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State redistricting battles intensify following U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act
A Supreme Court decision striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana has amplified an already intense national redistricting battle. Here’s a look at how some states are responding.
Voting Rights: Supreme Court ruling will reshape American politics
By NICHOLAS RICCARDIAssociated PressThe U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority on Wednesday handed Republicans their biggest
How a double substitution turned Leeds' season around
If Leeds are able to retain their top-flight status, the majority of supporters are likely to point to wins against relegation rivals Wolves, Burnley and West Ham as the defining moments of the season. The 49-year-old is more likely to point to a 3-2 defeat by Manchester City in late November as the moment his side's fortunes changed - and the numbers back it up. After goals from Phil Foden and Josko Gvardiol put City 2-0 up inside 25 minutes, Leeds were left fearing the worst.
Hope out of chaos: how the dark era of Trump is creating a new approach to global politics
There is cautious optimism that ‘a majority of multilateralists’ may be able to enduringly reshape global alliances
Tennesse to redistrict in effort to flip Memphis congressional seat
At the behest of President Donald Trump, Tennessee’s Republican supermajority is returning to Nashville to redraw the state’s congressional maps.
Schumer’s Maine pick Janet Mills drops out; VRA ruling boosts GOP path: Join Friday’s Whole Hog
Progressive Democrats cheered after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills (D), exited Maine’s Senate race, reshaping the field. Republicans are…
Who’s running for Congress in California? These races could determine the majority
Ballots are in the mail for California’s primary election. These are the congressional races CalMatters is watching closely — and the candidates fighting for their political lives.
The future of Latino politics just played out in Whittier
Whittier elected a Latino-majority council for the first time in the city's history. But for the three winning Latino candidates, their ethnicity was an afterthought.
Mills Exit Is a Blow to Schumer as Democrats Question His Strategy
Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, considered the Maine governor his top recruit for winning the majority. Critics said her collapse showed he is out of touch with the party’s voters.
A New Jersey Republican hasn’t voted in weeks, sparking questions over lengthy absence on Capitol Hill
Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey has not voted in Congress in weeks, sparking questions over when he will return to Capitol Hill as he faces a competitive race for reelection back home and Speaker Mike Johnson oversees an extremely narrow House majority in Washington.
New Survey from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Finds AI Adoption Remains High, Yet Value May Lag Without Modernisation and Workflow Integration
Most organisations have moved beyond experimenting with artificial intelligence, but few are realising its full value. New research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Appian, finds that while 59% of organisations (who are moving forward with AI to some extent) have AI in production, the majority are currently focused on incremental gains that prioritise efficiency and productivity over top-line growth.
Supreme Court ruling will reshape American politics. The only question is when
The U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority on Wednesday handed Republicans their biggest victory yet in the perpetual battle to control the House of Representatives and statehouses across the country — but it may have come too late to have much of an effect on this year's midterm elections.
Supreme Court ruling is set to reshape American politics
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has handed Republicans their biggest victory yet in the battle to control the House of Representatives and statehouses across the country.
‘It’s certainly possible.’ Louisiana Democrat worries both majority black districts in the state could be redrawn
Supreme Court limits key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act
The decision could touch off a scramble by Republicans to redraw minority-majority congressional districts, especially in the South, that could cost many Black Democrats their seats.
Supreme Court voids majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, boosting Republican chances
The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s second majority Black congressional district in a decision that could open the door for Republican-led states to eliminate Black and Latino electoral districts that tend to favor Democrats and affect the balance of power in Congress.
N.Y. Senate majority leader: 'Making good progress' on state budget policy items
The state budget was due on April 1.
BMG and Concord confirm merger, with Bertelsmann as majority-owner; Bob Valentine named CEO of combined
The combined company will be owned approximately 67% by Bertelsmann, and 33% by affiliates of Great Mountain Partners, a long-time investor in Concord…
San Diego Politics Show: The GOP civil war shaping the county’s District 5 race
Democrats could win a supermajority in San Diego County, but its an internal GOP feud defining the District Five race.
Supreme Court formally reinstates pro-Republican Texas voting map
The move by the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, formalizes an interim decision it made in December to revive the map of U.S. House districts in Texas.
New poll shows Florida voters support state vaccine policies in schools
Pollster says the majority Floridians favoring vaccines in schools is not changing.
Tennessee Passed a Slate of Immigration Bills. Here’s What They Do.
The Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly approved a series of immigrations bills, crafted in coordination with the White House.
‘Gerrymandering warps the balance of minority and majority rights’
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
Big business shows up in final days of arguments at Supreme Court
Big businesses are lining up at the Supreme Court as the justices hear the final arguments of the term, pressing the conservative majority to shield industries from multimillion-dollar jury verdicts, limit the marketing of generic drugs and neuter the government’s ability to issue fines.
Big business shows up in final days of arguments at Supreme Court
Big businesses are lining up at the Supreme Court as the justices hear the final arguments of the term, pressing the conservative majority to shield industries from multimillion-dollar jury verdicts, limit the marketing of generic drugs and neuter the government’s ability to issue fines.
Defeated Virginia Republicans regroup for last chance fight to save House majority
Virginia's redistricting fight heads to the state Supreme Court after a judge declared ballot language unconstitutional and blocked certification.
Cumberland takes $100M cash deal, keeps three Phase II programs
Shareholders must approve the Apotex transaction. Cumberland keeps majority ownership in CET, with top-line systemic sclerosis data next.
Romanian Cabinet Loses Parliamentary Majority as Top Party Quits
Romania’s biggest political party quit the government after disagreements over unpopular austerity measures, leaving Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan in charge of a minority cabinet.
The wide-ranging fallout from the Supreme Court’s new terrorism decision, explained
The Court’s Republican majority fractured in a case that could impact everyone from immigrants to consumers.
Is tit-for-tat political gerrymandering the future of US politics?
Virginia voters delivered a major win to Democrats on Tuesday.A narrow majority voted to allow lawmakers to bypass the state's bipartisan redistricting commission. That means the Democratic-led legislature will create a map that’s more favorable to them in the midterms.It's the latest chapter in a redistricting saga that President Trump started last year, but is the tit-for-tat redistricting battle the future of US electoral politics?We speak with Democratic Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger to hear her perspective.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam and Matt Ozug. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
Everyone Wants to Win the MAHA Moms
Are health-conscious women really the new silent majority?
Child Health Poll: Vast majority of Tennessee parents say their kids get regular immunizations, support school-based immunization requirements
Roughly 8 in 10 parents surveyed across the state said they are concerned about communicable diseases like measles if others are not immunized and agreed that immunizations are important to protect their children from serious infections.
National survey shows majority of voters support ceasefire in Iran
Seventy-five percent approve of a ceasefire in the war, while 24% disapprove.
National survey shows majority of voters support ceasefire in Iran
Seventy-five percent approve of a ceasefire in the war, while 24% disapprove.
The nine justices are increasingly building their own personal brands outside the court
The Supreme Court has long presented itself as a uniform group of justices, all sheathed in long black robes. Its rulings are the product of a collective majority. And when justices refer to a precedent, they speak reverently of “The Court.”
Democrats win Virginia redistricting fight, threating Republican House majority
Virginia voters passed a redistricting referendum that could boost Democrats with four additional House seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
On the Hill: Health Care Reauthorizations, Congressional Hearings
House leaders plan votes this week on reauthorizing rural health and telehealth programs, as well as a proposed directive on lung cancer research. Legislation to be taken up under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage, includes H.R. 2493, which would reauthorize rural health care grants through fiscal 2030, and has been unanimously approved by the House […]
Shaky political science: using "simulated" elections over real-world elections
[Dear DSOS readers – this article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in early December, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting. We found that many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data, and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here). Here are links to the first three articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report, the second one analyzing a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report, and a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research]. In this fourth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we shine a spotlight on seven studies that were web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group (the ERRG is an ad hoc committee headed by New America’s Political Reform Program and joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Unite America Institute and Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law). This research consortium has been led by Lee Drutman, senior fellow with New America’s Political Reform Program. These seven studies are simply not credible from any objective standard about how political “science” is supposed to illuminate our understanding of either ranked choice voting or politics in general. The feature that six of these seven studies have in common is that they all used surveys – artificial, simulated elections -- to attempt to say something cogent or interesting about ranked choice voting (RCV) elections. None of them used real world data from actual RCV elections – either the 1000+ elections in the US or the many thousands of elections from places like Australia, Ireland and elsewhere where RCV has been used for 100 years. While a few of these studies conclude with some mixed positives about RCV, our analysis here is content neutral. The idea that, with a political reform like RCV, you can ask respondents in a mock, artificial election to vote with that method, with only the barest of explanation about how RCV works or its likely impacts (i.e. no spoiler candidates, majority winners, voters liberated to pick their favorite candidates, coalition-building), and then ask them their thoughts/reactions about voting in that system, with fake candidates and no real campaigning, no real exposure to an actual election or actual candidates, rests on some very puzzling assumptions. The findings of these seven studies actually are contradicted by the findings from many other studies based on real-world RCV elections. These New America studies also failed to list the real-world RCV studies in their own citations, instead including those studies that reinforced their conclusions. The seven studies featured in this article were chosen because they form a cohesive cohort which precisely illustrates one of the main points of our research paper, namely that using surveys, i.e. artificial elections, or mathematical/theoretical models, instead of real-world data, is in fact “shaky political science.” Below are summaries of our analysis of five of the seven New America studies. You can read our complete analysis of all seven studies at our paper, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting.” Choosing to “Vote As Usual” by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi. New America. (Blais et al., 2021). This study, web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group, used two surveys in which respondents completed ballots for simulated elections using plurality, approval, RCV and point (Score) voting. In both cases the authors provided the respondents with only minimal explanation of each method. For example, the entire explanation for RCV was “For this vote, rank the candidates from your first to your last choice (you do not need to rank them all). This is called the ranked vote.” That’s it. The study did not provide any context or explanation to survey respondents about why she/he might want to rank multiple candidates. Participants were not even told that ballots would be tabulated using an “instant” runoff, not to mention any description of RCVs ability to eliminate the spoiler effect or liberate voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of helping the “greater evil” candidate to win. That’s like taking an iPhone back in time to 1970 and asking someone if they like it better than their rotary phone without explaining how it works. Their first survey targeted states that held 2020 Super Tuesday Democratic primaries and used the real candidates’ names in the survey; the second survey used fictitious candidates. In other words, they surveyed respondents who had only ever participated in plurality elections, had no history or background with using RCV or any of the other methods, had no clue about its likely impacts, and did not communicate how the alternative methods would be counted, and then asked them: “How satisfied are you with using each system?” Predictably, the winner was plurality elections, the system used for president, Congress, gubernatorial and state legislative elections – in other words, the method they have been using, year after year, all their voting lives. With so little explanation of RCV and its impacts, this study is simply not credible in discovering anything useful about real-world RCV elections. It merely shows that a basic voter education campaign is needed when adopting a new election system. Additionally, the result contradicts many other post-election surveys following real RCV elections, asking opinions from voters who had just participated in a RCV election, that showed a great deal of satisfaction with RCV (see details on that in Studies 22-25 in our paper, as well as the four studies cited in the review for Study 28). Share Other studies on “satisfaction” and “understanding” make similar mistakes, in terms of basing their surveys on inadequate explanation to respondents and lack of education about context. How could any survey ever hope to measure accurately, in essence simulate a real-world election, without actual campaigning candidates, the media writing about those candidates, organizations endorsing candidates and voters being inundated with crucial information? More than anything, what these “studies” based on surveys show is that if you ask voters about something they don’t know very much about, and fail to adequately educate them, their responses will unsurprisingly reflect their confusion. Equally puzzling is that New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group, headed by political scientist Lee Drutman, found this to be a credible enough study that they not only published it but highlighted it in Drutman’s own discussion of research related to ranked choice voting. This pattern was repeated in study after study featured by New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group. For example in Ranked-Choice Voting and Political Expression: Voter Guides Narrow the Gap between Informed and Uninformed Citizens by Cheryl Boudreau, Jonathan Colner, and Scott MacKenzie, the researchers based their analysis on a survey which found that respondents who were asked to vote in a simulated RCV election, with minimal explanation of RCV or how it works, displayed less evidence of being informed about how to use RCV effectively, with the least informed voters ranking fewer candidates. As pointed out under the study above, in a real election voters are informed by a wide variety of methods, including public education by the election administration, by interested political groups, the media, and the candidates themselves who benefit from voters being aware of how to vote in the new system. In Support for Ranked-Choice Voting across Race and Partisanship by Joseph Anthony, David C. Kimball, Jack Santucci and Jamil Scott, the researchers used respondents from different parties and races voting in simulated plurality and RCV elections, who indicated their satisfaction with each voting method. Instead of using real world election results, the authors fell back on the easy, armchair and less reliable academic research methodology of making up mock elections. As with the other studies, little explanation was given of how RCV works or what its implications might be (electing majority winners or eliminating spoilers, for example). Unsurprisingly, this study found that respondents were not very satisfied with RCV. However, when the authors added an explanation that RCV has a tendency to elect more women and people of color, they found that this greater explanation increased the preference for RCV. The more voters were familiar with it, and the more they understood potential positive impacts – surprise! -- the more they were open to switching away from the status quo. Of note, the results from this study are thoroughly contradicted by a number of other studies whose data was obtained from real RCV elections with real voters. Those studies show a great deal of satisfaction with RCV. More “fake election” research An interesting wrinkle on this “research by fake elections” approach, which only served to illustrate how unreliable such “research” can become, was taken in Ranked-Choice Voting, Runoff, and Democracy: Insights from Maine and Other U.S. States by Joseph Cerrone and Cynthia McClintock_,_ also web-hosted and funded by New America’s ERRG. It gets high marks for creativity, but an eye-roll for thinking this could possibly add anything meaningful to our understanding of real world RCV elections. This study tried to determine whether RCV, plurality or two-round runoff elections provided greater voter satisfaction and acceptance of election results. To determine that, the authors conducted a survey asking if voters were satisfied with a fictional newspaper report of an election, with three different versions given to respondents – plurality, runoff and RCV, with variations of Republican/Democrat winners and variations of “come-from-behind” winners,” i.e. candidates not initially in first place but who win the “runoff.” Again, a minimal explanation of RCV or how it works was given, and the survey showed that respondents had the greatest unfamiliarity with RCV than the other methods. The unsurprising result? Respondents were much more satisfied with “come-from-behind” victories in a traditional two-round runoff election than in RCV, even though RCV is also a runoff system but with a single round of counting. Interestingly, the dissatisfaction with RCV disappeared for those who were more familiar with RCV. In fact, among those respondents who were “very familiar” with RCV, they were equally satisfied with RCV, runoff and plurality. Surprise, surprise. Again, what this study revealed, more than anything, is not only the inadequacy of the explanation for RCV given by the authors of this study, but the failure of the research format itself, thinking that such an artificial mock election could somehow simulate what actually happens in the real world in a real RCV election. Those four studies reviewed above are fitting examples of inadequate and shaky political “science.” Other studies reviewed in our paper from the New America/Electoral Reform Research Group cohort which also used mock elections included: Ranked-Choice Voting is an Acquired Taste by Joseph Anthony and David C. Kimball. New America. (Anthony et al., 2021). Ranked-Choice Voting is No Refuge for Extreme Candidates by Melissa Baker. New America. (Baker, 2021). Also included in this New America cohort is Does Ranked-Choice Voting Reduce Racial Polarization? by Yuki Atsusaka and Theodore Landsman, which actually did use real-world election results data but applied an odd and unconventional methodology to the data which relied on shaky assumptions and non-real-world scenarios that were too divorced from reality. To determine levels of “racially polarized voting,” the researchers imagined “ethnic parties,” by which they mean political parties for each ethnic group, which was especially odd since the election data they were using came from nonpartisan RCV races. But then they made an even odder assumption, namely that since race and ethnic characteristics of studied voters were not available, the authors tried to infer that information based on who voters selected and the racial make-up of voters in each district. This amounted to little more than vague and ambiguous guesswork dressed up with a bunch of mathematical equations used to give it a veneer of scientific appearance. Indeed, it seemed to assume racial polarization in order to prove racial polarization. Based on this questionable methodology, the authors concluded that RCV doesn’t reduce racial polarization. But the premise of this study missed an obvious reality: since RCV incentivizes more candidates to run and can result in more diverse fields of candidates, one would expect more racially-polarized voting in voters’ top rankings, not less, because more voters would have someone on that ballot who represents their racial or ethnic identity and more freedom to vote for their real first choice. By encouraging more diverse candidates and eliminating the spoiler effect, RCV facilitates voting for a favorite candidate of your own race and then selecting a second choice with the best likelihood of winning. The real measure is what voters do with their additional rankings – do they consider other candidates and vote “for the best of the rest”? This study didn’t tell us anything useful about that. But readily available data shows this is common in real RCV elections, and candidates act on this knowledge by engaging with voters outside their racial group. So the authors of this study failed to consider or account for what actually happens in real-world elections, and their conclusions are tainted by this failure. New America has contributed a great deal over the past 2.5 decades to our understanding of many policy areas, including politics and political reform (full disclosure: Steven Hill, one of the authors of this article and of the “Shaky Political Science” research paper and series, is a former senior fellow and former director of New America’s political reform program, 2005-2010). So it was especially disappointing that New America funded and published such a large batch of dubious studies about ranked choice voting. The stated praiseworthy goal of its Electoral Reform Research Group was to inspire new academic research about ranked choice voting that would shed light and help the public better understand the impacts of RCV. Instead, the ERRG research did just the opposite. It produced dubious research that created more confusion and misinformation. In so doing, New America’s political reform program contributed to “shaky political science.” Steven Hill and Paul Haughey Share Upgrade to $5 subscription Thanks for reading DemocracySOS, a reader-supported digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. Subscribe for only $5 per month to receive full benefits and to support our work. Subscribe
A Majority of Americans, 54-26% View It as Good For Sports for Coaches And Athletes To Speak Out On Perceived Social Injustices
Majorities Remain Opposed to Transgender Athletes Competing with Those Who Share Their Gender Identity – But 20% Say They ‘Don’t Know’ If Prompted 62% Have Used a Streaming Service to…
Delaware nurse practitioner raises awareness and funds to end women’s No. 1 health threat
NEWARK, Del., April 20, 2026— While the large majority of cardiac events can be prevented, cardiovascular disease (CVD) continues to be the leading cause of death in women.[1] In recognition of her energy and passion to fight back against women’s...
Bulgaria headed for political stability as former president wins parliamentary majority
With about 130 out of 240 seats in Parliament, Rumen Radev has secured an outright majority in a country marked by deep political fragmentation in recent years. He will become the new prime minister, a position more powerful than president in Bulgaria.
Carney’s Liberal Majority Reshapes Fortunes to the Left and the Right
Mark Carney’s brand of centrist politics and his invitation to floor crossers with conservative convictions into the Liberal Party’s ranks have reshaped the country’s political economy.
Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise lean on tax cuts as they fight to keep their majority in Congress
WASHINGTON — Usually April 15 is greeted with frowns, if not outright dread.
Democrats vow to block next Trump Supreme Court pick amid Alito speculation
Justice Samuel Alito hasn’t tipped his hat on retiring just yet, but Senate Democrats are already entrenched in opposing the confirmation of a successor that would deliver President Donald Trump his fourth lifetime appointment to the high court. Democrats need to first retake the majority and for a vacancy to arise. But with the party’s […]
Two physicians on ending the waiting-room era: bring care home
Aetna CMO Benjamin Kornitzer and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on why home-based care for America's sickest seniors isn't a vision anymore.
From building stages to checking bags, these LA businesses help make fest season happen
“Each year, we work with dozens of companies across industries to produce the festival, and the majority of our suppliers and vendors are local. From stage construction and audio to security, sanitation, and operations, it really takes a full ecosystem to make it happen.”
'This is the majority of my income' | Painted Tree closures leave Houston-area small business vendors scrambling
Painted Tree Boutiques is shutting down locations across the U.S., including six stores in the Houston area, leaving hundreds of small business owners scrambling.
How Canada’s Carney Used His Political Savvy to Win a Majority
In six months, the prime minister orchestrated the defection of five lawmakers to his side and won a special election.
Some people don’t lose weight with GLP-1s. Evidence is building that the drugs are helping anyway
The majority of people who start taking GLP-1 medicines with the hope of losing weight, the drugs can quiet cravings and help them shed stubborn pounds. But research is also continuing to reveal GLP-1 medicines’ benefits independent of weight loss — even if people gain weight.
TPG Agrees to Buy Learfield in Deal Worth Roughly $2 Billion
Learfield’s majority owners—Charlesbank Capital Partners and funds managed by Fortress Investment Group—hired two banks in the fall to explore a sale.
College sports giant Learfield finalizing sale to private equity firm
Learfield, a leading college sports multimedia rights and technology firm, is finalizing a deal to sell a majority stake to private equity firm TPG.
Carney didn’t win a majority, he built one. Now comes the test.
Now that Canada's prime minister has control of Parliament, here's what he's going to do with it.
Canada’s Carney Secures Majority Mandate After Electoral Wins, Political Defections
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has secured a majority government, cementing his hold on power after electoral victories Monday night and defections to his Liberal Party caucus over the past six months.
House eyes possible expulsion of multiple members as it returns to Washington
Both parties appear to be factoring in the razor-thin majority that Republicans hold in the chamber as they weigh whether to oust members.
Cook Political Report shifts four Senate races toward Democrats
The Cook Political Report shifted four Senate races to the left on Monday but noted that the GOP is still favored to maintain its majority in the upper chamber this November. “With an increasingly…
Paul Renner calls for Obamacare repeal before GOP loses control of Congress
'We may not have a majority.'
Who is Peter Magyar, Hungary’s new leader who trounced Viktor Orban?
Magyar's centre-right Tisza Party has won a two-thirds majority in Hungary's parliamentary elections.
How To Understand Frontline, Diplomacy and Society in Iran
The ‘silent majority’ in Iran is not a passive bystander. Urban and university-educated groups are taking a stand against the war.
TST Best Bets: April 12, 2026
The day has come for the NBA’s 82-game regular season to come to an end, as all 30 teams play in their last contest of the season on Sunday with the final chance to lock in their postseason seeding. With the majority of the seeding locked up at the top of both conferences, the Eastern Conference’s lower rung will provide most of the excitement on the final slate, as seeds 5-10 are all yet to be decided. But the most consequential unresolved race impacting who will hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy
Commissioner Bill Canda created septic business to evade taxes
Thanks to a miscommunication in March between the Custer County Sheriff’s Office and the 12th Judicial District Attorney’s Office in Alamosa, the majority of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into Custer County Commissioner Bill Canda for alleged sales tax fraud was made public. The
Iraq elects Kurdish politician Nizar Amidi as president amid Iran war fallout
Iraq's parliament voted Saturday to elect Nizar Amidi as president, five months after a parliamentary election that didn't produce a decisive majority.
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
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