A fine Maine April day!!

Midterm political ad spending reaches $565 million - Wesleyan Media Project

💥 In case you missed our NEW WMP report from last week: 2026 midterm ad spending for U.S. House and U.S. Senate races reached $565M cycle-to-date.

Read full report: mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/releases-030...

Report by: @mikefranz.bsky.social @tnridout.bsky.social @efranklinfowler.bsky.social

Maine voters in 2024 overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to adopt a new state flag (below). Support/opposition was highly related to party enrollment by town. Party politics is everywhere.

And Q2 against Q1.

Maine voters weighed in on two ballot measures in Nov 2025. Q1 was about voter ID and absentee voting. Q2 concerned a red flag law for guns. Party enrollment by town strongly predicted outcomes. Q1 below. Q2 in comments.

The Federal Election Commission is down to 2 members. So its work is at a standstill The Federal Election Commission, which regulates campaign finance, has lost another member. But the FEC has actually been without a quorum for months, leaving the agency unable to do much of its work.

The Federal Election Commission, which regulates campaign finance, has lost another member. But the FEC has actually been without a quorum for months, leaving the agency unable to do much of its work.

Best take I’ve seen on social media all week. I am a big fan of candy corn.

And while Weintraub is at the bottom of the graph, the Republicans at the top by comparison are more extreme on the scale.

A Democrat, Siding With the G.O.P., Is Removing Limits on Political Cash at ‘Breathtaking’ Speed (Published 2024)

www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/u...

The FEC is currently down to 3 of 6 commissioners. I've collected as many FEC votes as possible + scaled them. The data back up that Lindenbaum is pretty moderate in historical terms. Two others (Trainor, Broussard) are more polarized. Trump (illegally) fired Weintraub, who was left-most Dem.

Insert caveat here about ecological inference! 😀

R-squared for the models.

Maine Senate since 1954. Graph summarizes town-level regressions by cycle, controlling for partisan enrollment, population, and county effects. Not much to see pre-2020, but high Dem towns in 2020 bolted at a larger rate from Collins. Dem voters are ready. Can the pty take adv? Model fit below.

President Trump Issues Dangerous Executive Order That Would Shift to Presidency More Power Over the Conduct of Federal Elections and Potentially Disenfranchise Millions of Voters #ELB I am still making my way through this new Trump executive order on election administration (helpfully posted by Chris Geidner). There is a lot in here, but let me make three four initial points as I s...

President Trump Issues Dangerous Executive Order That Would Shift to Presidency More Power Over the Conduct of Federal Elections and Potentially Disenfranchise Millions of Voters electionlawblog.org?p=149153

Netflix’s Reed Hastings Gives $50 Million to Bowdoin for A.I. Program The Netflix co-founder said he wanted his alma mater to become a leader in studying the consequences, and guiding beneficial uses, of artificial intelligence.

Great news!! In ‘23, I co-taught a course on the Ethics of AI. A central insight from that class: AI developers need students versed in the liberal arts to pressure them to think about the moral, political, ethical, and environmental implications of their models.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/t...

What's up w/Washington County? It was in the top 4 until 1980. This is partly a measurement effect, but also it seems that the share of Francos also dropped, from about 17 percent in 1960 (where foreign born was the numerator) to ~10 percent in 2021 (where any French or Canadian ancestry was).

Comparing percents across different metrics is not ideal, so I'm trying ranks within year.

In more recent years, the ACS is great for this (at the town-level!). Before 1990, we need to rely on metrics that tend to focus on country of origin or language used at home.

Maine has a close relationship w/Canada, and I'm working on measuring French-Canadian influence in Maine politics. Here are county-level ranks using available Census data back to 1910. Same four counties have historically had the most French ancestry. (Measuring this is not easy!)

Congrats to Bowdoin Women’s basketball for their NESCAC Championship. Packed gym. Epic comeback! An “instant classic”!

“Why don't you wear a suit? You're at the highest level in this country's office & you refuse to wear a suit. A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the office.”

Scatterplot titled “Empirical Evidence of Ideological Targeting in Federal Layoffs: Agencies seen as liberal are significantly more likely to face DOGE layoffs.” • The x-axis represents Perceived Ideological Leaning of federal agencies, ranging from -2 (Most Liberal) to +2 (Most Conservative), based on survey responses from over 1,500 federal executives. • The y-axis shows Agency Size (Number of Staff) on a logarithmic scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000. Each point represents a federal agency: • Red dots indicate agencies that experienced DOGE layoffs. • Gray dots indicate agencies with no layoffs. Key Observations: • Liberal-leaning agencies (left side of the plot) are disproportionately represented among red dots, indicating higher layoff rates. • Notable targeted agencies include: • HHS (Health & Human Services) • EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) • NIH (National Institutes of Health) • CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) • Dept. of Education • USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) • The National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE), despite its conservative leaning (+1 on the scale), is an exception among targeted agencies. • A notable outlier: the Department of Veterans Affairs (moderately conservative) also faced layoffs despite its size. Takeaway: The figure visually demonstrates that DOGE layoffs disproportionately targeted liberal-leaning agencies, supporting claims of ideological bias. The pattern reveals that layoffs were not driven by agency size or budget alone but were strongly associated with perceived ideology. Source: Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis (2018). Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill. The Journal of Politics, 80(1).

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️

The paper is "to be drafted." We've been working on getting the data in shape. The proj started as a focus on the Francos in ME politics. We needed a lot of town-level political data, and so I've spent the last year wrangling lots of files from the SecState that they dug out of the archives.

Interested in evidence of polarization in Maine? The graph looks at just enrolled Dems and Reps by year and cong dist (using current CD boundaries). Since about 2008, CD1 has become more Dem and CD2 has become more Rep. Not a surprise, perhaps, except that the chg is very recent.

Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner and Chair of the FEC. There's a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn't it. I've been so fortunate to serve the American people and stir up some good trouble along the way. That's not changing anytime soon.

🧵My statement in response to Trump illegally attempting to fire Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chair Ellen Weintraub: In claiming to fire a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, the president violates the law, the separation of powers and generations of Supreme Court precedent. 1/

Thanks for the help @shennabellows.bsky.social.

Big thanks to Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (and her office) for helping us get access to the town-level data over the decades. They scanned yearly pdf documents, and we moved them into Excel.

And because Bowdoin is in Brunswick, here is the change there: