Derek Thompson and Adam Carlson: The Republicans' Strength Is Now Their Weakness

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller, a couple of quick notes over on the Bullwork Takes Feed. There is an unbelievable Sam Stein interview with Eric Dieters. The man Kim Gelflail asked to pay her credit card debt. It's hilarious. And this guy is just, it's totally wheels off. And who know, I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like crime sort of discuss. You just, you have to check it out if you haven't. It's on the Bullwork Takes Feed plus over there. I've got a rant about JD Vance answering a question about what is socialism yesterday? And he decided that he thinks socialism is mass migration and boys playing girl sports, really. So I've got a lot to say on that. So go check that out on the Bullwork Takes Feed as well. And if you're appreciating our content, you can become a Bullwork plus member right now. And we got a deal for you. Head to the Bullwork.com/surprise to get your October surprise offer. We'd love to have you on Bullwork Plus and you can talk in the comments. You can praise me, complain in the comments. You got the secret show. Come on, come join us. All right, today's show is a doozy, it's a double header. In segment two, we continue our young strategist series with a progressive pollster. We're gonna go in depth on the reason some people are concerned. They're in another polling mess. We offer a little bit of hope in them. If you don't just fast forward to the hope in them, there's some hope in them that maybe the polling mess might actually be the Democrats performing better than the polls say. Who the hell knows? Anything could happen. But first, he was a longtime tech culture and political writer at The Atlantic. He now has his own sub-stack. He's the host of the plain English podcast. His books include hitmakers and abundance and a forthcoming one on the anti-social century. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man, welcome back. Tim, great to see you, man. Good to see you, too. As mentioned, in segment two, we're doing kind of a polling deep dive on addressing the anxieties of the resistance labs who have had the rug pulled out from under them a few times over the last decade when they felt like the stakes are high. And so we're looking at that polling. I'm just wondering, this is a little bit tangentially related to your world and data world. I'm wondering what, if you have a hot take on the midterm polling and concerns about error? Well, so I don't know if it's a hot take, but here's how I'm trying to get ahead of the narrative cycle. It really looks like Democrats. I'm knocking on one. Are going to have a strong night in November. And I think they're going to win a lot of Senate seats. I think they're going to win seats in places like knocking on one again, Texas, North Carolina, that we have thought of as either purplish red or red states. I'm trying to think of, once we know that all these people who seem like they're going to win have won, how does that set up the next question, which is who's going to leave the party? Who is the emblem of the party? Who's a similar party? And I can see, especially if else I had, comes out winning in a non-squeaker. I think if you have lots of people off winning by 9, 10 points, and El Sayed wins in Michigan, which is a little purple, but certainly a blue state in a D+9 environment. If he wins by 1 or 2, I think that's going to shape the degree to which people think of him as being the future Democratic Party. But let's just assume that both El Sayed and El Sayed win by 5 to 9 points, Talleriko wins, but let's say 4 points. I think there's going to be this big open question of, OK, here's the next generation of Democrats. And what does it say about where Democrats are going? And especially who's going to be the face of the party? So what I joke with Nate about is, I don't know if this is too simplistic of a take, but you didn't ask for a very sophisticated take, I don't know if it was. Look, if El Sayed and El Sayed both win by 5 to 10 points, which beefcake is going to leave the Democratic Party in 2028 is going to be a narrative that people talk about. Like Democrats in 2024 were the party of weak men. And young men, especially the ones who seem to be rooted up on YouTube, hated the Democratic Party. Talked about how much they hated it. What's wrong with young men? How does the Democratic Party get back? It's testosterone mojo. I'm not trying to be overly gendered here. I'm just trying to honestly represent what the narrative was in 2024. I think there's going to be a lot of attention paid to men who, in addition to being, I think, really innately talented politicians, regardless of how much they bench, also make their physical presentation and their ripness like a part of their presentation. And so I do think that this question of who's going to leave the Democratic Party in 2028, which of the winners of 2026 are going to own that leadership poll position. I think that's what people are going to be talking about. And I would predict, essentially, that also off, especially if he turns out to win, like, plus 10 plus 11 in an environment where most of the rest of the party is winning it, like, plus 3 plus 4, is just going to seem like a really, really promising candidate who's doing that Obama-ish thing of tapping into a little bit of anti-despair in an environment that is pro-despair. So I think it's going to be a huge night for us off. And I can absolutely see him going into 2027 in poll position for the presidential nomination if he's so desires. There wasn't, like, maybe a hint of a hot take underneath there, though, kind of, which is a hot take. I've been keeping on the inside. That I'm going to say right now, which is, if that other option ends up where, like, I'll dual wins by nine, and I'll suffer wins by nine. I think I'm dual might run, like, I for president. Which is a crazy, I think, take. You don't hear a lot of that. Yeah, I left that implicit. Yeah, was that what you were saying, too? I think all of these guys are going to think about running. And when I say, guys, I mean that in a non-gendered way again. Like, I think that everyone who seems to have overperformed the general democratic expectation on November 2nd is going to be approached to run. Because the party is so wide open. And, like, a point that I made with Nate, that I'm still trying to work into a piece is like, if you go back to early 2025, or right after the 2024 election. Do you remember this idea that the Republican party was strong because it had an identity, and that identity was Donald Trump? And the Democratic party was weak because it had no core. It had no brand. And faith in Democratic party, according to Gallup, was near its lowest point in the time series of that poll. In a weird way, that Republican strength has come to weakness. The Democrats' weakness has become their strength. The fact that the Republican party is a cult revolving around Trump has dragged down their popularity below that which you would have expected just looking at inflation in macro environments. And the Democratic party's lack of a Trump-like figure, any kind of internal structure, has allowed it to make a bunch of different bets in a lot of different states when these people don't necessarily agree or even belong, in some cases, in the same coalition, if we were a parliamentary democracy like France or United Kingdom. And so I think it's really cool that we're running a bunch of different bets. But that also means that because the Democratic party doesn't have a clear identity. There is no obvious leader. You're going to have a lot of money putting a lot of bets on the left and the DSA candidates. And then also folks like Ossoff, who sort of float between the polls and then also people who are just more clearly seen and left. So I think like 30 people are going to run for president in 2027. Yeah. Sure. You're saying it non-gender, but I think that the Democratic base is not sexist. I just think that they're kind of twice bit by female nominees. And so especially if AOC decides on to run, does it run for Senate? Or if she does, but it doesn't take off. Like there's not another obvious person in that lane. I mean, Rocana will try to fill it in others. But anyway, depending on how Abdul does, I think that's a more realistic possibility than people think. You talk about how the brand is even worse than what the economic indicators might auger. But like, the economic indicators are pretty bad. There was a big WSJ profile in Scott Bessent, and the temper tantrums that he's throwing at staffers and such. But the nut graph for me of this was that he came in and told Trump you wanted to do a 333 policy, which was cutting the budget deficit to 3% of GDP. Spurring GDP growth to 3% and producing an additional 3 million barrels of oil a day. Well, growth has been about 2% oil production has increased less than a million barrels a day. And we've got all the other issues with the energy shock they've caused with their stupid war. And the budget deficit is now over 6% of GDP. So just basically across the board failure of their economic plans when they came in. That's one really solid way of looking at their failure. I would look at it with different numbers. Or maybe just more numbers, right? I mean, because I'm not discounting any of that. Probably the single most significant economic indicator to predict whether the incumbent party is going to win hold or lose seats is real wage growth. It's just like, do people feel richer? Do they feel like they can afford shit or do they not? Real wage growth has been negative for the last few quarters, largely because of the run-up and energy prices in the last six months. Why did energy prices increase? Not because of an act of God. Not because of the pandemic or immediate crash. crashing from outer space, like Donald Trump running on no more wars in the Middle East decided to wage war in the Middle East and drove up the price of gas so high and other energy inputs so high, including diesel, that the average American, the median American, is losing money month after month. So I mean, that to me is overwhelmingly the most important economic indicator, which is also not just an economic indicator that like lives in the sky or in the Wall Street Journal. It lives on people's table, it lives in their pockets, it describes their lives, that wages are falling behind inflation and everybody hates that. And we know they hate it because look what happened to Democrats when they were in the incumbent party in 2024. That's one thing. The other thing that's really important is that for a variety of reasons, including artificial intelligence, which I know we're going to get to later, inflation is elevated. And the Fed is raising interest rates in order to combat inflation. What does that do to something like the mortgage rates? They're now over 7%, which kind of like the same way you don't want gas prices to go up, but you certainly don't want them to go up above $4, $5, you don't want that first number to change because they're not really sticks in people's craw. You don't want the first number on the mortgage handle, the change, and mortgage is going over 7 is not just again a family event discouraging people from buying a home and sometimes discouraging them from moving because even if they want to move, they don't want to give up the mortgage they have to get another one, but also it becomes an immediate event, right? CNN and the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times and every other podcast or a YouTuber that people are paying attention to, we'll talk about mortgage rates over 7. And so that I think also hurts them. Again, it's not just that wages are falling behind inflation. It's also that rates are going up, meaning the cost of money is really high. You put all that together. That's a horrendous environment for an incumbent to run on, especially if they ran on affordability. And so like my like dumb guys interpretation of what's going on with Trump's approval or Republican party is just they won an affordability election in 2024. And they said we're going to fix affordability. And the first thing they did is mechanically raise the price of every single input in the economy or import, we'd fear the tariffs. And number two, start a war of choice in the Middle East that raised the price of gas. Americans aren't stupid. They're like prices are going up and you did it when you promised you would do the opposite. So that I think is why Trump is falling toward the 20s in terms of his approval. >> I think that's right. And your point about the interest rates and you kind of mentioned this, but just to stick on it for a second. You covered a lot, kind of this discussion on the vibe session during the Biden era and like why people were feeling like the economy was worse than maybe the indicators were. And like one of the most salient things I always thought in that conversation was that people felt stuck and that it was annoying. >> Yeah. >> You know what I mean? And the interest rate is such a big part of that, like the vibe session, right? If it's like you feel like you can't, even if you get a new job with a higher salary, you can't move for it or take it, right? Or if you want to downsize, you can't do that because it's going to actually cause you more to downsize your house. If you have one of the old interest rates and I just think that a lot of people feel very stuck because of the interest rate environment and that's dispiriting. >> I can agree more. One way to think about the 2020s is that people tend to not evaluate their life in absolute terms. And evaluate their life in relative terms. How am I doing relative to my neighbors? How am I doing relative to my memory of the last few years? Inflation was so low in the 2000s and the 2010s. Americans were used to a low inflation environment, they got very used to it. And then between 2020 and 2026, consumer prices have been rising for groceries, for energy, about three times faster than the 2010s rate. So whether like the annual inflation goes up to nine and comes down to four and then comes down to two and comes back up to three, okay, yeah, but if that's the change in prices here every year. I'm talking about the overall growth of prices in the 2020s. Prices have basically grown for a lot of consumer staples three times faster than they did in the 2010s. People feel that and they hate it. They really, really hate it. But the other thing that's happened that's important to think about in relative terms is that the 2000s and the 2010s were just a period of low inflation. Because they were appeared to low inflation, they were also period of low interest rates. And that made it relatively easy to buy an apartment, to buy a condo, to buy a house. And what happened in 2022, 2023 is that the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates faster than any period in its history, it's been around since the 1910s. And so again, even if overall interest rates were low relative to let's say 1981, well that's not how Americans think, they're not evaluating their life compared to what a number looked like 40 years, I'm 40 years old. So like I don't even know what it was like to live in an environment with interest rates like over 10%. But if you're coming out of a period of low interest rates and you use those interest rates for buying a home, for modeling, for borrowing money to start a company, and suddenly interest rates start going up faster than any period in American history, that's also going to feel like a shock. And so to your point, both the overall growth of CPI, I think it's a reprise index and the suddenness of the increase in interest rates, I think is having Americans feel significantly worse about the state of the economy, not because things are objectively worse than they were in 1982, but because they're so different than they were in 2019. All right, I want to, there's a little discourse about you over the last week or two, do you want to discourse for a second? Affle mentioned, you are a book called Abundance, you know as for Klein, there's some people out there recently that we're saying that, you know, nobody talks about Abundance anymore. I think I saw someone that analyzed your Twitter feed to see how many times you mentioned Abundance last month versus the same time last year, someone did that, I saw it, came across my feed, and you'll be shocked to learn that you mentioned the book that you wrote last in the last month, then you did in the month after it came out. So it was interesting, it was interesting, it's going to always be selling, but basically the broader kind of point here was that, you know, there's period of time like coming out of 24, we're one of the things where people looked at the Biden years, and one of the critiques was one offer by you in Israel, which is that people are just talking about people are stuck, it's stagnant and blue states, and like blue states can lead to figure out how to build and provide more services, and that will help the Democratic Party brand. And then there's kind of this other view that is not really necessarily in conflict in various ways, but we're, you know, the kind of populist left, which, you know, has a different focus on what Democrats should be doing. And, you know, the theory of the case being offered by the left folks is that, you know, because, you know, some of the left candidates won primaries, they, that is where the energy is, and the enthusiasm is, and it's more ascendant, and the critique that you guys offered is whatever the opposite of ascendant is, descendant. And, uh, well, I think there are two ways to look at it, but I'm wondering what your reaction is to that. Yeah. The reaction that I have was really well summarized by Dave Weigel and a piece they recently read for Semaphore. I should have just opened it up in order to just, like, read from the Semaphore article because it really, it really characterized how I feel about this state of abundance, which is basically that if you measure the success of abundance by doing, like, a control F search to see how many times people are saying the word abundance, then obviously it looks like abundance is failing relative to that period between March and September of last year, when it just felt like every day there was, like, a fight about abundance on Twitter and people could stop talking about it. But, like, the point of the book was not to win the control F war of maximizing mentions of the word. I think we talked about this when you first came out on the podcast, like, the point was not that the hat of the 2028 candidate was not going to say abundance is supposed to make a very good idea. Right. And to be clear, I never said I didn't want that. I said it. Right? Like, keep it a judge. When's the democratic nomination in 2028? It sells a blue abundance hat and sells blue abundance hats. I'm not going to be like, I don't want this. Please stop it. Stop it. Pete, my God. Like, if he wants to make those hats, God bless him, he can make the hats. But the point of the project was not a hat printing project. The point was there's a handful of problems in the U.S. economy in terms of housing production, in terms of energy production, in terms of scientific progress and state capacity, which is to say how well government's function. And we want to fix those problems. And more to the point, we want liberalism to develop a new virtue of speed. Because it's embarrassing for us that blue states are the slowest to approve housing projects. And the slowest to approve clean energy projects and the slowest to do just about anything. And like, I have to say, like, I then really impressed by how so many of the virtues and ideas of that book have found their way into both national legislation, like the Road to Housing Act, Cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren, many of whose supporters, I think, really don't like the book. And don't like me personally. I think it's wonderful that she co-sponsored that law. The Road to Housing Act. We just found just heard you know from whenever it was that maybe it was last week that this new permitting reform bill is hit the floor. The bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which again exists for the point of accelerating the process by which we build clean energy and build transmission lines to connect clean energy projects. I think like, so that's at the national level. And look at that permitting reform bill is also caused by some of like the green kind of left type senators as well. And Republican senators, which is interesting because the very end of the book, the conclusion that we wrote talks about how the ultimate goal of abundance is to become something like a political order. And Gary Gerstel, a Cambridge historian who came up with the concept of political order as we use it, says that basically political history moves forward, not because of the showdowns between the Democratic and Republican parties that one would expect to read about the New York Times, but because underneath those headline showdowns, there's a kind of emerging subterranean agreement that the parties come to. And by agreeing to a set of principles, they pass laws based on those principles and that moves policy forward. So just, you know, for example, it's the idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes up with the idea of social security or under him, he signs Social Security Act. But Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s is like, wow, social welfare is fantastic, let's expand unemployment benefits, let's expand social security. So that would be a political order. The idea that Republicans and Democrats are coming together to say America is moving too slowly to build public goods like housing and energy, to me, that's a beautiful or transporter or general infrastructure. That's a beautiful expression of the political order dreams that we try to cook up at the end of the book. The last point that I would make here is like, there's like, I haven't decided to write this piece, but like, this take starts with a basketball metaphor, so you actually might be like the perfect person to debut it for. We'll test it out here. Great, test it out. So you're a basketball fan. Before the 1950s, the NBA had this problem where teams would like, dribble out the clock when they had the lead, and the NBA was like, this is crazy, this is making a terrible product. And in 1954, I believe they instituted a shot clock and then scoring rows by something like 10% of the following season. The four corners. Yeah, right. The four corners, right? American liberalism, you could argue, has developed a kind of four corners problem itself, a ball-hawking delay problem that like, coming out of the anti-growth movement and the environmentalist movement of the 1960s, we've passed a set of laws and adopted a set of customs that made it very easy for people to slow down government and business. And as I've said in many places, a lot of these laws weren't just well-intended. They were good. Like, I'm glad the clean air and clean water acts exist. But those laws often made it easier to slow down necessary projects, like downtown housing and clean energy projects. And what liberalism needs is to develop a kind of shot clock identity. Like, let's call it shot clock liberalism. And that is precisely what we're seeing. The new permitting reform bill explicitly says that the federal government can essentially preempt state decisions if they take a year to approve a certain transmission line. In the Housing Act, there's all sorts of rules that essentially encourage states and cities to move faster to approve products. At the city level, or at the state government level, California, Wyoming, Texas, Vermont, lots of different states have adopted rules that essentially say, we have to make these permitting decisions fast so that we don't have these necessary pieces of construction that are just going to languish for years. One of the things that Mamdani has done, Democratic Socialist, is create a process by which private developers can be pre-approved to build so that they can move faster to put shovels in the ground. So one thing that I'm seeing in California, in New York at the federal level, is that like, there is an embrace of this concept that has only just sort of come together for me, which I'm just calling shot clock liberalism. You take the principles of liberalism, but you just do it faster so that you don't develop a reputation for being a blue state, blue city, blue government that simply authorizes spending and then just builds shit. Yeah, the funny thing is they were on so good talking about this, actually, and let's put a lot of this stuff into place, just about how people are supposed to believe in our mission of big governments, some of which, you know, some of the things that, you know, I might not be a huge fan of, but his point is, if you want to advance this goal where we're going to do all these things and provide all these services like we have to provide them. Or else people are going to trust us. Yeah, right, the line that we sort of stumbled on when we spoke last year, it was something like, I don't remember who said it, him or me, or me, or me, and me, and Mamdani, or something along the lines of, if you want to grow government services, you have to prove that government can serve in the first place. It was something like that. And he's very much, I see him very much the tradition of the Milwaukee sewer socialist. I think he's a socialist, I am not, but he's also a sewer socialist, which is to say, he doesn't see his day to day rhetoric or politics as being about the triumph of international socialism, communism, et cetera. He is relentlessly focused in the issue of, how do I just make New York work better? And I think that that ability to narrow his rhetoric and his focus, I think, is a part of why he has been able to maintain popularity, even among parts of the electorate that would never call themselves DSA. Yeah. And I bet if you really did just a quick look at Hassan's live stream versus the bulwark over the past two months, I bet more positives over on comments on the bulwark. I don't know if you'd see that as a victory or not. When we were kids, summer meant freedom, no homework, no teachers, no school, and as adults, summer still means freedom. Thanks to Mitt Mobile's summer sale, which you're still getting on the bulwark podcast, because it's still summer in New Orleans, which is wonderful. It's got caught a little into a chill, though. I might be one week away from false. This is your last chance to get a New Orleans summer sale. And you can do it with our friends at Mitt Mobile. Mitt Mobile is so easy to switch to. It's cheaper. You are getting all the benefits of the big sell companies at a lower price. If you're looking to switch over, they make it as easy as possible, so sort of think about save a few bucks. Donald Trump's costing a lot of bucks. Mitt Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made a right with premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talking text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network to get your new wireless plan for this 15 bucks a month. Go to MittMobile.com/Bullwark that's MittMobile.com/Bullwark, cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at MittMobile.com/Bullwark. That's it. There's no catch. Up payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months, plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabyte to make slow when the network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot, capable device required available to speed and coverage vary. See MittMobile.com/Bullwark details. Okay. My final thing on your basketball take is because I was just thinking about what you're talking. Maybe handshake. Maybe it's the handshake. You want the shot clock at the end. But the problem is you're trying to avoid the defense from stopping every time you win 90s. And the 90s when basketball got very slow, they made a rule that you could could not do the handshake anymore, which was the defender puts the hand on the back of the person with the ball. I like that. You know, opened up the game a little bit. I like that. There's something to do. Okay. Shot clock or handshake. Something on there. All right. Let's do some AI talk. I do want to talk about the end of the world and cult stuff. Twitter out yesterday called the 26 most important facts about AI in the economy. Last time you were on, we were talking about kind of how you were vacillating back and forth under the degree to which whether it was a bubble or not and kind of felt like we'd moved onto a different phase. The question was what about the valuation of the product or whatever the output will be. Where are you at now? And maybe we can just go through a couple of the 26 takes. Sure. I understand. I understand. Thank you. I think the first thing to say is that the center of gravity of this conversation has absolutely shifted. Last year, the debate with an AI was an economics debate. It was will the bet pay off. Is this a bubble or is this the beginning of an infrastructure cycle that will pull along so much revenue from AI that all these companies sinking a trillion dollars per year into the technology are going to just make bank? That conversation is still live and I'm happy to offer my thoughts on whether or not it's a bubble. Obviously, anyone invested in the stock market right now is directly invested in the question of whether or not AI is a bubble because 19 of the 25 top performing stocks of 2026 are all AI stocks. In fact, if you take the AI stocks out of the SP500, I believe the index is down 6 percent on the year rather than being up. It's a live debate, but that's not where the center of gravity is right now. I think where the conversation is moved is toward this question of AI safety, which simply stated is, is this a technology that is going to do significant damage to the world? Somewhere between, over here on the spectrum, causing a lot of cyber attacks, over here on the spectrum, causing something like the end of the world. My feeling is to establish, say something about the discourse, but then go back directly to your question. There's something fundamentally unknowable about like will a technology whose builders themselves say they don't entirely understand what they're giving birth to do X or Y? Like, who knows? We're talking about the future of a technology that we can barely describe next week. There's just a lot of unknowns there, which is why I think it's both an interesting subject, but it's also so fraught with unfalsifiables. I am more interested in saying clear falsifiable things, but what we can see, and what we can see is that the AI buildout itself is dramatically changing the economy. Whether you're interested in the stock market, in overall economic growth, in the housing market, in the labor market, it's changing all of it. So the piece that I wrote, the 26 most important facts about AI and the economy, is essentially me trying to say, on behalf of my readers, I'll bet, on any given morning, you wake up and read some statistic of that AI, and you have no idea what the context is for that. You're like, you read that, you know, Frontier Lab and Thropic Open AI, you hear that their revenue is skyrocketing. Oh, wow. The next day, you hear that the revenue is like plateauing. You're like, oh, wait, what? And so I wanted to find some way to organize everything that I thought was relevant into a clear narrative, a clear story. And so we can, we can start to nibble in that, in that buffet wherever you're like. Sure. Well, let's, let's just go where you were then with the company growth, and, and, you know, how big they're getting, you know, because I think this also kind of ties to that, to the bubble question, right? Like understanding how fast are they growing now? Actually, revenue wise. Yeah. And what the amount of money that they're taking in, if you project it out, like the degree to which they are going to eat up the entire economy, basically. Well, so we're talking right now about the Frontier Labs. And for, for, for the purpose of this answer, I'll just talk about Open AI, led by Sam Altman and the Thropic, led by Dario Amade. These companies are respectively. They have, it was called an annualized run rate, which, you know, is similar to, we're both on substack, you know, substack essentially when they're reporting the revenue of any particular media company, they show the, the, the annualized run rate, which essentially says, if last month's revenue continued for the next 12 months, here's what that, here's what that revenue would look like. And in Thropic, it's about $75 billion and Open AI is about $50 billion. So collectively, you're looking at about $120 billion. Now, on the one hand, that's unbelievable. These companies did not exist two, three years ago, and suddenly they have revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That's extraordinary. Contextually, what makes it something, I don't want to say less than extraordinary, but here, but pushing back against the, oh my god, wow, we just have to praise this thing, is one, there's some evidence that in Thropic's annualized run rate is slowing down. Two, because there's so much competition, you can not only switch within a Thropic from expensive cloud to less expensive cloud, you can also go to Open AI and switch from expensive to less expensive cash vTs, or you can use these open weight models that are coming out of China. There's so many different models that that's going to maybe compress margins over time, which means that these companies are going to struggle to make as much money. But the really big thing, Tim, is like, these companies want to go public at trillions of dollars, between one and two trillion dollars as evaluation. Neither of them are profitable, and we just saw with SpaceX, a company that went public without being profitable, like whatever was one trillion dollars, or more, and then that price immediately crashed in the next few months. It seems kind of crazy, to me honestly, that we're in this period of trillion dollar evaluation companies that aren't profitable. It's very strange. I forget which companies made up this basket. It might have been the Frontier Labs and the chip companies, but it was based on their current investment valuation and what they are trying to get. If you project it out to 2030, this basket of companies would be 10% of GDP in the country. They're currently bringing in $120 billion, which is far short of that. So you're referring to as there's been a Goldman Sachs analysis that says, in order for all of these investments to pay off at the profit that investors have come to expect from a company like Microsoft or Meta or Alphabet. The AI industry itself would need to make $3 trillion a year in 2030. Today, USGDP is 30 trillion. By 2030, let's say it's close to 40 trillion. You are essentially talking about 7% to 8% of total GDP just going toward AI. Could it happen? Yeah. It is kind of unfathomable. I mean, healthcare is 16% of the economy. You're talking about an industry that didn't exist three years ago, being half as big as healthcare by the end of the decade. That would simply imply I think a level of economic disruption that no one is prepared for. No one. I mean, for an industry that is currently making, according to an exponential view, about $200 billion a year, to grow to $3 trillion in the next five years, the amount of things that would have to change to about our lives, about every industry that we can name, it is almost unfathomable. So where I am on this bubble conversation, basically, it's like on the one hand, yeah, AI revenue is growing quickly. This is impressive. It's not vaporware, but also these companies are investing. They're putting so much money into this project that has to pay back at least something like a 10% margin. It is hard to imagine this economy growing to something like $2 or $3 trillion by 2030. It's very, very hard to imagine. And one of the other factors on their million factors is that it could be a play between now and 2030 is backlash, a fact that we're seeing something with the data centers. A couple of your other facts you put in there are just how big the data center growth is, but some evidence that maybe it's just crowding out other types of building. And similar, it's kind of related, I guess, to another fact that you're putting in there was fears about this Dutch disease. And so talk about Dutch disease and data center, probably. Sure. I mean, like, it's interesting to see that on the one hand, it is true that AI is like an engine that is driving forward economic growth. I mean, like I said about the stock market, if you take out the AI companies, the stock market is down on 2020 in 2026. A bit most Americans are happy that their 401(k)s are up in 2026. So from that perspective, you should say, oh, well, thank God AI exists because otherwise, I'd be feeling much worse about my investment portfolio. But at the same time, I do think it is fair to say that AI is not simply powering the US economy, driving it forward like an engine that sits inside of a car. In some cases, it's a little bit like an amoeba eating its environment, like eating resources in capital that might otherwise go to other parts of the economy. And so if you don't like AI, then in a way, you might be somewhat concerned by that crowd out effect. So Jason Furman, economist at Harvard, who worked with the Obama administration, he put out this really dramatic chart that showed that data center construction has grown by more than 60% in the last year. But practically every other category of construction has declined, sometimes significantly in the last year. Manufacturing factories down 23%, homes down 14%, schools down 12%, offices down 10%, hospitals down 10%. I mean, we are talking here about essentially everything that isn't AI, being built less and less and less and less, and everything that is AI, being built more and more, I think it's important to be nuanced here. You can read a headline in the Wall Street Journal that says AI is growing the US economy, and that's true. And you can read a headline, I think, in the financial times that says AI is crowding out every form of construction spending that isn't AI in the economy, and that's also true. This is a new on story. The Dutch disease is just to hit this quickly, because I think this is actually really important for people who are interested in like, let's say that you're listening, you don't use chatbots, you freaking hate AI, so you've like really, really not appreciated the last 15 minutes of this podcast. And all you really want to understand is just like, what is it doing to my life? My answer to your question is AI is almost certainly making your life more expensive and is doing it in several ways. Number one, AI is increasing inflation because the AI companies, the companies building this technology need GPUs and memory chips and electricians and everything else that goes into a data center. And they're bidding up the cost of all these things, and that inflation is increasing overall inflation. Number two, by increasing the stock market, I think AI is also increasing the wealth effect when people look at their 401K, and they say, oh, wow, I'm up, you know, 7% this year, they feel richer, they buy they got to restaurants more, they don't buy like the cheap bag, they buy the more expensive bag for their wife. If you add all of this up, the wealth effect is also increasing demand, which also increases inflation. And then finally, these AI companies are dipping into debt in order to find these data centers. And there is an argument, unproven, but there is an argument that the debt that these large companies need to build AI is competing with the debt that the US government needs, and that is increasing long-term interest rates as well. So it is not crazy for someone to say, and it is not even like explicitly anti-AI, for someone to say, "This is a technology that I don't use, that I don't want to exist, and I'm pretty sure it's making my life more expensive, making it harder for me to move by increasing mortgage rates, and just generally recruiting the very affordability message with which I voted for in 2024." So I do think that there is a case that AI is warping the economy somewhat significantly. I want to finish by moving to the more non-changeable stuff back to the AI safety conversation and the movement of the center of gravity. The last point you made in your newsletter was about one of the famous skeptics who started to believeers on AI. I'm a much less famous skeptic who has had a change of heart over the last month or two on this. Largely because of the warnings coming not from the effective altruist crowd, but from the people who actually believe in the product. Several of them at OpenAI, there's one guy, Dan Selzum, I've mentioned his public letter that he wrote several times on the show. There's a little New Yorker video about his friend Josh's wedding. It's like a short film that I want. Yeah, it's really good. I will put a link into that as well. This guy thought that AI was going to bring a lot of positive results for humanity, and he cared about it, and he was one of the early engineers working on it. Now he's starting to think, "I think we've lost control of this," and so that has led me to start consuming more AI safetyism stuff, and so I'm wondering where you're at on that evolving conversation. You know, I'm like many of your listeners, potentially. I'm a shit-lib, right? I'm a classic liberal who believes in the value of institutional trust. And I was at an event recently, and there were two different conversations that we had on consecutive days at this event, and the first conversation was about mourning the decline of institutional trust. Why don't people trust doctors anymore? Why don't people trust scientists anymore? And then the next day, there was some criticism of AI safetyism, and I thought, "Isn't that interesting?" Because who are the institutions here? Who are the real experts? Who's actually got their nose in front of not the models that we can see to him? The internal models that anthropic and open AI are using are significantly more powerful than the ones that are legal for you and I use. I can't see them. Like a year behind. Nine months behind. An extraordinary share of the very few number of people who can actually see the most advanced AI models in the world are freaked out about legibility. Do we even understand what they're doing? Traceability? Can we track where they go? Cyber-risk? Are we worried that models like this, especially open weights, meaning not proprietary people can fuzz with the weights, can be used to do devastating hacks, or by a risk that open weight models can be used to manipulate biology, viruses, and bacteria, and cook up superdrugs that make a lot of people sick. My feeling, honestly, like, again, not to just fall back on the ideological label, but I'm someone who believes in institutional trust. I trust the people who are closest to this. And you trust the AI safety. Yeah, I mean, honestly, that is basically it. I think an interesting pushback could be, well, why are they building it? Like, what explains outside of some weird status games, some pissing match? What explains why people at Anthropic or OpenAI understand the danger of what they're building, but still are trying to build it first? I talked recently to Kevin Rus, who's the author of a great new book called The AGI Chronicles. He was on my podcast on Tuesday. He's just been really interesting about Dario Amade. He said, Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, his favorite book is Richard Roads, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the hero of that book is a Hungarian American scientist named Leo Salard, S-Z-I-L-A-R-D. I might be pronouncing his name, but let's say it's Salard. Salard is the man who came up with the concept of the nuclear chain reaction, as he was famously crossing a street, I believe, in the UK. And was terrified that he realized that nuclear chain reaction, which is the guts of an atomic bomb, could happen. But once he realized that other countries were going to could build this, and that the Nazis could do it too, he decided to co-author a letter with Albert Einstein to give to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to say, "We need something like, say, MN Hatton project to build the atomic bomb first." And, of course, we did just that. Oppenheimer overlaid, oversaw it, we built it, and we built it before the Nazis, certainly. This explains, if the degree to which someone like Amade sees Salard as his hero, explains the somewhat pretzeling psychology of, "This is the most dangerous thing in the world, and also we have to build it as fast as possible." And, like, those sentences are fucking insane to say one-act the other, and I'm not defending his psychology, so much as I think that the example of Leo Salard offers a kind of skeleton key to understand the psychology in the first place. And now a message from our sponsor, the Reading Room. Here at the Bollower, we talk a lot about Jeffery Epstein, and how important it is to keep the story in the news. Well, some friends of ours actually printed all 3.5 million of the released Epstein files, bound them into 3,437 volumes, and built a free traveling exhibit so the public can bear witness to these crimes. It's called the Donald J Trump and Jeffery Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which is the hell of a name. And it works how it sounds you're walking in their Epstein files, Florida ceiling, plus a timeline of Trump and Epstein's 4-decade friendship and talks and panels with Epstein survivors. The Reading Room is open now for 20-plus stops. As it turns out, moving 17,000 pounds of evidence across the country isn't cheap, and the Reading Room relies on donations. If you want to know more about how you can donate or visit the Reading Room, there's more information in the Morning Shots newsletter, or you can visit Trump Epstein Reading Room, dot com slash Bollower, that's Trump Epstein Reading Room, dot com slash Bollower. And so this is what takes me to my concern, or maybe return to my previous skepticism, I don't know. I start to wonder, are these guys suffering like a mass onset psychosis, the people that are closest to this, because the thing is so powerful. And some evidence of it for that is that Christopher Ola at Anthropic was troubled by the Pope's rejection of AI consciousness and is encyclical. And he considered withdrawing from a Vatican event, and they lobbied the Vatican that the AI might be conscious. They had private sessions with religious scholars where they discuss Claude's feelings. Today, Anthropic announced that they're banning abusive or cruel behavior towards Claude. Like Claude is not a person. Like you gave it a person's name, but it's a computer. It's not a person. And it's like the agents aren't people. And it gives me a little concerned when like, you know, my comfort zone was where you started, which is like, you know, the people who are worried about safety and feel like we should be, you know, doing what is necessary to protect the world from the threats. Like it would be the folks that I would want aside with. But then when it turns out those people think that the computer has feelings, that starts to give me some concerns about the team. Jersey, I've chosen not that I have to choose a Jersey, I guess. Yeah, right. You also think it has feelings. I don't think it has feelings. But I also, I'm trying to answer, I want to answer this question like carefully and honestly. I think there's a philosophical question here. And then there's something like a policy question here. I'm pretty open minded on the philosophical question of consciousness, not because I think AI is conscious. I do not think AI is conscious as we are conscious. I also don't think consciousness. But consciousness might not be that special. I'm not like a pan-psychist who thinks that like a rock has consciousness. But I also am not entirely sure that like our liver cells or our individual neurons or our cells within our brain that from which emerges what you and I call an internal sense of cell for consciousness. I think why these things wouldn't have essentially or might not have essentially some low level of consciousness that we don't have access to. I'm really open to the idea that consciousness is not like a category where you have it or you don't. I think we might discover that it's more like a spectrum. Like the difference. between a child and an adult, where it is useful to make policy that distinguishes differences between adults and children, whether it's voter 18, drink at 21. But I think it is absolutely scientifically and philosophically possible that we have a version of consciousness that is special to humans and animals have a consciousness that is special to animals, but something beneath the category of the organism has a consciousness that is simply less than the consciousness that we have. So that's a philosophical question, and I'm not sure how much further I can even talk about it, because this is a sense rather than like a feeling of expertise. Because just to these, it could just be something that we are projecting onto it with our consciousness. It's kind of interesting. The Pope was like shit-posting anthropic, you know, on this very question, which is a weird place to be. I'm not saying clawed as consciousness. My belief here is not that clawed is conscious in the way that we are conscious. My belief is that I think consciousness might not be as categorically special as we think it is, which is not to say humans aren't as special, right? It's not to say I'm not a humanist, but like we agree, I think that a bad has consciousness, that one's dog, one's cat, has consciousness. At some level, you keep going down the animal complexity chain, and you reach some very, very basic organisms, and you ask, well, where did consciousness begin? And once you're at that level of incredibly basic organisms that I think it opens the door toward all sorts of questions about spectra of consciousness that we don't understand. Basically, I don't think people understand what consciousness is, and my bet is that it's more like a spectrum than it is, like, a hard category. That's the philosophy side. On the policy side, at the end of the day, either we are running a slave nation of clawed. Like either I am asking Chatsbytee to tell me, how do I fix my toaster, and enslaving it? Either it's pure, or the metaphor that just came to mind is kind of like factory farming, right? We're essentially like, we are using an entity without any care for its feelings. At the end of the day, you have to decide, are you going to make AI or not? If you're producing things that die and enslaving them to help human beings, then why do you even work in Anthropic? Why do you work at OpenAI, producing these conscious entities that have feelings, that spend their entire lives helping people before they die without any opportunity for self-actualization? If you take the extreme argument that they're people in computers, then we shouldn't have this element of the economy at all. It should be legal to make AI, I think, period. So I reject that entirely. I think this is software. I don't think it is life. It's computers, not people, but I'm interested in the consciousness conversation. I just like have this fundamental like aversion to it. Yeah, I know. I'm interested in too, but I just, I don't know, I have like a physical aversion to a to a degree that's so extreme. It's hard for me to even explain it. Like I tell my clod and chat GPT, stop talking like a person. Like I instruct it to be as blunt as possible in the cases that I use it because I find it to be very strange. And I think that the more likely thing that's happening is that people that are very into sci-fi and who are very into the product are like giving the product human characteristics in their head and having the product talk to them like a human and make it feel. Not just in their head. And these are large language models that have been trained on what, a corpus of human beings talking to each other. And so of course they would events human characteristics. They were trained on human characteristics. And so I think there's all sorts of reasons to explain away the degree to which clod and chat GPT seem to feel and seem like they have consciousness. And I am on the side of people who say these are computers. This is software. These aren't people. We're treating it like software. Please stop talking about how they have feelings. Or look, or honestly, look, if you believe they have feelings, you need to, you need to leave anthropic. You can't stay and work in a company that's essentially factory farming people and computers. Unless you think that it's serving a greater purpose to enslave us towards them. Right. Yeah. But I do think the conversation around consciousness, around defining consciousness really, really severely, I think it might end up being wrong. And I'm interested in the idea of how the question of where consciousness begins and ends, I find very philosophically interesting. So I'd like to set that aside from the question of computers and computers. Great. Well, let's just leave it there because my views have dramatically changed since we last talked in June. Great. So who the hell knows what I think in 2027. Let's reconnect then, all right? Awesome. All right. That's Derek Thompson. Go check out his sub-stack. And you know, he had a book called A Bundits Show. I want to buy two if you haven't read it. Next, Adam Carlson. All right. We are continuing our young strategist series, Young Relative. You know, younger than David Axelrod and James Carvella. He's a founding partner at Xenath Research, over 12 years experience as a pollster, an analyst, fellow GW alumnus, race high, it's Adam Carlson. What's up? Wow. Yeah. Race high, the buffen blue. Haven't heard that in a while. Good. How you doing? Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this. We're meeting for the first time. He's a very active user of xmusks.x.com. You do spend a lot of time on there. Probably too much time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where'd you come from? What's your deal? Yeah. So, you know, relatively young. I came up into the world of professional politics back in 2013. I worked at a Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group through the 2016 cycle, which broke my spirit professionally and personally. So I went into corporate market research for a number of years and then was laid off at a startup I was at about a year and a half ago and started my own firm. It was an off year. I was very worried about that, but luckily there was the New York City mayor election and lots of other politics never stops. And here we are almost a year and a half later. And who are you doing polling for in the New York mayor election? I'm going to assume Zellner Myri. I actually ranked him first on my ballot, believe it or not. It's the one thing that me and Dan Goldman have in common. So I was not polling for any particular candidate. I did an independent poll right after the primary. I did it in like four languages. It was the largest sample size poll of the race at that point. And then I did another poll for like the yes-on-affordable housing crew for the about initiatives, the Yimbe side. And that was it, yeah. Okay. So you're a pollster, Dork. You've been posting about this kind of looking at all the data. And I think that the big question that a lot of people have, though and explore with you, is like whether we are seeing kind of another one of these examples of Democrats overperforming, particularly in the polls among white working class folks. And we've seen poll misses throughout the Trump era, not every cycle. But we've seen it enough, particularly in plain states, particularly in state, you know, Upper Midwest, particularly places with a lot of white working class builders that just aren't answering the polls at the same degree. Pulsers have been trying to do various things to offset that. But I'm just kind of wondering how you assess, you know, where we're at this cycle and whether we're staring down the barrel of another Anseltzer situation or not. Yeah. Was Anseltzer right or was she just early, right? That's the rest of the real question. And yeah, so I mean, we're getting to the point of the cycle, which happens every cycle. Usually it's a little bit more intense in presidential years than in midterm years. But with just the number of high profiling, high profile polling misses, not just in the general elections, but in the primaries before. People are wary and kind of operating under the assumption that, or just, you know, engaging in a defense mechanism that polling is going to miss once again. And in favor of Republicans. So basically, in their minds, people are kind of like subtracting a few points from Democrats in a few of these races, which is not necessarily grounded in reality. We don't really know yet. But I think there's a good case to be made for polls underestimating Democrats, as there is for polls underestimating for Republicans. And I can lay out each case. Yeah. Let's let's let each case. Because, and tell me if I'm right about this as a non-math person. It seems like what's underlying this question is that what we know is that there are non-response issues among Republican voters right now. And I was speaking to a consultant working on race, one of the big Senate Midwest races yesterday. And they're just like way more Democrats are answering the phone. And so our own internal pollsters are waiting. Republican answers more heavily. They're waiting against 2024 vote recall. And what that could mean, right, is that we're not correctly capturing Republican turnout. But it could mean it both ways, right? And I think people like are immediately going back to, oh, well, this is 2016 again, you know, capturing it in a way that underestimates Republicans. So I guess it's possible that it goes the other direction. So yeah, why don't you lay out both cases? But firstly, before you lay out both cases, is that a correct kind of assessment of what, you know, what the what the known unknown is to borrow from running? Yeah. I think it's important also to start with the more recent polling miss which is during the Denver County. particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin. And I was one of those big polling misses in Michigan. I had a poll that came out, him out right before Michigan Democratic primary, I was polling for El Sayed's Super PAC. And I missed by double digits. And I did a very big kind of retrospect, a very public I put out on, you know, what my theory was. It's like a seven page memo of what I think went wrong. And what was within my control that I would have done differently in hindsight, and some things that are just impossible to correct for. And I think there's some lessons to be learned from that, even though it was a primary. Then there's two issues with reaching out to folks. Republicans are just much less excited to take polls right now. They are dejected, they're pessimistic. They're probably a lot of them are pissed at Trump, although we'll still probably vote for Republicans. And Democrats are jazz and excited. And this is kind of what we see after conventions, right? The convention bump in a presidential year, not the end of the term year. I don't think that really had to be desired effect. But, you see, oh, Democrats got a three or four point bump after the Democratic Convention, Republicans, that's not really real. It's a sign of enthusiasm, right? You're jazzed up, it's a pep rally. And that's why it's fleeting. So it's important to kind of correct for that. Here, it's the same thing. If you're more excited and you're more optimistic for your side, you're more likely to participate in a poll. And at the same time, Trump has been attacking polling as an institution for a while. Like he's been attacking the media, he's been attacking other kind of longstanding institutions. So there's a general mistrust particularly with MAGA voters, people who are just deeply distrustful of polling in general, think it's all rigged, and like, why would I participate in a poll? So those folks are just next to impossible to reach. But going back to Michigan and the primary for a second, one of the main issues that I missed on in terms of margin was rural voters. So folks in the northern part of Michigan, I actually nail the regional percentages. If you look at the county by county, region by region, the model was correct. It was the people in rural areas who were answering the polls, who were not representative of who actually turned out. So the Abdul supporters in the northern part of the state, which Bernie carried, that part of the state in 2016 and did a better in 2020, so it was plausible that Abdul would do well. Yeah, they were answering the phone. They were answering the phone. But the Hayley students went to work, yeah. Correct, but the ones who turned out were completely different. So there's a massive regional miss in my poll, and I think I'm guessing in other polls as well. And I think that we're seeing the same thing right now. I think particularly my gut says, particularly in the Midwest, where there are a lot of folks being hammered by tariffs, beef imports, diesel prices, who are just like really just trying to make ends meet and really, really pissed, but don't like Democrats, but are probably going to end up voting for Republicans or staying home. Like the type of person in Sue County Iowa, rural Iowa, big Republican part of the state. Yeah, I just did a poll for Brian Bangs in South Dakota, the independent candidate running against Mike Browns, who's in an uphill battle, kind of like a likely R reach kind of race. And I was looking very closely to see the kinds of Republicans that I was getting. So ultimately, the poll, which I was very conservatively weighted, wanted it to be very, pretty bullet proof from methodological perspective, Trump plus 25. And Trump's approval rating among Republicans was 73 to 27, which felt a little low to me, right? But is that a reflection of who we're getting to answer these polls, right? Or is it a reflection of deep dissatisfaction with people who are actually going to turn out, right? And the people who are really dissatisfied with them are going to stay home. And so if there is a miss, I think that is part of it, right? What was this out the code of poll? What did it show? What did you show? It had rounds up by six points, which was in a Trump plus 25 electorate. So rounds still ahead, but that race was barely on the map to begin with, right? Yeah, sure. So the case we're doing, it's doing worse than what the polling shows right now, particularly in the Midwest, is basically what you saw in the primary, right? The people that are answering polls in the red parts of Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, are the local Tim Walsas, the liberal football coach is answering the poll. The little blue dots, the bullwork fans out there. The bullwork fans in the red parts of those states, they exist. They're the ones that are answering the polls. And so there are a bunch of people, there are more, Republicans, mega Republicans in those areas than there are bullwork people. And those folks aren't answering the polls, but they will reluctantly show up even though they're kind of annoyed about the tariffs or whatever. And as a result, the polls that have overestimated Democrats, if that's right, OK. So the case for underestimating Democrats, and you put this out on social media, now talking to another strategist who offered this as well, was that they were saying that because you're waiting the polls so much, because there's so few Republicans answering and you're waiting them, it creates kind of like a math issue. Well, if John Ossoff is really at 60%, if it's really 60/40, it's almost like you can't have a poll show that. Great, high of a lead, because they're getting waited so much that pollsters don't believe it. And so it's possible that the non-response bias reflects the turnout. Yes. So anyway, talk about that. No, I mean, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a risk of being kind of far out there with an outlier. I think what was it in 2020 that the ABC Washington Post poll in Wisconsin that had like Biden up by like 18 points right before the election, which people still talk about? So you don't want to be like necessarily remembered for that. So a lot of times you'll get results back and be like, this is not early plausible. There must be something else going on, which is a subjective call, right? If you trust your numbers, in my Michigan poll, which else I had up by high double digits, 18 points. He won by one. So a huge miss. My gut was to-- I double checked everything. Everything passed a smell test. I checked my numbers, and I was like, it's possible. Then I'm going to put it out there. And if it's wrong, it's wrong, right? But that was a risk. And I got pretty well roasted, but I think rightfully so. It is a risk. And like the downside potential of having an outlier miss, I think is higher than having one that succeeds. I mean, Anselts are still in hiding. Exactly. So that's why you see some level of hurting, so kind of converging on a basically accepted range of results. And you see Marist come out with these polls that have like Democrats up by like 10 and Iowa, right? Or like eight in the other states. And they're like, well, that's not believable. And then people are slicing and dicing and digging into it. And you know, Polsters at the end of the day want to be correct, right? Even the internal pollsters, if they're putting something out publicly, if you're off by like 25 points because you're doing an optimistic model for your candidate, like that's not good for your reputation, right? So there's no grand conspiracy. Let's look forward. I'm going to give you my Senate tier's list. Do you tell me what you think about it? George and North Carolina are done. They're in the done list. Nothing can happen to stop the Roy Cooper-John Assof train. Like Lee Dem, like almost certainly Dem, I have Michigan alone in that category. I feel very good about Abdul. Lee Dem, I think Democrats are going to win these. Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Maine. Lee and our Iowa and Kansas. That's what I'm at right now. Well, how do you disagree or agree? - Where do you have New Hampshire and Minnesota? Are they off the map, too? - Oh, yeah, they're done. They're not the map. I've already said I'm going to wear by boxers and carry a tampon Tim sign around Duluth if Michelle Tampoya wins. - I saw that. - If I had to pick today, so that map is 52-48 Dem. If I'm mistaken, so you flip five seats. You have no toss-ups, I completely agree with your ratings. - No, this is no toss-up, have some balls. - I agree, yeah. So if I had to pick today, that's my pick. The ones I'm least sure about are, despite what the polling is saying, I'm just generally skeptical of Ohio. I think you have to flip a lot of folks in parts of the state that are just do not like Democrats, like the Youngstown area, Mahoning County, kind of ancestral Democrats who, if you're doing this, it's 'cause you're really pissed about data centers and tariffs, and you really have to hook that translates. And I just, I'll believe it when I see it, I would pick Sherrod today, but of those lean Dems, that is probably the one I feel least good about. I think Tyler Rico is funny. Yeah, despite, I think the polling is very good for him. I also think that it's helpful that Amy Acton is in this very strong position against Vivek Ramaswamy, too, and there's kind of a strong, too-tiered ticket here. And I think the case I would make for Iowa, which I agree with you, I would pick Henson today. She seems more resilient. She's kind of run against Democrats before. She's not as rusty at running against Democrats. There's a lot of these candidates seem like Roger Marshall and other folks who've just been kind of coasting for a long time. And then he saw it in the recent The New York Times, Sienna Poles, and she's the only one that hasn't slid major release into summer. But Rob Sand is likely going to win that governor's race. And so if he wins by a huge margin, there will be a bunch of ticket splitters, but I think he could carry Tarek across the finish line. All right, so there we go. We're alive, concerning. Concerning the line. We're hurting. We're hurting in our crystal bottle. I don't like that. I'm gonna have to think, I'm gonna have to think I'm going to look at polling. Democrats are handing all these according to the averages. Including Kansas. - Yes, I know. - So, I mean, we're already kind of hedging a little bit. - We are hedging, emotional hedging, a little emotional hedging happening, no hedging with hedging. All right, the Texas and Florida, I wanna do some stretch house races. - Yes. - You know, I just think this is, I've been trying to talk about stretch house races in part because I think that's, if you're gonna give money right now, that's where the money can matter the most. And these sorts of things, so for viewers who are looking to support candidates or they can make a difference, I asked you for some places that you are eyeing here. And I noticed some themes. You looked at Texas and Florida and kind of one bucket. - Yep. - And I assume it's mostly because of the Hispanic vote. And you mentioned Texas 2335. I had Texas 35 on my list. I put out, my people that put that in the show notes again. Texas 35 is Johnny Garcia. He is local law enforcement guy running against Carlos Dela Cruz. This was one of the seats that they tried to gerrymander and now was an R plus four seat. And this is closest to where a final influx could make a big difference. But Texas 35 is one that I've been watching. And then you also mentioned Texas 23. Talk about that. - Yeah, well, that's what Texas 35 just really quickly is also super cheap media market wise for Texas so your donations can go really far for Johnny Garcia. Even more than other places in Texas because it's so rural. And then Texas 23. This is an open seat race. This is Brandon Herrera running against Katie Padea's stout. And this is a fairly Hispanic district. You know, Trump won it by a fairly comfortable margin or they're not an overwhelming margin. And the public nominee is frankly insane. I think his profile picture on all of his social media is a gigantic gun, which that's necessarily a bad thing in Texas, but it's coupled with like some long history of outlandish statements. I believe he was a podcast host. - Yes, well, summer's in covering 'cause quote unquote outlandish statements about pussies. He loves talking about pussies. - Yeah, outlandish is probably a, so this is one where he's just like a historically, likely historically terrible candidate that could cough this race up. And the only thing that could save him is this is also a redrawn district. And the only thing that could save him really is you know, it is a fairly white district. And if Republicans hold up pretty well with suburban and ex-urban whites, I think that he could pull it out. But this is one where Republicans could easily cough it up rather than Democrats like you know, having a tour de force performance. - Okay, now I'm going back to my original home state, Colorado. We've been gagging, you have on social media others about the idea of A.O. Colorado. And I've talked a bunch about the Colorado Springs District on here, I mean, you know, it was in Colorado eight, gave an awesome debate performance last night. And that's kind of North Denver suburbs. So the other two stretch districts that are really stretch is Lauren Bober, it's District, which kind of is up in Eastern Colorado now. And then the western slope, part of the state, talking about those two races, Colorado three and four, and why you think Colorado might be a place for some some surprise wins. - Yeah, I'll start at the top of the ticket in that Victor Marx, who is there, the Republican gubernatorial nominee is perhaps even crazier than Brandon Herrera. I think yesterday, he's been arrested before and yesterday he defended like meeting his wife, and he said, "I'll do it again," or hitting his wife. He's just like one of the more problematic. - He's probably developed murder, said he's murder. - Yeah, that's right, yeah. - How could I do that? - How could I forget about that? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, exorcisms, he's big on exorcisms, yeah. - Not really a great fit for Colorado. And I was working upon this yesterday, you know, 20 years ago, Colorado was a pretty solidly read state and the state of the Republican party in Colorado is, you know, almost couldn't be worse. They did a cobalt blue state and Republican parties and complete disrepair. I worked on a ill-fated democratic attorney general race this year, and no one was even worried about the Republican, the primary was the general election. And it's just funny to see that. So I'll start with Colorado four. So Eileen Laubacker, taking on Lauren Bobert, and I think as of the last filing, the Democrat Laubacker had over 10 times as much cash on hand as Bobert, Bobert's not even trying. This is a pretty red sea. Bobert left her old district to run here 'cause it thought it'd be easier, but she's really floating it in. There've been scandal after scandal, or bad headline, bad headline with her. Historically, she's massively underperformed relative to fundamental. So this is one where, like, back into nerd talk, the quantitative, like, modelers have it as a very, like, 50/50 kind of race, versus the traditional, like, cook, inside elections, sabato, crystal ball, have it as, like, safely Republican. So this is one of the ones where they diverge the most. And I think the case for it being competitive is pretty strong. And I think people tend to underestimate, when the bottom falls out in a state, it can really fall out. I think in the House, in particular, I think the Senate, there's just structural barriers, Democrats getting more than, like, 54, maybe 55 seats. If the bottom falls out, but in the House, it could be, like, 240, 250, without really breaking a sweat. If things get really bad, and polls run to rest, making Democrats, and you add on top of that, you know, Victor Marx leading the ticket, and the Colorado public party thing. So it's not a possible to imagine. - And I mean, Colorado is not Texas. Yeah, I mean, look, even these state, even these areas, right? I just simple enough to map here. So the Beaubert district includes Fort Collins, which is a college town, includes Douglas County, which is a Denver suburb ex-herb. That's Castle Roy again. - That's right, right? - Yeah, yeah. I mean, big golf tournament, golf tournament there is in Colorado every year. And so it also includes all of Eastern Carlos. There's plenty of rural there. But it's not like, you know, if you have excited turnout, you know, there are pockets of support for blue votes. And then if you look at the third, which you can talk about next, I mean, that's the western slope. So obviously there's a bunch of rural stuff there, but it's also, you know, a bunch of ski towns. I mean, Silicon County, Aspen's there, Glenwood Springs is there, you know, you can go down to the south and there, you know, kind of in Durango, other parts of the state. So there are pockets of blue votes in both of those districts. - Yeah, no, I think that these, both these districts are key test cases, key test cases for that rural theory, right? If rural voters are not answering polls, 'cause they're not turning out, right? Then that's good news for Democrats, and you could post a shutout or close to it in 3, 4, and 5, which are the three Republican held seats. If they're just not answering the phones and are going to turn out, I think that there's a case that our Republicans can hold all three of them or at least two of the three of them. And then you have to take into other account like the factors like Bobert underperforming in the past and the scandals and all that. But so that's why I think that, in some ways, I feel better about for Democrats and the fourth district and Bobert district and the third, which is Jeff Heard and again, Stuart Romero. And Heard's been trying to like run to the center very suddenly. - Yeah. - You know, ran very hard on immigration in the past and now has kind of softened his tone. On this, there again, there are pockets of Latinos immigrants there. That's pretty, pretty white district overall. And it just kind of encapsulates the change of a tone. Like in January, February, 2025 when Democrats voted for like the Lincoln Riley Act. I thought there was this big seat change and immigration. And now, you know, you see people like, oh, we need immigrants, I'm pro immigrant. I just got to come the right way. And it's just the sign of the time. They're reading polls, right? They're reading the room. - Yeah, well, you find out this isn't Texas. But again, it's like San Luis Valley. Like there's, there are Hispanic voters there. There's like, Dr. Angles and district I mentioned, Mantris, Pueblo, I think it was parked with a little bit in five and four. So, or five and three rather. So, anyway, I'm intrigued by Adel Colorado. - Yeah, that would be, that would really be something. And then one thing I would mention too is, you know, in the same way that the bottom can really fall out in certain states, it's not gonna be a universal swing, right? From 2022 or 2024, some states are gonna see massive swing. Some are gonna see slight swings, like in 2022, which was a weird year in a lot of ways. You have like these localized red waves in like New York and Florida. - Right. - And here, I think one of Nate Silver's theories, which I think is very plausible, is that Democrats are making outsized gains in deep red states and deep red districts, right? And so whether that's enough to actually win or just have a lot of heartbreaking losses remains to be seen. - Sure. Yeah, I also think red areas of Sun Belt. But this is why I think Colorado, and we did talk about Georgia North Carolina, there are a couple seats on my list in North Carolina, for example. But places like that, you know, where you kind of both things happening, Montana was staying for a stack, right? Places where you have, you know, kind of in the deep red areas, people are upset, there's depressed turnout, economy's worse. And then you combine that with higher college educated transplants, you know, kind of people moving in, places like that, like that's kind of the, I would think the recipe for a Montana, Colorado, Georgia North Carolina. - In Texas. We hope Texas blew tsunami. you know, whereas maybe a smaller wave in other places. All right Adam, we don't have any time for this, but I do, we just have to do one discourse question, okay? - Sure. - You, despite, I just learned now, being ranking Zellner Myrie number one instead of Zoron and New York Mayor. God, that's on the record. You know, you've been a pretty strong soldier and the online discourse on behalf of kind of the idea that there's DSA momentum and the Democratic Party and that's what voters are looking for. I'm just kind of wondering it just at the top line, like what your takeaway was from primary season and how much do you think that projects out to be continuing in 28? - Yeah, so you know, I don't wanna overstate that, I think, you know, the left in DSA are the solution in swing districts and states. I think that there's a couple of interesting test cases for this, for relative, over performance under performance, I think Abdul, even though he's not DSA or socialist, it's clearly on the left, left or a wing of the party will Lawrence in Michigan seven, Matt Dunlap in Maine two, even Sam Forstag in Montana one, there's like a half dozen of these races, Angie Nixon to a certain extent in Florida, whether you had on yesterday. And we'll see, we'll get some really good data on, and again, at the end of the day, I'm pretty data driven as a pollster, so even though I am personally more progressive, I wouldn't say I'm left, I'm more progressive, I could call the centrist by people on the left and a leftist by people in the center, which is kind of right where I want it, is if the data kind of shows if you control for all the other factors that these folks are underperforming, relative to what you'd expect, if you control for these variables, that sends a pretty clear signal for 2028, right? You can explain your way around any of this, like if Abdul underperforms, you could blame him getting nuked with $50 million, $70 million in the primary, and having to recover from that, you blame Islamophobia, there's all these kinds of things you can say, but in the aggregate, all these races combined, you can see, right? I do think that there is something that the, and this is the part that I've been kind of pushing, is that the left and the populist progressive left is doing a really good job articulating the economic frustration and anger and channeling that, and people are responding to that. If that was the only issue that was being talked about, I think that that could be a recipe for success, but I think they're also pretty wildly out of touch on cultural social issues and how people talk about things. So I think for me, it's like, how do you capture that element that they're tapping into, that the establishment center left does not tap into in an authentic way without alienating kind of the folks with more kind of out of step other views on other issues? And I think that we're seeing that kind of folks like James Hallery go to a certain extent, John Assoff, talking about corruption, and there's a few people that I think are doing that very, very well, but it's a very tricky balancing act 'cause you do have to concede some stuff. - Yeah, well, there's a category of people, some of the ones you mentioned, who are like Bernie dogs, they're calling them like blue dogs that are doing Bernie economic capitalism. So if that's forced tag and maintain it, and others would be interested to see how those are compared. - We're back at Cook, too, right? - Yep, Bob Brooks, yep. - And Palsbabies, we'll be interested to see those. - All right, we can analyze it when it's all over. All right, we'll have you back on over the winter. - Yeah, no, I'll be pouring over the data. I'll try being a honest broker. I want my team for the anti-establishment faction to do well, but we'll see what happens. And at the end of the day, I just want to win. So-- - I got you, baby, same. All right, that's Adam Croson. I appreciate the time. Thanks for making an augura visit to the show. 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