Your correspondent spoke to several DC insiders yesterday, in different lines of work, about different topics, and whenever the topic of the election came up, all of them spoke as if the election was essentially a foregone conclusion. They all mentioned the infamous "internals." This scared us a lot, so much so that we felt we had to break our "no horse race" rule a little bit.

We thought Nate Silver, who we always pay attention to about this stuff, in part because he is not afraid to antagonize his fellow liberals, had a useful corrective to this notion which is congealing into received wisdom very fast.

Here are some of your correspondent's thoughts on this topic:

"What about the vibes?" Look, we feel the vibes too, but vibes can be very misleading. This is especially true in a very big country that has become very fragmented by social media so that everyone now lives in a little bubble of his own making. Has there been a vibe shift in terms of how certain cultural figures like Elon Musk and bro podcasters have embraced Trump? Sure. How has this percolated to key voter groups in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona and Wisconsin? Anybody who tells you they know is either deluded or lying. The fact remains that the polls are very close. Both national polls and battleground state averages are all within the margin of error.

"Trump always outperforms his polls / nonresponse bias means Trump will outperform his polls." The problem with this theory is that pollsters now know this. The "art" of polling, as you know, is how to extract a representative voter sample from a representative population sample. In France, for example, because of nonresponse bias, pollsters for many decades routinely underestimated the National Front's score—until they didn't. And in fact they overestimated the National Front (now National Rally) score in the last legislative elections. Silver points out that something similar happened in the UK in 2017: because there had been so much chatter of "shy Tories" skewing the polls, pollsters overskewed in the other direction, and ended up overestimating the Tory vote. "If polling firms were still applying the same techniques they did in 2016 and 2020, we’d probably be seeing a Harris lead in the Electoral College right now," Silver writes. "Instead we have a toss-up, more or less." So the pollsters have changed their techniques to correct for the errors of 2020, which means you can't make a simple extrapolation of "Biden +8 in the polls meant a near-draw, so Harris +0 in the polls means a Trump victory."

Look, if someone put a gun to your correspondent's head, he would bet Trump wins. But nobody is putting a gun to our head. So we are saying: we won't know until we know.

We are starting to get a little bit of experience of these things, and we have been in too many situations where the polls and the vibes seemed to point towards Smith winning, and Smith lost. Our gut tells us to be careful. So we are sharing what our gut is saying.

Policy News You Need To Know

#LGBT #Science — Obviously the biggest non-horse race news of the past 24 hours is the report that, as a New York Post headline accurately put it, a "woke doc refused to publish $10 million trans kids study that showed puberty blockers didn’t help mental health." Her photo in the Times even shows her wearing a pronoun pin…

The study, which was funded by NIH and began in 2015, led by Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, followed 95 children with gender dysphoria, of an average age of 11, over two years. The study found that puberty blockers did not improve mental health outcomes—a finding that differed from earlier Dutch research that had influenced global treatment protocols. Dr Olson-Kennedy refused to publish the findings for political reasons. JK Rowling, who can certainly turn a phrase, summarized it perfectly: "We must not publish a study that says we're harming children because people who say we're harming children will use the study as evidence that we're harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children."

There's two issues here. The first is about trans ideology, particularly as it relates to children, and there's no polite way to put it, but at this point it is more than time to shut everything down and start criminal investigations with the goal of sending many individuals to prison for very long stretches of time and leveling crippling fines on institutions. The whole thing was always ridiculous (at best) from the start, but now even judged by the very skewed standards of medical science, the evidence is in. The evidence that "gender affirming care" hurts children with gender dysphoria is as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, at this point. The second, much broader issue, is about the integrity of science. As you know, it has been a recurring topic of coverage here: various levels of fraud are rife in the academic world. This is a policy issue if only because almost all science in the US is at least partly, directly or indirectly, taxpayer-funded. First of all, how does a doctor leading a taxpayer-funded study get to decide whether to publish the results or not? If a study is taxpayer-funded, the results should be published and available to the world. If the authors of the study believe that the results are weak or skewed or non-determinative somehow, they can put a disclaimer to that effect at the top and let their colleagues and the public judge for themselves.

We have two very simple policy prescriptions (that are politically realistic, we also have unrealistic ones…) to "fix science."

The first is to make a law to the effect that if a study is taxpayer-funded, it cannot be published in a peer-reviewed journal, instead it must be published on some open-access forum, along with the underlying data. Peer review is an oddity in the history of science: famously, Albert Einstein had never gone through the peer review process even after winning two Nobel Prizes (!), and when he did have to submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal after immigrating to the United States, he was gobsmacked by it. Peer review is not just inefficient, there are mountains of evidence that it has become a vehicle for quashing independent inquiry, which is the foundation of science. We have yet to encounter a scientist who will not readily admit, in private, that the entire peer review process has become a farce. If private individuals want to operate peer-reviewed journals and solicit studies, they may. If private individuals want to fund peer-reviewed studies, they may. But science that is funded by the public should be available to the public.

The second prescription is this: a significant amount (15% at least, we would aim for 25%) of the budget of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health should be earmarked towards funding reproduction studies. Currently, there are no financial or career or prestige incentives for scientists to test studies done by other colleagues, rather than try to come up with their own study designs. In fact, the incentives point in the other direction, since trying to reproduce a study done by colleagues and failing will not make you any friends, and it turns out, scientists, even those with tenure, really don't want to look bad to their friends. Reproduction is the bedrock of modern science. It is the fundamental insight that caused the scientific revolution: the reason why Galileo's experiment on the fall of heavy objects triumphed is because anybody can reproduce it, and, given the same conditions, it produces the same results every time. It's not a scientific finding unless it has been reproduced, several times. And right now nobody (or almost nobody—there have been some valiant initiatives at places like Stanford and elsewhere, but they are like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket) is being paid to reproduce scientific findings.

Those two changes would go 90% of the way toward making science in the US a lot healthier—and a lot more scientific.

#Media — A running theme in our coverage is that we can't have a country (to put it impolitely but starkly and accurately) if American elites don't work to restore some trust. During a CNN town hall with Kamala Harris, a questioner was presented as an "undecided voter." The "undecided voter" in question happens to be a Swarthmore professor who wrote articles arguing that sexual harassment law doesn't go far enough, and a frequent ActBlue donor. Stuff like this is embarrassing, it hurts the country, and it needs to stop.

#Lithium — The USGS has released information that shows there is a very large amount of lithium under the ground in Arkansas. "If commercially recoverable, the amount of lithium present would meet projected 2030 world demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over," according to the release. If this pans out, it would probably completely change the politics (and geopolitcs) of electric vehicles. A lot of conservatives would probably start to support them, at least in the states that would directly benefit. Meanwhile, progressives would probably start to oppose them, as they oppose every solution to environmental problems as soon as it becomes practical.

#FamilyPolicy — Very good article from the great guys at the Institute for Family Studies highlighting what they call "the new Nordic paradox." And the paradox, in a nutshell, is this: despite being known for family-friendly policies, Nordic welfare states actually place the heaviest financial burden on parents compared to other European countries. The authors of the study analyzed three key channels of child-rearing resources: public transfers (taxes), time spent caring for children, and direct monetary expenses. While Nordic states do provide generous benefits to parents, they also impose high taxes, impose higher childcare costs due to compressed wage structures, and require parents to contribute substantially through both time and money. This hidden burden may help explain why fertility rates in Nordic countries have declined steeply since 2008, with Finland and Sweden now falling below the EU average. The research suggests that even supposedly family-friendly welfare states fail to fully value and account for the true costs of raising children, effectively "taxing the stork" and potentially discouraging parenthood. It reminds us to a point that a very intelligent friend made a long time ago, pointing out that most women in Sweden work in "care" occupations in the public sector, e.g. as nurses, teachers, carers, childcare workers, and so on, while most men work in the private sector (and therefore generate the economic output that pays for the public sector). This makes the Nordic model reminiscent about the old joke: "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; communism is the other way around." In patriarchal countries, men work harder so they can afford to have the women raise the children and care for the elderly, whereas in enlightened feminist Nordic states, it's the opposite, men work harder so they can afford to pay taxes to have the women raise the children and care for the elderly.

#FirstAmendment — Absolutely terrifying stuff: a center affiliated with Harvard is hosting so-called academics to call for abolishing the First Amendment because of something having to do with "racial patriarchy." Obviously the Federal government should immediately withdraw all subsidies explicit and implicit to universities that promote this anti-American nonsense. (And what grounds would they have to complain?)

#Taxes — The Tax Foundation has updated its estimate of the impact of Kamala Harris's tax plans: "We estimate the tax changes in Harris’s tax proposals would reduce long-run GDP by 2 percent, wages by 1.2 percent, and employment by about 786,000 FTE jobs."

#ElderCare — Important point made by Carrie M. Farmer and Rajeev Ramchand of RAND: as we talk more and more about how to provide care to the elderly, the complex question of defining of who counts as a caregiver becomes very important.