Free Newsletter Tuesday: Midterm Panic, What's Up With the California Democratic Party, & The $8 Billion Machine Sprint
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Where a fractured majority can lose to an activist minority.
Midterm Panic: Keeping only the data we like, tossing the rest.
The Fire Extinguisher in the Room: The strategic silence of Gavin Newsom.
The Machine’s Pace and the Human’s Soul: Redefining athletic achievement in 2026.
What I’m Watching: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
Jukebox Playlist: Dionne Warwick, live club concert
Kareem’s Daily Quote
"We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate." Widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, though with no evidence he ever said or wrote it.
You’ve probably heard some version of the phrase “showing up is eighty percent of life.” It’s a nice bit of armchair philosophy for getting people to go to the gym or start a hobby. But when you apply it to the machinery of a democracy, it stops being a motivational poster and starts being a warning.
Thomas Jefferson (or at least the school of thought he left behind) once pointed out a cold truth that we often blithely ignore: “We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
It’s the “fine print” of the American experiment that most people don’t read until the bill comes due.
We love the idea of the “silent majority,” especially if they’re silently on our side. It’s a comforting thought, the notion that most people are sensible and moderate, even if they aren’t out there screaming in the streets. We imagine this massive, sleeping giant of public opinion that somehow keeps the country on the rails—and God help the tyrant who awakens her. Him. It. Us.
But here’s the problem: in a democracy, silence isn’t a vote, it’s a great big gaping hole. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that a great big gaping hole, also known as a vacuum, is always filled not so much by nature which abhors it but by the loudest and often the most extreme voices in the room.
When our better angels bring up the “majority who participate,” they’re reminding us that the government doesn’t actually care what you think while you’re sitting on your sofa. It only cares what you do when the ballot is in front of you or when the city council meeting starts. If 70% of a town hates a new law, but only the 10% who love it show up to vote, that law is passing with a “mandate.” The people have spoken…whether they actually have or not.
I get why people stop participating. Politics today is exhausting. It’s designed to be a grind. Between the 24-hour outrage cycle and the feeling that your single voice is just a drop in the bucket, it’s easy to think that stepping back is a neutral act.
But stepping back isn’t a neutral act. It’s a relinquishing of power. Every time a moderate, thoughtful person decides they’ve had enough and hits “mute” on the civic conversation, they are effectively giving their proxy to someone who is likely less moderate and less thoughtful.
Participation isn’t just about the big presidential elections every four years. It’s the school boards, the zoning commissions, the local primaries. That’s where the “majority who participate” actually build the world we live in. Those are the people who decide what your kids learn, how much your property taxes are, and whether the bridge down the road actually gets fixed.
At the end of the day, democracy is a heavy stone that a whole community has to push uphill. If half the people let go because they’re tired, that stone doesn’t stop where it is. It starts rolling backward.
The quote above, regardless who said it, is a reminder that the “will of the people” needs to be heard loud and clear. And if we decide not to be heard, we can’t act surprised when the government doesn’t look anything like us or what we care about.
The machinery of the state is always running. The only question is whose hands are on the levers. If it isn’t the majority of the people, it’ll be the majority of whoever bothered to stand in line. In the end, we don’t get the government we “deserve” in some cosmic sense, we get the government that the participants said we should have.
So, the next time you feel like the system is broken, remember the fine print. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: it’s listening to the people who are speaking.
The rest is just silence.
Panicked Trump, 79, Makes Desperate Move as Devastating Polls Pile Up (The Daily Beast)
Summary: Facing a wave of unfavorable polling, President Donald Trump has turned to cherry-picked survey data and a longtime allied pollster to push back on the narrative of declining public support.
Trump shared a screengrab on Truth Social from an X account called “America First Now”—an account whose profile carries an advisory warning that its manager may “have used a proxy—such as a VPN” to alter the country displayed. The post selectively cited a months-old Wall Street Journal poll while omitting its headline: “It’s Trump’s Economy, and Voters Are Unhappy With It.” Trump also amplified a Newsmax article authored by pollster John McLaughlin and his brother Jim, who have advised Trump across three presidential campaigns. Their poll claims 52 percent of likely voters support military action against Iran. By contrast, an NBC News poll conducted between March 30 and April 13 found that 63 percent of adults disapprove of Trump’s overall performance, and only 33 percent approve of his handling of the Iran war. A Quinnipiac University poll released the same week found 53 percent of registered voters oppose the war.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle responded: “The ultimate poll was November 5th 2024 when nearly 80 million Americans overwhelmingly elected President Trump to deliver on his popular and commonsense agenda.”
My Take:
If you’ve ever sat through Sidney Lumet’s 1976 masterpiece Network, you know the scene. Howard Beale, a news anchor who has finally seen behind the curtain of the “corporate cosmology,” has a breakdown on live television. He starts screaming about the “bullshit” of modern life. But instead of the network executives pulling him off the air or calling a doctor, they realize something far more lucrative: his unhinged rage is a ratings goldmine. They give him a prime-time slot, brand him a “prophet,” and let him stir the pot until the entire country is leaning out their windows screaming into the void.
That movie is fifty years old, but it feels like it was filmed this morning. Network is a clinical autopsy of what happens when the truth becomes secondary to the performance, when the people at the top start high-fiving over the distorted reality they’re selling to the public. Technology has changed since 1976, but the underlying playbook hasn’t aged a day: find a narrative that feels good, strip away the inconvenient facts, and keep the audience fed.
Right now, the White House is handling the news cycle like it’s running the Howard Beale show. Trump isn’t looking at the whole game; he’s watching a highlight reel his own team edited together and calling it the final score. They kept the one tiny sliver of an old Wall Street Journal poll that made the administration look good, but they conveniently cropped out the actual headline: “It’s Trump’s Economy, and Voters Are Unhappy With It.” It’s a classic move, take the part that feels like a win and throw the rest in the trash.
In the NBA, we call this “stat-padding.” It’s when a player cares more about their personal box score than whether the team actually won the game. But as any coach will tell you, the game tape doesn’t lie. You can tell yourself you had a great night, but if the other team out-rebounded and out-scored you, your highlights are just a vanity project. In the arena of governance, the “team” is the American people, and you can’t win if you’re only playing for the applause in your own head.
Then you have John McLaughlin, the pollster who’s been on Trump’s payroll for nearly a decade. The media calls the McLaughlin brothers Trump’s “most trusted” pollsters, but let’s be honest: that’s just a polite way of saying they’re paid to tell the boss what he wants to hear. These are the same guys who predicted a massive victory for Viktor Orbán in Hungary’s 2026 election. And we know how that turned out.
Instead of owning the miss, the McLaughlins are doubling down, claiming their “secret” methods are better than the independent data, even though they won’t show their sample sizes or their math. In science or medicine, you’d be laughed out of the room for that. In politics, apparently, it earns you a seat on the private jet. Like those execs in Network, they aren’t interested in the news; they’re interested in the “show.”
The White House’s go-to defense for all this bad data is to point back at the 2024 election and call it the “ultimate poll.” It sounds like a solid, civic-minded argument, but it’s actually a dangerous play. Winning an election gives you the authority to govern, but that authority comes with a side of accountability for every choice you make after the votes are counted. A mandate is a job description, not a permission slip that never expires. You can’t just keep pointing at the scoreboard from last year and pretend the current game doesn’t count.
In the same way, you can’t tell someone they’re “imagining” their bank balance. If you’re staring at a $6 carton of eggs, you won’t be comforted by an op-ed from a pollster who couldn’t even get a Hungarian election right.
I don’t know if this reality is making its way into the Oval Office. What I do know is that the scoreboard eventually catches up to everyone. The game tape shows exactly what’s happening on the floor, and no coach in America gets to point at the first-quarter stats and call the final score a win. The polls are just there to tell the rest of us how long it’ll take for the “prophets” to realize the show is finally over.
CALIFORNIA’S BLUE ARMAGEDDON (The Atlantic)
Summary: California’s 2026 governor’s race has descended into disarray, with the Democratic field fractured and two Republicans positioned to potentially dominate the June 2 jungle primary. The race lost its leading Democratic contender when Bay Area Congressman Eric Swalwell withdrew after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault and unwanted advances. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but denied the allegations. His exit leaves a crowded Democratic field still unable to consolidate around a single candidate, including billionaire investor Tom Steyer, former Representative Katie Porter, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. At the same time, Republican candidates Steve Hilton, a British-born former Fox News host and aide to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco have been polling in the mid-to-high teens. Under California’s jungle primary rules, if no Democrat breaks away from the pack, both Republicans could advance to the November general election, an outcome that would guarantee a GOP governor in the nation’s most Democratic state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who is term-limited, told The Atlantic he would only endorse a Democrat before the primary “in a break-the-glass scenario.”
My Take:
The California Democrats have pulled off a rare feat: they’ve turned a massive home-court advantage into a self-made crisis. In sports, we call this “hero ball.” It’s what happens when a team has all the talent in the world, but five guys are trying to drive to the hoop at the exact same time. The result is usually a turnover, and right now, the Democratic party is handing the ball directly to the opposition.
Seven Democratic candidates are currently splitting the vote. None will drop out, no one will pivot, and two Republicans are watching the whole thing fall apart from a very comfortable lead.
The problem is the “jungle primary.” It’s a rule that sends the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of their jersey color. It works fine when you’re organized, but it becomes a trap the moment you splinter. Strategist Paul Mitchell calculated the odds of an all-Republican November at 27% back in March. In the NBA, if you have a 27% chance of turning the ball over on every possession, you aren’t going to win many championships.
Every Democrat left in this race has convinced themselves they are the “chosen one.” Matt Mahan actually said, “I plan to be the one,” while polling in the low single digits. That’s either extraordinary confidence or a complete break from basic arithmetic. Nobody wants to be the first to head to the bench, so they stay on the floor, and the combined result is that they all lose together.
Then there is Tom Steyer. He’s spent over $130 million on ads and he’s still tied at 14% with a county sheriff. I’ve seen this before, owners who think they can buy a championship by just throwing money at the roster without checking if the players actually fit the system. Steyer spent $345 million on his 2020 presidential run and walked away with zero delegates. He’s currently on track for a repeat performance. The most jarring part? He told a reporter he hasn’t followed Governor Newsom’s record “closely enough to give him a grade.” Imagine walking into a locker room and telling your teammates you haven’t bothered to watch the game film. You’d lose the respect of the room before you even laced up your sneakers.
On the Republican side, Steve Hilton is leading the field. He tells moderates he’s “not ideological,” then turns around and calls the President’s endorsement “deeply honoring.” It reminds me of the 1979 film Being There. Peter Sellers plays a man named Chance who spent his whole life secluded in a garden, only to wander out and have his simple, repetitive talk about plants mistaken for profound political wisdom. Because the people around him want to believe he’s a genius, they project their own desires onto him. Hilton is running a similar play. He’s a blank slate for some and a “full DOGE” revolutionary for others. In the game of politics, you can’t claim to be an independent player while wearing the opposing team’s colors in private.
Gavin Newsom calls the current administration’s influence an “invasive species” that “exploits weakness.” He’s right. The weakness here is a Democratic field that refuses to consolidate, and the White House is pushing on that crack from every angle, endorsing Hilton, attacking Steyer, and putting pressure on the state’s federal funding. Newsom sees the fire. He’s standing right next to the fire extinguisher. But he says he’ll only “break the glass” in a worst-case scenario, without ever defining what that looks like. From where I’m sitting, we’re already there.
I don’t know exactly where the line is between “strategic patience” and just letting the disaster happen. But with the June 2nd primary closing in, California is crossing that line. At least one candidate needs to step aside for the good of the team. Newsom has the standing to say so. The party has the standing to say so. Neither is doing it.
That failure is a pretty accurate picture of the Democratic Party’s broader problem today. The path forward isn’t hidden; it’s right there on the chalkboard. But nobody with actual authority is willing to do the uncomfortable thing that fixing it requires. The diagnosis is sharp. But a prescription doesn’t do any good if the doctor is too afraid to sign the paper.
A humanoid robot sprints past the human half-marathon world record in Beijing race (AP)
Summary: On April 19, 2026, a humanoid robot built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed a half-marathon in Beijing faster than the standing human world record. The Honor robot, using autonomous navigation, finished the 21-kilometer course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Half Marathon—surpassing Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who holds the human world record of approximately 57 minutes, set in Lisbon in March. The result represents a dramatic improvement from last year’s inaugural robot race, in which the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds. Approximately 40% of the competing robots navigated the course autonomously; the remainder were remotely controlled. Honor’s test development engineer Du Xiaodi said the robot featured legs approximately 95 centimeters long and a liquid-cooling system largely developed in-house, noting that “structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.” Spectator Sun Zhigang remarked, “It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined.” The event took place within the broader context of China’s 2026–2030 five-year plan, which explicitly targets humanoid robot development as a national priority.
My Take:
I didn't know if I was reading a sports story or a press release from a government tourism board. The framing was just a little too tidy: “robots surpass humans,” cheering crowds, and state television providing the official timing. It reads suspiciously clean. And as anyone who has spent enough time around big institutions knows, a story that clean usually means someone did a lot of sweeping before you walked into the room.
When state media covers a state-sponsored event, you aren’t looking at journalism; you’re looking at a communications operation. The reality is that we don’t actually know if the reported times are accurate, yet that uncertainty is being glossed over because the story is being sold as proof that China is beating America in a high-stakes tech race. Once you attach “national security” to a headline, people stop asking basic questions. They get swept up in the geopolitical drama and forget to wonder who’s actually counting the laps or whether the track in Beijing’s E-Town even remotely matches the surface and elevation of the course in Lisbon where Jacob Kiplimo set his human record.
Then there’s the matter of how they picked the winner. Honor’s remotely controlled robot actually crossed the finish line first at 48 minutes and 19 seconds, but it didn’t “win.” An autonomous robot took the championship instead, thanks to “weighted scoring rules” that were never explained. The organizers decided to reward the way the robot ran over how fast it actually went.
This reminds me of when the NCAA banned the dunk while I was at UCLA. Officially, they said it was to “improve competitive balance,” but everyone knew the real reason: one player was dominating the game too much, and that player happened to be me. That rule change was an institution deciding that one specific kind of excellence was a problem, dressed up in the language of fairness. Rules do more than regulate a game: they define what the game is for. The organizers in Beijing decided autonomy mattered more than speed, and they made that call without feeling the need to explain it to anyone.
The jump in performance here is wild, from two hours and forty minutes last year to fifty minutes this year. That should be sparking a serious conversation about what happens when this tech moves off the race course and into factories and warehouses. One of Honor’s engineers even admitted the goal is “industrial scenarios.” Research from MIT shows that for every robot added per 1,000 workers in the U.S., wages fall and the number of people with jobs drops. The question of who actually benefits from this “progress” is usually the last one anyone asks.
The scale of the gap is also hard to ignore. Chinese companies shipped about 13,000 humanoid robots globally in 2025. Meanwhile, the three leaders in the U.S., Figure AI, Agility, and Tesla, shipped maybe 150 units each. China has an $8.2 billion national fund and a five-year plan; the U.S. has venture capital and whatever the market feels like betting on this quarter. Those are not the same thing. I’m not convinced that labeling this a “national security crisis” and throwing money at defense contractors actually fixes the problem, but it certainly makes for a satisfying press release.
Jacob Kiplimo’s half-marathon record of roughly 57 minutes shows us the absolute limit of the human heart and lungs. A machine running faster doesn’t erase that achievement; if anything, it makes it more interesting. Kiplimo’s record tells us what a human being can do. The machine’s time tells us what an engineer can build. Treating them like they’re in the same competition shows a shallow understanding of what athletic achievement actually means.
At the end of the day, a human body covering 21 kilometers in 57 minutes remains one of the most remarkable things our species produces. A machine doesn’t change the beauty of that effort. It’s like saying a car is faster than a cheetah. It just means we need to be a lot more precise about what we’re celebrating and a lot more honest about the questions we’re choosing to ignore.
What I’m Watching:
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
Bryan Johnson is a tech billionaire who spends roughly two million dollars a year trying to biologically un-age himself, and Chris Smith’s documentary follows him around with a camera while he does it (which, if you think about it, is a premise that practically writes its own ticket). The film earns its keep in the moments where Johnson’s relationship with his son and father does something the rest of the documentary mostly avoids: it humanizes what could easily read as pure Silicon Valley buffoonery; there’s something genuinely moving buried under all those blood panels and supplement protocols. What the film refuses to do, though, is push back. It gives Johnson enormous real estate to make his case while the harder questions about what this kind of wealth-driven self-obsession means for the rest of the country (the people who can’t afford a single MRI, let alone a plasma transfusion) mostly drift by unanswered. It’s watchable, even compelling in stretches, but it functions closer to a well-produced portrait than an investigation. Worth your 88 minutes if the subject intrigues you, as long as you don’t expect the film to do your thinking for you.
Grade: B
Jukebox Playlist:
Dionne Warwick, live club concert 1964
A young Dionne Warwick, age 24, the protegé of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and on the precipice of fame, is being filmed in a small bar in Belgium called the 27 Club. I picked ‘Walk On By’ from her 26-minute set not because it’s the best example of her talent (if you investigate the link, you’ll see she also sings 'Don't Make Me Over,' 'A House Is Not A Home,’ 'Anyone Who Had A Heart,’ and ‘What I'd Say,' among others). I picked it because this evocative song was actually a B side—which underscores the genius of the writers, singer and musicians: an embarrassment of riches. Hope you enjoy this huge talent in an intimate setting.
TO BE GOOD, YOU MUST DO GOOD. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER.
Your post this morning has served as a great pep talk for me personally,Kareem. It is hard to keep fighting the idiocracy, but your reminder of my favorite movie of all time gives me the boost I need. I've lived with Chance's "philosophy" since I first saw the brilliant film in the 70's.
So glad you are keeping on keeping on as you celebrate another birthday. Many Happy Returns!
Kareem
Your premise is 100% correct in your analysis of cherry-picking economic statistics and political polls to make the administration look good, and I commend you for highlighting this fact!
To strengthen your argument, note that despite the administration's claim that inflation isn't an issue, the U.S. CPI indicates food prices have increased by +2.7% year-over-year, with food-away-from-home rising even more at +3.8%.
Interestingly, the administration often cites egg prices, which have dropped 57% year-over-year, averaging $2.35 per dozen compared to $5.47 a year ago. Alternatively, we could mention that the average ground beef price is now $6.70 per pound, up from $5.79 a year ago, representing a 15.7% increase.
That proves you are 100% correct. Using the big-picture framework, in which all prices are rising rather than declining, is the honest way to assess the state of inflation, but those who wish to tell an incomplete story will always cherry-pick! If any of your readers want to dig deeper into the big picture on inflation, they can read one of my previous Substack articles on the topic.
https://thepeopleseconomist.substack.com/p/has-the-us-iran-war-put-upward-pressure