Isabel Miller reports at Capital Fax:

With Chicago’s 2027 mayoral election seven months away, a new University of Chicago poll suggests Mayor Brandon Johnson faces an uphill climb if he seeks a second term.

Just 13.6% of likely Chicago voters said they want Johnson to run for re-election, according to a survey commissioned by the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Fifty-eight percent said they were not excited by the prospect of another Johnson campaign.

The poll also found Johnson with a 23% job approval rating, down slightly from 25% in the institute’s December 2025 ChicagoSpeaks survey.

I cannot believe that 23% of Chicagoans approve of the job that Mayor Brandon Johnson is doing.

At Quartz Cris Tolomia reports on a joint statement released by 200 economists:

More than 200 economists and researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates, released a joint statement on Monday warning that artificial intelligence could reshape the economy at a speed and scale exceeding the Industrial Revolution, and calling on policymakers and technology leaders to begin building policies and institutions to address the disruption.

The statement, titled “We Must Act Now,” warns that AI “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.” Among its core demands, the statement urges economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to expand their understanding of how AI is reshaping the economy and to develop guardrails ensuring the technology augments rather than displaces human workers.

The statement’s significance lies partly in who signed it. Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford economist who helped organize the effort, said there has been “a notable change in the profession,” according to The New York Times. The economics profession has long pushed back on warnings of swift AI-driven displacement, with most researchers arguing that the timeline for technological disruption is routinely overstated. Among those who put their names to the document are Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson — both MIT professors and 2024 Nobel economics laureates — whose earlier public skepticism about AI’s disruptive potential made their participation particularly striking, according to the Times.

with this punchline:

The statement arrives as white-collar payrolls have contracted for dozens of consecutive months, a stretch that Aaron Terrazas, a former chief economist at Glassdoor, has called without precedent outside of a recession.

The situation is even more dire in India (although it’s hard to ferret that out of the official statistics).

The timing is noteworthy. Whether or not AI is already replacing large numbers of workers, corporate managers increasingly appear to believe that it soon will, and that expectation is beginning to influence hiring decisions.

OpenAI and Anthropic are not building most of the world’s new computing infrastructure. The principal investors are the hyperscalers—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others. Their cloud businesses supply AI computation to everyone else. Those firms also happen to account for much of the stock market’s recent gains. And those firms are likely to be the greatest beneficiaries of artificial intelligence.

It may be the case that LLM AI will result in creating more jobs than it destroys. As John Maynard Keynes quipped, in the long run we’re all dead. Workers displaced over the next five years receive little comfort from predictions about the labor market twenty years from now. In the shorter term managers of large companies will see trimming their payrolls as a strategy for boosting their stock values. Whether those productivity gains ultimately materialize is almost beside the point. If executives believe AI allows them to operate with smaller staffs, they have every incentive to reduce payrolls now and explain the decision to investors later.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has died at 71. May he rest in peace. His death is likely to produce considerable political ferment. We are now being bombarded by pictures of him, some historic, some recent.

What I notice in the recent pictures of him is how old he looks. He was considerably younger than I.

I can tell you from experience that age may not creep up with stealing steps to claw you in its clutch but may come on suddenly, even unpredictably. The problem is not that older people are necessarily incapable. Many remain remarkably capable. The problem is that the transition from capable to incapable can occur suddenly and unpredictably, while the offices themselves are too important to depend upon individual fortune.

While mourning his death, we should recognize that Sen. Graham’s death highlights the importance of imposing Constitutional maximum age restrictions on elective office. Federal elective offices are too important to leave to the vagaries of aging.

Former Democratic Socialist Jake Altman lays out an interesting case in a post at City Journal:

Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.

As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now—first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals—already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.

He concludes:

What happened to the DSA can and will happen to the Democratic Party if more moderate Democrats don’t organize against it. As Reuther, a man with experience fighting Leninists, wrote in 1948: “You have to show [Communism] up in the marketplace of ideas, expose it by honest dealing.”

But the battle is not merely ideological. Reuther’s victory over the Communists in the United Auto Workers union was the result of a clear-eyed strategy of exposing, isolating, and driving out those who rejected democratic norms. He also built a broad anti-Communist coalition. Dissident Democrats would do well to take inspiration from him.

Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA, graduated from the same high school I did, albeit several decades earlier than I. I often wonder what he’d think of today’s DSA. They’re a long way from Dorothy Day’s vision of voluntary charity and personal responsibility.

I frequently think that the best way to gauge someone’s actual views is to consider what they accomplish rather than what they promise. If leaders consistently prosper personally while advocating socialism, that tells us something. If jurisdictions they govern consistently fail to become more peaceful, prosperous, or orderly, that tells us something else. Campaign rhetoric matters less than observable results.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve linked to a New York Times editorial but I thought this one raised some interesting questions and was worth your time. The editors remark:

Let’s concede what is true in the case for candidates like Mr. Platner. Democrats do need fresh, charismatic, younger contenders, and they should stop treating the next name in line as an entitlement. A party is strongest when it is a genuinely big tent, willing to host real disagreement rather than enforce a single approved script. Voters can tell the difference between a coalition and a focus group, and they are drawn to the former.

But a big tent is worth pitching only if something is argued inside it, and that is precisely what this midterm cycle has lacked. Handed the chance to litigate what the party actually believes, Democrats have mostly declined. What is the party’s answer on immigration, moving beyond its proper outrage at President Trump’s methods to include an affirmative account of who should be allowed in and how? What would it do about the cost of housing, beyond lamenting it and suggesting inadequate fixes? What does it want from the public education system? What is its response to the disruption that artificial intelligence is about to send through the work force and society more broadly?

They conclude:

What the party owes voters this year is not another savior but a set of answers — plain, specific, sometimes divisive answers to the questions constituents are asking to improve their lives. That is how you convince someone that you are listening: not only by hunting for a better messenger but also by finally having something to say. Right now, too much of the Democratic Party’s identity is defined by what it stands against. The trouble in Maine goes beyond a single candidate. It is a party still hoping a contender will spare it the harder work of deciding what it stands for.

I think the party is also suffering from being too closely identified with public employees’ unions. That in turn has led to delegating the functioning of government to the civil bureaucracy. Now Supreme Court decisions, e.g. Trump v. Slaughter, threaten that strategy. Consider this chart from Gallup:

The Republicans have been bumping along at that low level of approval for some time but that’s a new low for the Democrats. That is a picture of brand erosion. Political brands are shaped less by campaign messaging than by the way a party governs. When brand erosion happens you must quickly adapt, lock in your core messaging, and focus on “customer experience”. I’m far from the first to point that out—the recent emphasis on “affordability” reflects precisely that concern. The challenge is choosing the right values and ensuring that ordinary voters experience government in a way that reinforces that.

Yesterday we had a small earthquake in Lake Michigan adjacent to Chicago. It was a 2.6. Nothing to be particularly concerned about.

I grew up in St. Louis where 4s or 5s are pretty commonplace. The Chicago metropolitan area has an earthquake every couple of years, typically in the 2-4 range.

The significance of this and why I’m calling attention to it is that Venezuela has had two major quakes and there was a notable earthquake in Northern California not long ago. The earth’s crust is interconnected. We should keep our eyes open and be ready for something really big.

In a recent post about Graham Platner James Joyner noted the scandals surrounding Robert Torricelli and Graham Platner and observed that Republicans undoubtedly had similar late withdrawals from political campaigns due to scandals but he couldn’t think of any. I can and here are two.

In 2004 Jack Ryan was running against Barack Obama for the Senate seat vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. He withdrew from the campaign after revelations about his private life. And in 1990 in Minnesota Jon Grunseth withdrew from his campaign for governor of Minnesota over a sex scandal.

Although each of these cases was different there were some similarities. Robert Torricelli is the outlier. He was a well-known, experienced politician and the issue was one of corruption in office. All three of the others were political newcomers.

Some are reacting to Graham Platner’s withdrawal in Maine with calls for more substantial vetting of candidates. I see it somewhat differently. Serving in the U. S. Senate should be the capstone of a distinguished career not the beginning of a political career. Individuals running for such offices, state governors, or even Congressional representatives should be well-known to the communities they wish to serve not political newcomers. A candidate who has spent decades in business, law, medicine, education, or civic life in a community has accumulated a public record. Friends, rivals, colleagues, reporters, and political opponents have had years to observe him. Serious character issues are therefore less likely to emerge only after a nomination has been secured. Had that been the case any issues in their pasts would have emerged much earlier.

That sort of public knowledge depends in part on a vigorous local press. Candidates who have lived and worked in a community for years should not arrive on the statewide stage as strangers.

The editors of the Washington Post urge our NATO allies to give their stocks of Patriot missiles to Ukraine and for President Trump to guarantee that the U. S. will replace them:

Early Monday, Russia fired a large salvo of attack drones and missiles at Ukraine, killing at least 22 people — most of them in Kyiv, where rescuers pulled bodies from collapsed apartment blocks.

Ukraine’s defenses had swatted down most of the drones. But of the 29 ballistic and hypersonic missiles in the barrage, they intercepted exactly zero. Compare that with three weeks ago, when Ukraine managed to shoot down 15 of the 19 Russian ballistic missiles lobbed at its capital.

That’s because Ukraine is out of Patriots, the U.S.-made air defense missiles it has used to defend itself since 2023. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t mince words. “As long as Patriot missiles remain in our allies’ stockpiles,” he said in a statement on Monday, “Russia is only encouraged to keep ‘vanquishing’ residential buildings.”

Zelensky is right. The main impediment to peace is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Negotiators say the outlines of a deal to stop the fighting are visible. But Putin has dug in his heels, demanding Ukraine hand over territory his army has failed to seize by force.

The shortage of Patriot interceptors gives Russia a lift. The Iran war has badly depleted U.S. stockpiles. Analysts project Patriot stocks won’t recover for years despite welcome ramp-ups in production and warn that replenishment will take precedence over deliveries to allies.

Trump has insisted that the United States will no longer pay to arm Ukraine. He need not go back on his word to help Ukraine’s stockpiles recover. Under the mechanism his own administration built — the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List program — allies foot the bill for American weapons.

The hard problem isn’t money; it’s fear. European governments hold interceptors that could be handed to Kyiv in weeks. But that would make a hole in their own defenses. Many European governments don’t trust that Washington, busy refilling its Iran-drained magazines, will ever help them rearm.

I don’t disagree with the spirit of the editorial. My objection is that it ignores a simple arithmetic constraint.

Even if our allies conveyed their stocks of Patriot missiles to Ukraine and even if President Trump swore to replace them and even if he tried to replace them, Ukraine is using its Patriot missiles faster than we can replace them.

By one estimate in a single four month period in late 2025 and early 2026 Ukraine used around 700 Patriot missiles. Even if that estimate is somewhat high, it illustrates the scale of the problem. According to Defense News, Lockheed-Martin produces about 650 of them per year. In other words, Ukraine consumed more Patriot missiles in roughly four months than American industry currently produces in an entire year. Even with Lockheed’s planned production increases it would produce just 100 more per year.

Even if those production targets are achieved, closing the gap assumes corresponding increases throughout the supply chain.

This is the consequence of treating defense manufacturing capacity as something that can be recreated on demand. Without dwelling on it, we erred in reducing our defense expenditures and procurement 30 years ago. We used the money for other things including balancing the budget. Trying to undo that error will be even more costly than not making it in the first place.

I’m having considerable difficulty understanding the point of David Petraeus’s and Clara Kaluderovic’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. There’s a strong opening paragraph:

Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history. It isn’t merely defending its front lines or carrying out occasional deep strikes. It is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.

which they immediately follow by calling the effectiveness of the “strategic pressure” into question:

Ukraine almost certainly can’t destroy Russia’s war machine, but if it can keep enough of that machine disrupted, degraded and short on fuel, it can change the strategic equation.

The difficulty is that disruption is an operational concept; victory is a political one. As Clausewitz argued two centuries ago, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Military operations matter because they change the political relationship among the people, the government, and the armed forces. Petraeus and Kaluderovic never explain how Ukraine’s campaign of disruption produces that political result.

This claim is interesting:

History suggests that Ukraine’s strategy will give it the upper hand. The Allied oil campaign against Germany showed that modern armies can’t fight without fuel. The U.S. submarine campaign against Japan showed that a country can be strangled by attacking its logistics and supply lines. The Battle of the Atlantic showed that victory often goes to the side that adapts faster. Ukraine is combining elements of all three—cutting off Russia’s energy, targeting its supplies and adapting faster—while using a 21st-century tool kit.

Is that in fact what the history suggests? Those campaigns were enormously important, but they were conducted as part of a strategy aimed at the enemy’s complete defeat. The Allied objective was not merely to impose continuing costs but to eliminate the enemy’s capacity and ultimately its willingness—to continue the war. Indeed, Japan’s willingness to continue fighting long after its fuel reserves and industrial capacity had largely collapsed suggests that logistics alone do not necessarily produce political surrender.

That is not to say that the actions of Ukraine are completely irrelevant; they aren’t. They’re damaging to the Russians. But will they alter the strategic landscape sufficiently to secure victory for Ukraine? I’m skeptical.

Gen. Petraeus and Ms. Kaluderovic themselves acknowledge the limitations:

Despite its achievements, Ukraine hasn’t solved every problem. Russia continues to strike Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, and the front remains brutal. Moscow is exploiting Ukraine’s shortage of missile-defense systems and interceptors, and the introduction of jet-powered Shahed drones may pose a new challenge for Ukraine’s largely piston-driven drone interceptors.

I think the lesson is somewhat different and it is illustrated by both Ukraine and Iran. Precision weapons, inexpensive drones, and dispersed manufacturing have lowered the cost of continued resistance. A state that could once have been rendered militarily helpless can now continue imposing costs on its opponent for a very long time. That certainly changes the strategic equation but not necessarily in a benign way and not necessarily in a way that produces decisive victory.