One thing about live chats on popular Substacks is that the chats roll off the screen so quickly that nobody has a chance to pay attention to what anyone says. My limited experience with live chats suggests that this is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to say anything interesting in a few words we know will quickly scroll away.
But I was thinking that a live chat here tomorrow night might be different. If there’s an advantage to being a comparatively tiny Substack (about 1800 subscribers, the vast majority free), it’s that a live chat might make it possible for my most engaged readers to participate in a meaningful chat with one another and act like a community of sorts, which is a goal we often hear Substack aiming for.
If I do this, the chat will be available to everyone, paid and free subscribers alike. I’m not concerned about trolls on a chat this size, but if it happens, it’s easy enough to kick them off.
My regular readers know that I complain about the New York Times almost once a week or so, but when I unsubscribed a year ago, they offered a deal I couldn’t refuse, so I took it. Their election infographics are great. They make it easy to make predictions about final results because it’s easy to zoom in on precincts that have already reported and precincts that haven’t.
And I know where to look.
There are other sources for this, of course, but those at the Times are the ones I’m used to, so, assuming I run a live chat, I’ll rely on them to offer my opinions (also known as snark and sarcasm) and prognostications. I’ll probably have a better idea of whether Talarico is going to win before our friends at the major political Substack venues will, and I say that with the utmost humility.
For example, even though I was in the ICU at the time, I knew Kamala was cooked early on. That was a rough night, and not only because of the election.
My readers are top shelf in terms of knowledge, so you folks will have great insights into your local elections, too. It could be quite enlightening.
Anyway, I will probably base my decision at least partly on feedback here in the comments. None, or only one or two comments expressing interest, will mean no live chat. I might not even do it if there is strong interest. I just don’t know yet. I’ll post my decision and pin it to the top of the comments sometime tomorrow.
I’m not a big fan of Substack’s live chat feature. I have no good reason for this. It’s just not my jam, same as video is not my jam. So I’ll probably close the chat after election night is over. It’s just not something I have time to monitor.
About that New York Times Alaska primary election “controversy”
Speaking of the New York Times, what a joke.
As some of you know, they published what they thought was a gripping exposé on the alleged efforts of the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Alaska, Mary Peltola, to massage the open primary in Alaska by recruiting a guy with the (almost) same name as the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan, to run in the primary.
This is an old trick that both parties have used for a long time whenever they get a chance. It’s an old enough trick that it has a name: “stacking the ballot.” But the Times thought that it would be fun to try to interfere with the election by creating controversy where there is none.
The ballot stacking effort, even if it were confirmed as real, is not illegal, and hardly the only occasion that it has happened, but that’s not the problem here.
The problem is that Alaska, as a ranked voting state, has the solution to that kind of chicanery baked right into the process.
The only thing people who wanted the correct Dan Sullivan to win had to do was vote for both of them. In ranked voting, you pick your favorite, then your second favorite candidate. If you really want Sullivan to win and somehow didn’t know which one to pick on the ballot, all you had to do was choose both, because that’s how ranked voting works.
Pick one. Then pick your second favorite. Boom. Issue solved.
New York Times deputy politics editor Amy Gardner, who led the defense team on the New York Times during some posted discussions to address withering criticism over their curious choice to make this an issue, apparently never took Politics 101 as an elective in college, so she is unaware of how ranked voting works, I suppose.
Someone might also tell Amy that most Alaskans know what the word “incumbent” means. If they don’t, they probably shouldn’t be voting anyway (I assume there are ballots available in translated format).
The only difference between my image below and the Alaska ballot is that the word “Incumbent” wasn’t highlighted in yellow on the real ballot.
Maybe the Times should do an exposé on why the Alaska Secretary of State didn’t add that helpful highlight. If they can prove the Peltola campaign paid off the Secretary of State to avoid highlighting the word “Incumbent,” they might finally have a story.
More on New York Times sanewashing
One more note on the conflict at the New York Times between some of its journalists, who try to expose MAGA corruption, and its editorial staff, which undermines their efforts. It’s something I’ve been trying to understand for quite some time.
It turns out that the clues have been out there for awhile. An article by the Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto provided one of them in January 2025.
The article concerns the Times assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy:
According to Ms. Lopatto’s article on the Verge:
Healy, who’s worked at the Times since 2005, has a fascinating track record with judging newsworthiness. There’s his bizarre fixation on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage (resulting in a column from the now-defunct public editor desk at the Times that found, among other things, that parts of Healy’s story belonged in “the trash can”); his sexist focus on Hillary Clinton’s laugh; and his frankly misleading (and heavily rewritten) coverage of Donald Trump’s “audacious attempt” to “remake his image” on immigration.
Perhaps most notably, Healy was, as a reporter, one of the driving forces in the “but her emails” nothingburger in the Times’ 2016 election coverage, a news cycle so pointless and destructive that it had newsrooms everywhere rethinking ethics around hacked and leaked sourcing (but not, apparently, Mamdani’s hacked and leaked college application).
More recently, longtime columnist Paul Krugman blamed Healy for his departure from the paper, complaining that “Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages” resulting in Krugman saying he was “putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.”
I’m not going to pin it all on two editors, but names are beginning to surface as more people call the newspaper out on the sanewashing of the most corrupt regime in American history (and the competition is not close).
You might fairly argue, “Dude, unsubscribe again.” But the problem is that the paper needs to be saved, not ignored. It has too many outstanding journalists still toiling away in the face of bad editors. We need to openly support the good journalists, and out the bad editors like I just did.
The far right has enough of an advantage in media already. The last thing we need is for the New York Times to fall under its sway, too.
Take my poll!
If you don’t feel like commenting on whether or not you're interested in a live chat, you can just answer anonymously here.
Keep in mind that I won’t be offended if zero people show interest in a live chat. My query is another way to ask how people are spending election night. I don’t feel invested either way, other than, hey, maybe this would be fun (unless somehow the Democrats don’t sweep).
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