

Dan Turrentine suggested that Harris' approach has been overly defensive, which may be hindering her momentum with key voter groups. "After the convention and the debate, she shifted into a defensive posture. She's been trying not to make mistakes and saying very little," the analyst said.

He also noted that Harris has focused on appealing to "soft" Republicans and specific voting blocs like Black men, rather than aggressively courting undecided voters regardless of their party affiliation or demographic.

Trump has seen encouraging signs over the last week following strong showings in several major national polls. Nate Silver, the polling guru who is closely modeling the race on his Substack, noted that, with 21 days remaining, the former president has reason to feel more optimistic about the race.

Silver's analysis indicated that Trump is gaining slight ground against Harris. His Silver Bulletin presidential model, which tracks polling data and electoral trends, showed a 0.3 percentage point shift in Trump's favor over the past week, signaling a more competitive race as the campaigns head into the final stretch.

The updated forecast reflects small but significant gains for Trump in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—states pivotal to both Trump's 2016 victory and his 2020 defeat. Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are barnstorming those states this week, with multiple stops scheduled in all three over the coming days.

[mariacallous]

NYT On Politics: Confessions of a liberal heretic

‘An embarrassment of political riches’

A funny thing happened on the way to the emerging Democratic majority. Twenty years on, the co-authors of a hugely influential work on the subject acknowledge that their party took a detour.

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis published a book that struck a chord among liberals despondent over the success of George W. Bush, a president who was then so popular that he gained seats in that year’s midterm election.

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” took note of the demographic change pulsing through the country, and boldly predicted that the Democratic Party was poised to dominate American politics for the foreseeable future.

“Over the next decade, this bloc of voters is expected to continue to increase and, extrapolating from recent trends, could make up nearly a quarter of the electorate,” Teixeira and Judis wrote. “If these voters remain solidly Democratic, they will constitute a formidable advantage for any Democratic candidate. Democrats could suffer from an embarrassment of political riches.”

Six years later, the American public elected Barack Obama, an African American president whose rainbow coalition seemed to vindicate the thesis. A Time magazine cover from May 2009 pictured an elephant below the headline “Endangered Species,” capturing the feeling that Republicans’ demographic reckoning had finally arrived.

But it unraveled quickly with the election of Donald Trump, who not only discovered pockets of white working-class voters that few knew existed, but also appealed to more voters of color than anyone had expected.

Now, as President Biden sinks in the polls, Teixeira finds himself fighting against what he says is a caricature of his famous book. His Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, delivers “no-holds-barred, reality-based analysis,” unafraid to take on what he calls a “race-essentialist” dogma that is dominating the Democratic Party.

Teixeira is unsparing about the party strategists who he believes are leading Democrats astray — and unapologetic about offending many on his own side. His newsletter has become a kind of samizdat for like-minded liberals who aren’t as willing to speak their minds.

“There are some people who think I’ve completely lost it,” he told us in a wide-ranging interview about his book, his party and lessons not yet learned. “But I feel like we’re making some progress.”

The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity:

There’s lots of nuance that gets lost in translation, but the narrative that a lot of people took from your book was that the Democratic Party would benefit from the inevitable growth of people of color, young people, this new cadre of voters who at the time seemed ready to join the party and put the Republican Party in the rearview mirror. And the narrative has been complicated since then, hasn’t it?

Well, it was even complicated back then. You fairly summarized what is a bowdlerized version of what we said. That was only part of what we were saying. Demographic change was inevitably shifting the political terrain. It did not make it inevitable that Democrats would benefit.

And even on this raw demographic basis, it’s not crazy that there’s a natural popular-vote Democratic majority in the country. However, that does not translate into political power. We very specifically said — and this is widely ignored — that for this majority to attain and exercise political power, you have to retain a significant fraction of the white working class. The country was changing, but it wasn’t changing that fast.

The second thing we didn’t anticipate was the eventual effect of professional-class hegemony in the Democratic Party — that it would tilt the Democrats so far to the left on sociocultural issues that it would actually make the Democratic Party significantly unattractive to working-class voters.

It’s a huge liability for the Democrats, because the people who staff the party, the people who staff the think tanks, the advocacy groups, the foundations, the staffers, they’re all singing from the same hymnal to some extent. They live in this liberal cultural bubble, particularly the younger members.

Can you give an example of that?

Sure. Go back to the 2020 Democratic primaries. It was remarkable the extent to which things that were alienating to the average voter, particularly your average working-class voter, were gaily promulgated, with no apparent second thoughts about how it might appear to people outside the bubble. Things like open borders; basically, let’s decriminalize the border. Anybody who knows anything about immigration and public opinion in the United States realizes that will not play well.

Arguably, Democrats would have been better off from the beginning saying, “Yeah, we believe in being humane to immigrants. We also believe in border security, and we’re going to enforce it.” You know, take a page out of the old Obama playbook. Obama got a lot of stuff right on some of these issues, which the party is now insisting on forgetting.

You had a lot of stuff about mass incarceration, but almost nothing about crime. Democrats now fit this profile of being relatively soft on crime, more interested in not putting people in jail than in putting them in jail when it’s appropriate. That’s really wound up hurting them.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, there was a distinct, almost inflection point in the intensity of this professional-class hegemony on race, to the point where it became completely routine for people in and around the party to talk about white supremacy, systemic racism, how America has always been a benighted country and still is, we haven’t made any progress, everybody who is white has work to do in terms of discarding their racism.

You write about something you call “the Fox News Fallacy,” which you say is “blinding Democrats to real problems.”

The basic idea is when one of these criticisms appears — like, Democrats are allowing the intrusion of race-essentialist ideology into curriculum and teacher training — the first reaction is to deny it and just to say it’s simply a racist dog whistle to constituencies who aren’t that happy about the way the country has changed.

The same thing goes for crime. I mean, who wants to be tough on crime? Well, no one could possibly want to be tough on crime except for people who want to put a lot of Black people in jail; whereas actually, this is a huge matter of concern for people across races, and particularly in poor Black and Hispanic communities. The idea that concern about crime and a desire to be tough on criminals is simply a reflection of a bigoted, reactionary type of politics is completely ridiculous.

The base of the Democratic Party in many ways is older Black voters who are quite conservative on a lot of issues. And those are the people who elected Joe Biden.

Right. And the extent to which this is completely ignored by the dominant liberal Democratic discourse, to me, is completely astonishing. Do they really believe that the Black voters who formed the base of the Democratic Party think like Ibram X. Kendi, or the leaders of BLM? Are they crazy? I mean, how can they not understand there’s enormous sort of diversity among the worldviews of people within the Black community? They vary by class, they vary by age, they vary in all kinds of ways. And the idea that they are sort of all on board with this crusade against the superficial aspects of so-called systemic racism, that that’s really what they care about, is fanciful, really.

What would you recommend the Democratic Party do?

Well, it won’t be easy. You try to be productive, you try to get the Electoral Count Act and associated reforms done. You try to get some sort of Build Back Better thing through Congress with Joe Manchin’s support, or you break it up into pieces that are popular and try to get them through. These are the kinds of things you have to do to convince people you’re effective, and you can govern.

The second thing is, whatever you haven’t done to try to get the country back to normal, do it. We’re fast approaching the end of this pandemic. A Democrat should be ready to reopen the country. You’ve just got to send the message that what you want is for people to be happy and for things to be back to normal.

A third thing here that’s related to any elections: They’ve got to try to lift the ceiling on their support levels, which I think will necessitate some drawing of lines within the party, where you say, “No, no, we believe in being tough on crime. We think it is an absolutely atrocious idea to defund the police.”

You’ve got to win, and when you win, you’ve got to do stuff for the people who elected you. It’s not much more complicated than that.

[thethirdromana]

At some point this poll came to an end without me realising.

I was hoping this might take off and there would be one clear winner with thousands of votes, which I would then look into turning into an actual substack. That did not happen. But it's been interesting anyway!

Here are the results in raw numbers:

North and South - 29 votes The winner! Albeit not by much of a margin. I'm definitely open to the idea of setting this up as a substack, but I'm a little worried that given a) the length of the book, b) that it would take a full year and c) there's not exactly a vast pre-existing North and South fandom, that it wouldn't really take off. And despite getting the largest number of votes, North and South didn't get all that much actual enthusiasm in the notes.

Evelina - 17 votes Probably suppressed by the fact that this one already exists, which I didn't know until @fourthfolio kindly pointed it out.

The Well of Loneliness - 7 votes Not much enthusiasm for this. Pity; it's a fascinating read. Though also depressing as hell, which might have been what put people off.

The War of the Worlds - 23 votes This one did get more love in the notes, and benefits from being better known and shorter than North and South. I'm quite tempted to do this if people would be interested. (Ideally more than 23 people, but I'd be up for putting a small amount of Blazed cash behind this). Though I would then have the Jeff Wayne version stuck in my head for the entire duration.

The Moonstone - 12 votes Not much love for Wilkie Collins either.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles - 19 votes Another one with more love in the voting than the notes. Possibly something to revisit when Letters from Watson has finished? For the vintage detective crowd.

Les Misérables - 11 votes Also already happening! Thanks @rapplatt for the heads-up.

The Canterbury Tales - 14 votes for Middle English, 28 votes for Modern English Splitting this into Middle English or Modern English split the vote, or this would have been the frontrunner. And theoretically it would be possible to do this by including both the original and a suitable modern translation (well, modern-ish - it would also need to be out of copyright) and letting people pick what they would like to read. This would be a lot of effort, and since it should by rights start in April, we've missed the window on 2023 anyway. But I'm happy to throw out the idea to other people for 2024, or keep it in my back pocket if there's a surge of interest in Chaucer on tumblr.

Suggestions for Tumblr's next book club

With Dracula Daily on the horizon again, I've been pondering what other out-of-copyright novels we might like to consider reading very slowly. Here are my ideas! And if any of them already exist, lmk.

North and South

Author: Elizabeth Gaskell Year of publication: 1854-55 Length: 185,000 words, 52 chapters. So we could have a chapter weekly for a full year. Summary: Margaret Hale is forced to leave the rural south of England and settle in the rough, industrial north. There she clashes with mill-owner John Thornton over his treatment of his workers... Why Tumblr would like it: Enemies to Lovers! Class struggle! Fascinating historical context! Honestly, it's a great read.

Evelina

Author: Fanny Burney Year of publication: 1778 Length: 157,000 words in 84 letters. That's right, it's epistolary, and the letters are almost all sent March to October of the same year, so we could read this one in true Dracula Daily fashion. Summary: Evelina is the sheltered daughter of an aristocrat trying to make her way in the world of late 18th-century society. Why Tumblr would like it: Evelina is a likeable, relatable character. I think it'd be fun to get emails from her.

The Well of Loneliness

Author: Radclyffe Hall Year of publication: 1928 Length: 158,000 words in 56 chapters. Summary: The story of Stephen Gordon, a girl who realises at an early age that she's a lesbian, and her attempts to find love in the early 20th century. Why Tumblr would like it: It's one of the most iconic lesbian novels of the 20th century!

The War of the Worlds

Author: HG Wells Year of publication: 1897 Length: 63,000 words in 27 chapters. Summary: Alien invaders land from Mars and fuck up the south of England. Why Tumblr would like it: Alien invaders land from Mars and fuck up the south of England, come on, what's not to like?

The Moonstone

Author: Wilkie Collins Year of publication: 1868 Length: 200,000 words (so a bit of a marathon) in 51 chapters. Summary: A young English woman inherits a large Indian diamond of dubious provenance on her 18th birthday. Then it gets stolen! Why Tumblr would like it: One of the first detective novels, and supposed to be one of the best, it's a page turner with lots of suspense, twists and cliffhanger endings.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Author: Agatha Christie Year of publication: 1920 Length: 60,000 words in 13 chapters. Summary: The first murder mystery starring Hercule Poirot. Why Tumblr would like it: Look, you liked Glass Onion, right? And if you like this, Agatha Christie's novels are emerging from copyright at the rate of about two per year.

Les Misérables

Author: Victor Hugo Year of publication: 1862 Length: 570,000 words in the English translation (ouch) in 365 chapters. Summary: A vast, sweeping story of poverty, justice and revolution in early 19th century France. Why Tumblr would like it: Well, if you thought Moby Dick didn't have enough digressions...

The Canterbury Tales

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer Year of publication: 1387-1400 Length: 24 stories averaging 700 lines each. Summary: Some pilgrims are heading to Canterbury. They tell one another stories to pass the time. These are their stories. Why Tumblr would like it: I mean, there's a reason we still read these 600 years later. They're a fascinating insight into medieval life, but they're also - for the most part - just good fun.

If you love any of these suggestions and would really like to see it take off, reblog to help make it happen.