Our friend Rick Perlstein had a good piece in The American Prospect yesterday about polling and its pitfalls — both its pitfalls as a practice, with its evolving, imperfect methodologies, but also as something we political junkies obsess over. The gist of his argument is contained in the subhed: “Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?” I don’t think Rick quite sustains that claim fully. I’m not sure he’s actually trying to. But as is the case with many articles, its interesting enough for the points and the bits of history he shares along the way. The gist is that new methodologies keep working great until they suddenly don’t, and then it’s on to some new methodology. Then there’s the fact that for decades pollsters always seemed to stop polling too soon and miss big shifts at the ends of campaigns.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss recent polling, the competitive Senate races and various oddities happening in the Cornhusker State.

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

When New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021, I told a number of people that I thought he’d either be a great mayor or end up getting indicted for something. A baseball player who bats .500 is a god. So I’m feeling reasonably good about this prediction. I tried to see whether I’d written this down somewhere. Back in December 2021 I wrote on Twitter that “I think there’s a lot about Adams that is really what the city needs. Most of the things. But also concerned that he’ll get indicted for something.” A month later I explained the basis of my largely misguided bullishness on Adams. “For clarity, I’m not cheering anything from the last three days. I think a mayor rooted in the politics of the city’s black middle class (which is Adams’ base) is better for the city today than rooted in the politics of liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

This general point I still believe.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.

Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.

A quick update on the Nebraska electoral vote situation. As I noted yesterday, the key hold out in the state legislature, Mike McDonnell (R), said he was a definitive no. That pretty much signaled the end of the effort. Since they need his vote. Since then Sen. Deb Fischer also said it was over. And now Gov. Jim Pillen (R) has said he will no longer call a special legislative session to make the change. Given the nature of Trumpism, I don’t think anything is ever truly done. In Trumpism, an election result amounts to no more than an advisory opinion. But this looks as close as one gets to done. Done enough to take it off the front burner of concerns.