If you’ve followed the uproar over ex-President Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected you’ll see it’s partly been diverted into a kind of textualist grudge match over whether he meant apocalyptic and blood-drenched civil violence or simply stiff competition for the U.S. auto industry. If you look at the actual words it seems clear he initially riffs on his claims about the auto industry but then doubles down on the promise of a bloodbath, suggesting that problems with the economy will be the least of the country’s problems. You can interpret it either way in large part because Trump always expresses himself in the kind of disjointed word salad which always require the words to be reconstructed after the fact, thus giving a fair amount of leeway to whoever wants to do the interpreting and reconstructing.

But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Here is a small bundle of updates on significant events unfolding in Israel and Gaza which are mostly out of the US headlines.

With so many weighty issues pressing upon us for attention I was surprised by a new story yesterday evening which sparked some joy.

Let’s go to Ohio where three Republicans are vying for the opportunity to unseat three-term Senator Sherrod Brown, a highly effective politician who nonetheless now faces reelection in an increasingly Republican state. State Sen Matt Dolan, son of the owner of the Cleveland Guardians, is the GOP normie candidate — we’ll be normal if you just give us your tax cuts. Another candidate, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, latched himself to the desperate Hindenberg of an effort to defeat Ohio’s abortion rights referendum. And then there’s Bernie Moreno, a businessman and full-on Trumper (though also, as is often the case, a one-time Trump critic). Basically LaRose and Moreno both pushed hard for the Trump vote and endorsement. But Moreno won that fight. He got J.D. Vance to endorse him almost a year ago. And then Vance seemed to play an important role in getting a lot of key MAGA luminaries, eventually including Trump himself, to get behind Moreno.

There was really quite a stunning development in the Senate this afternoon. Schumer went to the floor to call for new elections in Israel, calling Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” and going on to say he is pursuing “dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing standards for assistance.” If Netanyahu remains in power after the war, the U.S. should “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”

These words require some context and deconstruction.

I just noticed a write up on Trump stumbling into saying there’s lots you can do in terms of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The Biden campaign and other Democrats were promptly all over those comments, as you’d expect. But it raises a point that is too little discussed in the campaign dialog. Trump has two big advantages right now. The first is simply that he’s not Joe Biden and Biden’s approval has been low since the fall of 2021. The other is a general sense that things were better before the pandemic. You might say, wait, the pandemic happened on his watch and the worst of it took place during his presidency. But that’s not really the public memory. In any case, those are his two big advantages. And they could get him elected.

What this has tended to obscure, however, is that politically he is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.

I find it very hard to make sense of what the likely outcomes are. But I wanted to point your attention to a series of developments in the Biden-Netanyahu relationship and the U.S.-Israel relationship that could escalate dramatically very soon. First there’s this article in Haartez which says the U.S. might suspend the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by later this month. (Unfortunately the piece is paywalled.) The tripwire is a national security memorandum Biden signed last month which gives Israel until March 25th to provide the U.S. with written assurances that weapons sales from the U.S. will only be used in accord with international law and that it will pledge to facilitate and not obstruct aid deliveries into Gaza.

That’s the calendar tripwire.

With a day’s reflection my thoughts on last night’s State of the Union are pretty similar to what they were right afterwards. As I was telling my sons this morning, there are all sorts of objective standards about what counts as a good speech, good communication, good organization, etc. But those aren’t usually that relevant in a political context. It’s better to be a good public speaker than not, of course. But what’s good or not good really only has any meaning in a specific political context and as it relates to trying to achieve a certain goal.

No, really. That’s pretty much what the Alabama legislature just did with a new law, hastily passed and now signed by the state’s governor.

As you know, Alabama created a firestorm last month when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics are the legal equivalent of minor children. This ruling sent shockwaves through the United States, pushed a new dimension of the Dobbs/abortion debate to the top of the national election debate and temporarily shuttered the state’s IVF fertility clinics. In response Alabama has now passed a law which appears to have created enough legal assurance to allow the state’s clinics to reopen. This is not just a win for reproductive rights in the state. Numerous couples had their ongoing fertility treatment halted by the ruling.

But as in-state critics have made clear, the new legislation is at best a band-aid rather than a solution.

Over the years I’ve written about structural problems in the digital news industry, often driven by the growth of platform monopolies and other issues. Just in the last few months and even in the last few weeks we’ve seen a new round of publications shuttering or pivoting to publication zombiehood. So why is this happening? Why is your favorite news site suddenly going under? If you’re listening you’ve probably heard the story in general. But I wanted to share some numbers with you that I think will make it much more concrete.

(I think we can add something to the equation here because for a mix of business and personality reasons, we’re willing to share very granular dollar figures that very, very few other publications are willing to share.)

This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business.

Over the weekend, Democrats or Dem-adjacent persons watching polling of the 2024 presidential election got knocked over the head with a metaphorical anvil: a batch of polls collectively showing Joe Biden 2 to 4 points behind Donald Trump. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about these polls and polling generally, ranging from the technical, to the what does it mean, to please talk me off the ledge. So I wanted to try to address them here.

First: Are these polls accurate? In an age when no one answers their cell phones let alone landlines, how do we know whether these polls are representative. Who has a landline? etc.

This is a complicated question. Without getting into deep technical details, yes, the pollsters definitely get that landlines are old news and most people don’t even answer unknown numbers on their cell phones. The same applies to text requests for political surveys. Response rates — or, rather, non-response rates — are awful. But pollsters know all of that and they’ve come up with pretty smart ways to deal with it. Without getting too far into the weeds, it comes down to increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling the electorate, using those models to weight the results, and in so doing backing out a representative sample from the data.