The official twitter for /r/IAmA - reddit's Ask Me Anything subreddit.
California, USA
Joined March 2012
- Tweets14.7K
- Following987
- Followers50.5K
- Likes26.3K
reddit AMA retweeted
Yeah, there will be no pivot to the center. This is what you get when you have an 80-year-old president who doesn't really gaf about the future of the Republican Party.
reddit AMA retweeted
OK, wrote about the models vs. prediction markets debate. Actually, the real stolen valor is from NYT/Siena. But prediction markets converged toward FLIPR/model prices, not the other way around, and the models got to the right answer sooner and more confidently.
> 2. End the Iran war immediately.
There are no easy or immediate ways out of what he and his administration/Hegseth started with Iran. It will take a decade to deescalate.
8 THINGS President Trump can do to SALVAGE his presidency:
1. Publicly announce he’s shutting down the 100K subscription to get ‘early access’ to stock market-moving posts & will donate all prior profits to the Red Cross.
2. End the Iran war immediately.
3. Fast-track affordable housing in every major metro area with a high-velocity task force much like Kennedy did to get us to the moon in record time.
4. Televise Town Hall events in various cities along with Democrat leaders discussing the nation’s most pressing issues & seek to build rapport.
5. CEASE all glitzy meetups with top Hedge-fund CEOS & make Main Street his focus & not Wall Street.
6. Work aggressively with Putin to end the Ukraine war.
7. Focus all nationally televised addresses on topics most important to Main Street Americans. They don’t care about lavish ballrooms or reflecting pools.
8. Repeal the tariffs.
These are things that are his fault that he tries to tie into an isolationist ideology he wants to sell people on. Dude wanted to deliberately inflate the dollar and here we are. Talking out both sides of his mouth about the war he helped start is on him.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
reddit AMA retweeted
The betting markets lagged the high quality models in forecasting a blue wave the ENTIRE cycle.
The way we judged forecasts at FiveThirtyEight was based on the accuracy of its output *each day* it was live. Not just the morning of the election.
Kalshi thinks you are dumb.
reddit AMA retweeted
Give me a break, the polls and models provided the direction in contast to vibes and dumb insiders. And yes it's good that traders were smart enough to trust them. But the better election models were more confident about the outcome than the markets and got there more quickly.
Last night, the power to decide what America sees changed hands.
I have spent a ton of time in DC over the last few months. The elites were certain the markets were off. I heard many variants of “no chance markets are right about X” and “I’ve been in politics for a decade. ‘These people’ don’t really know much.”
Last night, ‘these people’ beat the elites.
Prediction market favorites won 479 of the first 487 races. That’s 98%.
The elites live in a bubble. They theorize, write, ideate, and mistake credentials for an understanding of lives they’ve never lived. They don’t see and feel what the everyday man, on the ground, sees and feels.
Knowledge is not exclusive to the elites but scattered across millions of people.
Someone knows their hometown better than any national pundit. Someone has followed a local race passionately for months. Someone has followed a local race dispassionately for months. Someone notices a shift in their community before it makes the headlines. Someone is shaped by an incident at work. Someone is shaped by what’s getting harder or easier for their families.
Each holds a piece of the picture that no expert can see in full.
And for the longest time, that knowledge had no way to reach the rest of the world.
For generations, election night meant turning on the TV and waiting for a handful of people to tell you what happened.
Prediction markets change that.
You don't need a title, a large following, or an editor to publish you. All you need is a perspective and the conviction to back it.
That changes who holds power over information.
Anyone can see the market. Anyone can contribute to it. Anyone can question it. No title gives you the final word. No gatekeepers can filter your view.
Sometimes the signal can be wrong. But anyone can challenge the consensus and improve it.
And when people consolidate their knowledge together, something remarkable happens: millions of individual perspectives become a signal that we all can learn from.
Over the last few months, the people showed up on Kalshi to tell the world what they were going to do.
Last night, the megaphone was passed to them.
reddit AMA retweeted
Want to be clear that in 2024 Elon was so sure he was a political mastermind everyone loved he felt confident enough to do a winky nazi salute twice on national television, and then since then he totally failed in his role in the White House, lost a wisconsin special election, burned half a billion dollars losing the midterms, and is now pretending he never said anything all. What a massive downfall
Gratitude for what, exactly?
Kushner "told Zelensky that he should pause the strikes because he and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff were dedicating a lot of time, energy, and jet fuel to mediating with Moscow...A 30-day pause on refineries would be a way for Ukraine to show gratitude"
wsj.com/world/ukraine-pauses…
reddit AMA retweeted
Host: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: In the '70s I was too young to get go to South America for the Jonestown massacre, so this is as close as I'll get. There's nothing like seeing a cult up close.
Host: Alright, maybe this is not a Trump supporter
reddit AMA retweeted
Many are (confusingly) referring to record-breaking CA coastal water levels as arising from "king tides" despite only moderate astronomical influence. Instead, main culprit is local sea rise from extreme El Niño event! Actual Nov-Jan king tides will bring *greater* inundation.
reddit AMA retweeted
This chart is insane. This shows Russia's casualties over time compared to Russia's territorial gains in Ukraine over the last five years.
No sane or rational person would say continuing the war to try and take more of Ukraine's territory is worth the casualties.
reddit AMA retweeted
CONCLUSION 🧵(1/2): Putin would have the world, and especially the United States, believe that he is somehow holding back from crushing Ukraine, but that he could do so at any moment of his choosing. The opposite is the case.
If Putin had had a way of ending the war quickly, he surely would have used it. The effort to field an army large enough to make virtually no gains is costing Putin a fortune, driving up inflation in Russia, and generating increasing social discontent. Fielding a larger army would cost more with no guarantee of materially changing the situation on the front. That is why Putin is holding back at least for now. ⬇️
Putin has likely recognized the folly of trying to drown Ukraine in Russian blood and has instead opted to try to hammer Ukraine into submission with a strategic bombing campaign. The Russians have secured a temporary advantage in the skies over Ukraine through their jet-powered drones and the shortage of Patriot missiles that can intercept their ballistic missiles. But Ukraine is fielding solutions to defend against the jet-powered drones, and it is hardening and decentralizing its infrastructure to survive the ballistic missile strikes (as well as developing its own ballistic missile interceptors, although that effort will take time).
The Russian strikes are currently devastating Ukrainian energy and other infrastructure and imposing a brutal cost on Ukrainian civilians—as Putin intends. But there is no reason to think that this strategic bombing campaign will be any more successful than every other strategic bombing campaign in history—all of which have failed to compel a country holding its own on the battlefield to surrender.
It is unclear whether Putin is lying about Russian gains or being lied to by his own military—or both. Russian military correspondents constantly complain of what they call “beautiful reports” that Russian military units send to higher headquarters, claiming gains they have not made. Ukrainian forces say that they have been able to use the Russian military’s own internal culture of lying to their advantage, luring Russian troops into traps because the Russians think that they are moving through territory they control. Leaked Russian military maps show phantom gains, often matching Putin’s claims. The pervasive lying within the Russian military is a problem for Russian soldiers, but likely an advantage for Putin, as it supports his own efforts to present Russian forces as advancing and winning when, in fact, they are doing neither.
