ChatGPT's astounding hallucination: "Joe Biden did not withdraw after the primaries were over. He stayed in the race through the primaries and remained the nominee. Kamala Harris did not replace him as the Democratic nominee."

I was reading the NYT article, "Concern Grows Over Republican Congressman’s Mysterious Absence/A spokesman for Representative Thomas Kean Jr. said an unspecified 'personal medical issue' has led the New Jersey Republican to miss House votes."

The last vote Mr. Kean cast was on March 5.... [A] campaign spokesman said that Mr. Kean was “dealing with a personal medical issue” and would be “back to a full schedule soon.”... “He’s going to be totally fine”...

I went to ChatGPT just to ask about what sort of medical issue it might be. He needed to keep it secret. It's "personal" (embarrassing somehow?). And we know he'll be "totally fine" "soon." On reflection, I suspect there's some dissembling in there. I prodded ChatGPT to consider that Kean is ultimately going to withdraw from his re-election race and that what's going on now is a matter of timing. The primaries in New Jersey will happen on June 2d, he'll win, then withdraw, and then the Republican Party will be free to slot in whomever they want. 

ChatGPT was dubious about my hypothesis, so I said: "Just look at the last presidential election. The Democratic Party avoided a crowded primary because they let the incumbent look like he was going to go forward. When it was too late and the primary season was over, Biden withdrew, and the party got to put Kamala Harris in. I assume that was coordinated and the timing of Biden‘s withdrawal was done to spare the party a contentious primary season."

Here's ChatGPT's amazing answer:

That interpretation doesn’t really line up with how the 2024 cycle actually unfolded—or with the incentives the party was facing.

First, some grounding: 

• Joe Biden did not withdraw after the primaries were over.
• He stayed in the race through the primaries and remained the nominee.
• Kamala Harris did not replace him as the Democratic nominee.

So the specific sequence you’re describing—“incumbent clears the field, then withdraws late so the party can install a successor”—didn’t actually happen in that case.

Thanks for the "grounding," Chat.

"I mean, heck, Donald Trump tried to steal the election, the last election."

BREAKING: Newsom at Davos: "There's no rule of law. It's the rule of Don... I mean, heck, Donald Trump tried to steal the election, the last election. Tried to light democracy on fire, and then pardoned everyone that participated in that."

He just hit the nail in the head here.… pic.twitter.com/ETAqF9SjX4

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) January 22, 2026

"The erosion of working-class support — among Black, white and Latino voters alike — has unnerved every ideological wing of the Democratic Party."

"Ben Tulchin, a pollster who worked on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, said the old political calculations for how Democrats can win elections were now obsolete. 'The math doesn’t work,' he said. 'For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side. Now, the inverse is true.' Some Democrats hope that this is only a phenomenon of the Trump era, and that G.O.P. gains will evaporate once the president is no longer on the ballot.... But Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who left the party last year, warned that such optimism was misplaced. 'Trump is the symptom, not the disease,” he said. “The disease is the fact that you have lost touch with a whole swath of voters that used to consistently vote Democratic.”... [Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from the Bronx said] 'I am convinced that Donald Trump is a singular phenomenon in American history.... I am unconvinced that his appeal is necessarily transferable to the Republican Party writ large. That remains to be seen.'"

From "The Democrats’ problems run deep, nearly everywhere.This is where voters shifted toward President Trump in each of the last three elections" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are a lot of interesting graphics showing the dramatic shift toward Trump (or something more than just Trump)).

"Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities... where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr. and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift."

Here's a free-access link to a detailed analysis at the NYT. Please spend some time understanding these maps. They're loaded with information, and the text makes it hard to discern what I think is the main trend: Harris generally lost ground among all non-white groups.

That article has 5 authors and no comments section.

IN THE COMMENTS HERE: There is support for the idea that the extra votes counted for Biden did not represent human beings at all, but were the fake votes of what was a stolen election in 2020. That's a notion that will not go away easily. Perhaps the new Trump administration will investigate and either uncover the fraud or prove it didn't happen, but Trump couldn't come up with much proof before January 6, 2021, and it might be a disaster for him to devote this new presidential term to questioning the legitimacy of the presidential term that escaped him. Concentrate on doing great things for the American people and ensuring that future elections are scrupulously accurate.

AND: Speaking of conspiracy theories, on another post this morning, Lem, the commenter, wrote: "Conspiracy theory Althouse is the best Althouse 😌." So if you're disappointed that I won't lean into the stolen-election theory, you can go over there and see what I had to say about Biden carrying the "Hundred Years’ War on Palestine" book.

Bill Maher asks about the "fact" that 84% of "gays" "stuck with the Democrats," and Andrew Sullivan doesn't agree with the assertion of fact.

Sullivan: "We don't really know how gays vote.... That's how GLBTQIA+ people vote.... The vast majority — 40% of that — are bisexual women, many of whom are in relationships with straight guys. So we don't know. I'm sure it was a big majority. I'm not sure including a big bunch of of of young women in that will distort it somewhat. I wish we could have polling of gay men and lesbians. Why can't we? Why are we now forced into this bleh?"

I'm using the letters b-l-e-h to represent a Sullivan vocalization that seemed to express the opinion that the GLBTQIA+ grouping is annoyingly large and indistinct. He seems to think gay men and lesbians should be polled as a distinct group and that their opinion is more meaningful than the amorphous grouping that sweeps in the many young woman who call themselves bisexual and may very well be living the most privileged sort of life. Of course these women tend to vote Democratic, but did gay men continue to vote Democratic? Sullivan groups gay men and lesbians together, but why not demand separate polling there too. There is an important difference in the voting of men and women, and why wouldn't that difference also show up among gay people?

ADDED: Tim Dillon says that trans people ought to identify as Republicans:

"Most of the country shifted right in the 2024 presidential election...."

"Trump won the suburbs.... Rural areas went even more for Trump.... Harris also underperformed in urban areas...."

NPR reports.

I see my county got bluer though.

"Mr. Trump beat his polling numbers by about 2.5 points nationally... and 2.1 points in the average swing state."

"Our final forecast had it so close to 50-50 that the outcome was literally more random than a coin flip. (Empirically, heads win 50.5 percent of the time.) But a Trump sweep of the swing states was our single most likely outcome, because polling errors tend to be correlated. It’s not great that the polls missed low on Mr. Trump for the third and final time, even in a year when survey companies adopted all sorts of novel strategies to avoid this exact outcome."

Writes Nate Silver, in "Don’t Blame Polling" (NYT).

I'm blaming polling. What's Silver's reason not to blame polling? First, Republicans are (supposedly) more suspicious and less likely to respond to polls. Pollsters using "weighting" to try to compensate. There's also "herding," which is massaging the numbers to make them more like other pollsters' numbers, but herding isn't a basis for not blaming polling, and Silver is certain that herding occurred in 2024. So what justifies that headline? I see this:

Should we trust polls less? I’ll offer a brave and qualified no, but only because the shift in public sentiment about polls — from viewing them as oracular to seeing them as fake news — has probably overcorrected relative to reality....

Blaming and not trusting are 2 different things! But that's an issue with the headline writer. Silver is talking about trust, and he's only saying don't trust polls any less that you already do. I guess it's like the way I feel about reading the mainstream news, which I do every day. I don't consider it a complete waste of time. I regard it as biased and manipulative, but the alternatives are even worse. (And this blog is not an alternative to MSM. It feeds off MSM.)

At Real Clear Politics, the GOP has won control of the House.

 

Link. The GOP takes control at 218, and they're up to 219.

At the NYT — here on Tuesday morning, a week after Election Day — we're locked in a state of wistful wondering....

 

You can't attribute the difference to California's agonizing slowness in vote-counting. The 2 news sites are looking at the same public information. It is journalistic/commercial decision-making on display, but impossible to tell whether either site is doing anything wrong. Personally, I assume both sites are attempting to feed the emotional needs of their readers, and they've just got different readers. But maybe one is adhering to higher principles than the other. 

"Republican Kari Lake took yet another bite out of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego’s lead in the race for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat on Friday evening."

"After cutting nearly 13,000 votes off Gallego’s lead on Thursday and Friday morning, Lake gained about 2,100 more votes when Maricopa County released the results of nearly 100,000 ballots just before 7 p.m. The state’s largest county is expected to release another update Saturday morning.... Gallego... was ahead 5.4 points in the initial results posted after the polls closed on Election Day...."

KTAR News reports on the only Senate race that is still not yet determined.

Why would anyone fight for Mark Robinson? He was already expected to lose.

But that's got to be sad for the people who were hoping to use Mark Robinson's problems against anyone other than Mark Robinson.

I'm reading "Mark Robinson’s porn site scandal greeted with shrugs by some Trump backers/The revelations surrounding the N.C. gubernatorial candidate mark a test of voters’ tolerance for disturbing allegations in the Trump era" (WaPo).

Oh, it's not "tolerance." It's just withholding all support and letting him go.

Here, you can see the history of his polling. He wasn't going to win.

A big Wall Street Journal article about the Tammy Baldwin/Eric Hovde race for the U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin.

I'm reading "Democrat Woos Dairy Farmers to Keep Crucial Senate Seat/Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin hits country roads and agricultural fairs, seeking to win over rural Trump supporters once more." 

Baldwin’s campaign for a third term against the wealthy banker Eric Hovde, who says the Democrat is an out-of-touch career politician, has sent her down country roads in sparsely populated counties that cut through farmland and curve around lakes....

Baldwin has to win for Democrats to have a chance of hanging on to the Senate, where the party clings to a 51-49 majority and faces a difficult map this fall. They have already thrown in the towel regarding West Virginia....

The article doesn't have as much dairy cow detail as I was hoping to see, but there is this: 

At a dairy farm outside Merrill, Wis., a small town in a deeply red region that Baldwin lost in 2018, a farmer, Hans Breitenmoser, 55, gave Baldwin a tour that led them through a cavernous barn past cows that poked their heads through metal fencing and bales of hay to watch. As Breitenmoser, a registered Democrat, paused to explain how megafarming operations put pressure on smaller ones, Baldwin let a calf nibble on her fist....

"She makes us smile. She loves everybody. And how could the message possibly be any simpler than just that?"

I can't remember the last time we had a good nonhuman political animal in the spotlight. But this was Jim Justice, an oversized governor on the GOP convention stage with his overweight dog Babydog, summarizing the GOP message as vast unconditional love.

It really is a welcome relief to look at a fat dog and think about love, simplicity, and smiling. Here's a WaPo article about it:

"Ousted Trump prosecutor Nathan Wade shocks guests with appearance at ex-lover Fani Willis’ primary election victory party."

The NY Post reports.

The 52-year-old prosecutor’s victory over attorney and author Christian Wise Smith comes as she faces multiple investigations launched by state and federal lawmakers over her alleged misuse of taxpayer money and relationship with Wade.

“We can’t keep turning a blind eye to what’s going on in that office,” Wise Smith argued on the campaign trail Monday. “Chaos. Corruption. It’s time for us in Fulton County to stand up and take our justice system back”....

I didn't vote in yesterday's primary.

I was the classic nonvoter: I didn't vote because the weather was bad. It wasn't even that bad. Early on, it was raining, but then it changed to snow, and it was even big fluffy flakes, the kind I tend to exclaim about with delight. And yet, it was windy, and it was getting a bit late. 

But who was I supposed to vote for? It's Wisconsin, where I could have voted in either party's primary. The most compelling candidate was in the Democratic Party primary: "uninstructed delegation."  This morning I see, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Wisconsin 'uninstructed delegation' voters more than double Biden's 2020 margin." I had a little trouble understanding what that meant.

Voters who chose "uninstructed delegation" in Wisconsin's presidential primary Tuesday more than doubled the 20,000 votes President Joe Biden won the state by in 2020, sending a warning sign for his reelection chances in the battleground state.

Now, there was some constitutional amending going on, and I missed out on that.

It's Super Tuesday, and the only interesting thing seems to be whether the California Senate race will be between Adam Schiff and Katie Porter or Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey.

I'm reading "Schiff’s insider support trumps Porter’s outsider appeal/Polling shows Rep. Katie Porter running in third place, behind fellow Rep. Adam Schiff and a Republican he helped boost" (WaPo).

The two popular Democrats [Schiff and Porter], who are both prodigious fundraisers, had long been viewed as the probable victors Tuesday in California’s jungle primary, in which the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election regardless of party.

"Jungle primary"? There's some outmoded slang.

But with Schiff, Porter and their Democratic colleague, Rep. Barbara Lee, splitting their party’s vote, Schiff has wielded his enormous war chest to boost support for their top Republican rival, former Major League Baseball player Steve Garvey.

Oh? So Garvey's success has been Schiff's shifty doing?

"All Washington does is divide us and talk about who’s to blame.... That’s not the country I know and love. I believe we need to come together and find common sense solutions to restore America."

Says Eric Hovde, quoted in "Eric Hovde launches Wisconsin Senate bid, handing GOP a boost" (The Hill).

Hovde seeks the Republican nomination for the Senate seat held by Democrat Tammy Baldwin.

"Mr. Trump’s wing is, by a comfortable margin, the largest and most dominant force in his party."

"No power center in the Republican Party can exist without the blessing of his movement, and we have yet to see a national political figure who can survive even the slightest bit of conflict with it. If there is any remnant of a pre-Trump Republican establishment, the trajectories of the campaigns headed by Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis illustrate its imminent fate."

From "Trump Has Devoured the Republican Establishment" (NYT). 

Useful graphs:

 

  

I don't see how "Steve Garvey became a punchline."

I'm reading "How Steve Garvey became a punchline at the first California Senate debate/The Republican and former Dodger was an easy target for House Democrats on Monday night" at Politico.

And I'm watching the full debate....

I don't see anything to laugh at. Start at 36:34 to see Adam Schiff pressure him to say whether he'll vote for Donald Trump. Garvey stays perfectly calm and speaks rationally, even as he deprives his opponents of a video clip of him saying that he'll vote for Trump. And notice how the moderator breaks in repeatedly as he's answering. He never loses his cool. He seems to have studied and adopted the demeanor of Ronald Reagan. 

By the way, Politico credits Katie Porter with delivering a "zinger," when she said "What they say is true: Once a Dodger, always a Dodger." But Dodger fans won't want to hear their team name used as an insult. Anyway, there were lots of references to baseball, including from Garvey. 

"With West Virginia off the Senate chessboard next year, Democrats must win every race they are defending — and depend on President Biden to win the White House..."

".... in order to maintain a majority.... With no competitive race [in West Virginia] in 2024, both parties will have tens of millions of dollars to spend on a second tier of battleground races. Last year, candidates, parties and outside groups spent more than $1.3 billion on 36 Senate races, including $737 million in just five states — Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — that are also on the ballot again next year. 'I think Wisconsin and Michigan are about to get a bunch of Republican money they weren’t going to get otherwise,' said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races.... There is no top-flight Republican challenging Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, but the party has been pushing for Eric Hovde, a businessman who ran for Senate in 2012....."

 
I'm reading "With Manchin Out, Democrats’ Path to Holding the Senate Is Narrow/While the party will be on defense in every competitive race, Republicans face some messy primaries and a recent history of nominating extreme candidates who have lost key contests" (NYT).

"The people on the Republican side are highly concerned about what’s happening in this country and realize how important this Wisconsin U.S. Senate race is."

"I would hope that they would have those conversations and decide amongst themselves. Instead of having a nasty primary, let’s back one of us and move forward."

Said Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, quoted in "Republicans look to fill a glaring hole in their Senate recruitment map/Wisconsin is one of the closest states in the country, but the GOP hasn't yet landed its candidate to face Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin" (NBC News).

[Possible candidate Scott] Mayer echoes Johnson’s thinking. “We really don’t want a bloody primary,” he told NBC News. “But it’s a free country,” he added....