Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, February 23, 2026
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12 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Just saw a bumper sticker:
PBS logo with a Mohawk
“PBS is punk”
Per The Guardian half an hour ago Peter Mandelson, once UK ambassador to the US, has been arrested. Same deal as Andrew, sharing sensitive info within the Epstein class.
Suppose we’ll ever do anything like that?
All this talk about how impossible it’s going to be to issue refunds for the now illegal tariffs. Atrios quotes WSJ (paywalled),
Yes, that WSJ. Corporate GOPs have supported MAGA “populism”. There’s always been the risk to them that the inmates might take over the asylum and actually do something economically “populist”. Maybe some of them understand that risk better now.
And “Princess Awesome v. CBP”?
Trump is back to his low of 15% underwater.
Looking back at the Nate Silver average it looks like we are on a new plateau. Trump started his term on positive ground, spiraled rapidly down to a Spring-to-Autumn average of 6-8 points underwater. This new plateau started in late October, for reasons I don’t understand, and he is now in the 13-15 points underwater zone. His base of support has declined less, but has still declined, from ~44% during the first plateau, to ~41% now. The topline changes have been less about his base, although be grateful for the small things, and much more about a consensus forming among the Trump-curious.
The issue now is that in effectively capturing the undecideds, the only way we can improve the numbers is by seeing erosion in his base. That erosion will start with a lack of enthusiasm – and polls show the Trump haters are much more enthusiastic than the Trump lovers. It’s worth noting that he did not recover from the first plateau, and has not recovered from the second, lower plateau. Trump does not appear to be able to add support.
@Michael Reynolds: Feels like there’s a scale of popularity regimes that a president operates in, having to do with the span of approvals of these polls:
10. Approval > 75%. Nazi Killer Zone
5. Approval and disapproval variances distinct, separated. Average approval > 50% and probably approaching 60%. Power Zone
3. Approval and disapproval variances overlapping, but average approval > 50%. Re-Electable Zone
1. Approval and disapproval variances overlapping significantly, average approval < 50%. Mediocre Presidents Zone
-1. Approval and disapproval variances overlapping but disapproval average hovering at or above approval. Both will still be 50%. “People Don’t Like This” Zone
-5. Variances distinct, disapproval notably larger than approval, disapproval > 50%. Toilet Zone
-10. Average disapproval > 75%. Polls only measure just how much people hate you. Congress Zone
Trump has fallen to -5 and the trends are approaching the theoretical -10. Every single thing that comes from either the president or his direct appointees is some combination of idiocy and corruption. I find it incredible that outside a few extremely sketchy polls, disapproval is well over 50% and approval is clearly under 45%.
Though I also find it completely insane that so many voters didn’t see this coming. At least some of them are seeing more clearly what they voted for.
As an aside, the messaging around ICE and immigration raids has gone pretty stale. ICE hasn’t left anywhere, they just stopped being as blatant about the daily violence, and the media has moved on since Homan took over. It’s still a hundred-billion-dollar agency masking up and assaulting civil liberties in cities across the country, often with the help of local police.
If Democrats want to use this as an issue, they need to keep the violence, racism, and un-Constitutional activity front-and-center. (Sorry, voters suck at paying attention and will promptly forget that a half dozen amendments have been rendered meaningless under the guise of enforcement of civil federal immigration laws.)
Interesting.
This guy has the frame for political control AI: If you’re worried about immigrants taking jobs, you should be a hundred times more worried about AI which is, in effect, a flood of job-killing immigrants. We’d have to massage that a bit, but the essential idea could be very good politics.
This is a path for Democrats. Populist resentment of the billionaire class, and fear of AI. If unemployment goes up and can be traced to AI, this can explode.
The story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, is that a spoiled rich kid left his bubble (a literal palace), saw poor people suffering, and told them that they were suffering wrong, and that if they weren’t so attached to the idea of not suffering, it would all be more bearable.
Anyway, carry on.
(I got my shingles vaccine yesterday, and am suffering the wrong way, having some attachment to when things didn’t hurt so much. Every chronic injury is inflamed.)
@ptfe:
The post-Trump years are going to be very hard for me. I’m going to want to ask people just what the fuck they thought would come of electing a loathsome, ignorant, liar and sexual predator. All my life political messaging has been character, character, character, then overnight it’s nah, let’s elect a real pig.
One of the reasons I rejected direct participation in campaigns is I didn’t want my past to be an issue for a candidate. Jesus. Had I switched to GOP I could be chairman of the party now.
@gVOR10:
JohnSF probably knows, but my understanding is that it’s a whole lot easier to arrest someone in the UK under the Official Secrets Act than it is to arrest someone for at least superficially similar things in the US.
@Michael Reynolds: The focus on character was always stupidly executed, like we were evaluating whether someone smoked a joint (ever!) vs someone wants to bomb the hell out of a country to profit off their oil. It’s leaderly to to have fudged your taxes so you could hold onto 3 middle class paychecks worth of excess cash if you’re an outspoken bully with bold but idiotic ideas, it’s not leaderly to be thoughtful and care about your neighbors because also you shoplifted as a teenager.
In the post-Trump world, I suspect we’ll find there are suddenly 10s of millions of people who say they didn’t vote for Trump, but who definitely voted for Trump.
@Michael Reynolds:
I see it like this:
If the bubble pops, the economy tanks and we very likely go into a deep recession.
If instead the LLMs grow into Artificial General Intelligence super-stable geniuses, bots take over all jobs and we go into a deep recession.
The good news is that it seems just scaling up compute and training does not produce better LLM models past a certain point, and this point has already been reached. TL;DR: we still don’t know what it takes to make a genuinely intelligent artificial intelligence.
The bad news isn’t that some companies are developing AGI or even automating some forms of human mental productivity. The problem is this is happening in a time of excessive capital accumulation by the people attempting to develop AGI.
We won’t be turned into papar clips after all. We’ll become shareholder value.