Elliot Morris, the new boss at 538, has up a helpful discussion on the question of just what polls in March mean about the outcome of the November election. As you’d expect, they’re not terribly predictive. In fact, when Morris goes back through 538’s database, which goes back to the 1940s, they’re not really predictive at all and are frequently wildly off. You can read the piece for the examples. Of course that doesn’t mean they’re “wrong” necessarily. It just means they’re not predictive.

The big qualifier is that the big swings from earlier polls to final results have gone down over time. And the big driver of that is partisan polarization. The biggest example of a huge swing from March to November was Jimmy Carter being up by 14 points and then losing to Ronald Reagan by 10 points. Neither of those margins are remotely plausible today in a presidential general election. It just shows how many fewer voters are really up for grabs these days. The other factor which likely constrains movement in the polls, unique to this race, is the fact that the race is between, in effect, two incumbents. We literally know in advance what each man would be like as President.

There’s a good article in Haaretz today about the limits of U.S. sway over Israel with any kind of cut-off in U.S. weapons supplies. The piece is paywalled, so you can’t read it if you don’t have a subscription. But the gist covers a lot of ground we’ve discussed. Israel can make a number of the weapons itself, just not as quickly or cheaply. Most big-ticket items either aren’t being used in Gaza or don’t need to be replaced — aircraft, for instance. What Israel really needs are various munitions. But in the absence of those it might be forced to use bigger and more lethal bombs in Gaza. There’s even the risk that it might boomerang and strengthen Netanyahu at home.

So I was very interested to see what seemed yesterday to be a promised vivisection of, well, me, after my post last week about the collapse of programmatic advertising and how it’s affected the news business. That is the post that included the chart of rapidly declining programmatic ad revenues. Gawker alum Foster Kamer linked to a promised takedown from Ben Smith in which Kamer is quoted and calls on everyone to stop “losing their minds at the death of media” because it’s a “very dumb chart.” (That’s yours truly’s chart: cue to Josh rending his garments.) But when I looked at the Ben Smith column it basically just repeated the points I made in the original post. So having been promised that I would be flayed alive, it turned out that wasn’t the case at all. Total low-energy move basically. But the comments did raise a few other issues that I thought worth mentioning.

One of the big developments of the Trump years is the increasingly central role of a California outfit called the Claremont Institute as a kind of house think tank of Trumpism. If you haven’t had a chance yet to see our big exclusive from over the weekend (thank you, members!) you’ll want to get reading. Our Josh Kovensky got a trove of documents from the secret society planning and recruiting for a white, male, Christian government that will take over after the fall of the American “regime.” And a central player in that group is none other than the head of the Claremont Institute. Check our exclusive report out here.

I hope you have a chance to check out our new exclusive from TPM’s Josh Kovensky. Josh got access to a trove of documents from a secret society of right-wing Christian men who are on a crusade to build a Christian government-in-waiting for after the right achieves “regime change” in the United States, either through a civil war or a “national divorce.” The group goes by a fairly anodyne name, the Society for American Civic Renewal. But that belies the extremism of the program.

Of course you and your three weirdo pals can call yourself a secret society. And we’ve seen examples of militia groups or boogaloo boys saying some of the same things. What’s different here though is that these aren’t people on the fringe. They are people who present as respectable business leaders, academics, think tankers. Indeed, one of their number is the President of the Claremont Institute, which, in recent years, has functioned as a kind of brain trust of Trump campaign intellectuals. It’s fascinating, disturbing and important story and your memberships made it possible. You can read it here.

I thought this was a strong speech. Strong on a few different fronts. Biden got into it a few times with House Republicans which he and his advisors clearly wanted to happen. He also got some good applause lines and clippable moments where he called out things like Republicans killing the border bill. He hit a number of policy points where Biden’s policies are just much more popular than Republican ones. State of the Unions can play a big role because they allow a President to make a key point that maybe just hasn’t broken through before. Here everyone’s watching. So a President can force the matter. There are probably ten other boxes they checked more or less well.

But a political speech is only really good or bad judged against a specific, contextual need. Bill Clinton’s SOTUs were often plodding and, for political insiders, boring. But they usually accomplished his specific political goals. In this case, Democrats have been worried. Worried about the stakes of this election. Worried about the poll numbers. They’ve been worried about whether Biden has the energy and whatever else to really do this. Can he be vigorous? Can he show up and deliver? Does he have the energy to get this done? Answering that question in the affirmative was in many ways the first, second and third goal of this speech. And on that measure he did very well.

As he had the confidence to dwell on towards the end of the speech, Biden is an old man. He’s over 80 years old. But I think people who’ve had these doubts, Democrats who have been worried … I think they will see this speech and think, “Ok, I think we can do this.”