Fri: The QOP is the POBL

You need to calm down,

You need to calm down, Democratic pollsters argue

But there are reasons campaign professionals tend to wave off early surveys, which have notoriously overstated threats to incumbents. Here’s why pollsters and strategists we spoke to say they’re not panicking yet.

There is no campaign. Every time you see a poll showing Biden’s approval in the 30s, mentally add an asterisk that says “before Democrats spend $1 billion.”

This isn’t so much about a prohibitive spending advantage (Republicans will have money too), but about what that money goes towards. In this case, it’s a message that so far has worked for Democrats in real-life conditions.

In the midterms, postmortems found that Democrats performed poorly in noncompetitive contests, but they won big in highly contested, swing state races where they could devote millions to ads on issues like abortion, drug prices, and entitlements while painting their opponents as “MAGA extremists.” The same formula has held up well in off-year elections since then, including a blowout judicial race in Wisconsin centered on abortion rights and gerrymandering.



Polls This Early Out Are Meaningless

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

The construction of former President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border desecrated Indigenous cultural sites, hurt wildlife, destroyed vegetation, dried up key water resources, exacerbated the risk of flooding and triggered erosion that has left mountain slopes “unstable and at risk of collapse,” according to a new report.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, reviewed federal data and interviewed government officials, Native American tribes and stakeholders over the course of two years. The result is a comprehensive look at the widespread cultural and environmental harm — much of which experts had predicted — that came from Trump’s relentless pursuit of what he called a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern U.S. border.

The Trump administration spent an estimated $15 billion constructing more than 400 miles of border wall, much of which replaced smaller existing barriers. It waived numerous environmental laws along the way. Trump had insisted during his campaign that Mexico would foot the bill for the construction, but Mexico never paid a dime.

Laiken Jordahl, a conservation advocate at the left-leaning Center for Biological Diversity who documents environmental damage in the borderlands, told HuffPost the report “confirms all our worst fears about the damage wall construction has inflicted” on wildlife, public lands and cultural resources.

Among other things, construction of the wall fragmented wildlife habitats, cut off species’ migration routes and destroyed ancient cacti and other native vegetation.

“These border walls haven’t done a thing to address immigration or smuggling, but they did drive endangered species closer to extinction, butcher thousands of iconic saguaro cacti and dynamite Indigenous sacred sites and burial grounds,” Jordahl said. “This is a clear warning that any attempt to build additional miles of border walls would be a horrifically destructive and useless folly.”

They Should Have Gotten Out While the Getting Was Good.

Russia is making it really difficult for international companies wanting to exit its market.

Despite 1,000 companies announcing they were voluntarily cutting back on operations merely two months after the Ukraine war started in February 2022, just 535 foreign companies have made a clean break with the country 18 months on, an ongoing study from Yale University last updated on September 6 found.

Not only do the companies have their internal struggles, but Russian authorities have also steadily increased the hurdles — such as regulatory approvals and financial penalties — for Western companies that are taking longer to leave the market.

The pace of such measures appeared to have kicked into high gear from December 2022.

Even London-based law firm Linklaters said in a March 2023 blog post that "the legal situation for multinational companies operating in Russia continues to become more precarious by the day."

The Russian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.

Here's a timeline of five major hurdles Russia has imposed on companies looking to flee its heavily sanctioned economy since the Ukraine war broke out. This list is not exhaustive as Russian corporate laws and regulations have been changing rapidly since the war started.

A timeline of 5 major hurdles Russia's imposed on Western firms trying to exit the country