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Pretty much all of the polls this year have been contradicted by every notable election since the start of 2022. There's really no way around this. We can talk a bunch of sh-t about the "generic" ballot, but almost every single time a named Republican candidate is up against a named Democrat, the Democrat has won or at least over-performed. Is Sisolak the only Democrat of note to lose since the Youngkin mess back in 2021 (when Trump was the least visible he's been in the last ten years)? Downballot Republicans have not been this weak in my lifetime. Obviously more of them lost in 2006-2008, but that was when they had no hope of winning. If Biden is as hated as the polls say he is then Democrats should have been losing across the board these past couple years.

 

I don't think people are willing to admit it but I feel like the country has depolarized significantly in the last few years. It's not at the point where Hogan can win in Maryland baring a miracle, but I could absolutely buy Biden doing far worse than downballot Democrats. Maybe not 10 pts worse, but around half of that is certainly possible.

Congressional Democratic candidates would have to massively outperform Biden and run significantly ahead of his vote share in order to capture the 26 House delegations necessary to settle a contested election in his favour. I'm not sure it's too realistic to expect such a high rate of split-ticket voting in a presidential election year these days.

Polling agencies keep updating their weighting method every cycle.

On the whole, they really don't make as many changes under the hood as you probably think.

Happy 4th of July (UK)

Funny enough, the 250th anniversary will have a World Cup game in Philadelphia. Imagine if it was England vs the US.

I don't know if he was considered more hawkish, but 1960 was definitely the most hawkish matchup of the Cold War.

The difference between Clark County voting D+5 and D+10 these days is huge. The former is almost certainly an R win

I'm not entirely convinced this will still hold true for the presidential race this fall.

Every time I hear a baby cry I want to drop kick it into the clouds.

[lot]

- Does turnout, interest and investment drop off with no other marquee race on the ballot?

The presidential election is the most marquee contest of all, so I don't expect that to happen. When it comes to financial investment by Biden's campaign, they won't pull out of Georgia at the moment, nor do I think they should. As far as I can tell, things would have to get a lot more dire for Biden in GA than they currently are in order for him to truly forfeit a state he carried four years ago that features multiple simultaneous demographic shifts benefiting Democrats.

Biden's issue with African-American voters is turnout, not an en masse flip to Trump

Lower turnout/enthusiasm can still constitute "abandonment" though, as can increased rates of third-party voting.

 The dude who eats two Big Macs and a Sprite everyday is still alive.

I asked this elsewhere but you seem to have missed or forgotten about it, so I will repeat here where it's more likely to catch your attention: could you give me a detailed description of the forms that religious politics (especially religious conservatism) and social-theological disputes take in Buddhist societies?

This is a big enough question that it will take me a while to get to in full, but thanks for asking! I'm going to enjoy answering it.

So, breaking it down by region/country:

• In Southeast Asia, Buddhist institutions (mostly Theravada) tend to be "religious conservatives" in a surprisingly straightforward and legible way; they skew anti-gay and anti-abortion, are intimately tied up with secular hierarchies and power structures like the Thai monarchy and the ethnonationalist freaks in charge in Burma, etc. Vietnam is a partial exception here because of its colonial history and the resulting elite Catholic population, which means that, prior to 1975, the Church filled the "religious bastion of the Establishment" role instead. Vietnam is also a Mahayana rather than Theravada country.
• In Sri Lanka, the dynamic is similar to that in Southeast Asia, but Sri Lankan Buddhism is more pluralistic and more influenced by Buddhist Modernism, to the point that the Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Ranjith, supports retaining Buddhism as the state religion because the Buddhist establishment is seen as a protector of other religious groups.
• Bhutan is a quasi-theocratic Vajrayana Buddhist monarchy whose government is so religiously influenced that it sets completely different economic targets from the rest of the world that are derived deductively from Buddhist moral theology. It's not as nasty as what we see somewhere like Burma, but there's still a distinct supremacist/ascendancy attitude towards the country's Hindu minority.
• Tibet and Mongolia were traditionally similar to Bhutan in these respects, but because of their recent histories of communist rule, Vajrayana Buddhism in those countries has a somewhat ersatz-feeling human rights focus that we also catch glimpses of in Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
• Japan, one of the Mahayana countries par excellence but with Vajrayana denominations also present, runs the gamut from the expressly Nichiren-affiliated Komeito--a rather acquisitive, self-dealing conservative party currently strongly allied with the LDP, although this wasn't always the case--to various #populist currents, both left-wing and right-wing, derived from or influenced by the Pure Land tradition. The sort of "socon" Buddhism we see in Southeast Asia is much, much weaker in Japan, and has been for a fascinatingly long time; a relatively lax approach to things like sex goes back at least as far as the Tokugawa and possibly a lot further.
• China and Taiwan have similarly diverse and polymorphous Buddhist political histories to Japan, but Buddhism was traditionally a little bit further outside the secular power structure than it was in Japan, mostly because of the presence of Confucianism and in some cases Taoism as much easier go-to legitimating ideologies. Buddhism was intermittently persecuted in China even before modern times. However, Chinese Buddhist politics does have some of the moral conservatism or traditionalism that Japanese Buddhist politics largely lacks.
• Korea has a similar history to China in this respect, with the added wrinkle of the recent very strong Christian presence (fun fact: the curious "anti-authoritarian but pointedly orthodox" character of Korean Christianity comes from many Korean people perceiving religious liberalism as characteristic of Japanese Christianity).
• The Malay cultural sphere has Buddhist minorities with the sort of generally left-liberal (for these countries) skew that we tend to associate with religious minorities in most of the world, at least in terms of voting behavior.

You said detailed description; this is not nearly as detailed as I'd like to be able to be about this fascinating subject. But I've already left you hanging for the better part of two months and did not want to take even longer. I hope it's interesting to you nonetheless.

My inner wokescold is cringing at Vietnam not getting its own Confucianist Asia Mahayana Buddhist society bullet point, and I'm not sure if the "Catholic" = religious establishment applied outside of South Vietnam. But overall this is a high-effort, high-quality post.

It's still safer for American missionaries than North Sentinel Island.