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.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the State of the Union aftermath, Trump’s Social Security slip-up and Republican Ken Buck’s unceremonious departure from the House.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

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!

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.

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.