About

How to Use This Site

This site is designed to be as simple as possible to be a resource for your campaign work. The primary product, the reports, are all listed by date, and the search functionality is decent. In addition to searching words and phrases, you can also search by FRED series names or Yahoo Finance tickers to see if I have done any analysis on the data you are working with. In addition, tools like Notebook LM should be used to enhance the power of what has been produced here. Loading the pdfs you get every day into it will allow you to ask questions and be almost instantly pointed towards the relevant bullets.

The polling dashboard and data download pages are designed to be used in under a minute.

Why Glass Candle?

For my entire adult life, I have worked in and around the world of Democratic electoral politics. And one thing that I noticed is that campaigns are a lot less policy focused than they are often portrayed. There is good reason for that. Campaigns often do not have a lot of control over policy decisions, and the lag from a decision being made to it having an impact on marginal voters is often too long to be useful. Furthermore, earned media is much harder on policy. Especially when things are complicated.

To get a good policy hit, you will often need a highly unlikely chain of events: a clear mechanism by which the policy works, good documentation of that mechanism happening, a reporter who is interested, and an editor who thinks the story generates engagement. For an individual committee to devote serious resources to generating hits like that would border on an irresponsible use of resources.

That is where Glass Candle comes in. I have spent the more than four years becoming something of an expert in macroeconomic finance, but I am still fluent in English, and have enough experience working in campaign environments to translate the firehouse of economic news into something useful for operatives.

Every day, I create a report that bullets what I think is important that is happening in the interactions between policy and the macroeconomy. These reports should serve you as a resources to be able to quickly build campaign materials when you need to.

How did I choose the name?

It all starts with the company Palantir. The name comes from Tolkien’s work, in which the Palantiri are magical seeing stones that allow the user to see beyond what they normally could. In the Lord of the Rings series, the dark lord Sauron uses his Palantir, to show selective truth to two ostensible allied of good with the goal of drawing them to his side. He is partially successful, turning Saruman to his side, and making Denathor think that Sauron’s win is inevitable.

This strategy is almost successful for Sauron, and it is why it bothers me so much that so many in Washington seem to take it on good faith that a company named after them that is in the business of turning incomprehensibly large datasets into something that makes decision makers can use quickly and easily. Furthermore, it is not coy about the fact that it brings an ideological perspective to its work.

That got me to thinking about another fantasy epic, a Song of Ice and Fire. Glass Candles, in the books, are a pretty clear rip off of Tolkien’s Palantiri. In the series, a group called the Maesters have something of a monopoly on advanced knowledge. As they gain expertise in a subject, they forge a link in their chain, with different metals representing different areas of expertise. In order to claim expertise in magic (or the “higher mysteries” as they call it), the final test is to spend a night in a room with a Glass Candle, attempting to get it to light. The official position of the leaders of the Maesters is that this will not work. Rather, it is to show the candidate that magic is not something to be relied upon, and that its power as a force is much less than commonly believed.

But, near the end of the fifth book, a major character (Sam) encounters a renegade Maester, who tells him that magic is regaining power, and there is a Glass Candle alight in his rooms.

I felt that there was an analogy to be drawn between the Glass Candles and policy research in campaigns. While policy research is, for the reasons I discussed above, not a huge part of the work done by campaign committees today, I think that its potency still exists, and with this company I am to provide liberal entities with it.