Democracy and the midterms after the VRA

Two links for you this weekend

I’m celebrating my birthday early this year (my daughter is due just before, and I imagine I won’t have the time for such things with a one-week-old in the house), so just a short post this weekend with two links to share (written en route to a Nats v Orioles game, so forgive the brevity).

In case you haven’t had enough of me in podcast form this week…

1. I chatted with Paul Krugman about the latest redistricting news and Democrats’ still-solid chance of taking the House, as well as my work (in part with David at The Downballot) on the impacts of what I guess is now getting called “price anxiety” on consumer sentiment. Paul and I put out some hypotheticals for what may be causing the “Vibecession 2.0” — the period after January 2025 when our predictions of consumer sentiment, even accounting for excess prices, are higher than they should be (still a lot lower than if you ignored excess prices). That interview, and the transcript, are now up at Paul’s site.

2. I was also interviewed on WNYC’s podcast On The Media about my article on the “fundamental statistical error at the heart of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision” that effectively killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Link here.

Thanks as always for supporting this Substack, which gives me the institutional freedom to do interviews like these and affect public discourse on polling, voter psychology, and democracy — in all the spare time I have between crunching the numbers and writing these articles! (It’s not a lot of time.)

More next week.