That’s not normal stuff. That’s a thorough and unapologetic repudiation of a president whose policies are bad and who’s hurting the American people.

This was the headline earlier this morning from The New York Times:

But there’s so much more good news than that. There are a lot of other races flying below the collective American radar that you might’ve missed.

I’m sharing this just in case you wanted to feel a little more excited and a little more hopeful about where we’re headed.

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Gerrymandering backfired on Republicans

Gerrymandering is an inexact science. And when you get too aggressive, in a wave election like we saw last night, you risk spreading yourself too thin.

Right now, Ohio has 10 Republicans and five Democrats in its Congressional delegation. Pressed by the Trump administration, Ohio redrew its Congressional map, expecting that it’d yield 12 Republicans and three Democrats.

What happened? Ohio Republicans spread themselves too thin, and the state will now have seven Republicans and eight Democrats.

Same story in North Carolina. Right now, North Carolina has 10 Republicans and four Democrats.1 Pressed by the Trump administration, the North Carolina legislature redrew its Congressional map, expecting that it’d yield 11 Republicans and three Democrats.

What happened? North Carolina Republican folly will lead to a delegation that will likely have 10 Democrats and four Republicans.2

Whoops! The same thing happened in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere too.

And speaking of repudiating gerrymandering: Missouri easily defeated Proposition A, the proposed gerrymander of the state’s Congressional map.3 And just for good measure, Ann Wagner lost in Missouri-02, a seat I ran for four years ago and a seat I’ve long said in private wasn’t really winnable. Shows what I know.

I hope this is a lesson for political operatives and a staple of future political science classes: gerrymandering isn’t a guarantee. I have to think this sort of norm-breaking, mid-decade gerrymandering won’t be happening again for a long time.4

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State legislatures flipped, some for the first time in decades

One of the longest-lasting consequences of the 2010 tea party movement was Republicans winning control of a substantial number of state legislative chambers. We’re still living in the shadow of that, in part because legislatures have been able to draw themselves favorable maps.

That wasn’t undone last night. But if current projections hold, it was an extraordinary night for Democrats winning back some of that control. Based on early and unofficial results, Democrats are poised to flip:

• Arizona’s Senate, for the first time since 2000

• Georgia’s House, for the first time since 2004

• Minnesota’s House, giving Democrats control of both chambers and the governor’s office (a so-called trifecta)

• Michigan’s House, giving Democrats a trifecta

• North Carolina’s House

• Pennsylvania’s Senate, for the first time since 1994, giving Democrats a trifecta

• Wisconsin’s House and Senate, for the first time since 2010, giving Democrats a trifecta

Most surprising of all, perhaps, is that Texas’ House is likely to flip to Democrats, which would be the first time that’s happened since 2002. And while Missouri remains controlled by Republicans, they don’t have a supermajority in either chamber for the first time since 2008.5 Republicans lost their supermajority in the Indiana House too. Indiana is yet another state surprisingly poised to elect several statewide Democrats.

Voters strengthened democracy

Amendment 6 in Missouri handily passed, again with support from around the state.6 This is a big deal—I’ve complained repeatedly about the legislature messing around with the ballot measure process, and Amendment 6 enshrines meaningful protections for that process.7

Those sorts of wins happened all over America. In North Dakota and South Dakota,8 voters rejected the legislatures’ efforts to make it harder to pass constitutional amendments. Utah did something similar. In Montana, voters emphatically passed amendments that keep judicial elections nonpartisan and protect their ballot measure process. Voters there also passed meaningful campaign finance reform.

It’s too early to tell for certain, but I think Alaska will—again—defeat an effort to get rid of ranked-choice voting.9

This wasn’t a uniform win. Question 3 in Massachusetts, which would’ve created a top-two open primary, failed, and that’s too bad. But overall, it was a great night for democracy.

The tide is turning on online sports gambling

Online sports gambling is dangerous and destructive. I write about this a lot. So I was happy and relieved to see that Nebraskans defeated two ballot measures that would have legalized online sports gambling.

The shift in public opinion has been happening for a while now:

But this is a big deal because, by some measures, these sports gambling ballot measures in Nebraska were the most expensive in the history of the state.10 The sports gambling industry is spending substantially, obviously on ads to recruit customers but also on political giving. Among issue-specific advocacy groups, super PACs that supported legalized sports gambling were the second-largest this cycle, behind only the pro-cryptocurrency people.11

Based on these Nebraska ballot measures, and based on polling I look at, their efforts to buy public opinion don’t seem to be working.

Some truly odious candidates lost

Republican Bo French, so plainly bigoted that Karl Rove endorsed his Democratic opponent, lost his statewide election for Texas railroad commissioner.

Brandon Herrera, known as “the AK guy” who had to issue a clarification that he was not, in fact, a neo-Nazi, lost his election for Texas’ 23rd congressional district.

Alex Kolodin, an election denier who would’ve run Arizona’s elections as its secretary of state, lost. Same with Jim Marchant in Nevada, another election denier.

And perhaps most wonderfully of all, Vivek Ramaswamy, a generally bad dude who ran perhaps the most repugnant political ad since Willie Horton, lost too.

Lots of lunatics won. But a lot of the worst Republican candidates lost.

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What now?

It’s very 2000-and-late to quote Hamilton,12 but I’ve been thinking about this quote this morning: “Winning is easy, young man. Governing’s harder.”

Democrats were elected to address affordability, to address corruption, to improve democracy, and to make our lives better.

This is an opportunity to focus on substantive policy change that I’ll write about more in the coming weeks. And I’m encouraged by the fact that there will be dozens of members of the U.S. House and Senate who represent Republican areas and will need to cater to everyone, not just primary voters.

Democrats shouldn’t just launch into impeachments of Trump and fall back on culture wars. They didn’t work after the ’18 elections, and they didn’t work in ’24. Don’t take the bait.

Americans just elected scores of new Democratic legislators. Let’s not squander the opportunity.

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This is also complicated because a) there are a ton of smaller super PACs, and b) sometimes the objectives of a super PAC are opaque. But here’s a graph that illustrates some of the largest super PACs this cycle:

It’s complicated because certain advocacy groups have multiple super PACs they operate. But across the two largest sports gambling super PACs, they spent $145 million on this election, behind only the cryptocurrency super PACs that spent $182 million.

You can look up this data in more detail on the FEC website. Note that the accounting here can be weird, because there are often transfers that go from one super PAC to another. There’s likely some double-counting. But this should give you some directional sense of what’s what.

By the way: I think this chart is really interesting and I might write a stand-alone article about it at some point.

Election day is next week! This is how I’ll be voting in Missouri’s elections. If helpful, share this with other voters before election day!

The 2026 midterm elections are just eight days away.1

Without a high-profile statewide candidate election, the ballot measures are the marquee issues. The phrasing of ballot measures is often confusing—unfortunately, that’s by design—and with so much information and misinformation out there, I wanted to share how I’m voting and why.

Here’s how I’ll be voting in next week’s ballot measures:

• Amendment 3: Vote NO

• Amendment 6: Vote YES

• Amendment 7: Vote NO

• Amendment 8: Vote NO

• Proposition A: Vote NO

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I will also be voting YES to retain Judge Paul Wilson.

More on why those are my votes, and more on the other votes you’ll have, throughout this article.2

Amendment 3

The primary goal of Amendment 3 is to reinstate Missouri’s ban on abortion access. I’ve written about abortion access in the military before, but I’m also under no misapprehension that I’m going to change anyone’s mind on such a thorny and personal topic.

The thing I’ll focus on instead is the ballot candy in Amendment 3.3 The primary goal may be to ban abortion in the state, but the last bullet point has nothing to do with abortion. Instead, it’s about banning gender reassignment surgeries for minors.

What do they neglect to mention? Gender reassignment surgeries for minors are already illegal in Missouri.4

So what’s the impact of this ballot measure? It would change nothing about the access minors have to gender reassignment surgery. But Amendment 3 would reinstate a near-total ban on abortion in the state.

The yes-on-3 campaign knows it can’t win on its own merits, which is why their most common sign says, “ban trans surgeries for minors.”5

• 59% of Missourians think abortion should be legal within the first eight weeks of pregnancy,6 which is the phase of gestation when the majority of abortions are happening.7

• So instead they focus on a more popular issue, banning trans surgeries for minors, a ban that 72% of Missourians support.8

Missouri Republicans have openly admitted to including policies related to gender reassignment surgery because it’ll help Amendment 3 pass, despite the fact that it would change nothing about its legality in Missouri.

When they admit that they’re trying to trick us, we probably should listen to them.

I’m voting NO on Amendment 3.

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Amendment 6

When I write about Missouri, a pretty consistent theme is that the state legislature regularly tries to mess around with the ballot measure process:

We’ve seen two things happening time and again:

• The legislature rolling back laws that Missourians pass via ballot measure.

• Missouri’s Secretary of State consistently writes misleading ballot language, with the express goal of misleading voters. (This isn’t my opinion; Secretary of State Denny Hoskins has literally admitted to doing this in court.)

The status quo isn’t working, and elected officials are getting more creative in trying to mess around with the ballot measure process. Amendment 6 would meaningfully protect the ballot measure process:

1. It requires fair, neutral, and easy-to-understand ballot language.

2. It makes it significantly harder for the legislature to throw out legislation that Missourians pass at the ballot box.

3. It enshrines the right to initiate and pass ballot measures in the state constitution.

Future reforms depend on Amendment 6 passing.

I’m voting YES on Amendment 6.

Amendment 7

This would basically create a sovereign wealth fund for Missouri, with the goal of using it in about a century to get rid of all state taxes.

I have no problem with the concept of a sovereign wealth fund, and I think sovereign wealth funds in Alaska and Texas9 actually work pretty well. The problem is that the way that this amendment is structured is totally half-baked.10

The majority of sovereign wealth funds are funded by revenues from natural resources like oil and gas. That’s how it works in Alaska, Texas, and every other U.S. state with a sovereign wealth fund.

But it’s totally unclear how the so-called “Show-Me Prosperity Fund” would be funded. There’s just this abstract idea that some hypothetical surplus money could go into a sovereign wealth fund, at the same time that the state is already staring down some pretty substantial budget cuts.

I’m struggling to find a single example of anyone trying something like this anywhere in the world.11 The idea that Missouri can somehow squirrel away money now to avoid taxes in a century is completely unserious.

I’m voting NO on Amendment 7.

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Amendment 8

This would weaken counties’ power to remove sheriffs, instead consolidating that power with the attorney general. Given the last few attorneys general we’ve had and the ways they’ve been behaving, I’m not inclined to imbue that role with more power.

It would also require counties to elect their sheriffs, though most counties in the state already do that.

I’ll be honest—this is the least consequential statewide ballot measure in this election. But it’s still bad policy.

I’m voting NO on Amendment 8.

Proposition A

I already gave this one a standalone article, so I won’t belabor the point. Voting NO strikes down Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional maps. It’s a no-brainer.

I’m voting NO on Proposition A.

What about all the judges?

On my ballot, I’m being asked whether to retain 19 judges. These are bizarre elections: they very rarely result in any judge losing their position.12

This is a testament to the strength of the Missouri Plan, a nonpartisan means of selecting judges for appointment that’s been used in the state for 85 years and adopted (in whole or in part) by dozens of other states.

These elections are important; they’re also lower turnout, because people get tired of filling in the bubbles.13

The Missouri Bar recommends retaining every judge. I won’t opine on each of these, but I will opine on one: Supreme Court judge Paul Wilson. I don’t agree with him on everything, but over the past year, he’s consistently sided with voters and with democracy.

Despite immense pressure from statewide elected officials and from the federal government, he and a majority of the court stood up for fair ballot language, for fair courts, and for the state constitution.

I’m voting YES to retain Paul Wilson on the Supreme Court.

What about the local ballot measures?

There are too many to opine on—about 100 local and county ballot measures, by my count. If you’re looking for help, I’d refer to:

• Local news outlets

• Vote411 from the League of Women Voters

• Look up the endorsements for each, and rely on the endorsements from people and groups you trust

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We’re currently in the “endlessly inundated with ads” phase of the ’26 midterm elections, and everyone seems to be leaning into the attack that their opponent is pro-data center. Republicans are using it to attack Democrats; Democrats are using it to attack Republicans, sometimes in the same race;1 ballot measure campaigns are using the tactic to win over voters even when their campaign has literally nothing to do with data centers.2

Within a matter of months, support for building data centers has crumbled.

At the same time, setting aside the narrative, what I haven’t seen: what’s the real story with data centers? Where is public opinion on the mark, and where is public anger unjustified?3

I’m splitting this discussion across two articles. In this one, I’ll talk about public opinion, what’s driving those opinions, and the top reason Americans are concerned about data centers: their water use.

Article summary:

• The water that data centers use is a minuscule percentage of the country’s total water use: less than 1%, even broadly defined. But that undersells the impact they’re having.

• During the summer, in arid places, and in places without adequate regulation, the water data centers are using is a legitimate and growing problem.

• States and municipalities must update their laws to require more efficient technology and to charge more for data centers to use and consume water.

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Americans are concerned about data centers

Ordinarily, I’m perfectly comfortable using polling data from a year or two ago—certainly, from a few months ago—because while public opinion shifts on issues, it’s usually pretty slow.

That’s not the case with data centers. In a matter of months, public opinion on data centers has become considerably more negative—a change across every demographic and across both Republicans and Democrats.

For context, that’s higher than the percentage of Americans who are concerned about future terrorist attacks, crime, and unemployment.4 This is a real concern for people.

In the same poll, people who were concerned about the growth of data centers were asked why specifically they were concerned:

I’ll use this data as a way of defining people’s top six concerns with data centers.5 With data centers having become such a toxic political issue, I wanted to understand: how real are these issues? Where’s the narrative about data centers right, and where is it wrong?

In this article, I’m focusing just on the top concern that Americans have: how much water data centers use. In the next one, I’ll focus on the next five issues that worry us.

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1. Are data centers a strain on local water supplies?

Right now, the water that data centers use is a really, really small percentage of total water use in the United States. Data centers use about 38.5 billion gallons of water per year. The country as a whole uses 102.6 trillion—that’s 102,600 billion—gallons of freshwater per year.6 Data centers make up about 0.04% of the country’s total water use.

On the one hand, that’s nothing.7 On the other, it almost certainly undersells how much water data centers consume, and undersells the impact that data centers have on water supplies in the U.S.

Even still, for most of the United States, we’re a long way from water use becoming a substantial strain on our systems. But there are places where it is a real issue.

Water use ≠ water withdrawals ≠ water consumption

Before we dig into any of the data, there are some definitions that matter.

Water use is any water that we use: for households, for agriculture, for power, etc. Water withdrawals refer to any water removed from rivers, lakes, groundwater, etc. And water consumption is any water that isn’t returned to the immediate water environment, usually because it’s lost to evaporation or because it’s incorporated into products.8

I give you (and myself) this lesson in ecology because how much water is used generally matters less than how much water is consumed. It turns out that data centers are quite consumptive:

• According to Google disclosures, 78% of the water they use at their data centers is consumed.

• According to Meta disclosures, 72% of the water they use at their data centers is consumed.

This is very high! It’s on par with irrigation, where 72% of water use is consumptive. There are two points I’d add here for important context.

First, tech companies are promising more efficient water use at their data centers, and while they have some incentive to overpromise here, their incentives are generally aligned—saving water generally saves money—and I suspect this technology will get better over time.

Second, while the data centers themselves may be highly consumptive, power production generally isn’t. For power production, only about 4% of water use is consumptive, though that varies considerably based on the mode of power generation.9

That 0.04% estimate doesn’t include power generation

With that said, we should talk about the water that’s being used to generate the power that runs data centers.

Saying that data centers account for 0.04% of the country’s water use accounts only for direct water use, i.e., water used by the equipment on-site at data centers. But that discounts the water consumed by having to generate more energy—and that indirect water consumption is estimated to be as much as 12× more than any direct water consumption.10

Again, this varies a lot based on how the energy is being generated. But incremental power generation substantially increases the impact on water systems that data centers can have.

Water use is highly seasonal

Water use is not constant throughout the year. Namely, in most of the United States, water use is higher during the summer.11

That’s true at data centers too. Because it’s warmer and more water is needed for cooling, monthly water use at data centers is often much higher during the summer than the rest of the year. That coincides with periods—namely, the late summer and early fall—when American water levels are generally at their lowest.

So even if data centers use a low percentage of a region’s water on average, they can still seasonally strain water systems because of when their water usage is highest.

Water usage varies greatly across the United States

Something else we all know: the amount of water available—and the amount of water used—varies drastically by state. Arizona, for instance, has the seventh-most data centers in the United States, at a time when its water availability is already under incredible strain because of a sustained drought impacting the Colorado River.

In Arizona and elsewhere in the Mountain West, where this is an issue, data centers are a particular threat. That’s less true in other places where water availability is less of a pressing issue.

Left unregulated, data centers really can wreak havoc on local water

Back in 2006, Google opened a data center in The Dalles, Oregon, a city with 16,000 people about 90 minutes east of Portland. Google has since opened several more there, and its data centers use about 33% of the city’s water supply.12

This creates all sorts of issues for the city (and for wildlife in the region).

In Louisiana, Meta is building a data center in Richland Parish.13 When it opens in 2028, its daily water usage is projected to be comparable to the daily water usage for 17,000 people in the parish, which is notable because only 20,000 people live there.14

There are plenty of examples like this from across America.

What’s incorrect about the narrative about water use at data centers?

I already talked about the big thing: today, data centers are still using a tiny percentage of American water. For most of the country, it’d be wrong to say that this is a pressing, imminent threat.

If we were serious about addressing water use in the United States, we’d start with agriculture, not data centers. Agriculture is pretty horribly inefficient and consumes substantially more water than data centers will anytime soon.

Yes, agriculture is also more essential. But small reductions in agricultural water consumption would outweigh even substantial improvements in the efficiency of water use at data centers.

But that doesn’t mean that data centers shouldn’t be doing much more—especially since they’re poised to continue expanding at such a rapid pace.

Verdict: the water that data centers use is a tiny percentage of America’s total water use. Data centers don’t necessarily threaten the water supply in all of America, since they’re so localized. But if you live in an area with data centers, or if you live in an arid area, they can—and do—have a real and lasting impact on water systems.

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Regulating water use at data centers

Addressing water use is, famously, rather difficult to do. First of all, people—rightly—get anxious when anyone talks about increasing the rates for water use. But there are also very arcane rules that govern water use in much of the country, often a complicated weave of property rights and tribal sovereignty and other long-standing agreements that make reforms challenging.

But since data centers are important—more on that in a moment—something here will have to give. There are a few policy proposals that states are trying to address water use and water consumption from data centers:

• Oklahoma bans the use of groundwater for cooling systems in data centers without recirculating the water.

• Florida requires its data centers to use reclaimed water in some situations, rather than drawing water directly from the environment.

• California will require data center applicants to estimate their water use and outline their plans in the event of water scarcity or drought.

But the biggest change will have to come from the data centers themselves, which will have to find ways to use less water, to reduce their water consumption rate, or both. And that is likely only possible if the cost of water at data centers goes up substantially.

States and municipalities should charge data centers much more to use their water. That will create a financial incentive for tech companies to invest in better, more efficient systems that both use and consume less water.15

Local governments should also enter into agreements that give them more flexibility to allocate and reallocate water rights to data centers as necessary.

Chinese misinformation campaigns are part of the story here too

One thing that’s lost in the debate about data centers: they are important. They’re the engine for AI development, and AI is already an enormously important part of our economy. Does AI need to be properly regulated? Absolutely. But it’s here to stay, and if America cares about global competitiveness, we have to invest in AI.

I bring this up because China is intent on reducing American public support for data center construction. If America slows down its data center development, that creates a competitive advantage for China.

Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, among lots of others, have spoken about this. I’m generally not inclined to believe either of them, but in this case, they’re right. China and other American adversaries are fanning the flames.

We have to be responsible in the way that we’re building out data centers. But stopping them entirely is probably a mistake, and we should be aware that active campaigns are trying to drive more forceful public opposition.

More to come in Part 2.

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This is especially true for crop irrigation, where water use is way higher in the spring and summer than in the fall or winter:

This is intuitively obvious. But it’s still surprising to see the full extent to which this is true.

The idea that not only would there be legal weed, but also that you could buy it in clean, above-board retail shops is a crazy development from where the country was in 2000.2 A quarter-century ago, I truly think that only the hardcore stoners and hippies would’ve really believed that this was possible.

I’ve never had super hardened views on legalized pot.3 I voted against the marijuana legalization amendment in 2022, but that was more on technical grounds; I thought (and still think) that the amendment was poorly written.

Nonetheless, like the vast majority of Americans,4 I agree that no one should be put in jail for smoking weed. In any event, that’s a false narrative; there were never that many people in prison for true marijuana-specific offenses to begin with, even though recreational weed is still federally illegal.

But one thing that’s been lost in the (largely settled) debate about legalizing weed: today’s marijuana is nothing like the marijuana from a generation ago. Because of how marijuana has been grown and bred, today’s weed is more than 15× stronger than it was back in 1977, pre-legalization.

Arguments in favor of legalizing pot focus on a drug that isn’t particularly strong and isn’t particularly dangerous. As it gets stronger and more potent, that’s not obviously true anymore. Regulators need to catch up.

Article summary:

• Marijuana has become much more potent, even since states have legalized it.

• Yes, marijuana is addicting. Especially at high potencies, that’s a particular concern for teenagers and for daily users.

• The solution? The federal government should finally legalize it, because that would allow for better, more consistent regulation and consumer protection.

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Puff, the Magic Dragon

Let’s start with the math: weed is getting really, really powerful. This is a chart from the Drug Enforcement Administration:

Keep in mind that this is the average; there’s a lot of pot out there that’s even stronger. There are marijuana products where the THC content is as high as 90%, especially with newer offerings like vapes.

As more states move towards legalization—either full recreational legalization or medical legalization, which is incredibly easy to game—only a small number have limits on the potency of most marijuana products being sold.5 Because this is regulated at the state level, how this is communicated to consumers varies considerably.6

The other thing that’s alarming about this increase is that when people support legalization, as the nature of marijuana changes, it’s not obvious that they really know what they’re voting to legalize. A joint with low THC concentration is very different from a vape whose THC concentration might be 25× higher. Here’s what I mean:

• 47% of Americans ages 12+ have consumed marijuana at some point in their lifetime, but only 21% have done so in the past year.

• That leaves 26% of Americans—some 75 million people7—who have consumed marijuana, and who therefore think they understand what’s being sold at the local vape shop, without necessarily understanding how much more potent it’s become.

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We Be Burnin’

At the same time that marijuana is becoming way more potent, it’s also becoming way more common. A few years ago, for the first time ever, the number of people who consume marijuana every day surpassed the number who drink every day.8

I’ve brought this up before in the context of online sports gambling too: when you legalize something, more people are going to do it. Yes, plenty of people partake in all sorts of illegal activities, but a lot of people don’t really want to break the law.

That’s backed up by the data here: adults in states where marijuana is legal consume it 20% more frequently than in states where it’s not.9

The other evidence comes from global marijuana consumption. It turns out that North America is unusual in having legalized weed; in most of the world, it’s illegal. The consequences of that are borne out in the data, where North America’s rates of marijuana consumption are by far the highest in the world:

(We’re the) Kids in America

The common narrative these days, shared by professors and doctors alike, is that Gen Z doesn’t drink alcohol and they consume weed instead.10

That’s not really accurate.

It is true that teenagers are drinking way less than in the past. But unlike adults in America, kids are also consuming less marijuana. It’s just a slower rate of decline:

This data masks an alarming underlying trend, however. While the number of 12th graders consuming marijuana is down over the past 30 years, the number who consume marijuana every day is actually up:

This trend we’re seeing here—that a greater share of 12th graders are using every day—is not the case with alcohol. In the past 30 years, the number of 12th graders who drink every day has fallen 74%.11

This, combined with kids being exposed to higher-THC products at a younger age, seems concerning.

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Because I Got High

But so what if people are smoking more weed? The common narrative today is certainly that pot is healthier than alcohol. Isn’t this a good shift? After all, the pro-weed advocacy group NORML says that “marijuana is not addictive.”

This is, to use the technical term, horseshit.

For starters, marijuana use among teenagers is linked to poorer school performance, lower long-term socioeconomic attainment, and higher rates of psychosis.

It may well be the case that marijuana is less bad for you than alcohol, but the number of people with marijuana use disorders is in the tens of millions—higher than the number suffering other afflictions you might think would outrank problematic weed consumption.12

Finally, and this may be obvious, but studies very consistently find that the higher the THC concentration in people’s marijuana, the higher their rates of cannabis use disorder and psychosis.

As products become more and more potent, in part because more consumers have built up tolerances to lower-THC products, that’s a real issue.

Roll Me Up

I don’t think marijuana should be illegal. I think the opposite—it’s time for the federal government to legalize pot.

Why? Because right now, the federal government is caught in purgatory: they don’t really enforce laws on the books, but because it’s illegal, they’re effectively toothless in regulating marijuana consumption, marijuana growers, and marijuana distributors.

That’s clearly not working; marijuana use is being governed by patchwork and often inadequate state-level laws. Without intervention, these problems will only become more acute.

Americans everywhere should have consistent laws that govern marijuana use, which should include:

1. A cap on THC levels. Vapes that have 90% THC concentration are dangerous and addictive, especially for young adults. There’s no need for that level of concentration in marijuana products.

2. Tax rates based on THC rates, not just “is it marijuana or isn’t it.” Illinois does this now; most other states don’t.13 But a 3% THC joint and a 90% THC vape aren’t the same product, and they shouldn’t be treated as such.

3. Better education and information. Everyone understands that drinking a 12 oz. glass of Bud Light isn’t the same as drinking a 12 oz. glass of whiskey. There isn’t that awareness among the public about marijuana, even though THC levels from one product to another can vary even more drastically than that.

4. Clear and uniform labeling, so people know what they’re buying and consuming. This exists with alcohol products already.

5. Better research. Driving-while-high rates, for instance, are very likely going up. But research is surprisingly scant, and that makes it hard to really figure out prevalence and the right policy interventions. (Yes, driving while high is dangerous.)

As marijuana rapidly becomes more potent, Americans have inadvertently legalized what is effectively a new drug. Regulation—at the state level and at the federal level—needs to catch up.

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Here’s the actual chart, if you’re curious:

(Here’s newer data from SAMHSA.)

I originally had this in the body of the article, but I moved it here because there’s a lot of overlap between “drug use disorder” and “marijuana use disorder.” Namely, it seems like drug use disorder—at least in part—is a superset of marijuana use disorder, but it would appear that it’s incorrect just to subtract the marijuana users from drug users generally. (It may be the case, for example, that someone who uses marijuana and also a bunch of other drugs may have a generalized drug use disorder even though they don’t have a marijuana use disorder per se.)

Here’s a link to People Not Politicians, Richard von Glahn’s organization that is leading the effort to defeat Proposition A.

When Missouri politics is a national headline, it’s seldom anything good. But these past few weeks have been particularly bruising.

Yesterday, I spoke with Richard von Glahn. Over the past week, his case has been in front of the United States Supreme Court twice, in front of the Missouri Supreme Court three times, and in lower federal courts a few times just for good measure.2

Why? He was the plaintiff in a case that sought to uphold Missourians’ right to initiate a veto referendum—which, in this case, would suspend the newly gerrymandered map that the Missouri legislature passed last year pending a statewide vote.

So why all the drama? Well, there’s much more on that in our conversation.

Topics from my conversation with Richard von Glahn

• 0:00 – 3:00: Introduction, Richard’s background, and his involvement in democracy issues.

• 3:01 – 7:06: How Missouri’s Secretary of State tried to forcibly implement a new map—without any authority to do so.

• 7:07 – 15:39: A recap of last week’s news, when the whiplash of Missouri redistricting became national news. (Or, what happens when elected Republicans sue other elected Republicans—even when they’re all in cahoots.)

• 15:40 – 20:53: What happens when the legislature commits its energy to unpopular policies?

• 20:54 – 28:11: How do you get Republicans to vote against Proposition A?

• 28:12 – 30:44: If Proposition A fails, will the legislature try this gambit again?

• 30:45 – 37:22: Does this change the paradigm of redistricting in Missouri forever? What happens after the next census when Missouri is required to redraw its map?

• 37:23 – 41:30: Isn’t it weird to run primaries and general elections in different districts?

• 41:31 – 43:44: Besides voting no, what else can people do to defeat Proposition A?

We talk about a few different people, policies, and ballot measures; I’ve defined a bunch of them in the footnotes.3

One thing to keep in mind: this isn’t a ruling on the constitutionality of gerrymanders. Neither the Missouri Supreme Court nor the U.S. Supreme Court has changed its position on that. This was a very narrow ruling on the procedures of Missouri ballot measures, a ruling that was necessary because Secretary of State Denny Hoskins consistently refused to do his job.

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Remind me what all the gerrymandering fuss is about?

Last September, the Missouri legislature redrew its already gerrymandered congressional map. With the new map, Missouri would likely have elected seven Republicans and one Democrat (rather than six Republicans and two Democrats), something the legislature accomplished by splitting Kansas City across three different heavily Republican districts.

But Missouri allows its citizens to initiate what’s called a veto referendum: if enough signatures are gathered within 90 days, legislation is suspended pending a statewide vote.

People Not Politicians did just that, gathering 300,000 signatures statewide, well over the threshold needed to suspend the legislation and trigger a statewide vote.

With elected officials who cared to follow the law, that would’ve been that. But Hoskins, whose bad faith and incompetence I’ve written about before, decided to play a game of chicken. He figured that if he slow-rolled things enough—throwing out signatures with flimsy justification, refusing to certify the ballot measure, frivolously questioning its constitutionality—the Purcell principle would kick in and make it impossible for courts to intervene.

His willful delays and noncompliance created the absolute mess we’ve seen unfold over the last month. You may have followed the whiplash last week, as Missouri see-sawed from one congressional map to another just weeks before the election. If you want the full rundown, that’s in the footnotes.4

But the issue is now (almost certainly) settled: our congressional map in this election won’t have changed from 2024. Richard and I discussed what this means for the rule of law, Missouri, and gerrymandering.

A (constitutional) crisis of their own making

Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, also a Republican, both referred to this whole situation as a “constitutional crisis.”5

It’s an absurd claim. Hoskins spent months intentionally slowing things down; Hanaway publicly acknowledged that “delay works in our favor.” Then they all but ignored court orders until Hoskins was held in contempt.

This isn’t a constitutional crisis; in the end, the rule of law won, though we got there as chaotically as possible. But to the extent that you do consider this a constitutional crisis, they’re the only ones to blame.6

What we should worry about, though, is the willingness that elected officials have to subvert the law either by slow-rolling their obligations or by ignoring courts altogether.

I’ve been reading a few different articles lately about what this means heading into the midterm elections. Chaos, delay, and confusion are part of the strategy, and that’s frightening.

To quote Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City: “Usually in politics, we ask ourselves if someone’s actually being nefarious or incompetent. Here is just a magical mix of both.”

But for now, despite the best efforts of Missouri’s lawmakers, the rule of law held. Now it’s on us, as voters, to take the first step towards defeating gerrymandering by voting NO on Proposition A.

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By now, everyone seems to get that. The issue is that there isn’t one easy fix.

The causes of loneliness are global, but the solutions are manifold, local, disjointed, and often pretty ordinary. Policymakers at every level of government aren’t doing enough.

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Article summary:

• Americans, particularly men and younger people, are lonelier than they’ve ever been.

• Loneliness isn’t just an individual problem. Systemic loneliness means higher mortality rates and lower workforce productivity.

• We need policy solutions to chip away at systemic loneliness: addressing social media use, community engagement, and housing are all part of the answer.

The scale of loneliness is staggering

Certainly, people feel lonelier, and both men and women say they have fewer close friends than in the past.

That’s especially true among men. In 1990, 55% of men said that they had six or more close friends; in 2021, that fell to 27%, at the same time that the percentage of men who said they have no close friends increased by 5×.

The same is true of young people generally: people ages 18-29 are 4× likelier to say that they’re serially lonely relative to people who are 65+. Lower-income Americans are also much lonelier than wealthier ones.2

But this goes beyond how people are feeling. We can measure clear changes in societal norms and habits too:

• People are far likelier to live alone today than they were 50 years ago. 29% of Americans lived alone in 2024 versus 19% who lived alone in 1974.3

• From 2015 to 2025, the number of people who socialize every day fell by more than 20%,4 and the average time people spend socializing per day dropped at a similar rate.

• 26% of Americans eat all of their meals alone on any given day, a 50% increase from 2003.

• Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of Americans who regularly spend time with their neighbors was in steep decline, having fallen 34% between 1974 and 2018.5

As a society, we’re still living in the shadow of the pandemic. I don’t know if this is the primary way we’re living in that shadow: that may be students having fallen behind in school, or the intense polarization of society that the pandemic exacerbated. But it’s clearly one of the durable consequences.

COVID didn’t create loneliness; all of the data suggests it had been trending that way for decades. But it very obviously made things worse.

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Loneliness is a public health crisis

As I’ve written before, government’s role is to make people’s lives better. If people are serially feeling lonely, it’s worth trying to fix that on its own merits.

But this isn’t just a question of happiness; the problems run deeper than that.

• This is a workforce problem. Lonely workers miss 5.7 more days per year of work than non-lonely workers—more than a full work week. By that estimate, loneliness costs employers $154 billion per year. Loneliness is also associated with lower job performance, lower job satisfaction, and higher burnout. On the flip side, people with close social relationships at work produce better work and stay longer.6

• Loneliness is a health problem. Serial loneliness and lack of socialization reduce life expectancies. One longitudinal study found that lonely people live 5.4 fewer years than non-lonely people, which is staggeringly high.7

When people talk about this as a public health emergency, this is why.

What can policymakers do?

It’s not that the U.S. doesn’t recognize that this is a problem.8 At the federal,9 state,10 and local levels,11 the government says it’s working to address it.

But much of what these government commissions conclude is that more research is needed. Obviously, the data is important, but I don’t get the sense that there’s enough urgency here given the scale of this problem.

One challenge is that there isn’t one simple policy intervention that’s going to fix this. Another is that the way people socialize is guided far more by long-evolving norms than by any public policy; you can’t (nor should you) pass a law that requires people to hang out with their neighbors.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more we can be doing. Below are examples of policies that would start to address America’s loneliness crisis.

Limit social media for children

Social media isn’t uniformly responsible for loneliness, but it’s no accident that just as social media got really big around 2010, the percentage of 12th graders who spend time with their friends every day fell precipitously and loneliness started sharply rising among adolescents.

Social media is here to stay. But elected officials aren’t going far enough to protect minors, and teens under 16 shouldn’t be allowed to have social media accounts:

This is a short- and long-term policy solution. Short-term, kids will be less lonely; long-term, they’re more likely to develop the skills they need to build and maintain friendships.

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Invest in lasting, recurring community events

More often than not, I’m writing about policy at the federal level or at the state level, usually in Missouri. This policy intervention is at the local level—which is tricky, because local mayors and city councilors wouldn’t often include “addressing loneliness” in their mandate.

It should be.

There’s data on how team sports increase connectivity and reduce depression rates for men with mental health issues. But since 2012, the youth sports participation rate is down, modestly for girls and significantly for boys.12

That’s a real problem, especially when you consider that back in 2015, for 45% of teenagers, team sports and group activities were a big part of how they stayed connected to their closest friends.13

We’re moving the wrong way, and I don’t think it’s an accident that loneliness is climbing as youth sports participation falls.

This doesn’t just have to be sports, by the way. Local, affordable, community-based events—team sports or otherwise—empirically help people feel less lonely and make friends. This sort of social infrastructure needs to be seen as a public good.

Promote volunteering and service years

I’ve written before about the importance of volunteering, in part because it makes people less lonely. But the number of hours that Americans volunteer is in decline.14

Finding increased opportunities for national service outside of the military is a start.15 Growing AmeriCorps, which invests in young adults and in the United States, is one such example. These programs help with the transition from high school to adulthood, particularly for people who don’t go to four-year college.

These interventions are critical for the so-called disconnected adults, people who are neither employed nor in school. They make up 16% of 18-to-24-year-olds, a huge number when you consider that every year that they aren’t working or aren’t in school, they become lonelier and much less employable.

We should be growing these programs with disconnected adults in mind specifically.

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Design housing with the goal of addressing loneliness

One of the ideas I find most intriguing: changing the regulations, guidelines, and support for housing with the specific goal of promoting community.

That takes a few forms, which include but aren’t limited to:

• Change the design of housing, particularly things like student housing and senior living facilities, with building community in mind.

• Offer support, faster permitting, etc. to housing developments that build out larger shared amenities and services.

I’m not pollyannaish here; WeWork’s long-abandoned co-living spaces didn’t fix American loneliness. Having a shared kitchen or park doesn’t automatically create community.

But design choices matter in housing: just look at how disastrous Pruitt–Igoe was in St. Louis, or how successful the Fuggerei has been in Germany for centuries. There’s surprisingly robust research on the design choices that encourage socialization and reduce loneliness, namely around how common spaces are designed and the ways in which people are encouraged to cross paths.

People are spending less time with their neighbors, as I mentioned, and while not every neighbor is worth spending time with,16 it’s a fairly logical group from which to build community.

Policy helps, but the largest issues are cultural

Even if all of this is implemented overnight, it won’t fix our loneliness crisis. It’d help, but so much of what drives loneliness is cultural. Policy solutions only get you so far.

We should push for all of these changes and dozens of other good ideas that’d help address loneliness. But the best thing any of us can do is simple: be a good friend.

Stay in touch with people. Invite friends to meals. Get someone’s phone number if you think they’d be a cool new friend. Include people in your activities.

On any given day, the best and most direct way to address loneliness is to keep a few people from having meals alone.

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I originally wrote this for the American Institute for Boys and Men, an advocacy group that conducts nonpartisan research on issues that affect the well-being of boys and men across the United States. AIBM published it yesterday.

Since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports gambling in 2018, it’s been an all-out land grab for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other gambling platforms: to push for state-by-state legalization, to acquire customers, and to make gambling an integral part of watching sports.

By almost every measure, they’ve succeeded. State-licensed sports gambling is legal in 39 states; it’s legal online in 27 states.1 But as the American Institute for Boys and Men has written about extensively,2 this has had profound social consequences:

• When states legalize online betting, bankruptcy rates rise as much as 30%.3 One study found that for every dollar bet on sports, investment contributions fall by 99¢.4

• When states legalize online betting, alcohol consumption goes up, calls to gambling helplines go up, child maltreatment goes up, and food insecurity goes up. Problem gamblers are much likelier to have suicidal tendencies.

• Projected state tax revenues from online gambling have been far lower than what was promised. When you factor in societal costs—higher bankruptcies, higher rates of substance abuse, more violent tendencies—states may be losing money.

When you look at young men, what we’re seeing is even more concerning. So-called “prediction markets” like Kalshi, which are largely unregulated and available to any American 18 or older, are really just sports gambling platforms in disguise. They’re exacerbating this problem.5

Most alarmingly of all, gambling apps, prediction markets, pseudo-gambling apps, freemium games, and more are all targeting boys under 21. These companies are creating a funnel that has young men habitually—and often problematically—gambling well before they should legally even be allowed to open an account.

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Boys under 21 can’t legally gamble, but they’re doing it anyway

Common Sense Media put out a terrific report on how boys under 18 are gambling. Gambling is pervasive, even among boys as young as 11.6

This isn’t inherently bad. I think most parents would be fine with their teenage boys playing a poker game at home with friends, or putting a few dollars into a March Madness pool. For lots of boys under 21, it really is just that.

But home poker games don’t blow up your phones with notifications, nor do they offer ACH withdrawal, nor are they available 24 hours per day.

Minors can access online casinos through offshore and unlicensed platforms, crypto casinos, or accounts belonging to parents and older siblings, all of which are common and easy workarounds. Consequently, even if it’s nominally illegal, young men—who are especially susceptible to gambling addiction—are getting themselves into serious trouble.7

There’s a lot of harrowing, well-researched reporting on boys getting themselves into serious debt before they turn 18. And of course, countless other stories are never told.

• “Teen gambling is turbocharged thanks to sports-betting and prediction markets. Parents often have no idea.” (MarketWatch)

• “Gamification and memes lure young people to sports wagering apps and prediction markets” (Associated Press)

• “‘Public health crisis’: Experts weigh the stakes of youth gambling in America” (ABC News)

• “Prediction markets have made betting easier than ever—and young men are paying the price” (Fortune)

• “Young man reveals how online gambling put him thousands in debt before age of 18” (ABC 7 NY)

These trends are likely to accelerate as prediction markets—which are available in every state, are less regulated, and have an age limit of 18 rather than 21—become more prevalent.

While we know that prediction markets can feed gambling addictions, we don’t know how many of their users are under 21. That’s because they’re not required to disclose who’s gambling on their platforms.

Despite requests from members of Congress, these companies have opted not to share that information.

Gambling ads reach—and target—boys under 21

Obviously, boys who are watching television are going to see the (ubiquitous) ads for FanDuel, DraftKings, Kalshi, and other platforms that are spending billions per year on advertising.8

That may not be ideal, but it’s hardly unique. Beer companies get to advertise on television, and that’s not meant to reach minors.

What’s more alarming is that boys are more likely to encounter gambling ads on platforms capable of targeting them directly (namely, YouTube and social media):

The content on social media can be relentless, and it seldom includes disclaimers about gambling addiction, which violates the gambling industry’s own guidelines.

FanDuel, DraftKings, and others have public positions about their commitment to promoting responsible gambling and preventing minors from gambling. In practice, they don’t operate that way.9

Their public comments on the topic are fairly explicit. Here are a few examples from investor presentations and earnings calls:

• Back in early 2021, FanDuel put together slides on “Attracting and Engaging Gen Z” and “Building a Product for Gen Z.” Keep in mind that at the time, the vast majority of Gen Z wasn’t of legal gambling age: approximately 20% of Gen Z was 21+, and approximately 40% was 18+.10

• FanDuel and DraftKings are actively thinking about how to make sure that young adults are in their pipeline. This question came up in a DraftKings earnings call earlier this year,11 and FanDuel last year announced the launch of FanDuel Predicts explicitly as “a new prediction market product which will include sports in states without access to regulated sports betting.” Prediction markets are 18+, not 21+.

• Super Group, a gambling company that trades on the NYSE, spoke about “a growing population of customers turning 18 and 21 every year” abroad as a demographic opportunity for the company.

Moreover, all of these companies are hiring brand ambassadors who are popular with people under 21. Take Pat McAfee, who just signed a sponsorship deal with DraftKings to replace his FanDuel sponsorship deal, which was worth up to $30 million per year. He has a large TikTok following, and his content is immensely popular among people under 18 and among people ages 18-21, who are exposed to all of his gambling content.12

Polymarket may be the most shameless, hiring brand ambassadors in fraternities and paying them to recruit new customers. College campuses have been particularly lucrative for prediction markets.

Believe it or not, these aren’t even the worst actors. Plenty of illegal casinos operate without proper disclosure, operate without licenses, and target minors.13 Ads for these casinos are nominally prohibited on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch, but they proliferate anyway, and teenagers have found themselves deep in debt well before they’re legally allowed to gamble.

What can be done?

As anyone who’s ever been a teenager on the internet can attest, it’s very easy to break the rules. And while some of that creativity is admirable—a fake moustache to get around AI age verification tools, for instance—minors can get themselves into serious trouble before they even turn 18, much less 21. Gambling companies have little interest in keeping them from seeing their ads and sponsored content.

What’s more, these companies use aggressive, predatory methods that aren’t legal elsewhere in the world to reach new customers. U.S. regulation hasn’t caught up.

Four policies that are obvious and urgent:

1. Regulate advertising for prediction markets. Right now, they’re basically unregulated. That’s a regulatory oversight at best, and they should be subject to the sorts of rules that other online casinos face.

2. Require more extensive disclosures. For prediction markets, how many 18-to-20-year-olds are using these platforms? How many minors are trying to create accounts? How much of their content on social media is being seen by minors?14

3. Limit how much young gamblers can wager per month. Flutter, an Ireland-based gambling company, limits gamblers under 25 to £500 per month. That should be enshrined in American regulation.

4. Crack down on illegal gambling. Crypto casinos and other unlicensed offshore casinos are operating in the U.S. without consequence. State and federal regulators must do better to enforce the laws already on the books.

This is a perpetual game of regulatory cat-and-mouse. Despite what they’ll tell you, gambling platforms are reliant on high-frequency problem gamblers, who drive much of the platforms’ profits. They know that young men in particular are especially vulnerable—and, therefore, especially lucrative.

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Good data on what constitutes “serious trouble” is challenging to come by, but this chart tells an interesting story:

There is more than one way that gambling can be problematic. But using your parents’ credit cards without their knowledge is unquestionably problematic behavior—even if it doesn’t constitute a formal gambling addiction.

It is true that DSA members unseated incumbents in New York City and in Denver. A few other things are true:

1. The DSA is remarkably unpopular among the general public, and moving to the left to placate a loud but small part of the base is a sure-fire way to lose some otherwise winnable general elections.

2. Even if DSA members win every competitive primary they’re in for the rest of this cycle, they’d represent under 5% of the Democratic U.S. House caucus.

3. The media has done a terrible job covering trends in Democratic primaries, selectively extrapolating from a few elections in NYC.

4. Moderate Democrats are right to be worried about the direction of the party.

Being moderate isn’t inconsistent with being ambitious. Moderate Democrats should be pushing for more ambitious reforms; but to do that, you need to run on policies that are popular enough to get you elected, and popular enough to garner support from Republicans.

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No, the DSA isn’t taking over

This was The Wall Street Journal opinion page late last week, with stories about socialism highlighted in red.

It is true that no matter how the primaries play out over the next couple of months, the ranks of Democratic Socialists in the U.S. House will increase by multiples.

But those multiples are off of a very, very small base.

Right now, there are two members of the U.S. House who are DSA members. That will increase to at least six2 in the next election; it may increase a bit more than that.

Let’s assume that the DSA, somehow, gets to 10 members of the U.S. House next session.3 Even in that scenario, which isn’t particularly likely, DSA members will still make up less than 5% of the Democratic caucus,4 and 2.3% of the House as a whole.

There are 435 members of the U.S. House; in any given year, there’s no shortage of lunatics. A few more of them are adding a DSA label onto their lunacy, but that doesn’t make it a takeover worthy of wall-to-wall WSJ coverage.

The media’s coverage of the DSA wins has been abysmal

That the DSA is growing its ranks is, absolutely, a story.

But based on the day-after coverage, you’d think it was a seismic change in the composition of the party. That’s certainly how everyone in the press covered it: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian, the list goes on.

Part of this is that way too many reporters live in New York City, and as a result, NYC politics is chronically overcovered.5

Because the races below got a fraction of the media coverage, you may be unaware that on the very same night as the NYC primaries:

1. Adrian Boafo, the 32-year-old Maryland delegate,6 won his congressional primary against far more progressive candidates. He’s now running in a safe Democratic seat and will almost certainly win in November.

2. Ben McAdams, a former member of the centrist Blue Dogs in the U.S. House, handily won a primary for a safe Democratic seat against Bernie Sanders-endorsed state senator Nate Blouin.

3. Most importantly, less than an hour up the road from NYC,7 moderate Cait Conley won her primary against an Our Revolution-endorsed opponent in a swing seat held by Mike Lawler, a Republican.8

Why is this most important? Because if you care about Democrats actually winning back the House, then Democrats should nominate moderate candidates. DSA-aligned candidates do terribly in general elections.

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DSA nominees do really poorly in general elections

All of the elections I’ve written about above are primaries, not general elections. That’s notable because the DSA is immensely unpopular among American voters.

Here’s how candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats and Our Revolution, groups in the same ideological lane as the DSA, perform in general elections.9

For all that people talk about the polarization of politics, candidate quality still matters, and people are less likely to vote for candidates they see as extreme.10 That won’t matter in the races with DSA nominees because they’re all in extremely Democratic seats—even underperforming candidates won’t cost Democrats those elections.11

But there are vanishingly few competitive U.S. House races—only 9% of U.S. House races are competitive12—and if Democrats want to win back the House, the political alignment of candidates matters a great deal.

To date, Democrats have done a decent job of this, nominating more electable House candidates in Nebraska, Texas,13 and a few seats in Pennsylvania. That hasn’t been universally true—Democrats nominated a weaker candidate in a competitive Colorado U.S. House race—but the consistent media narrative isn’t exactly backed by what’s been happening outside of New York City.

There are still primaries to go—Cori Bush is running against Wesley Bell in Missouri-01 again,14 and the Democrats may very well nominate a particularly bad candidate for the Senate in Michigan.15

But no, the DSA hasn’t taken over the Democratic Party. With that said: if the party fails to distance itself from DSA impulses, it will cost Democrats at the ballot box, something we saw play out already in 2020.16

What should we learn from recent primaries?

Let me say three things here:

1. I don’t believe there is an equivalency between DSA leadership and MAGA leadership. I strenuously object to a lot of what the DSA says, does, and believes. But I don’t believe that there’s the same anti-democracy instinct, willingness to subvert laws, or self-dealing that’s evidently a Trump administration prerequisite.

2. There is truth in the horseshoe theory of politics, that the far left and far right are uncomfortably close on certain policy issues. That’s particularly evident in the MAHA movement, as an example.

3. I do think this is a precarious moment in politics, because politics is reactionary.

We’re living through an antiestablishment moment that’s accelerating, and it’s clear that everyone across the ideological spectrum thinks that our institutions are broken.

Moderates too often come across as incrementalists at a time when people want bigger change. That doesn’t have to be the case.

There are a lot of major reforms—infrastructure, housing costs, education, AI and workforce displacement—where moderate Democrats at the state and federal level are well positioned to lead. For any criticism it’s faced, the Abundance movement is a pretty good example of this.

The goal of government is to help people and make their lives better. DOGE and the MAGA movement have spectacularly failed to do that.17 I’m not casting them as equivalents, but DSA electeds and electeds-to-be are also unserious legislators.

Bernie Sanders is famously ineffective; over 35 years in Congress, he’s been the lead sponsor of only three standalone bills that have passed—two of which renamed post offices. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, the two DSA incumbents, have passed zero laws as lead sponsors, albeit in a shorter period of time.

That leaves it to the serious legislators—often the people winning in the toughest races with the broadest appeal—to get things done.

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This is true of Republicans also:

Many people will vote for someone even if they don’t like them, but not everyone. Bad candidates cost Republicans too.

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I recently wrote about Missouri’s brazen power grab to curtail the right that Missourians have to propose and pass constitutional amendments via ballot measures:

In August, the Missouri legislature is asking voters to make it functionally impossible to pass constitutional amendments proposed directly by its citizens. How?

• Currently, citizen-initiated constitutional amendments pass if they win a majority of votes.

• Under the proposed new scheme, citizen-initiated amendments would only pass if they win a majority in all of the state’s congressional districts.

There are a few things that are particularly absurd about this proposal:

1. It only applies to citizen-initiated amendments. The legislature also has the right to refer amendments, and these rules wouldn’t apply to them. The legislature is weakening the power of voters while preserving its own power.

2. Missouri is aggressively gerrymandered, which means that the congressional districts aren’t at all reflective of the state’s communities.

3. “As few as 5% of voters could defeat initiative petitions” under this new scheme.

This proposed change is pretty technical, but it’s seismic in its impact.

The ballot measure process, as I’ve written about, is hardly perfect. But Amendment 4 would functionally end the right that citizens have to initiate and pass ballot measures, which for more than a century has been a critical check on our state legislature.1

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Why the ballot measure process is important

Flawed though it may be, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that citizen-initiated constitutional amendments have radically changed the state for the better. Here are a few, wide-ranging examples of what voters have accomplished with ballot measures over the last century.

• 1924: The state’s highway system was funded, in large measure, by an amendment initiated and passed by citizens.

• 1936: Voters adopted a plan to create the nonpartisan Missouri Conservation Commission that manages the state’s hunting and fishing licenses, wildlife, and conservation policies. Before this amendment passed, jobs managing the state’s wildlife were given out as political patronage to people who had no experience at all, and as a result, “fish and wildlife in Missouri were in calamitous decline” until this amendment was adopted.2

• 1940: Voters adopted a nonpartisan process for selecting judges so successful that other states later adopted what’s now known as the “Missouri Plan.”3

• 1974: Voters approved campaign finance reforms that included disclosing donors and limiting contributions.4

• 1992: A voter-initiated amendment created term limits for elected officials in Jefferson City.

• 2020: Voters expanded Medicaid eligibility, and as a result, 146,000 Missourians who previously lacked insurance are now covered—a change that results in more financial security and better health outcomes across the state.

It’s also a reminder: these aren’t partisan issues.5 There’s a tendency to focus on recent partisan victories—abortion access, legalized marijuana, etc.—but the examples above are just a few of the lasting, nonpartisan policy wins that either:

1. Limited legislative power and/or corruption; or

2. Went around the legislature when it wasn’t doing its job.

That’s really important. And if Amendment 4 passes, these checks go away.

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Amendment 4 would end citizen-initiated amendments

If the system worked the way it should, voters would have their say in policymaking by electing representatives in Jefferson City.

In practice, because of gerrymandering, gridlock, personal incentives, primary dynamics, and more, elected officials aren’t always that good at representing our interests. That’s especially true in Missouri, where legislators are objectively getting worse at legislating.

The ballot measure process is one way that we hold elected officials accountable. But if Amendment 4 passes, we lose that check on legislative power.

Yes, the Missouri legislature has found ways to slow down or stop the policies that voters have enacted. But this is much more extreme. The legislature is tired of fighting back against everything that voters pass; why not make it impossible for voters to pass amendments altogether?6

Congressional districts don’t represent Missourians

What Amendment 4 supporters claim is that this change requires constitutional amendments to have broad buy-in from across the state. Perhaps that would be true if congressional districts were drawn in a fair, representative way.

But they aren’t. Missouri is a Republican state, with Trump having won 58.5% of the vote. But Republicans don’t control that proportion of U.S. House seats; by November, they’ll likely control 87.5% of the U.S. House seats, and it’s not inconceivable to think that it’ll go to 100% by the ’28 elections.7

What does all of this mean in practice? Under Amendment 4, every congressional district has veto power. Even if a majority of the state votes in favor, and even if six of the seven Republican districts in the state vote in favor, a citizen-initiated ballot measure will still fail. That’s bad for everyone—Democrats and independents, obviously, but also for Republicans, whose proposed amendments would still face an insurmountable hurdle because of veto power from MO-01 or any Republican district.8

The structure the legislature is proposing via Amendment 4 puts a hat on a hat:

1. Forcing a ballot measure to pass in eight U.S. congressional districts is already an enormous, unreasonable burden that gives tiny pockets of Missourians functional veto power.

2. Because of how aggressively the state is gerrymandered, the already-slim chance of passing a citizen-initiated amendment becomes even slimmer, because voters in cities and suburbs have had their preferences diluted by partisan mapmakers.

Rules for thee, not for me

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of Amendment 4 is that it only applies to amendments initiated by voters; these constraints don’t apply to amendments referred by the legislature. They’re hamstringing our ability as Missourians to change the constitution, but they’re keeping the old rules for themselves.

This is, of course, on brand for Missouri, which has for years thrown sand in the gears on everything from nonpartisan redistricting to Medicaid expansion to abortion access despite all three being—empirically—policies that voters want.

Our state government does hypocrisy pretty well too. Governor Mike Kehoe has complained that funding to defeat Amendment 4 has come from “out-of-state special interests”—never mind that he’s doing literally the exact same thing for Amendment 5.

Rules for thee, not for me.

Hypocrisy is nothing new in politics. But Amendment 4 would be something new: something bad for voters and something that ends a critical check on legislative power.

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Here are three citizen-initiated constitutional amendments from the last three cycles. All had support from a majority of the state, and all would fail under Amendment 4, whose thresholds are impossibly high.

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Missouri’s election calendar is a bit unusual this year. For the first time since 2014, there are no marquee statewide candidate elections: no gubernatorial races and no U.S. Senate races.1

That means two things:

1. Because there aren’t marquee candidate elections, turnout will likely be low.

2. For most Missourians,2 the votes they cast on ballot measures will be their most consequential.

On the August 4 ballot, two ballot measures are the most alarming and most profoundly threaten the state:

• Amendment 4, which would functionally end the right that Missourians have to initiate legislation and constitutional amendments via ballot measure, a critical check on the legislature.

• Amendment 5, which would abolish the state’s income tax.

Missourians should vote “no” on both. In my next post, I’ll write more about Amendment 4, which is a pretty clear-cut and brazen power grab.

Amendment 5 is more nuanced. Lowering taxes is a worthy goal, but for most Missourians, Amendment 5 would drive their taxes up, not down.

What’s more: Missouri is far more reliant on its income tax revenue than most states, and the state has no cogent plan to replace the lost revenue. It would obliterate the state’s budget and require substantial cuts to infrastructure, public safety, and health. We risk reducing these investments to some of the lowest levels in the country.

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Amendment 5 is rushed, incomplete policy that would obliterate Missouri’s budget

Conceptually, I have no problem with Missouri trying to repeal its income tax. The problem is not the concept; the problem is the implementation.

The state legislature rushed the policy to the voters, and as a result, Missouri has absolutely no plan for how it’ll pay for its services.

To begin with, Missouri is unusually reliant on its income tax relative to other states. By eliminating its income tax, the state would forfeit more than 50% of its tax revenue.3

OK, so if Missouri is about to get rid of more than 50% of its tax revenue, what’s its plan to actually run the state? In short, there isn’t one.

Is Missouri slashing its budget in preparation? Nope. They’re doing the opposite. Missouri’s budget has ballooned in the last six years, and while some of that is attributable to inflation, even against that baseline, the state is spending far more out of its general fund than it did before the pandemic.4

The whole premise of the proposed constitutional amendment is, basically, “we’ll figure out how to deal with budget shortfalls if this thing passes.” Here’s how Amendment 5 would change the state constitution (emphasis added):

2. (1) Notwithstanding any provision of this constitution to the contrary, including subsection 1 of this section, for the purpose of reducing and eliminating the state individual income tax and reducing local tax rates, state and local sales and use taxes (or any similar transaction-based tax) may be expanded by legislation to impose taxes on transactions involving any goods and services.

Using sales taxes to backfill the revenue lost from abolishing the income tax is a ridiculous proposal. For context:

• Missouri collected $3.2 billion in sales tax revenue in FY2025, 24.0% of the state’s general revenue collections.

• Missouri collected $9.17 billion in individual income tax revenue in FY2025,5 68.3% of the state’s general revenue collections.6

What on earth is the plan here? Already, Missouri has the 12th-highest sales tax rate in the country. Economically, you can’t just go out and triple the sales tax rate; that’d devastate restaurants and retail businesses, whose sales would be hurt by what would amount to a 10%+ increase in prices.

For most Missourians, Amendment 5 will increase their taxes

In any event, it’s a political nonstarter. What legislator is going to support a plan to make Missouri the highest sales-tax state in the country? Not for nothing, sales taxes are regressive: while top earners spend less than 1% of their income on sales taxes, the bottom 20% of earners spend nearly 5%.7 As a result, for most Missourians—as many as 80%—Amendment 5 will result in their effective tax rate going up.

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To put this as bluntly as I can: Mike Kehoe and the state legislature have no idea what they’re doing with this proposal.

1. They’re slashing the vast majority of state tax revenues without starting to meaningfully cut the budget.

2. They’re trying to replace income tax revenue with sales and use taxes, which isn’t politically feasible and isn’t economically feasible.

3. Because Missouri has a constitutional mandate to balance the budget, they can’t just start running deficits.

It’s the definition of delusional, wishful thinking.

Already, Missouri’s government is underinvesting in the state. Amendment 5 would make things much worse.

By Missouri’s own definitions, 74% of the money spent from Missouri’s general revenue is “mandatory.”8 But even the so-called “discretionary” money in the state budget seems hardly discretionary: money to the Department of Transportation, Department of Public Safety, and Department of Corrections are all considered “discretionary” spending.9

Yes, Missouri does have its inefficiencies, and more serious policymakers would address government bloat throughout the state.

But Amendment 5 doesn’t pair responsible cuts in Missouri’s spending—cuts that certainly exist—with tax cuts. It’s simply saying that the state will surrender its largest source of revenue, and state legislators will have to figure out what to do with that.

First of all, it’ll be open season for Jefferson City lobbyists. Companies, industry groups, and organizations will want to make sure that their funding isn’t cut. Groups with the strongest connections to Jeff City legislators will come out ahead at the expense of the rest of the state.

There are lots of places where more government funding—or at least better government funding—would go a long way. There’s a lot that Missouri needs to address:

• 30% of Missouri’s school districts are down to four days per week.

• Missouri ranks among the worst states in the country when it comes to road condition and bridge condition.

• Missouri has the ninth-highest rate of drug use and 11th-lowest life expectancy of any state in the country.

• Missouri has a worse-than-average maternal death rate, and per state data, 77% of all pregnancy-related deaths were preventable.

• Missouri is 48th in average teacher salary.

I’m not saying that throwing money at these problems will immediately make them better. But Amendment 5 would almost certainly result in large cuts to the state budget, and these are the sorts of programs—designed to help children, the poor, and the not powerful—that will be the first ones on the chopping block.

No, tax cuts alone don’t magically guarantee growth

The argument that the Rex Sinquefield-funded proponents of Amendment 5 are making is that Missouri has to cut its income tax to keep from falling behind. Missouri Promise, the advocacy group in favor, has been running this ad, trying to hammer home that point.10

The ad is easy enough to understand: we’re in a race with other states, and we’re falling behind. But the whole premise is wrong. Getting rid of our income tax won’t suddenly give us Tennessee’s growth rate.11

All things held equal, it is better to be a state with lower taxes. But there are a million other things that factor into a state’s growth and prosperity. Educational attainment, for instance, is far more important in driving economic growth than tax policy.12 There are innumerable other factors that matter too: things that the government can impact (e.g., housing costs) and things that it cannot (e.g., culture, weather).13

Missouri should aspire to lower its income tax rate, to lower its tax rates across the board, and to get more out of the money that the state spends. But this is a sloppy, rushed effort that will result in the vast majority of Missourians dealing with higher taxes and a hamstrung government delivering worse services for its residents.

Kansas already tried this. It spectacularly failed.

Fourteen years ago, Kansas passed HB 2117, in what became known as the “Kansas experiment.”

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback reduced the state’s income tax, making a similar argument: cutting taxes would drive growth in the state that would outpace any necessary cuts to the state budget.

It was, by all measures, an unmitigated disaster. Here’s what happened:

Since the 2012 tax cut, however, Kansas’s economy has lagged behind neighboring states and its budget has been in tatters. Lawmakers were forced to make significant cuts in vital programs such as Medicaid, education, welfare, court funding, and infrastructure. [In 2017]—in the face of slow growth, two downgrades of Kansas’s bond ratings, and a budget shortfall of almost $900 million—the state’s Supreme Court mandated that Kansas increase education spending. And the Republican-led legislature reversed much of Brownback’s original tax cut.

Given the scale of the proposed budget cuts in Missouri, the impact on the state would be even more extreme. To use a quote misattributed to Albert Einstein, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

By this definition, Missourians would be insane to pass Amendment 5.

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3

The story is more complicated when you look at income tax as a percentage of general revenue:

General revenue includes non-tax money that the state gets: most notably transfers from the federal government, but also things like tuition to public universities. Even so, Missouri is still far more reliant on its income tax revenue than the average state.

It should also be noted that the data in this graph is from 2022, the last year I could readily find good information from the Tax Policy Center. While there have been some changes—New Hampshire, for instance, repealed its interest and dividends tax—the state-to-state story is substantively similar.

4

As above, because of federal spending, the chart above doesn’t encompass all government spending in Missouri. But even when we account for total government spending, including what comes from the U.S. government, it tells a similar story.

I’ve written extensively about gerrymandering before—not just because my own run for Congress ended in ’22 because of gerrymandering—and why it’s bad for everyone in America.

But what we’re experiencing now is much worse than anything in modern American history. Republicans will favorably redraw more seats than Democrats ahead of the ’26 midterm elections, though I still think Democrats will win the U.S. House.

The long-term prognosis concerns me much more: vanishingly few competitive seats, perpetual gerrymanders, and more extreme politics. All of this had me feeling quite pessimistic: what’s the point?

As some of you may know, Ray Hartmann—a longtime figure in St. Louis media and politics—died last month in a freak car accident.

I went to his funeral in the throes of some rather intense nihilism at all the gerrymandering and at the state of our politics, and I was reminded of something important: America is deeply flawed and imperfect, but cynicism gets us nowhere. It’s still worth fighting for what’s right.

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Article summary:

• Perpetual gerrymandering is here. It’s not obvious to me which party will “win,” but it is obvious that the American people will lose.

• Ending partisan gerrymandering is overwhelmingly popular. We’ve pulled off much more challenging democracy reforms before, and unlike changes in the past, fixing this only requires an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment.

Ray Hartmann was difficult, loud, and committed to justice

I didn’t know Ray particularly well, but we did have a lot in common.

Most notably, we both tried (and failed) to unseat Ann Wagner in Missouri-02. Missouri Democratic politics is a small world and we would run into each other periodically. When I ran for Congress, he was kind to me when he didn’t have to be, making intros and having me on his radio show a couple of times.

If variety is the spice of life, Ray was a Carolina Reaper.1 He was a speechwriter for Kit Bond; he ran two different publications, the Riverfront Times2 and St. Louis Magazine; he spent a few decades yelling on Donnybrook; he started a family around the age of 50 and had two kids; he went bankrupt; he ran for Congress; he had all sorts of (mis)adventures.

I’d known most of this before I went to the funeral. What I hadn’t known was that his mom, as a nine-year-old, left Nazi Germany with the support of the German Jewish Children’s Aid program. Ray’s aunt, grandmother, and grandfather were all murdered in Auschwitz. But his mom survived because a family in University City took her in.3

His family history is a testament to humanity’s capacity for evil, and also what America can be at its best.

Growing up with a mother whose family had been murdered instilled in Ray a desire to fight for justice. As every eulogist noted—including his children—he was an ideologue, unwilling to back down when he believed he was right. That’s how you end up running for Congress in a seat you know you’re going to lose.

Politics is full of people who flap in the wind to keep their jobs, to survive another election.4 Ray Hartmann ran for Congress because he truly cared. He really wanted to engage with voters; he really wanted to change people’s minds. Ray wasn’t upbeat, but insofar as he believed he could make things better, he was an optimist.

Here’s why I’m bringing this up: amidst all the attacks on our democracy, it’s hard to have that optimism.

Below, I’ll walk through where all of this gerrymandering is headed. But I’ll end on a positive note: change is possible. We’ve realized more difficult reforms before, including ones that were much more outlandish in the context of their time.

We have something to learn from Ray’s brand of hopefulness.

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Who cares about persuasion when you can change the ground rules?

Once you start to grapple with the scale of what’s happening right now, it’s easy to let the despair set in.

92% of U.S. House races are functionally decided in the primary. That number will likely go up after the ’26 elections, because more states will draw away swing districts and districts whose partisan lean they don’t like.

This redistricting stuff changes all the time—much more in the footnotes5—but there’s a chance that as many as 68% of the states that have the structural ability to gerrymander themselves do so.6 This is imprecise and subject to change, but it’s a fairly maximalist look at what could happen by the 2028 elections:

It’s the sort of thing that makes politics feel pointless; why bother with ideas or persuasion when we can just draw the districts we like?

The chart above undercounts Republican gains, because a lot of the swing seats here—in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—are still Republican-leaning, and are really only flippable with the best candidates and under the best conditions for Democrats.

There’s also a decent amount of guesswork; legislative negotiations can be black boxes, especially at the state level where there isn’t much local media coverage.

In any event, the scale of this is unsettling, and we’ve opened Pandora’s Box. Unless something changes, we’re barreling towards a universe where gerrymandering will happen every two years. Don’t like what happened in the last elections? Just tweak the lines; that’ll solve it.

My best guess, looking ahead to the 2028 elections, is that neither party will gain a huge edge. If anything, I can see a world where Democrats give themselves an edge in the House.

But this is all really, really bad. When the parties are truly competitive, they have to change and adapt. They have to meet voters where they are. The more we gerrymander, the more extreme parties become, and the more elected officials only have to worry about primary voters.

I’ve felt plenty nihilistic about all of this.

So with all of this happening, why bother?

Against almost impossible headwinds, extraordinary things are still possible. Women won the right to vote without even having the right to vote. So did Native Americans and African-Americans.7 When I was in high school, the idea that gay marriage would be legal was a pipe dream. Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage, passed in California in 2008, which is crazy to think about.8

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Ending gerrymandering is comparatively simple. It doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, merely an act of Congress. And unlike the changes above, it starts out from a much different baseline: an overwhelming majority of Americans of all stripes believe that partisan gerrymandering is bad.

Cynicism is easy. Optimism requires work. But in this case, it helps that the American people are in agreement.

The solution here will have to come at the federal level; when states act alone, it’s a race to the bottom. But we can fix this—perhaps not overnight, perhaps not with this Congress, but Americans have overcome much larger obstacles.

What makes this issue tricky is that it requires politicians to vote against their self-interest. Even then, when the groundswell is substantial enough, elected officials have voted against their self-interest before, for instance:

• Creating the right to citizen-initiated ballot measures.

• Passing the Seventeenth Amendment.

• Creating financial disclosures for members of Congress.

• Capping themselves with term limits.9

It doesn’t happen immediately, but elected officials are responsive to what voters want, however imperfectly.

And that’s the hope I carry with me from Ray’s memorial service. Hopeful that there is a way to make things better. Hopeful that there are candidates who still want to run for office to change minds and persuade people. And hopeful that there are people like Ray out there in the world: hard workers, loud critics, and contrarians, truly dedicated to what’s right.

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What I left out of that: housing. Housing is, by far, the largest expense for American families; it accounts for more than one-third of household spending.2 Over the past few decades, housing has become increasingly unaffordable and increasingly concentrated in the hands of seniors.

If policymakers are serious about helping younger Americans keep up, addressing rising housing costs is the most powerful thing that they can do.

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Article summary:

• Homeownership is less and less attainable for young people and lower-income people.

• Missouri’s proposed tax policies to address housing affordability will make things worse, not better.

• Immigration and tariff policies are driving up the cost of housing. We may be stuck with both until ’28, but policymakers have other options to reduce housing costs.

Housing is getting more expensive

The data backs up what all of us already know: housing has gotten much more expensive.

Since 1970, as far back as this measurement goes, inflation-adjusted residential property prices have gone up 2.6×.

The situation is much more acute for renters, and renters are already poorer to begin with: the median net worth for a homeowner is 38× more than the median net worth for a renter.3

A recent report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that a first-time homebuyer needs to be making at least $126,700 to afford the median American home, a dramatic increase from just five years ago, when a first-time homebuyer needed only $79,300.4 Only 33% of American households can afford to buy a median-priced home.

All of this paints a clear picture: housing is increasingly unaffordable and unattainable.

Younger people and lower-income people are hit hardest by this

A stat that blows me away:

• In 2007, the median homebuyer was born in 1968.

• In 2024, the median homebuyer was born in 1968.5

That’s nuts! Seventeen years on, the median cohort of homebuyers hasn’t budged. It’s an alarming lack of generational movement.

And even that doesn’t tell the full story.

In 2024, the most recent year for which there’s data, the average age of a householder6 was 52.2,7 but in lower-income homes, that average age is significantly higher.8

Homeownership is an extremely powerful path to building wealth. What this shows us is that the door to homeownership is available to fewer and fewer lower-income Americans, and we’re deepening wealth inequality in the U.S.

Housing has never been cheap, but in decades past, lower-income families were able to buy houses in a way that’s much less attainable today.

That isn’t limited to homeownership. Regardless of whether they own or rent, poor households spend significantly more (as a percentage of total annual spending) on housing than higher-income households do.9

There’s really only one easy way to afford a home in the U.S.: inherit it. In California, 18% of all property transfers last year were inheritances, and while that’s unusually high, 9% of all home transfers nationwide in 2025 were inheritances. That number is climbing fast.

But not everyone stands to inherit a house from their parents, and—to state the plainly obvious—rich people tend to inherit more money.10

What does all of this tell us? It’s not easy for even middle- and high-income people to afford homes, necessarily. Higher housing prices hit everyone. But for anyone young and lower income, it’s completely out of reach.

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What shouldn’t we do about this?

Well, let’s start with what not to do: property tax freezes are a bad idea.

Prop 13 in California, which passed in 1978, is uniquely bad policy. It drives up the cost of housing and makes it artificially expensive to move; its unique provisions protecting people who inherit properties are part of the reason California has such a high inherited property rate.

I’m bringing this up because of Senate Bill 3 in Missouri, which does something substantively similar. In the (low-turnout) municipal elections last month, 97 of the state’s counties11 voted on whether to take up the legislature’s offer to freeze or limit property tax increases.

This is bad policy. It risks creating many of the same issues in Missouri that exist in California: artificially depressed housing supply and higher housing costs, for starters.

If the goal is to make housing broadly affordable, this risks doing the exact opposite, particularly if you’re young and don’t already own a home.

What can we do about this?

Addressing housing affordability is tricky, because costs are driven by so many different factors, and because those factors vary so much between rural areas and cities (and from one city to another).

But two things that’d address housing costs right away:

1. Tariff reform. Last year, tariffs increased the cost of new home construction by $10,900.12 Who knows what the latest with tariffs is—it seems to change just about every week—but their impact on the cost of housing is real and lasting.

2. Immigration reform.

Among construction workers in America, 26.3% are immigrants—meaningfully higher than the 14.8% of residents in America who are immigrants. It’s even higher in certain construction specialties.

Of these immigrants, many are undocumented. In 2023, undocumented immigrants were 19% of the country’s construction workers.

Like it or not, the way that we’ve set up the system today, undocumented immigrants are a vital part of the nation’s construction economy. Indiscriminately deporting people without any plan for how we’re going to address the labor shortages is a problem for housing costs.13

In the wake of the California wildfires last year, Realtor.com—hardly a partisan voice—reported that homes were taking longer to rebuild because of ICE raids.14 Federal policy is having a real impact on our ability to build new housing.

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I don’t expect Congress to meaningfully address immigration anytime soon. But a temporary work visa for people to come to the U.S. and work construction jobs would alleviate these concerns—and it’d reduce incentives for people to come to the U.S. illegally.

Immigration and tariffs are intensely partisan; there are bipartisan policies in the works too. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act15 that’s currently meandering through Congress has strong support from both parties and a good shot of passing.

The Bipartisan Policy Center has a rundown of what’s in the bill, if you’re curious to read more. A good number of the provisions will help address housing affordability.

At the state level, there are other common-sense reforms that’d reduce housing costs: getting rid of parking minimums and changing zoning around ADUs, for instance.

Finally: throwing money at this is always a tempting, and politically easy, solution. It shouldn’t be the only solution, and the U.S. is already way too deep in debt, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss it as an option.

Setting aside my aversion to the name, Trump Accounts had potential, but their implementation was flawed: because parents have to opt in, and because of its structure, it heavily favors higher-income families over lower-income ones. But so-called baby bonds, done right, can reduce income inequality.

Something similar when it comes to housing—a tailored, targeted plan that’d help lower-income people buy homes—could make housing more attainable for more Americans. Moreover, it’s possible even at the state level.

The status quo isn’t working. Younger Americans are being left behind. Something has to change—and states can’t rely on a dysfunctional federal government to do much.

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Yes, it’s imperfect, but the government has a mandate to take care of society’s neediest. In spite of what DOGE would have to say, the goal of government isn’t profitability; the goal is to make people’s lives better.

Against that framing, Social Security has been an enormous success. When it began 90 years ago, seniors1 often faced homelessness and struggled to make ends meet.

America is much different today. Between healthcare and retirement, getting older remains expensive, but on the whole, seniors are much wealthier than they’ve ever been. Meanwhile, younger people are falling behind, less able to afford retirement, and less able to afford housing.

The paradigm of American need has changed. The federal government hasn’t caught up.

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Article summary:

• Social Security was, and is, an essential program. It’s also true that seniors have become substantially wealthier relative to the population since it was introduced.

• Meanwhile, younger and middle-aged Americans control much less wealth relative to their share of the U.S. population than was the case even a decade or two ago.

• Younger people in this country are increasingly unhappy, and we aren’t doing enough to help them.

Social Security is an enormously successful program

Before talking about the needs of this country’s under-65 cohort, we should first mention:

1. Taking care of the elderly is a societal mandate and something that a prosperous country should be doing.

2. Social Security is the most expensive federal program, by a lot. Set aside any issues that Social Security has, if its goal was to make sure seniors were taken care of after retirement age, it’s been wildly successful.

3. It’s also overwhelmingly popular: 79% of Americans say that Social Security benefits “should not be reduced in any way,”2 which is another part of the reason it’s so difficult to reform.

When Social Security was first introduced in 1935, it served a pressing societal need:

• 58% of people 65+ were living in poverty, vs. 41% of adults ages 18-64.

• About half of people 65+ were dependent, generally on children and other family but sometimes on charity.

• It’s tough to do an apples-to-apples comparison on homelessness, since it was understood and measured so differently 90 years ago than today. What is clear is that homelessness (as we’d now define it) was a much larger problem for seniors, who were often forced to live in almshouses or other homes for the needy. Today, of the 61.2 million people 65+ in the U.S., only about 42,000—well under 0.1%—are homeless. There’s always more work to do, but that’s a triumph.

The rest of this article will be spent focusing on under-investment in people who aren’t seniors. But it’s important to recognize that Social Security is an enormous historical success and, for all of its costs, still essential for seniors today—60% of seniors rely on the program for at least half of their income.

Retirees reap far more benefits from federal money than young people

This article from The Washington Post drew my attention last week.3

We will always need to spend more on seniors, per capita, than on younger people. But it’s worth noting that the wellbeing and fortunes of American seniors have dramatically improved, especially since Medicare was introduced in the 1960s.

Since then, Social Security and Medicare4 have become two of the largest federal expenses. Here’s what they look like against the overall federal budget:

• In 1970, seniors were 10% of the country’s population, and Social Security and Medicare made up 18.2% of the federal budget. That’s 1.87× their share of the U.S. population.

• The percentage of Americans who are 65+ is at an all-time high, but it’s still only 18%. Social Security and Medicare made up 36.5% of the federal budget last year. That’s 2.04× their share of the U.S. population.

Spending on seniors has gone up relative to their share of the U.S. population, and these modest changes add up fast when the combined budget of Social Security and Medicare is $2.5 trillion.5

What has changed much more dramatically: the wealth and welfare of seniors in this country vs. its younger people.

Younger people have less wealth and own less housing than at any time in recent American history. We’re spending relatively more money on seniors even as they’ve gotten substantially wealthier.

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Older people are becoming relatively wealthier, and younger people are falling behind

People over 70 hold 32% of the nation’s net worth. Even when you control for their growing share of the population, this is far more than over-70s held in 1989.

Meanwhile, the share for younger people is shrinking.6 18-to-54 year olds have fallen slightly as a percentage of the American population, but their share of the wealth has fallen dramatically:

This divide is even more stark when it comes to homeownership. This year, for the first time, Americans who are 70+ years old hold more real estate wealth than people 40-54 years old.

That is a dramatic change in who owns homes in the U.S. and an enormous decline in homeownership for middle-aged Americans, especially when you consider that homeownership is an extremely common path to building wealth in this country.7

Middle-aged people’s share of real estate wealth has dramatically fallen, whereas older people’s wealth has dramatically grown. The National Bureau of Economic Research captures this best. (Emphasis added.)

In 1983, the average wealth of American households headed by someone aged 75 or older was 5 percent greater than the national average; in 2022, it was 55 percent greater. Gains in owner-occupied housing and the stock market, and reduced mortgage debt, were key contributors.

To be clear, rising wealth among older people is not inherently a bad thing! Wealth creation is not zero-sum, and everyone has gotten wealthier over the past few decades.

What’s clear is that although seniors are no longer the most vulnerable in society, they still reap disproportionate benefits from federal spending. It’s worth understanding the political drivers behind that.

Seniors disproportionately decide elections

Part of the issue here is that young people don’t vote. To state the obvious: elected officials are in the business of winning elections. And so they’re going to craft policies that are appealing to their voters—who are, disproportionately, seniors.

After an uptick from 2016 to 2020, turnout among voters under 45 dropped precipitously in 2024. Meanwhile, the voting rate went up for people 65+ between 2020 and 2024.8

Even this doesn’t tell the full story. Because of gerrymandering, 92% of U.S. House races are functionally decided in primary elections.9 And voters in primaries are even older than voters in general elections: the median age of a primary voter is 59; in general elections, it’s 54.10

All of this creates a dynamic that gives elected officials a very strong incentive to cater to older voters. I worry that leaves younger Americans in the dust, especially in light of changing fortunes for the country’s seniors.

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America’s changing paradigm of need

Despite Social Security’s issues—namely, solvency—it is an important program for seniors in this country.

It’s also increasingly clear that seniors today are in a much stronger position than they’ve ever been. Adjusting for inflation, Baby Boomers control 2.3× more wealth than the Greatest Generation did at their age in the early ’80s.

Younger people aren’t keeping up, which has consequences for affordability, family planning,11 and quality of life. But as much as anything else, this stands out to me: “in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old,” according to the World Happiness Report.12

I’m not suggesting cuts to Social Security in favor of the young, and in any event, touching Social Security is the ultimate third rail of American politics, so it’s not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, it’s abundantly clear that the paradigm of American need has changed, and the federal government isn’t doing enough to help young people.

More to come in Part 2.

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3

The chart in this Washington Post article is a bit misleading, namely because education funding comes almost entirely from local and state governments. Regardless, what’s clear is that younger adults receive far less federal money, by their share of the population, than seniors:

(To be very precise: the Census data that I found was 25-64, but the data from the article was 26-64. So it’s very slightly off but not in a material way.)

At the time, newspapers would say—without a touch of irony—that it was “the greatest scandal in the nation’s history.”1 Even today, historians look back on it as “the greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics” prior to Watergate.

If Teapot Dome happened today, I’m not convinced anyone would even notice.

A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal wrote an exposé about an Emirati sheikh who secretly bought 49% of a Trump family cryptocurrency venture for $500 million.

What happened next? Two months after that deal, “the [Trump] administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

In a different era, this would’ve been an administration-defining scandal and Pulitzer Prize-worthy investigative reporting. But in this one, it was out of the news almost immediately.

There are countless stories like this, where Donald Trump and his family abuse their positions of power for personal gain. The scale of the Trump administration’s consistent corruption, self-dealing, and bad-faith governance is so vast that we’ve gotten used to it.

That doesn’t mean we should tolerate it.

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Article summary:

• The breadth of Trump’s corruption is so vast that it’s impossible to remember everything.

• In his second term, crypto has opened up a whole new channel to self-deal and grift. But Trump is running back a lot of the classics from his first term: old-school conflicts of interest, letting his family take advantage of his role, etc.

Let’s set aside all of the other scandals

Donald Trump is a bad, unqualified president for lots of reasons. His policy is terrible; he inspired an insurrection against the country; he’s been accused of rape and sexual assault by at least 28 women.

Hard though it may be, let’s set all of that aside for the moment.

Here’s what is relevant to this article:

• 73% of Americans see government corruption as a critical threat to the United States,2 and only 17% of Americans say that they trust the federal government.

• 80% of Americans say corruption among members of Congress is a problem, and 72% say corruption among U.S. presidents is a problem.

• “Corruption” is consistently a top-10 issue for American voters.

There’s a reason that insurgent campaigns—including Donald Trump’s, I’ll note—work. People don’t trust politicians.

But Trump has been the face of one of America’s two political parties for more than a decade. He’s the quintessence of a political insider. And yet, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, brazen corruption scandal after brazen corruption scandal doesn’t move the needle.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t chronicle it or call it out. His corruption—in its breadth, scale, consistency, and shamelessness—is breathtaking.

As I see it, his corruption falls into five main categories:

1. Old-school shakedowns, backed by the might of the presidency

2. Domestic conflicts of interest and pay-to-play schemes

3. Taking money from foreign governments, Constitutional restrictions be damned

4. Crypto, a new frontier of Trumpian grift

5. Corruption and self-dealing from the rest of his family

This list is hardly exhaustive, both because I don’t have the space and because lots of stuff surely isn’t being reported. But each of these stories is as bad as, or worse than, Teapot Dome. In a different era, any one of these might be disqualifying.3

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Old-school shakedowns, backed by the might of the presidency

• Nine days into Trump’s second term, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) paid Trump $25 million to settle a free speech lawsuit in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

• Elon Musk did something very similar, directing Twitter to pay Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit a few weeks into the second term.

• Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, paid Trump $24.5 million to settle the same basic lawsuit.

• Paramount paid Donald Trump $16 million (sound familiar?) to settle a lawsuit against 60 Minutes coverage that he didn’t like.

All of these lawsuits were frivolous. Each of these companies paid Trump directly to curry favor, or at least to avoid his ire.

Since then, white-shoe law firms across the country—Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher, Skadden, and others—paid tens of millions in settlements and pro bono legal work for Trump-aligned causes after the president issued executive orders designed to hamstring those firms.

And these shakedowns don’t even include the extortion of Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and other schools—as insane as those demands are, at least the money isn’t going to Trump directly.

Domestic conflicts of interest and pay-to-play schemes

• Trump uses the presidency to sell Trump-branded merchandise that lines his pockets: everything from shoes to guitars to hats to Bibles.

• Both during his campaign and since his second inauguration, Republican-aligned groups are hosting events at Trump-owned properties that move campaign cash to Trump and his family businesses.

• Matthew Moroun, the owner of the Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit and Canada, gave $1 million to MAGA Inc.4 in January. Very shortly thereafter, Trump threatened to shut down development of a competitive bridge that would damage Moroun’s business interests.

• The president charges $5 million for a one-on-one meeting, with no documentation for where that money is going. This isn’t a one-off thing.

• The presidential pardon process is often a shady business.5 But Trump takes the quid pro quo of pardons to a new level, handing out pardons to donors and turning million-dollar lobbying for pardons into a cottage industry.

Taking money from foreign governments, Constitutional restrictions be damned

Here’s your reminder that the Emoluments Clause is part of the U.S. Constitution:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

This was long understood to mean that officers of the U.S.—including, obviously, the president—could not accept payment from foreign nations.

I guess we’ve entirely given up enforcing that, but Trump takes this to new lows:

• Trump accepted a $400 million jet from the Qataris, which will serve as Air Force One during his presidency and become part of Trump’s presidential library afterward—which would allow him to use it for personal, post-presidency travel.

• Trump’s business is opening a $1.5 billion golf club and is building a $1 billion tower in Vietnam while Vietnam negotiated tariffs with the U.S. These projects got fast-tracked through all sorts of Vietnamese regulatory reviews, and sure enough, the U.S. lowered its tariffs against Vietnam not long thereafter.

• LIV Golf, the rival golf league to the PGA, is owned by the Saudi government and continues to host events at Trump golf courses around the U.S.6 Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and ally of Mohammed bin Salman, funds LIV. And given that his job is to advance Saudi interests, he knows exactly what he’s doing when he wears MAGA hats to LIV tournaments.7

There’s a lot more that could be included here, but I’m covering that in the “Crypto” and “Family” sections below.

Crypto, a new frontier of Trumpian grift

As I suspect you can tell, and as I’ve written before, I’m a crypto skeptic. But if you’re a believer in Bitcoin or Ethereum and its underlying economic value, that’s fine.

But you know what doesn’t even pretend to have any value? $TRUMP and $MELANIA, which are explicitly meme coins! It’s basically just gambling where the Trump family gets to take a cut, and it’s no surprise the two coins have lost almost all of their value.

Another term I’d use to describe meme coins? A pump and dump.

He’s fleecing the American people who go in on his so-called investments. It’s netted Trump—at least—$100 million. But it’s not the only crypto grift he has going:

• The news at the top of this article: an Emirati royal bought a major stake in Trump’s crypto company and got a sweetheart deal on high-end chips for AI processing.

• The crypto industry—to its credit, I guess—was savvy in how they approached Trump: namely, they knew that giving him a bunch of money would buy his loyalty. The crypto industry has become a reliable pool of donors, and sure enough, he has gone from saying that crypto was a “scam” to going all-in on it.

• Justin Sun, a crypto investor, put $75 million into Trump-owned businesses. Almost immediately thereafter, the administration dropped its civil fraud case against him.

• After Binance worked closely to support Trump-owned World Liberty Financial, Binance founder and convicted criminal Changpeng Zhao got a pardon.

• Crypto.com put about $1 billion into Trump’s social media company, a company whose revenues are all of $3.7 million. (As in, $0.0037 billion.) A terrible business decision; a great way to curry favor from a president for sale.

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Corruption and self-dealing from the rest of his family

You could almost have a section on every kid and every son-in-law.

• Most famously: Amazon paid $40 million for Melania, a shocking amount of money for a documentary. It went on to lose tens of millions, but that’s not why Jeff Bezos spent all of that money.

• 19-year-old Barron Trump has been mentioned as a possible board member for TikTok. Set aside that he’s entirely unqualified, there’s no one even close to that young who’s an S&P 500 board member.8

• Jared Kushner is up to something so bad that he’s the subject of a whistleblower complaint. The details have been withheld, but what we do know is that he’s taking billions from different Gulf states, including the Qatari sovereign wealth fund.

• Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, America’s princelings, trade on their family name and power extensively: they’re capitalizing on their dad’s crypto grift, they’re getting involved in public companies in what basically amounts to pump and dumps, they’re using their golf club companies to take stakes in defense technology companies9 that work with the government, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

• Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor for Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket. Those two are rival prediction markets and that’s a crazy conflict of interest in and of itself. But Kalshi and Polymarket keep him around because they’re completely unregulated sports gambling platforms, and now that he’s involved, the federal government has shockingly little interest in regulating them.

• Even Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, is getting in on the action, forging ties with different Saudi businessmen since marrying into the family.

To get ahead of any whataboutism: yes, Hunter Biden traded on his dad’s name too. He’s not a good dude. But there’s no parallel here; this is all so much more extensive than anything Hunter Biden even did.

Trump won’t ever face consequences

There are people in my orbit who think—or hope, maybe—that one day, Trump will face consequences for the brazen corruption.

He won’t. Weaseling his way out of legal trouble appears to be a superpower. But that doesn’t mean we should stop calling out the corruption as we see it.10

One of my all-time favorite articles is a 1999 New York Times piece by Paul Simon about Joe DiMaggio, who had died the day before. The two were bound by the famous lyrics of “Mrs. Robinson.”11

Simon, in his telling, meant DiMaggio’s reference in “Mrs. Robinson” as a metaphor: “I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply.” Writing the article in the throes of the Clinton impeachment trial, he longs for DiMaggio’s kind of heroism:

In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence.

Think about how far we’ve sunk since then—if only the scandals were run-of-the-mill Oval Office affairs. But the sentiment is right: we should aspire to a greater dignity and respect, now more than ever.

We have a tendency to look back through history with rose-colored glasses; our leaders have never been perfect. But we’ve come to tolerate what should be intolerable.

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First, some context: last year, the legislature referred an amendment to the voters that would make it functionally impossible1 for voter-initiated ballot measures2 to become part of the state constitution.

The legislature knows that this sort of thing wouldn’t be popular—North Dakota, Ohio, and others have tried this without success—so the legislature did what they’ve done before: they included some “ballot candy.”

What that means is that the legislature paired what it actually wanted to do—make it all but impossible for citizen-initiated ballot measures to pass—with some super popular policies to hide its true intentions and sneak a seismic change past unsuspecting voters. Confusion and deceit were the goals.

Here’s what the amendment originally said. You don’t even get to the important part until the fourth bullet:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

• Stop foreign nationals and foreign adversaries of the United States from providing funding to influence ballot measure elections, and allow criminal prosecution of violators;

• Punish initiative petition signature fraud as a crime;

• Require public hearings be held to get public comment before initiative petitions are placed on the ballot;

• Require a majority of voters in each congressional district to approve initiative petitions to amend the constitution; and

• Make available to each voter the full text of initiative petitions with their ballot?

Anyway, the good news: a judge in Missouri3 ruled that the legislature can’t do this, because they’re just restating existing law. The ruling makes it much likelier that voters will defeat this ballot measure, which would strip away a right that Missourians have had since 1908. But it’s a continuation of an alarming trend in Republican states all over the country:

1. Legislators are unwilling (or unable) to pass laws that voters want.

2. Voters, using the rights they have to initiate and pass ballot measures, make changes to their state laws and state constitutions.

3. Legislators—because they’re unhappy with the laws that are passed, uncompromising ideologues, and/or convinced they know what’s better for voters than the voters themselves do—try to strip those rights away, often dismissing the voters as misled or uninformed or confused.

There are lots of concurrent threats to democracy happening right now. We need to focus more on this one.

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A (brief) history of ballot measures and direct democracy

Most laws in this country get passed because they’re voted on by our elected legislators. Ballot measures, a type of direct democracy, allow voters to directly vote on specific policies, bypassing legislatures4 to enshrine things into law.

Ballot measures are not part of the U.S. Constitution or the federal government at all. That’s not a surprise; although the U.S. has (generally) gotten more small-d democratic over time,5 it’s still exceedingly difficult to amend the U.S. Constitution.

But on the state level, constitutions are much easier to amend. And for a variety of reasons—the Progressive movement of the early 1900s, the temperance movement, organized labor, corruption scandals—voters elected legislators who advanced direct democracy.6 Between 1898 and 1918, 26 states added some right to initiate and/or pass ballot measures, including Missouri.

Ballot measures are imperfect—more on that below—but they’re generally good. That’s especially true for issues like gerrymandering, where as I’ve written before, the incentives of legislators are structurally misaligned with what voters want.

But Republican governors and legislators don’t like what their voters are passing.7 And over the past few years, they’ve been trying hard to whittle away these rights or to strip them from voters entirely.

It’s the most concerted attack on ballot measures in more than a century.

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Republican states are rolling back these rights

At an alarming pace, elected Republicans are trying to make it harder—or impossible—to pass ballot measures. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of attempts in Republican states to make ballot measures harder:

• Arkansas: wholesale rejecting proposed amendments without the authority to do so (2024); rejecting petition signatures under murky circumstances (2024); allowing the legislature to repeal citizen-initiated amendments (2025).

• Florida: changing the rules to make signature gathering prohibitively difficult (2025).

• Idaho: Changing signature-gathering requirements such that it would be “nearly impossible to bring a ballot initiative or referendum forward” (2021).

• Missouri: Referring a constitutional amendment with biased language to repeal nonpartisan redistricting, one election after Missourians voted to end partisan gerrymandering (2020); giving a pro-abortion access ballot measure plainly misleading language (2023); in the subsequent election, referring an amendment to repeal abortion access, again with misleading language (2025); repealing sick leave protections that voters approved just months prior (2025); referring an amendment to repeal expanded Medicaid benefits approved by voters (2026); everything outlined at the beginning of the article.8

• Montana: Adding the highest-in-the-nation fees in order to start gathering petition signatures (2023); giving sweeping authority to the state attorney general to reject or rewrite ballot language (2023).

• North Dakota: Making it harder to pass amendments by increasing the signature threshold and requiring voters to approve ballot measures in successive elections (2024).

• Ohio: Drafting deceptive language for an abortion-access ballot measure (2023); requiring a 60% threshold to pass (rather than 50%) to make future amendments less likely (2023); drafting deceptive language for a nonpartisan redistricting ballot measure (2024).

• Oklahoma: Reducing the number of petition signatures that can come from high-population counties, which makes qualification meaningfully harder (2025).

• Utah: Delaying (for the better part of a decade) the rollout of nonpartisan redistricting approved by voters (2026).

Some of these are in effect; some died because voters shot them down; some were overturned by courts; some never made it to voters. But it paints a clear picture of what they’re trying.

When it comes to ballot measures, nothing is more absurd than Mississippi

Mississippians, in theory, have the right to propose and pass their own ballot measures. To qualify, petitioners need to gather signatures in at least five of the state’s Congressional districts.

The problem? Since 2001, Mississippi has only had four Congressional districts. In the other states, with proposed changes it’s still theoretically possible to qualify for the ballot. But not in Mississippi.

This absurdity went to the Mississippi Supreme Court, who said, basically, that they don’t have the power to change anything.9 That ruling was back in 2021. Mississippi’s legislature has had four chances (and counting) to fix this, but they’ve chosen not to.

Notwithstanding Mississippi, to date, most Republican efforts in other states haven’t succeeded, because voters don’t like giving up their own power. But Republican states are trying different tactics, and eventually—without proactive reforms—something will stick.

It’s worth noting: this is not a both sides issue. I have no problem calling out Democrats when they’re in the wrong.10 But the systematic whittling away of this right is overwhelmingly happening in Republican states.

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Direct democracy isn’t perfect. That doesn’t mean we should kill it

I’ve written—extensively—about how bad online sports gambling is for Missouri. But that was added to the state constitution via ballot measure, the same way that it was legalized in Colorado and the same way that sports gambling more generally was legalized in states like Arkansas and Maryland.11

Voters have passed plenty of other bad policies at the ballot.12 So why keep it?

1. It’s not like our legislatures (state or federal) have a track record of passing perfect laws.

2. Our legislatures aren’t exactly doing much. As I wrote last year, the Missouri legislature is passing fewer and fewer laws. Increasingly, it feels like some policy change has to come from voters.

3. It’s an important check on the power of state legislatures, especially given the intense gerrymandering that exists in state legislative districts. In the 2024 North Carolina House elections, for example, Democrats won 51% of the statewide vote but hold only 41% of the seats because of gerrymandering.13 Ballot measures are a safeguard against legislatures whose composition, because of gerrymandering, doesn’t align with the policies and values of its voters.

Ballot measures do need reform

Part of the reason that Amendment 2 passed in Missouri to legalize online sports gambling is that DraftKings and FanDuel each spent more than $20 million on the race, outspending the opposition by a 4.5-to-1 margin.

If you’re running for State House or State Senate in Missouri, your donors are capped at a $2,400 donation per election, and corporations cannot give money to your campaign. But those rules don’t apply to ballot measures; there is no limit on how much donors can give, and there are few rules on who’s allowed to give.

This isn’t unique to Missouri, by the way. Alaska, California, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming also have no contribution limits, and this isn’t even an exhaustive list.14

Missouri’s partisan Secretary of State is responsible for writing the ballot language that voters see,15 and that needs to change too. Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s nutty Secretary of State, is particularly shameless and egregious in the way that he approaches this duty.

In Missouri and other states, there are efforts underway to protect ballot measures and keep partisan actors from writing unfair or actively misleading ballot language. This, along with campaign contribution limits, are two sensible reforms that voters can (for now) pass via ballot measure.

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs that we need ballot measures to protect ballot measures.

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Democrats should be careful with how they talk about democracy issues

A few weeks ago, the U.S. House passed the SAVE Act, and it’s been a hot partisan issue since then. I object to the bill mostly because it addresses a made-up problem; voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.

Even if it were to pass, and prediction markets think that’s unlikely,16 it’s not totally obvious that Democrats would be hurt by it any more than Republicans.17 The other thing about the SAVE Act: picking this fight may not be a political winner for Democrats.

The bill is about more than just voter ID, but 84% of Americans support voter ID laws. If it gets framed as such, and I think it will, fighting this in the court of public opinion isn’t a winner.

But fighting against Republican states limiting the rights of voters? That’s a political winner. This one is pressing, urgent, and easy to understand. It’s a war worth waging.

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I’ve been putting that online with What They’re Reporting, an Instagram page that compares how they’re covering the news. It’s fascinating to look at this stuff side-by-side—follow the account if you’re interested.

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The last two weeks of news have been defined by two stories: Trump’s proposed acquisition of Greenland and the protests against ICE in Minneapolis, specifically how ICE agents have now killed two civilians.1

I often get asked some version of this question: “Republicans can see what’s going on with Greenland/ICE/whatever insane and chaotic thing is happening right now. Why aren’t they turning on Trump?”

The answer: Republicans aren’t seeing what’s going on.

Intellectually, everyone understands that there’s a divide between how Republican outlets versus mainstream ones cover the news. But when you look side-by-side, you get a sense for just how wide that divide really is.

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Article summary:

• The headlines you see every morning vary wildly depending on where you’re getting your news. The screenshots below are vivid examples of that.

• Fox News hardly covered Trump’s threats against Greenland; their coverage of the protests and killings in Minnesota has, to date, blamed chaos on the “far left.”

• It’s hard to spin local news—you’ll know if the potholes aren’t getting fixed. But it’s much easier to spin national news, because it’s not something we immediately see.

Republicans and Democrats have different top stories

Everyone knows this: Democrats and Republicans consume and trust different media sources.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been capturing what that concretely means. Here are screenshots of the top stories from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News2 taken around 8:30 a.m. on Monday, January 19.3

If you’re reading the NYT or the WSJ, the top story was about a president threatening to invade an ally over a petty personal slight.

Fox News wasn’t covering it at all. Their top story was about a “leftist mob,” and I don’t recall any Greenland news even being on their homepage that morning.

Now let’s take a look at how these three media outlets have been covering the ICE protests in Minneapolis and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Below is their coverage around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, January 25.

And here were the top stories on the NYT, the WSJ, and Fox News taken around 6:50 a.m. on Monday, January 26.

Unlike the story with Greenland, where Fox News coverage was largely absent, they are covering what’s happening in Minneapolis. But they’re taking a completely different angle. Where the NYT and the WSJ are covering the killing of a U.S. citizen, Fox News is focused entirely on “anti-ICE agitators” and “the far-left network that helped put Alex Pretti in harm’s way.”4

I’m not a newspaper editor. But from where I sit, Fox News is willfully missing the big picture. A U.S. President threatening to invade an ally is a much bigger story than protests at a church; the primary story in Minneapolis is the killing of a U.S. citizen, not what a former Vikings captain has to say on the topic.

This problem is even more acute on social media, by the way. But there’s no good way to capture that in three screenshots—the problem there is much more immense and much more diffuse.

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Americans trust the news that they’re consuming—and don’t trust news coming from the other side

It’s worth taking a closer look at precisely what this means.

Democrats are inclined to trust traditional news sources like newspapers and broadcast news. Republicans have very little trust in any of those institutions,5 and instead trust outlets like Fox News and Newsmax.6

We can quibble about the biases in the NYT or CNN newsrooms, which definitely exist, but they all aspire to, and work towards, nonpartisanship. Compare that to Fox News, which explicitly calls itself an “alternative to the left-of-center offerings of the news marketplace.” Or to Breitbart: “original reporting curated and written specifically for the new generation of independent and conservative thinkers.”7

So if you’re wondering why people seem so immovable in their political views, this is a huge part of the reason. You and I might be outraged by what’s happening with Greenland or what’s happening in Minneapolis, but if Fox News is your primary source of information, you may not be getting this information at all.

And even if you are exposed to the coverage from the WSJ, you’re not even inclined to believe or trust it.8

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It’s easier to spin national news than local news

Like a lot of the country, St. Louis was covered in snow last weekend. And at least where I live in St. Louis County, they did a pretty good job plowing the snow such that I could drive without too much issue on Monday.

During last year’s big snowstorm, that wasn’t the case in the city of St. Louis. (A reminder: St. Louis City and St. Louis County are distinct from one another.) The city was so bad about dealing with that storm that then-incumbent mayor Tishaura Jones had to apologize, and it may very well have cost her the election.9

In 1979, something similar happened in Chicago: mayor Michael Bilandic famously did such a bad job managing a blizzard in 1979 that he lost that year’s mayoral Democratic primary.

Why am I bringing this up? Because in local politics, it’s a lot harder to hide what’s going wrong. If the snow isn’t getting plowed, if the trash isn’t getting picked up, if there are potholes on the streets, if kids aren’t getting to school on time, messaging can only do so much. People on the ground know what’s happening.

But that’s not the case with national politics. When it comes to what’s happening with Greenland, at Davos, or in Minneapolis, if it weren’t on TV, in the media, or on social media, most of us wouldn’t know what’s going on. It may impact us long-term, but it doesn’t affect our day-to-day like a pothole does.

And so media coverage—or media spin, in the case of what we’re seeing from Fox News—matters a great deal more. And it’s hard to change people’s minds if everything that they know is coming from media and social media, rather than what they’re actually seeing and experiencing themselves.

No, not all hope is lost

In spite of all of this: people do get information outside of their bubble. People watch videos online with their own eyes. They talk to friends and colleagues, some of whom don’t agree with them and force them to reckon with their own opinions.10

And it means that some people, if slowly, do change their minds. Just look at how much polling has shifted towards Democrats ahead of the ’26 midterm elections.

But this process is slow; all of us, myself included, aren’t keen to admit that we’ve been wrong about something in the past. It takes a lot to get us to change our minds.

Hopefully, the stories of the past two weeks are enough to start breaking through.

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6

Traditional media outlets are, on the whole, more trusted than Republican-leaning outlets, in part because they’re more likely to have the trust of independents and in part because even Republicans don’t always trust Republican outlets. But the story is the chasm between Republican and Democratic trust in these news sources.

It was refreshing. It also meant that coming back was exhausting: invasions and indictments and ICE and Iran and immunizations; Greenland and gerrymanders and global warming.

Somehow, none of that is what frightens me the most right now.

I do political work with different Democratic-aligned causes, and what I’ve been seeing: the weaponization of the Presidency and the Department of Justice is having an immediate and meaningful impact on what people in politics are saying and doing.

Trump has forced people to reevaluate their political engagement, and in many cases, people are choosing to step back. He’s dramatically upped the stakes for people who choose to fight his agenda. Democratic volunteers and donors are looking over their shoulders. He’s made it harder to run for office.

That chills free speech and political expression—the bedrock of American society for 250 years. It’s maybe the most alarming thing happening in America today.

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Article summary:

• Fear—a fear of retribution from the federal government and/or a fear for personal safety—is forcing Democrats to reevaluate their political engagement.

• There is no sense that Republican elected officials are following the law, nor any sense that they’ll be punished for breaking the law.

• Many people who otherwise might run for office are scared off, fearing for their safety and for their family’s safety.

Among Democrats, there is a genuine fear of a vindictive Trump Presidency and Department of Justice

The most alarming thing that I’m seeing in Democratic politics: a lot of people are genuinely alarmed, and fearful, about the weaponization of our legal system.

To state the obvious: this is authoritarian, anti-democracy behavior. What’s happening to Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and Jerome Powell cannot and should not become the norm in the United States of America.

But it’s forcing Democrats to behave differently. What does this mean in practice? A few examples I’ve seen:

• More people in Democratic politics are hiding their work, hiding where they live, and scrubbing references on the internet to make it harder to figure out who they are and what they’re working on.

• Political donors are cutting back their giving, or they’re working to obfuscate their political giving.1 There is a fear that giving to the wrong causes or the wrong candidates will mobilize the Trump administration against the donor, their family, the companies they work for, etc.

• Almost everyone in politics uses Signal now,2 with messages that delete within a week. There’s a feeling that messages could be taken out of context and, among the more paranoid, a fear that messages could be leaked or hacked.

• Non-U.S. citizens who are in the country legally are cutting back their political speech and activity, for fear of being deported.

All of this is, tragically, justified. People are being threatened at home; Democratic political donors are being looked at with more scrutiny; private conversations are being used as a pretense for punishment; people are being deported for exercising their right to free speech.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi is in Trump’s crosshairs for not being aggressive enough in going after his enemies. That is frightening.

People who work in politics aren’t exactly sympathetic to the general public, but we can all agree: this is un-American. It’s chilling free speech and it’s chilling our right to political expression.

It’s not exactly that people think they’ll end up in prison, though the more paranoid do worry about that. But here’s the reality: if the might of the United States Presidency comes down on you, it’s incredibly time-consuming, difficult, expensive, and stressful to fight. That’s true regardless of who you are, how well connected you are, or how much money you have.

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There’s no faith in our elected officials and diminishing faith in our courts

Speaking of which: there is little sense that the legal system is doing its job. In recent polling data, faith in our justice system is at an all-time low, and Supreme Court approval ratings are at or near all-time lows.

Our courts are nominally nonpartisan, but that’s not how they actually work. Just look at how they’ve ruled on different lawsuits against the Trump administration:

But even deeper than that, there’s a real sense that our Republican elected officials aren’t bothering to do their jobs and are ignoring the law without consequence. Let’s use the proposed veto referendum of Missouri’s gerrymander as an example.3

• Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, has refused to accept nearly 100,000 petition signatures, something he has no right to do.

• Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, said that citizens don’t have a right to a veto referendum when it comes to redistricting—never mind that it’s literally been done before.

• Hoskins then wrote incredibly misleading, biased ballot language, with the active goal of confusing voters.

• On the fly, Hoskins and Hanaway are changing the rules for what happens now that enough signatures have been gathered for the veto referendum. (Ordinarily, the existing legislation is suspended; they’ve decided they can do whatever they want.)

I’ve never been a fan of Denny Hoskins. But the issue isn’t so much that he’s routinely and willfully breaking the law, though he’s doing plenty of that. It’s that he’s routinely and willfully breaking the law and he faces no consequences for doing so, because he’s in the good graces of the state and federal government.

All of this is to say: as Democrats, there’s a real sense that playing by the rules doesn’t work, because the Republicans on the other side of the table aren’t even bothering with the pretense of norms, laws, or the Constitution anymore.

It’s getting harder to recruit the best people to run for office

I’ve written before about how hard it is to run for office. So when I spent time last year recruiting people to run for different U.S. House seats, I did so knowing that it wouldn’t be for everyone.

I imagine that it’s always been challenging to run for office. But increasingly, taking that leap feels insane.

Let’s start with the big one: there’s a genuine, and justified, fear that you’re putting your life at risk, and you’re putting your family’s lives at risk. Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed last June by an assassin who had a list of 70 different “targets” in and around Democratic politics. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was politically motivated too.

It may be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: if you’re trying to get someone to run for political office, this looms incredibly large. (Most) people are trying to serve their communities; they’re not signing up to put their lives at risk.

Political assassinations are as old as politics themselves. So what feels different now? Two things:

1. People can communicate their thoughts (often unhinged, sometimes dangerous and threatening) directly to political candidates and elected officials via email and social media.4

2. We have a President who eagerly promotes conspiracy theories all the time; take what he’s saying about the assassination of Melissa Hortman as just one small example. It’s good that Republican state legislators in Minnesota are speaking out against this, but they do not have the megaphone that Trump has.

The risk and fear of violence, fueled by a President who encourages that violence, is making it even harder to get some of the best people to put their names on the ballot.

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We’re living in a moment of fear

I’m not a fatalist. America has survived other undemocratic moments like the one we’re living in now, and I have faith that we will again.

But I don’t take that as a given. It’s why I’m calling this out, because I haven’t seen many others talk about what’s happening.

The intimidation and fear coming from Trump and his DOJ is antithetical to everything America stands for. Free political expression has been the underpinning of our government and society since the Constitution was ratified.

There is no question that what Donald Trump and his administration are doing is chilling free expression and chilling political discourse. That’s intentional on their part. And it’s truly frightening.

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I flew into the St. Louis airport a few nights ago and was immediately hit with more sports gambling ads.1

Because I am extremely on-record acknowledging that online sports gambling is bad, I have friends sending me these sorts of ads all the time now.2 They’re inescapable.

But if you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, what you’ll notice: a recent groundswell of coverage on the negative impact that sports gambling is having on communities, especially on boys and young men.

Public opinion is finally shifting, and I’m optimistic that in a few years there may be an opportunity to limit the damage that companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are causing.

Here’s a roundup on what I’ve been reading on the topic.

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Americans are increasingly skeptical of online gambling and sports gambling

The Washington Post recently ran a poll that shows Americans’ growing concerns about sports gambling. In May 2022, 23% of Americans said states allowing people to bet on sports was “a bad thing.” As of earlier this month, that number has grown to 36%. (A plurality, 49%, say that it’s “neither good nor bad.”)

What’s interesting: every group measured increasingly thinks that sports gambling is bad, relative to what they believed in 2022.

What I find most notable is that the people most exposed to this—the gamblers themselves and sports fans generally—are some of the people who’ve moved the most on this issue in the last 3.5 years. Today, relative to 2022:

• 6.7× more sports bettors agree that legal sports gambling is a bad thing.

• 2.8× more devoted sports fans agree that it’s a bad thing.

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Other polls find something similar. A recent survey in Massachusetts finds that “56 percent of monthly gamblers in Massachusetts now believe that the harms of gambling outweigh the benefits.”

The Economist: “College campuses have become a front line in America’s sports-betting boom”

I’ll start with a few quotes from The Economist article:

• “The NCAA survey found that 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds engage in problematic sports gambling.” (Here’s the underlying data.) For additional context, in most states, it’s not even legal for 18-year-olds to gamble.3

• “At Pennsylvania State University, which has 64,000 undergraduate students, Stephanie Stama, an assistant director at the student psychological services centre, reports that ‘it is increasingly common for us to hear that students have lost a significant amount of money’ in sports betting and that it ‘is interfering with basic needs like eating and sleeping.’”

• “Timothy Fong, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles sees a similar pattern. Every one of his clients of late has been an 18-to-24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. The financial wreckage can be severe, too.”

Finally, the chart below is instructive. I was first turned onto the issue of sports gambling because, as a young (ish) man,4 I’ve seen people I know end up getting themselves in way too deep—and I’m confident there are people whose problem gambling I know nothing about. So it’s no surprise that young men increasingly know people who are problem gamblers:

Axios: “The high cost of the U.S. sports betting boom”

Three data points taken verbatim from this article, all of which I’ve spoken about before:

• In states with access to online gambling, bankruptcy rates rose 28% and debt collection amounts rose 8% — roughly two years after legalization, one paper found.

• Another study found that every dollar spent on sports betting shaved 99 cents off investments — meaning bettors are pulling from savings, not “fun money.”

• A third study tracked a 20% jump in mass-market alcohol consumption and a 75% spike in calls to helplines after legalization.

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Because it’s been a staggered legalization from one state to the next, we can more clearly see the impact in states where there’s gambling vs. states where there’s not.

In short: gambling addiction—because of illegal markets, crypto, and national ads—is up everywhere. But it’s way up in states where online gambling has been legalized:

The New York Times: “Inside the Dark and Predatory World of Crypto Casinos”

I’ve focused most of my writing and research on online sports gambling, but the problem is much bigger than that. Here’s a video recap of this NYT article that I think is really instructive:

In short: a lot of casinos use cryptocurrencies to operate illegally. They lure people (usually men, usually young, often under 18) in with celebrities and the promise of wealth, but people are finding themselves with addictions and debt before they’re legal adults.

The Wall Street Journal wrote something similar last week about the risks young men are taking by gambling on things like crypto and stock-market options trading.

Lawmakers are taking notice, but they’re (generally) too old to see the carnage first-hand

On both sides of the aisle, lawmakers are taking notice: Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Ron Johnson (WI) and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) are all on record calling for more regulation. Right here in Missouri, Josh Hawley has expressed plenty of skepticism on this in the past.5

But Congress is disproportionately old, which means that members of Congress are:

• Less likely to be problem gamblers themselves.

• Less likely to know someone who’s a problem gambler, online or otherwise.

What this means: it’s incumbent upon those of us who are most impacted, and those of us whose friends are most impacted, to keep speaking up.

It’s why I’m still writing about this, and why I will continue to do so.

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1

In fairness, it’s better than the “Are you happy to be home?” divorce lawyer ad that greets travelers on their way down the escalator to baggage claim in the Southwest terminal:

Ads for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other gambling platforms are inescapable everywhere these days, but that’s been especially true in Missouri over the last few months leading up to legalization.

I’ve argued for a long time that this will be bad for everyone. But it’s especially dangerous for our Armed Forces. Active-duty military personnel are already far more likely to have gambling addictions than the rest of the population.

Now, we’ve given them unfettered access to sports gambling whenever they want. This is bad for our active-duty military, bad for our veterans, and bad for our national defense.

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Article summary:

• The military is predominantly young and predominantly male—exactly the demographics of people most vulnerable to predatory gambling apps.

• “Investing” in cryptocurrencies is highly correlated with problem gambling, and our service members trade crypto at a much higher rate than the rest of the U.S.

• Active-duty military (and veterans) are alarmingly at risk for gambling addiction. We must ban online gambling from military bases before the problem gets worse.

The inescapable barrage of gambling ads

A few weeks ago, KMOV ran a good segment on the barrage of ads flooding Missouri’s airwaves in the lead-up to legalization earlier this week:

DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics Sportsbook, theScore Bet, and Circa are all running ads and offering promos to new customers. Not a dime has been gambled yet, and already they’ve spent a lot of money on this:

• Sports gambling advocates spent $46 million to pass Amendment 2.

• The companies above are spending tens of millions in ads to encourage new users in the state to sign up.2

• They’re offering all sorts of promotions: DraftKings and FanDuel are offering bet $5, get $300 promos; the other platforms are offering something similar. To paraphrase a friend, there’s not a drug dealer in the world offering a buy-one-get-60-free promo, which tells you just how addicting this stuff is.

• Just for good measure, they’re not just paying for ads on TV and social media. On Monday, I got an email from Marriott—yes, the hotel brand—encouraging me to sign up for BetMGM, which you can see in the footnotes if you’re curious.3

Men and young people are the most susceptible to gambling problems; young men are the most vulnerable of all. And basically no one makes money on this stuff: a study that looked at over 700,000 sports gamblers found that fewer than 5% made any money.

To state the obvious: the gambling platforms are spending all of this money because they expect to fleece Missourians, just like they’ve fleeced Americans everywhere else in the country. And that includes our military.

The military is alarmingly vulnerable to gambling addiction

There have been a bunch of articles lately talking about the risks that gambling, online or otherwise, creates for our Armed Forces:

• Wired: “The Big Money and High Cost of the US Military’s On-Base Slot Machines”

• The Wall Street Journal: “Top Gun Traders: Stock Bets and Crypto Culture Take Over the Military”

• The Guardian: “‘Gambling addiction on steroids’: fears of betting crisis at heart of US military”

• Task & Purpose: “Gambling addiction in the military may be going unnoticed, advocates warn”

It’s worth noting that our military, demographically, doesn’t look that much like the United States.4 You know who it looks a lot like? Sports gamblers and online gamblers.

Like gamblers, our Armed Forces are younger and more male than the general population—the two groups most vulnerable to the dangers of online gambling.5

It’s no surprise then that active-duty service members are 3× likelier than civilians to gamble online, or that service members are 2× likelier than the civilian population to have gambling problems.6

This is an enormous, and growing, crisis among our Armed Forces. And that makes it a crisis of national safety and defense.

Our Armed Forces are being exploited by these apps

As tough as this may be, set aside for a moment the risks of bankruptcy, addiction, domestic violence, and suicide—all of which are correlated with gambling online. Online gambling is eating up a lot of time that our service members should be spending on their work.

What proof do I have? As I noted above, online gambling platforms release very little data (obviously) about how much money and time people are throwing away. But we can look at how people are gambling on cryptocurrencies.

I’ve argued before that cryptocurrencies, and get-rich-quick investing generally, aren’t any different from gambling:

Here’s a quick look at the data to back up that claim:

• People who gamble are more likely to trade cryptocurrencies.

• Cryptocurrencies appeal far more to problem gamblers than to the general public.

• Crypto traders are—surprise!—generally young and generally male.

I bring this up because while most of what we know about online gambling on military bases is anecdotal, there’s growing data around how much cryptocurrency trading there is.

A recent WSJ article said that service members are, “trading tips on obscure cryptocurrencies from the decks of aircraft carriers.” Military bases have some of the highest rates of crypto trading anywhere in the country:

Given everything we know—that service members are far likelier to be problem gamblers and that cryptocurrency traders are far likelier to engage in problem gambling—it’s a safe bet that they aren’t just trading crypto tips from the decks of aircraft carriers. They’re almost certainly gambling too.

Gambling is a violation of Section 2-501 of the Joint Ethics Regulation (JER), which prohibits “gambling activities with Government equipment, on Government property, or while on duty.”

And even when they aren’t working, 30% of active-duty military personnel live on a base, and another 13% live in government-leased housing. By the letter of the JER, they shouldn’t ever be allowed to gamble at home.

But the new status quo, one that allows online gambling on base, leaves them more vulnerable to addiction than ever before.

Ban online gambling from military bases

People can see the impact that sports gambling is having on their friends and family, so it’s no surprise that a growing percentage of Americans agree that it’s bad for society.7

The sports gambling lobby has become incredibly powerful, and it won’t be easy to roll back sports gambling legalization efforts that have taken hold all over the country.

But one thing we can push for: a ban on online gambling and on sports gambling on military bases.

Of service members stationed in the U.S., 48% are in states where online sports gambling is legal.8 By gambling on base, they’re violating military policy. But much more importantly, it’s an activity to which they’re uniquely vulnerable.

That doesn’t just hurt our military. It hurts all of us.

By banning their apps from Fort Leonard Wood, Whiteman Air Force Base, and other installations around the state, voters and lawmakers in Missouri can protect our military, our service members, and our national security.

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Driving down I-64 yesterday, I saw at least a half-dozen sports gambling billboards, including this one right before the Tower Grove Ave. exit:

Sorry for the blurry image; it comes from my dash cam. It’s a DraftKings ad that reads “Provel and parlays that hit the spot.”

Can someone explain what on earth that means? Does DraftKings serve Provel somewhere? I get that Provel is a St. Louis thing, but does that have anything to do with parlays? As far as I know, Imo’s isn’t into sports gambling (yet?).

This seems like some AI-generated nonsense where someone in DraftKings marketing plugged “generate a billboard ad that combines sports gambling and St. Louis culture” into ChatGPT.

3

Here’s the ad, if you’re curious:

Marriott points in the U.S. are worth about 0.69¢ each, so this promo is worth about $34.50. (All you have to do is make a $5 bet!) So once again, it tells you how much they’re expecting to make off of you over time.

Everyone’s selling their soul on this issue.

Sign Missouri's petition for fair maps

In the months since Texas kicked off its gerrymander, it’s become clear that the Republicans probably overplayed their hand.

When I first wrote about this back in August, I predicted that when the dust settled, Republicans would probably net two House seats. But as the tit-for-tat gerrymanders have played out more, it’s become possible that the Democrats will actually gain seats, in large part because of how aggressive Democrats have been in pushing for state constitutional amendments.3

I supported California’s efforts to redraw its Congressional districts to counter what was happening in Texas, but I also called out that the whole fight around gerrymandering is really bad for Americans:

The American people lose out here. Why? More gerrymandering leads to fewer competitive races and fewer Americans whose votes really matter.

There are 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Of those 435, only 40 seats—just 9%!—are likely to be competitive. That means that 91% of us—including basically everyone in Missouri—votes in an election where the outcome is all but decided.

But amidst all of the gerrymanders, there’s an unusual bipartisan opportunity that may emerge: because of all the districts that have been redrawn, a lot of members of Congress are about to lose their jobs.

Untethered from regular pressures to win elections, they have a chance to come together and create a bipartisan coalition to fight gerrymandering. Why might this work? Because for once, doing the right thing is in their self-interest. And self-interest is the most powerful motivator in politics.

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Article summary:

• Gerrymandering is happening all over the U.S., even though it’s immensely unpopular among Republicans, independents, and Democrats.

• Because of gerrymandering, a lot of members of Congress are about to lose their jobs. They all have very strong personal incentives to push for nonpartisan redistricting.

• That group could push for meaningful changes. There’s nothing more impactful they could do with their last year in Congress.

Why gerrymandering happens

Gerrymandering is immensely unpopular. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican; people do not like it.

82% of Americans say that Congressional seats should be drawn by nonpartisan commissions. Overwhelming majorities of Republicans, independents, and Democrats agree that gerrymandering is a threat to democracy, and basically everyone agrees that it shouldn’t be legal for parties to gerrymander themselves to power.

For something so overwhelmingly unpopular, why does this keep happening? Because the people in power have the least incentive to change anything.

Sure, it’s what the American people want. But why would you vote yourself into a more difficult election? Why make election results more unpredictable? Why make it harder to elect people to share your agendas and policy goals?

Ballot measures to end gerrymandering in Colorado, Michigan, and Utah4 were successful because it’s something voters want. But when you leave those reforms in the hands of elected officials, they don’t happen, because no one in elected office wants to make their own life harder. And that’s why they haven’t gone anywhere at the federal level.

With the latest surprise mid-decade gerrymanders, there’s a new opportunity.

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The Coalition of Losers

(Or the Gang of the Gerrymandered. Whatever you prefer.5)

The New York Times says that the impact of the gerrymanders will be “roughly even.” What they mean is that when every state has maximally carved itself up, Republicans and Democrats won’t really have gained any partisan edge against one another.

But do you know who doesn’t feel like that impact is “roughly even”? California Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley.

Kiley represents a sprawling Congressional district that covers most of the California–Nevada border. He’s also just 40, young by political standards. I don’t know Kevin, but I’m guessing he has ambitions for higher office.6 Yes, that’s tricky as a Republican in California, but maybe he could climb into Republican House leadership one day.

So another Republican might vote like Kevin Kiley. But if you’re Kevin Kiley, you would very strongly prefer to be that Republican, versus another Republican from Texas who’s coming in to replace you.

In any event, because Californians passed Proposition 50 to gerrymander the state, he’ll likely be out of a job in 14 months.7 So will four of his colleagues from California and a bunch of other Republicans across the U.S. The same is true on the other side of the aisle; Democrats in Texas, Ohio, Missouri, and elsewhere could find themselves out of a job too.

Suddenly, we find ourselves with at least 19 members of Congress, and possibly more, who have a very strong incentive to push for nonpartisan redistricting, because it’s how they get to keep their job.

That’s our Coalition of Losers: the members of Congress who may not share a party or policy goals, but who are very much in the same boat in wanting to keep their jobs. Here’s that ever-evolving list.8

This group could come together to push for common-sense reforms around redistricting, and they have very little to lose. (What they have to gain: their jobs.) The people who stand to benefit from all of these gerrymanders are five Republicans in Texas and five Democrats in California, but they’re not in Congress yet.

Already, Kevin Kiley is making some noise that he’s been left for dead by Republican leadership:

“I did hear the Speaker [Mike Johnson] say something to that effect at a press conference, but then he also went and said, ‘Well I think Republicans are going to come out ahead in the redistricting across the country’ which I honestly did not appreciate,” Kiley said.

“I think this whole redistricting thing is terrible for the country, and you shouldn’t be celebrating whether your party is going to gain in one state or across the country or not, we shouldn’t be drawing lines in a partisan way,” Kiley said.

Let’s see if Kiley—and the others who only have another year left in Congress—want to put their money where their mouth is.

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Is a federal law for nonpartisan redistricting feasible?

Well, the status quo isn’t working, and I haven’t seen any better ideas.

I do think there’d be enough votes to bring this to a vote (through a discharge petition9) and pass it in the House. Why I’m confident:

• On the Democratic side: the For the People Act of 2021, which included national nonpartisan redistricting, was cosponsored by literally every Democrat in the House.

• On the Republican side: you don’t need many Republicans to join this bipartisan group. They’ve already been sold out by Republican leadership and have nothing to lose. (What they have to gain: support for a popular policy, and their jobs.)

From there, it’d go to the Senate for a vote. Senators have different personal incentives; there’s no redistricting in the Senate. Republicans would only play along if it really looks like they’re losing ground.

And in the long-shot scenario that it gets to the President for a signature, would Trump sign? Republicans would really have to be falling behind for him to get behind this.10

Winning doesn’t happen overnight

So, do I think this is likely to pass? No, not in the next few years. But here’s what I do think:

• Americans believe that there’s less bipartisanship than in the past, but Americans still want the parties to work together.

• A bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing for something that’s overwhelmingly popular like this does create political pressure on anyone running for office to take a position on gerrymandering.

• A reminder that public opinion isn’t fixed,11 and politicians do change their minds.

• Democrats and Republicans can work together on issues, especially when they’re overwhelmingly popular. The bill to increase the smoking age to 21 passed with bipartisan support. So did the bill that legalized gay marriage.

Most members of Congress leave little lasting legacy; most are just rubber-stamp votes for their party.

The irony of America’s Coalition of Losers is that, even though they’re about to be out of work, they have an opportunity few members of Congress truly have: to shape the public narrative, to move public opinion, and to change public policy for the better.

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Sign the anti-gerrymandering petition