I wanted to give you a heads up that we will soon be kicking off our annual membership drive. It actually wasn’t by design that I published that article a few days ago on the ad market. But it’s kind of fortuitous. You have a sense of why your memberships are so, so critically important. So please keep an eye out for that. If you’re not a member or you’re a former member, consider joining. If you are a member, spread the word to friends and whoever you might think needs a nudge or maybe doesn’t know about TPM. More on this soon. And if you have any questions, let me know at the regular email.

I want to do a brief follow up to the last few posts I’ve done on the changes in the digital ad market for news. First, I published the charts and a description of what it meant. Then I did a follow up. In those exchanges one of the people taking me to task was a guy who runs a tech site who was saying basically, this is sensationalism and hyperbole! We’re making bank on ads. It’s awesome!

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.