brr research director i like data and unions. 🌹
Van, Down By The River
Joined September 2012
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Ali Mortell retweeted
Quiet?
Medicare for All is a 4-year bill.
Year 1: Lower the age to enroll to 55, cover all kids, expand Medicare for dental, vision & hearing
Year 2: Lower the age to 45
Year 3: Lower the age to 35
Year 4: Everyone’s enrolled in Medicare
Passing year 1 NOW would be huge.
new - Progressive Democrats are trying a tricky feat as their party takes power: endorsing Medicare for All while quietly pushing for smaller steps toward it.
w/ @davidalim
semafor.com/article/11/11/20…
Ali Mortell retweeted
"Not a bad compromise! We co-opt the name of the policy that leftists have spent decades building good will for, and in exchange you get a worse policy!"
Ali Mortell retweeted
There's a coordinated effort going on right now to co-opt "universal healthcare" and present inferior models that increase prices and protect the profits of pharma and insurance companies. Realistically, multi-payer systems tend to end up functioning like single-payer systems with higher costs.
teapawt.org/NateForUtah/status/211…
Ali Mortell retweeted
Sitting in an all staff meeting where they are explaining that United Healthcare is raising our costs 30% and every other insurer declined to even offer us a quote so now our coverage has to get worse and more expensive. This has happened basically every year i’ve been here :)
Ali Mortell retweeted
Public option is not an option after watching Obamacare fail due to funding cuts.
If you have a two tier system, capital will 1000000% make it so the public option fails.
So public option is another DEFUNDABLE Obamacare type solution. We cannot allow insurance companies to breathe and suck all the oxygen out of the health and care of healthcare.
This isn’t even radical. What’s radical would be nationalizing pharmaceuticals and health systems like Kaiser, Allina, Sutter, etc.
Ali Mortell retweeted
Found some vintage Troy Jackson footage in the CNN archives during their 1998 logger protest. (on the right)
Ali Mortell retweeted
In 2025, the North Carolina Democratic Party, which is led by @abreezeclayton, the youngest party chair in the country, passed a resolution calling for an arms embargo on Israel. Pro-Israel orgs and media lost their mind and promised it would cost the party bigly at the polls and drag down their senate nominee Roy Cooper.
Ali Mortell retweeted
This is the way
Congressional Progressive Caucus chair lays out strategy to ‘wield our power’ politi.co/4BJU1pf
Ali Mortell retweeted
I am marveling at the level of turnout effects this election. I am a known turnout skeptic, but Republicans do seem to have lived the nightmare of "your base just straight up stays home"!! Obvi we'll know more as more data comes in, but wow.
Ali Mortell retweeted
Great discussion of some of Caucus AI's research on NBC yesterday. We found that it's trivial for outsiders to influence chatbot content about real elections.
This is a looming problem for 2028, and one that campaigns cannot solve on their own.
youtube.com/watch?v=FpBeSwn0…
Ali Mortell retweeted
This is about where the Blue Rose estimate lands. NORC data implies ~55% turnout / ~30% switching / ~15% new votes. Differences aside, all point to turnout differential as top accelerant of blue tsunami.
We won in a fucking tsunami!!! Everyone can have a little "I told you so" as a treat 💙
This is the funniest post-election discourse I can remember. Every Dem won so the fighting is about whose historic W margin was more historic.
I’m seeing chair-throwing fights about whether Roy Cooper would have gotten as much applause at CrookedCon as Abdul El-Sayed.
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Ali Mortell retweeted
Just to be really specific though, the types of corruption that break through is the GOP cut millions of Americans healthcare in order to pay for massive tax breaks for the wealthy — not Trump accepting a Qatari jet (etc)
One personally impacts Americans in their day to day
Positioning as a moderate/independent/free thinker/someone who rejects extremes quantifiably helps in battlegrounds. Controlling for all else. Emphasis on "all else."
I think that’s basically true—it’s not that we *have* to win the electability argument, and it does strike me as baseline probable that “moderate” candidates perform better in frontline districts—but we shouldn’t overrate the empirics here when there is genuine uncertainty
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lol
Scoop: The White House delivered a warning to conservative groups on Thursday: We’re watching you wsj.com/politics/elections/w…
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Ali Mortell retweeted
Begs the question once again: what if we did an autopsy in 2016? What if Dems were curious about why we lost?
If you’re a moderate Dem, you roll your eyes a bit here bc this was how Obama beat Romney in 2012. Hillary stepped away from that strategy but it’s still the Dems’ Nicean creed.
But Sanders obviously identified, instantly, how Trump’s alliance with big tech and the ultra wealthy was a threat to his brand — the “blue collar billionaire” who couldn’t be bought. The “deplorables” weren’t in the front row at the inauguration. Elon and Zuck were. The lower middle class guy who bought some crypto wasn’t getting rich. World Liberty Financial investors were
So when Elon went all in for Trump in 2024, it looked like the world’s smartest man was joining Trump’s populist movement. By this September, when Elon was trying to bail out Paxton, pretty easy for Talarico to say — this is what I mean, look at this trillionaire trying to buy a senator so he can guzzle up our resources and leave you with nothing.