I am happy to share two pieces of news: For the 2026-2027 academic year. I will join the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement @KelloggSchool as a postdoc working with @EliJFinkel and Nour Kteily. Then, in Fall 2027, I will join @LSEGovernment as an Assistant Professor. I am incredibly excited about both positions and grateful to friends, family, mentors and co-authors who have helped me along the way. I am excited to be doing more work on strategic voting, democratic norms, field experiments and many other topics. So please reach out if you are Evanston or London (or anywhere else I suppose).

This looks like a very cool paper that I look forward to reading. Especially the point in the last tweet that the right way to think about the electoral effects of moderation is to consider the counter-factual of a whole party taking a moderate stance and voting accordingly.

Its interesting to watch the parties trying with massively varying degrees of sucess to push losing candidates into backing nominees.

This thread makes the good point that (1) some groups within parties prioritize something other than winning general elections and (2) no-one will ever admit their candidates aren't the best bet to beat the other side. Given that, I bet you would get a much more honest answer to the question "what winning probability would you sacrifice to achieve your ideological goals?" than "is your preferred primary candidate really the best bet in the general?"

It does seem like a problem that between the house, senate and presidency there is basically nothing citizens of safe districts can do that is relevant to national electoral politics except (1) donate and (2) make headlines that shape the party brand.

I think "obviously political investigations are a gift to the investigated" is a good sign of democratic resilience since the surge in donations and attention outweighs the minimal legal jeopardy. It will be a bad sign if this stops being true.

This paper makes by far the best argument for the electoral college.

This is a very strange argument. If there is a 30% fatality virus spreading in the population the public demand for extreme measures will be overwhelming. No one will care about COVID era grudges about public health.

Why do state parties that routinely lose all their elections not make even cursory attempts to appeal to their state's median voter? There are many plausible answers but not clear what combination of them is most accurate.

New article! @markovitis and I examine how prosecutions of political leaders affect public opinion by studying the valuable case of Trump's criminal prosecution. Key finding: rhetoric from Trump's prosecutor marginally ⬇️ intention of voting for Trump but massively ⬆️ backlash 1/

This is a case where the public opinion literature on democratic norms is very practically useful: voters don't like efforts to rig elections in isolation, even as they won't massively punish candidates who back such proposals in general elections (where many other policies are at stake). Still, "they did it first" is almost certainly the best way for both parties to raise public support for these proposals.