Woah. A politician owning a loss instead of blaming turnout. Bravo, genuinely rare.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
The more power a government holds, the more damage one bad actor can do with it. Freedom spreads that risk across millions of people, so no single person can wreck everyone. The price is that each person carries more of their own weight. Mao, Pol Pot, and Chávez didn't promise tyranny. They promised equality. Look what that delivered.
Context management is going to be a real job, and plenty of companies haven't hired for it yet.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says if frontier models stopped advancing, it wouldn't matter for most orgs because enterprise AI is bottlenecked on context, not intelligence:
"There's no agentic work that's automated the whole enterprise. That has just not happened. Why is that? The real reason is the models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside of any organization."
"They have not been in every meeting. They don't know what's in everybody's heads. They don't know all the processes. There's always a couple of employees who know everything in every organization. You go tap on their shoulder, and everybody's like, 'Oh my God, what would happen if he or she quits?'"
"If you just fused that and gave that context into the AI models, just the frontier today, I think there's so much productivity gains you could get for any organization on the planet."
"For that, we actually don't need smarter models... If the frontier doesn't advance, it doesn't actually matter for the vast majority of organizations on the planet. They're just so far behind in the adoption curve of actually automating things and getting value out of this stuff."
@alighodsi
Read the latest Profiles of the Future by @bhorowitz and @mikemcg0 on Databricks & the Future of the Firm: a16z.news/p/databricks-and-t…
Same tools, wildly different results. Curiosity is the real edge right now.
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
AI rewards curiosity more than credentials. The people building with it beyond the chat box are setting themselves apart right now, and that window won't stay open long. Waiting isn't a neutral choice. It's a cost you'll pay later.
Incumbents are asking how AI fits their workflow. Startups are asking why the workflow exists at all.
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Companies don't exist to create jobs. They exist to solve problems people will pay for. Jobs are a side effect, and the fewer it takes, the better the company.
Everything's up if you exclude the parts that went down.
$META CFO: "Third quarter GAAP operating income was $13 billion, representing a 37% decline year-over-year and a 20% operating margin. Excluding the Q3 legal charges related to the aforementioned legal settlement, our third quarter operating income would have increased 11% year-over-year."
Non-voting stock is a founder asking for your money and your silence at the same time.
Meta plans to introduce a new class of non-voting stock that it could use to fund its heavy spending on artificial intelligence, according to a report bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
If this sort of thing has real, sustained momentum, it will be incredible for our youth
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Means-test retirees and you've built a tax on saving. Everyone who pays in should collect. Fix it on the front end: later and smaller checks for new retirees, and a growing share of payroll tax should be invested for decades so the system itself stops living paycheck to paycheck.
