> Doesn’t matter what they think about the economy at large in abstract terms;
It totally does. If they say what they care most about is the economy, but they interpret the economy through the lens of whether their political party is in power, then their actions will be radically different than a theoretically objective voter.
If voters say that their top concern is X, but they act like they are willing to compromise on X for the sake of Y, then we should interpret that as Y actually being their top priority.
I think you are misinterpreting what the voters mean by "economy." It refers to the incomes and expenses and economic opportunities of themselves and their family and friends. It does not mean macroeconomic metrics. I do not believe an individual no matter how dumb can be that easily fooled on those micro metrics; not in the short to medium term.
If your claim were true, the polls would show that Americans' view of the economy is broadly aligned and non-partisan: when inflation goes up, it goes up for everyone. But that's not what polls show. When people are asked about "the economy," the repeat what they've been told, not what they've experienced. Polls repeatedly show a strong partisan bias in evaluating the economy, inflation, and unemployment (as well as crime and other factors). Are you telling me that Republicans actually experience a different economy than Democrats, or should we just go with the obvious conclusion?
Yes, it might be very well be true that predominantly Republican population experience economy differently than the average Democrat population. They do different jobs, live in different geographic locations with varying density and urbanization and have different employment rates/seasonality. Inflation is not a single number and depending on what your life looks like may impact you differently.
P.S. nothing about your conclusion is obvious. Everything cited seems to be referring to one specific period (COVID/Biden era inflation) with no historical analysis, in which case the parties in charge had every attempt to portray their loss as "economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better" so I'll take the analyses with a grain of salt from clearly partisan hacks.
Okay, so you're going to go with the classic "I will disregard all evidence that I don't like by making unsubstantiated claims of bias".
It's not hard to find research that supports conclusions based on polling from different time periods. [1]
Fact is most people don't have enough data points in their personal lives to make any kind of conclusion about the state of the economy. They haven't gotten a raise in two years and their cousin Dale got laid off last week, but no one would extrapolate that to mean the economy is bad.
> They do different jobs, live in different geographic locations with varying density and urbanization
Yes, but they don't typically all swap locations with each other when a new administration takes power. Nevertheless their opinions do swap.
> economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better
> Dude, I literally linked to FEC contributions. "Unsubstantiated" my ass.
That's not evidence of bias, unless, you think that anyone who makes a political contribution is unable to perform accurate research or do their job. Would you casually dismiss the work of a cop or a professor just because they made a donation? If you find a flaw in the research method, let me know.
You're literally looking for any reason to justify your a priori decision to ignore research you don't like. That makes you the partisan hack, not the researcher.
It's great that you two were able to come to an understanding & all, but your agreement leads me to wonder if many voters choose to fixate on culture war issues in an attempt to distract from real quality of life problems that seem impossible to fix and thus just better to accept.
I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
I definitely appreciate your measurements, but I think your analysis is off.
The top & bottom quintiles don't cancel out, but rather support the same trend, which is that Republicans have more voting power per capita.
That said, I am surprised that the top & bottom quintiles are nearly balanced. I'll have to look up which bottom quintile states have Democratic senators.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
The existence of the Virginia Plan (the Large State Plan) and the New Jersey Plan (the Small State Plan) indicates that balancing the differing interests of high- and low- population states was a prominent concern of the founders. I think they would expect states to often align by population size since that very thing occurring at the convention led to the compromise written into the Constitution.
I have a hard time conceiving of matters that states would separate themselves on by population size other then proportional representation in Congress back then.
I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
>I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
Not so much, unless you consider Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont to be "frontier" states in 1787. Actual frontier states like Georgia were in favor of the Virginia Plan as they figured their population would grow soon enough and they could take advantage of their eventual large population (with slaves being counted as 3/5 of a person) in a "Virginia Plan" world.
The Connecticut Compromise[0][3] ended up in the Constitution as a reconciliation of the Virginia Plan[1][4] and the New Jersey Plan[2][5], with the larger states supporting the Virginia Plan and smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan.
The above is incredibly abridged and ignores much context. As such, I strongly recommend you read Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the US Constitution[7] (the result of the Connecticut Compromise) as well as the original Virginia and New Jersey plans, or at least the wikipedia pages I linked for a much better discourse on the topic.
[3] The current system. Which differs from the original only in direct election of Senators, rather than them being appointed by state legislatures[6].
[4] Proposed a bicameral legislature with both houses apportioned by population.
[5] Proposed a unicameral legislature with one vote per state.
China doesn't have a strong internal economy. They probably have a lot of saving that might be able to be translated into an internal economy, but they seem to have a cultural leaning towards frugalness: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/business/china-economy-co...
China has a massive energy & manufacturing base, which can easily translate into military power, but until they decide to transform into a war economy, they need trading partners to keep their citizens employed, which is already a struggle for their young adults who I guess don't want to work in factories.
That frugality is likely temporary. The Greatest Generation were frugal due to lessons learned during the Great Depression. That frugality was lost in a few decades. The corresponding event in China was the cultural revolution, but poverty lasted past that. It's been a few decades, and now the Chinese are famous for their love of luxury status products.
Your reply of "everyone is doing it" definitely could a logical answer to the question of "Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again?" instead of just a moral justification.
I would agree that Tesla's stock price is as high as it is because investors are betting that there are plenty of other suckers who will be convinced by Musk's unfounded claims.
I recall reading that when the costs of distribution (but not the costs of discoverability) are low, generally you end up with a power law sort of distribution of consumers to providers, where provider #1 has exponentially more market share than provider #2 and provider #2 has exponentially more market share than provider #3, #4, etc.
Examples of this are Windows/Mac, McDonalds/Burger King, Playstation/Xbox, Nvidia/?, AWS/Azure?, Android/iPhone, etc...
Basically, the majority of users all using the same dependency/platform/product is basic economics.
The culture changed. When I first worked there, I was encouraged to take calculated risks. When I did my second tour of duty, people were deathly afraid of bringing down services. It has been a while since my second tour of duty, but I don't think it's back to "Amazon is a place where builders can build".
Somewhat inevitable for any company as they get larger. Easy to move fast and break things when you have 1 user and no revenue. Very different story when much of US commerce runs you on.
For folks who came of age in the late 00's, seeing companies once thought of as disruptors and innovators become the old stalwarts post-pandemic/ZIRP has been quite an experience.
Maybe those who have been around longer have seen this before, but its the first time for me.
If you bring something down in a real way, you can forget about someone trusting you with a big project in the future. You basically need to switch orgs
Nah, I used to work for defense contractors, and worked with ex-military people, so...
Anyway, I actually loved my first time at AWS. Which is why I went back. My second stint wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't go back, unless they offered me a lot more than what I get paid, but that is unlikely.
I listened to the earnings call. I believe the question was mostly focused on why AWS has been so behind on AI. Jassy did flub the question quite badly and rambled on for a while. The press has mentioned the botched answer in a few articles recently.
They have been pushing me and company extremely hard to vet their various AI-related offerings. When we decide to look into whatever service it is, we come away underwhelmed. It seems like their biggest selling point so far is “we’ll give it to you free for several months”. Not great.
In fairness, that's been my experience with everyone except OpenAI and Anthropic where I only occasionally come out underwhelmed
Really I think AWS does a fairly poor job bringing new services to market and it takes a while for them to mature. They excel much more in the stability of their core/old services--especially the "serverless" variety like S3, SQS, Lambda, EC2-ish, RDS-ish (well, today notwithstanding)
I honestly feel bad for the folks at AWS whose job it is to sell this slop. I get AWS is in panic mode trying to catch up, but it’s just awful and frankly becoming quite exhausting and annoying for customers.
The comp might be decent but most folks I know that are still there say they’re pretty miserable and the environment is becoming toxic. A bit more pay only goes so far.
So basically China has the infrastructure & raw materials for properly utilizing AI & America doesn't.
I really wonder if America will wake up because China crushes us under their feet. I kind of doubt it.
We beat the USSR due to their style of government being absolutely terrible. China's form of authoritarianism has proven far more adaptable. Not to mention that America's governance is showing risks of sliding towards corrupt authoritarianism as well. If both forms of government suck from an idealistic perspective, then China's manufacturing, rare earth metals, growing naval capacity, experience in stealing IP, & energy infrastructure seem to give it the advantage.
The only thing that I think that America has going for it right now is possibly control of space through SpaceX.
It totally does. If they say what they care most about is the economy, but they interpret the economy through the lens of whether their political party is in power, then their actions will be radically different than a theoretically objective voter.
If voters say that their top concern is X, but they act like they are willing to compromise on X for the sake of Y, then we should interpret that as Y actually being their top priority.