Robert (Bob) Kubinec
@rmkubinec
Political scientist @ Texas A&M Bush School of Government. Interests: business politics/corruption, Middle East, measurement, Bayesian statistics The Bayesian Hitman: Website: www.robertkubinec.com
Even the Kalshi boys are giving Talarico a 50-50 chance of beating Paxton 👀
It is time for new adventures--this summer my family and I moved to College Station, Texas where I am now an associate professor of political science in the Bush School of Government & Public Service. We will miss many friends in South Carolina, but I am also excited for new opportunities at A&M.
This is my policy for AI-generated writing. 👇 AI prose adds nothing to my understanding. I have no interest in engaging with it in any form.
Wow. According to @gelliottmorris.com poll tracker, 61% of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump. 👇 Per NYT, engagement with right-wing content creators is also way down this year. 👇 A possibility is open to reset US politics--but the opposition needs to seize the chance. It won't "just happen."
I honestly never thought I would read this sentence in print.👇 +557% profit is *below* expectations The only thing bigger is Harvard students' GPA expectations 🫢
Tesla's 5-year share price return is half that of the S&P 500. Mr. Musk is getting beaten by the likes of GE and Bank of America.
I just saw this in a used book store while browsing shelves and... what??! 🫢
This LinkedIn post 👇 used a Tukey quote about uncertainty & truth to celebrate his life while including a fake AI-generated picture of John Tukey (real pic attached). In other words, Tukey was right. AI-generated images of historical people are "an exact answer to the wrong question." 🫡
🚨 New draft The past few months I've been implementing a Bayesian prior into LLMs to facilitate easy & efficient structural compression. The result: push puppet networks One tuning param can shrink an LLM from 99% ➡️ 5%--without further post-training or loading in memory. arxiv.org/abs/2606.28251
This breakdown of Trump approval polling by issue from @gelliottmorris.com is devastating. Trump is now 40 points underwater on inflation/cost of living.
This 👇 is one of the single strangest comments I have read about demographics. Parents can't take the place of their children in the workforce because... their children exist in the future??? To replace our children, we have to stop dying. So get on that 🫡 www.texastribune.org/2026/06/25/t...
Hehe the rocket has come back to earth Looks like it might be a crash landing 🫢
The number of Texans who say immigration/border security is the state's most important problem has fallen to the lowest level in over a decade (!!). The GOP is going to need something other than immigrant-hating to win. Polling from the Texas Politics Project
A lot of academics rolling their eyes about this truce agreement 👇, but how's that new draft coming along after you decided 4 months ago to completely redo the data analysis section? 👀 Yeah I thought so 🫢
Ever wondered what you *should* put in a pre registration? Come to our #EPSS2026 panel at 10:50 today in ICC/Olympic. I will present on my new web app for making it super easy to pre register causal graphs with theoretical priors to show what you learned from your experiment. 😎
Had a gorgeous #polisciruns up in the hills around Belfast. Worth checking out if you have time -- Divis & Black Mountain National Trust. So far, #epss2026 is pretty fun...
Job market candidate says job market paper published in the APSR, but it's title & date of publication remain secret
My first result plot from my first ever LLM paper--what do you all think? It's from a new compression algorithm for LLMs: "push puppet networks."🪆 The idea is to build an algorithm that can resize models to any size *before* loading into memory. We're beating Wanda/sparseGPT with less overhead 😎
My favorite new ordered beta paper is a study showing that an application of coconut oil can act as an organic preservative for peaches. 🍑🥥🤌 Look at that nice curvy ordered beta plot 👇 😎 and apparently they have a Clemson peach dealer 😅 #rstats Link: ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Google Gemini gets dunked on a lot for its AI search feature (rightly so), so I was very surprised to see it had a factually accurate summary of ordered beta regression. Not sure why it gets ordered beta right and not basic facts about the world, but well 🤷
Trump may be a terrible general, but he's become one of the most effective fighters against climate change the world has ever seen. Global oil consumption will *decline* this year 👇 according to the May IEA forecast. EV sales & renewables are way up & may trend that way long after the war ends. 🌍✨
Post-election poll dropped in Texas on the Senate race and Paxton is 3 points *behind* Talarico. He's losing *30%* of Cornyn voters. Only 7% undecided--that's an unreal number for five months before an election for a state-level race. see - texaspublicopinionresearch.substack.com/p/new-poll-j...
Free money available on Kalshi - their own "race intel" shows Talarico up by 3 points with 4x the campaign funds of Paxton. Options on a Talarico win, though, are selling 30% cheaper. Veganism may be "low T" but it does save you $$.
Iran is anxiously checking manuscript central where its submission is listed as Reviews Complete - Awaiting Final Decision. 🤞
Fascinating table re: Texan election -- Paxton won the run-off with almost the same # of votes from his March primary loss. Hard to say why from just these numbers, but would be fascinating to see whether Cornyn voters didn't turn out, or turnout generally fell but Paxton picked up Hunt voters.
On point analysis by Nate Cohn on the midterm elections in Texas. It's so important to use concrete comparisons (like prior elections in Texas) rather than vibes. Demographic change plus non-white backlash makes Texas a very dangerous place for the GOP. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/u...