10: How Trump Destroyed the Republican Majority

- Oh, guys, I don't know. How many Victory Lops should we take? - Not that many. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gaelan Drook. - I'm Claire Malone. - And I'm a relatively sleepless Nate Silver. (laughing) - Okay, don't need to brag, Nate. - We have a combined, we have a combined 11 hours. So we're gonna be able to make it through at least an hour long podcast. - And I am, I am most of that 11 hours. (laughing) - I'm feeling great, feeling great. Okay, on today's show, Blue Wave, Red Wipeout, Blue tsunami, the big Kahuna. Call it what you like because no matter how you slice it, Democrats swept in the kind of blowout that hasn't been seen since 1974. Watergate style. - Biblical flood, a biblical flood. I don't know, do you know your Bible Claire? Like, what's the, yeah. - Noah? - Harding of the, Noah, Noah-esque flood. Harding of the Red Sea and Noah are different stories in the Bible. (laughing) - But, you know, maybe it was a matchup of the two last night. - Quite different stories. - I know that it was an oral tradition. They might have been merged at some point and in some, you know, anyway, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna push, I'm not gonna challenge a Catholic. - Thank you, very good. By the way, shout out to our listener @FenderJazz for Ryan for noting the Watergate blowout. I was also listening to Galen Drewks, GD politics this morning and you guys were talking about the 1974 comparisons. We are going to test the results that we have, the ones that we're waiting for, how Nate's flipper model did. (laughing) - Oh my God, you got this. - For those who are listening along at home and not watching this, Nate brought his stuffed animal to play tonight. - Who bought that for you? - No, we're not talking about flipper secrets, okay? (laughing) - Nate, are you familiar with the artist, Lisa Frank? - Lisa Frank probably is. - Lisa Frank, this is gonna be a fun one tonight. - No, Lisa Frank, if you were a little girl in the 1990s, you had Lisa Frank binders with like psychedelic rainbow unicorns and dolphins and that's really what this is. It is giving me. Anyway, we're gonna discuss all the numbers. We are also gonna discuss what everything means for both parties and the path to 2028. Just before that, a couple of house cleaning things. This Saturday, we will be doing our first still counting live show at CrookedCon. There will certainly be tons to talk about. So please grab a ticket. - Were you matching what that Saturday morning would be like if there was like another pulling or favoring Democrats again? - Were you? (laughing) - For all of us, it would be a grumpy mood at CrookedCon. - We'll have front row seats to watch the lips living out and we will probably talk about that, I think. That'll be, I think we'll be right in the ground. I'm thinking of it as a sourcing experience. Anyway, if you want your tickets, get them at CrookedCon.com. Okay, let's just bang out the results right here. As of recording, Democrats have 54 Senate seats, which could become 55 or maybe even 56, which is crazy. Democrats currently have 228 house seats according to the AP and they are estimated to take 258, according to NBC. They flipped five governorships and according to the times they are on track to win the national popular vote by 13 points. Okay, I was looking around at the different, you know, what are the, what are the newspaper headlines this morning? A lot of big, bold, tight face, Nate, Galen. What are the headlines for you? - I have a couple. I mean, a couple is allowed. You can have a head in the subway. - Well, I said two last night and I said I'm, but like, you know, the closing of some type of Trump era and the repudiation that in some ways he was asking for, for a long time, right? Combining maybe a more technical sense with a decline in partisanship for the first time in a while, and we can like explore what that means. But yeah, that's, I mean, that's, those I'm stealing now from like the things in my editorial calendar for what I'll write about next at Silver bulletin, but like, you know, the first kind of thought I had when I woke up this morning, apart from the drink I was drinking. - That damn I look good. - On my computer last night, I'm happy the computer still worked. That was a frightening moment when we went talk about that. But it's like, how the fuck do Republicans extraguite themselves from this by 2028 when the next election cycle is already starting, right? If you go to prediction markets, they have Democrats as a two to one favorite to win the 2028 presidency, right? Given the baseline of its 5050 and you don't know shit, about the presidential election two years out, right? That's a big, that's a big edge two to one. It went up in the markets from like 60% to 67% after yesterday. So that's, you know, but we can talk about that. Those are the things I'm thinking about. - I'm just gonna drop the caveat right here that historically speaking, the midterms are not predictive of the presidential election that comes two years later. You can chart, you can plot all of the numbers, obviously, in 2006 to 2008, that was a one to punch for Democrats. But historically speaking, that chart is not linear. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. I'm just gonna put that to the side. We'll come back to 2028 later on. But in terms of my headline, you know, the thing that came to mind when I was writing the headline for the GDP politics podcast at five o'clock in the morning, or whenever it was last night, was a Watergate scale rebuke of Trump. And first I had written a Watergate sized rebuke of Trump and I was like, oh, that's not quite factually correct. Like in that election, like post-Watergate, Democrats won the House popular vote by 18 percentage points, 17 percentage points, you know, they ended up winning 291 house seats. They had, you know, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate of 60 seats. Like, but considering how much more polarized we are today than we were in the mid 70s, the scale is certainly comparable. - Yeah. - And so I think that is, I think that is the right benchmark. The one other thing I just wanna say, which is a throwback to the episode we put out on Monday, was the betrayal election. The reaction that we saw from voters last night was not just Trump, you sort of overreached on your mandate, you overread your mandate and went too far into the sort of the immigration and tariffs and things like that that you promised. It was the things that you said you would not do that you did that everyone hated, ranging from the Iran War to corruption. - It's just, I mean, just to put, yeah, my two cents here, which is like, you know, I watched the other day, rewatch hadn't watched it in a long time. Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, a visual feast. But last night, I kept on thinking about that movie, which is mostly a visual feast, but you know, it interrupts the, I guess you could call it corruption of the French king and is, you know, their outside spending with, hey, you're spending too much on the war in America and the people, you know, need bread. It's all the same factors, you know, 300 years ago, it's all the same factors that we're talking about today. And I was thinking about it because last night was so, again, maybe we'll talk about this, maybe we shouldn't have been shocked by it. I think it's the most, it's like the wildest election that I've felt like since 2016, where it really felt like, we don't have revolutions in this country, we vote, right? Like it very much felt like a repudiation. Well, again, we'll talk about this, but just across the board, all demographic groups, I mean, Steve Bannon being like, wait a second, those exit polls about young men splitting between Democrats and Republicans can't be right. I mean, just across the board felt so seismic and historic. - Sean Trendy called it 100 year flood. I'm not sure quite go that far. It might be once in every 25 years flood, right? The kind of result you get like a few times a century instead of once a century, right? But it does feel that momentous and like, I am in some sense, not that surprised. Kind of from a modeling standpoint, you know, you never know, right? The conditions were there for a really big wave. If you actually like watch waves, if you go to like a Katie National Park and you watch waves form, right? I don't even know whether I guess a rising tide, right? Plus a lot of wind, plus a lot of sea foam and whatever else. Like all those kishas are there. It like still doesn't quite predict how things collide together in this complex way to produce a really huge wave occasionally. But like all the conditions were there, including just like the complacency and kind of indifferent some most of Trump, right? I mean, I, the New York Times had video when the reporters like, hold Trump. He's like, yeah, I accept, I accept the results. When some lose some, right? And he's almost like resigned to. - Which by the way, huge, hugely important. - Let's go. good for the country, right? Like we were having conversations about whether or not that would happen. We met our incredibly low bar for the president of the United States to accept the election results. Do you think Trump would, um, hot tick, as we get on three hours sleep, right? Do you think Trump would just go off to Mar-a-Lago or go off to the West Village and start a karaoke bar where he can comment about men's asses all he wants, right? And let, and let JD have the job. No, I think he's, I think he's actually one of those people who like, his life is all the people that he employs and his staff and like he is, he is one of those, he is one of those people who like, it's proof that like working for a long time or having active hobbies is like makes you live longer. So I, I think he'd, uh, I don't think he'd hand it off. Yeah, I also think that, you know, what he said last night was important. Like I'm ready to work for the Democrats. We can get things done. I don't just want to spend two years vetoing. Like he does not give a fuck about the Republican party, which was evidenced by, you know, the metaphor that I used on the live blog last night was that he fucked his party from both ends. He went to war in Iran in a way that made it, you know, an impossible task to run in the national environment. And then he chose really bad candidates just across the board in Kenpaston, Darleen Graham, Vivek Ramaswami, you know, like Andy Biggs, the list goes on and on and on. And so like you create a really bad national environment by violating one of the core penance of your, the world view that you've presented to people. And then you elevate a bunch of people who would have a difficult time running and even like a okay or neutral national environment. And so, you know, my question is we're going to go back to the like, where we were in the late 20 teens, where like every couple weeks he's gesturing at working with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Like I think that he will probably be like, oh yeah, let's get some things done. Like he just wants, he like, here's the grand bargain, right? Like he gets to finish his ballroom. He makes the Trump arch and like Democrats can pass enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, right? Like there's something in that, which is that like he doesn't care about the policy. He doesn't care about his party. But the things that he is really focused on as witnessed by his closing argument about the reflection pool, which like I usually don't talk about this kind of like petty crap. But like, that's the stuff he seems focused on. Still counting is brought to you by Sundays. We are what we eat and so are our dogs. We know dogs. I've dogs at dogs. I like dogs. I see dogs on the street. And a long, healthy act of life starts with clean, real food nutrition every day. And humans, I mean, this is where species comes to play. 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Even the places where they lost, you saw a competitive Democrats in Florida, Angie Nixon finishing three points behind the Republican Ashley Moody in Louisiana, the Democrat finished less than two points behind the Republican. I mean, like if you are going to pick, let's do a pick two of like the big data trends. Nate, what's your pick two? Well, you know, like usual Claire, it's men who are doing the hard work of being independent and open-minded and non-partisan and switching candidates when the conditions warranted. Look, these trends take more time to dissect, but Democrats, if you look at prediction marker, so the people who are most confident about this kind of thing, there will probably be a Democratic center, a black Democratic center from Mrs. fucking city. So crazy. Yeah, so crazy. I can't get over that. And if he's not, he'll lose by 200 votes. And so analytically, it's the same kind of conclusion. Yeah, I know what's funny is like Democrats might actually feel like, well, I guess if they win Mississippi by 40 votes, they can't complain about their luck exactly, right? But they might wonder, what if we had nominated somebody different in Florida or Louisiana or not had this collision between two liberal candidates in Montana? I mean, but they did a pretty good job, right? They get a great candidate in Kansas and they win the Texas governor. I mean, yeah, I, you know, obviously, yeah, Roger Marshall, Gina, you know, and then Mississippi race are probably the three signatures for me, even though Talleriko will be kind of the cover boy. Yeah, in terms of the data trends that I'm looking at, you know, like we were debating before we got online, like, should we be taking victory laps for, you know, database analysis in this election and like, you know, we'll come to maybe some of that. But I do want to say that the cross tabs on the polls were really accurate. I mean, the biggest shifts that we saw in this electorate were young voters than Latino voters. And we also saw a significant shift amongst non-college educated white voters, as you mentioned. I mean, it was closer to like, right, your baseline here is nationally a 13 point shift to the left. So when you're looking at this data, you want to base it off of that, like our, you know, is this group shifting more? Is it shifting less? Cross tabs were pretty good in the polls. The one group that I have, I'm paying attention to is, and this was not in the voter data that the New York Times put together, but it was in the exit poll data where they do ask about income. Folks who make between $50,000 and $99,000 a year is a part of the electorate that Trump has been has done very well with over this past decade, which is to say not people who are genuinely poor, who sort of the Democratic Party makes a lot of arguments that are in their economic best interests and the Democratic Party has kept poor voters as they have lost a lot of ground with sort of like the middle income or working class voters. And they oftentimes reflect the preferences of the wealthy, or at least the college educated, which is only 37 or 38% of the country. So what about those people who are in the middle, who are, you know, in general, not receiving, you know, government assistance, maybe they used to qualify for ACA enhanced subsidies, but now they don't. They live settled lives, but not lavish lives, and whether or not they went to college is like a question. That's like a sort of, it's a mix within for certainly that pay range. That was Donald Trump's sweet spot. Yeah. And Democrats improved their margin, their performance with that group by 11 points according to the exit polls last night. Now, you know, again, that's like lower than the 13 point baseline, but that's pretty good. And one of the things I clocked this election that Claire, you've heard me talk about, is like, Democrats just really did move towards talking about the material concerns of middle income America tax relief gas prices food like all of those kinds of things that are not either, you know, either the social wars are like culture wars or like straight up government assistance. But beyond that, that genuine middle class, it's not just it's yes, it's gas prices. It's all of those things that you just said. It is also the way that Trump did or did not address the existential threat of AI, which is coming for white collar jobs, which is coming for places, you know, across the economy and is going to scare a bunch of settled middle class people shitless if it isn't already. And when you air hug, you know, every AI billionaire possible, right? Like you are, that's crazy work. Do you know what I mean? Like at least, at least inject some kind of, I'm very worried about this. I mean, I think Trump is, you know, that that, that valence of economic uncertainty hasn't really been seen in the modern American economy. I mean, maybe, you know, University of Chicago over here correct me if I'm wrong, but just that kind of big question mark. I think that's also speaks so much to the way people are feeling unsettled about the economy plus all the crazy, you know, high interest rates and rates of home ownership among, you know, you know, middle aged millennials like it's a, there's a bleakness there that I think Trump just, Trump the Republicans couldn't address. Yeah, and it's ironic because you could imagine, I mean, what was it like 38 of 39 data center referendums on municipal ballots last night failed? And you can imagine that being a very clever pivot for Trump, but like, I think part of it is like a voters feeling like they got sold a bag of goods. I mean, keep in mind that like, Trump has been, if you consider a midterm being up for reelection, right, he has been up for reelection three times and like lost all three times. And it's a slightly way way to frame it, right, counting both midterms and 2020. The idea of Trump, especially compared to all the ways that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fucked up, the idea of Trump is a lot more appealing than the reality of Trump. His party had two terrible midterms and had a, uh, presidential year where, I mean, that one's, that one's weird, right? I mean, we talked about this last night, but like, I do wonder if, I mean, I think Trump is one of the, he's like one of those athletes that like, kind of has clutch abilities, but is also so underrated, he's overrated and like vice versa, right? But like he ran against some pretty shitty democratic presidential nominees. You know what I mean? Yeah. He's ran against the B team three years in a row. And I, I'm not, it's not a subjective value judgment saying these are candidates who were rejected by their electorates in their first primary runs, um, narrowly in Hillary Clinton's case, but like, embarrassingly in like the Biden runs for president and the Harris run for president. And listen, to tie this, to tie this all together, like Donald Trump created an environment, like think of the last midterms, Democrats were running on abortion and democracy. This environment pushed, like, Democrats acted like a normal party after 2024 and tried to figure out why they did poorly and how they might do things differently. And we saw a lot of iterating in different style of candidates and different emphasis and different arguments. Like, there were really decent quality, not everywhere, but, and we'll get into the candidate quality equation. Yeah. But who moved to talking about material concerns, they couldn't do that in 2018 because the economy was good. And it was like a shock to the conscious 2022. They're in control of the economy. In 2026, it's like, these two forces come together, which is like, you know, Trump lost the high end suburbs in 2018 and never got them back, but still ended up performing well with working class voters and increasing his share, especially with non-white working class voters in 2024. But 2026 married the two together, right? You already lost the college-educated white voters back in 2018. And now you've lost the working class that the whole innovation of your Republican coalition relied on. Yeah. Can we drill down on two races that I think were, you know, maybe evocative of what happened last night? Any Andrews, the Democrat in South Carolina ended up beating Darlene Graham by four points. And then Adam Hamilton in Kansas with a five-point lead over the over the Republican Roger Marshall. I mean, I feel like the last couple episodes we started talking about South Carolina. But how did things go so wrong for Republicans and so right for Democrats? I mean, I feel like in South Carolina, that's like the black vote with Kansas, maybe the story is just, it's just purely the economy. But, but, you know, it takes a lot of things to make a plane crash. Nate, what about, let's start with South Carolina. Like, what stands out to you? Yeah, look, as I, South Carolina was a race that I was personally more skeptical about than flipper. So the dolphin got it right. Yeah, but it was still a 33% chance that came through. I'm like, maybe 25, 30. And I care about that kind of difference because I'm weird like that. But like, yeah, um, look, a really interesting signal early in the night was the Lexington Kentucky district, the six district, um, which, you know, Lexington is kind of a nice place. That's college town and, and, but, you know, it's kind of horse farms. Lots of horse farms. It's like, very in types of middle class. It aren't that, and we kind of ask, flipper, like, hey, which other states are more similar to this? And it, like, is a lot of states that are like Kansas and in certain ways, certain parts of South Carolina, right? But also, you have this black vote. And like, you had, I think people are going to find you had presidential level black turnout in at least some majority black precincts in some states, right? And a shift. I mean, Trump won 15% of the black vote in 2026, 2024, excuse me. I think according to the times, as estimates, it was 8% this year. So there was a shift in persuasion too. But, you know, but you layer that kind of white middle class objection versus like, and black voters on top of that and Hispanic voters too. I mean, it, you know, it's kind of weird because like, you have these like groups among whom the trends are more pronounced. By the way, young voters too, young voters are the ones concerned about AI. The best part about the economy has been that the stock market has done fairly well. But that's more of a young person's thing, right? Can I ask, can I ask just thing? Yeah, I mean, just with Galen, like, with the those examples of South Carolina and Kansas. I'm curious what you took out of them. But also, you know, my head immediately goes to the idea of what the 2028 presidential map looks like are more Southern states on the map in the manner of like, you know, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were trying to run obviously to Southern Democrats. Like, do those do wins in those states? Obviously, Kansas hasn't had a Democratic candidate, Senator in like almost a hundred years. Do they say anything about the 2028 map? Is it too early to make any extrapolations? Like, what are your reactions to those? Yeah, and I just want to go off of what Nate said, approaching presidential turnout levels in majority black precincts or parts of the state. We also saw that in some other areas, like the overwhelmingly white parts of South Carolina and other places across the Bible belt, that it was like 80% of presidential turnout. So there's there's a one two punch, right? There was a really high black turnout, and white turnout was not particularly high. And that's like, you know, we can talk about there's a spectrum between, you know, casting a vote for the same person you voted for last time and switching your vote altogether. And the in-between position is just not voting, which is, I don't think a wholly different activity, but lies on that spectrum. Okay, put that to the side. What do I think this says about 2028? Of course, Democrats are kind of, I mean, like Texas, I think, is obviously the prime target state for Democrats in 2028. Talleriko, winning by, it's going to end up looking like 11. It ultimately won't be that close for Gina Enahosa, the, you know, sort of dark horse candidate that both of them together, Talleriko and Enahosa, got hundreds of millions of dollars dumped on them in the final stretch. And like, as we talked right on this podcast, didn't seem to matter. This is where I would start to get into candidate quality, though. And I think it's a longer conversation, which is if Democrats are going to be true, and like, if there was a big turnout differential, that matters for 2028, because in presidential elections, probably more Republican inclined voters who didn't turn out this time will still turn out. Again, a lot's going to happen in two years, a lot happened in the past two years. So I'm not going to like entertain all the different possibilities too much. But the candidates in those races, like Republicans had a really bad candidate in South Carolina, a really bad candidate. They had a really bad candidate in Texas. They had an almost seemingly as bad, I mean, you know, Roger Mosher wasn't like totally scandal plate to the point where he was like escaping being served papers with his ex-wife, like in his car running away. And then like, fat, you know, impeached by his own party, whatever. But like, sort of scandals, quote, unquote, that we're really bad for the moment that we live in, which is people are concerned about the cost of living and the cost of healthcare. And he had taken people to collections. Yes, exactly over his OBGYN services. And on the other hand, Adam Hamilton is a former Republican Methodist pastor of a mega church. I'll also say Scott Column, former Republican as well. Like, and, you know, James Tallerico, a seminarian, like Gina Inohosa, who was like super live back in the late teens, completely switched around, was like making fun of pronouns and sort of pitching a campaign wholly on, like, I will not implement it in income tax. You know, I want to lower your property taxes. And I'm just like a guy who likes to hang out at Waterburger and, you know, talk to TMZ or whatever. I think candidates are really going to matter in terms of what parts of the map are in play. And we can get a lot more into candidate quality further on down. Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, Claire mentioned about like, um, the whole, oh, democracy and abortion and like, you know, Democrats kind of put a lot of self reinforcing eggs in, in one basket, right? Kind of, you know, and if you had to give them a name for the basket, it'd be the college educated white women basket. Um, which is a basket that we love and cherish. Which we love to be clear. Cherish is cherished by the crooked media audience. By the way, college educated white women, fucking love baskets. I have like two straw baskets in the next room. We love baskets. I will not tell you how much I paid for those straw baskets. Anyway, continue. No, but I think Democrats realized the peril of being in like a little bit of an echo chamber. And I think this is like, um, broader than, um, progressive versus moderate, right? It's kind of almost orthogonal to that. Like, you know, um, Abdul El-Sayed is very progressive. He is not in that democracy kind of blue sky Heather Cox Richardson lane as much. These are all my nomenclature for different democratic groups, but like, but he's speaking to like about affordability, I, the term I hate, but I just used it. He's talking to men kind of as a bro, right? And like, um, he's a bro. He's a burning bro. He's a, he's a burning bro grown up. And like, I think he also has, he doesn't, um, his persona is scrapper, right? Like, which I think dovetails with the whole, like, how do you like, you know, we're, we're appealing to the men, we're, you know, we're appealing to the Bernie bros. I mean, of the kind of millennial candidates of which, by the way, last night I was sitting there and I was like, in addition to the person I went to college with, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so middle-aged, everyone winning is my age, and it's no longer like, oh, look at that young buck. It's like, look at these people who are in the, the, the middle of their careers. Um, but L. Sciad is notable of those rising millennial stars in that his rhetoric is not the rhetoric of like Obama, Redux, Hopi, Changi, like the Rob Sand, embrace your brother and James, tell Rico, I love Jay, I love Ken Paxson because he is a child of God. I mean, uh, L. Sciad got up there and said, Abdul L. Sciad, Abdul Rahman, like, uh, you know, defiant, can't wait for JD Vance to swear me in, right? It's a little bit of that, like, spikiness that I found, um, very, very interesting. Still counting is brought to you by Made In. If you're considering the pros and cons of different cookware bands, you should know that Made In has more of the pros, pros like Tom Collickio and Brick Williamson and many other professional chefs who all trust their cooking to Made In Cookware. The fact is Made In has a long-standing relationship with professional chefs. The company evolved from 100-year-old kitchen supply business and works with multi-generational craftsmen to make each piece. They make exactly what demanding chefs are looking for, including a wide selection of curated products from carbon steel to stainless-clad, plus plateware, glassware, and more. I'm excited. All of us have Made In Cookware coming on the way, right? Looking forward to some good uses of that. Also, uh, I'll have you know. Good use of cookware or bad use of cookware. We'll see how it's used. Made In is always good use of cookware. Uh, Giancarlo, the VP of sales at Crooked, who probably sold this ad, uses Made In and he's a big fan. Giancarlo uses the ceramic clad pen and the Sasi-A to make pasta every week. Sasi-A. Sasi-A. Sasi-A. He loves Made In Cookware. But perhaps the biggest pro is that Made In is sold online and delivered to your door. If you want to take your cooking to the next level, invest in Made In Cookware. Once you try it, you'll be pro-made in too. For full details, visit MadeIn Cookware.com as M-A-D-E-I-N, cookware.com. Should we just get into this? So, you know, not to rehash, you know, old fights or whatever. But like, when we first launched this podcast, we joined John Love at it, Pod Save America, and he asked us how we were understanding the race. And I talked about this interesting sort of forces colliding of a very red Senate map with candidate quality differential across the country. And, you know, we ended up talking about the Michigan race. I've done all this. I had at different points we've also talked about other sort of more activist left candidates or progressive candidates. The words that we use to describe these things are always imperfect and always piss people off. But however you want to describe it. And we talked about how, you know, I expected these candidates to perform below a replacement level Democrat. And that I expected that we would see gaps, split tickets across many of these states, where there may be sort of more, you know, fighter, counter-punchery, progressive Sanders aligned folks would perform worse. And we got a lot of like blowback from listeners being like, you're like making shit up. What do you know? You're just like carrying water for whatever. Like, first of all, I should say, my role here is as a journalist, I just want to help people better understand the world. I really am not trying to get people on the right or the left to like believe any one thing. I'm trying to describe the world as best I can. Now that I've said that, let me give you the data. I looked at the shift from 2024 to 2026 in every single Senate race last night. The bottom four. Do you, can you guess which states were in the bottom four for the shift from 2024 presidential to 2026 Senate? Main Michigan Minnesota. And which one am I missing? I don't know. It's an M state. It's also an M state. Montana? Nope. And it's also an M Senator. Come on. You're so close. You just said it. Maryland? No, Massachusetts. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah. I don't really know. So the bottom four performers were Troy Jackson at the very bottom, then Peggy Flanagan, then Ed Markey, then Abdul Alsaid. So the shift from 2024 to 2026 in those states, Alsaid was eight and a half point shift. Massachusetts was seven point shift. Minnesota was six point shift. Main was no shift at all. They are point three shift. Again, you have to take that against the median shift overall across the country, which is a 13 point shift towards Democrats. And this is not like I was thinking, is this just a northern thing like what's really going on here? Is it a Midwestern thing? What have you? But you look at a place like Iowa and Ohio, the shift there. So Iowa, Josh Turk shifted that race from 2024, 17 points to the left. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown shifted that race. 16 points to the left. Both of them doing better. Then you look at. But Sherrod is pretty lib. But it's different. It's a different kind of different from the. Right. He's labor. He is old school labor. That is very different from the activist left of the late 20 teens. And again, whatever. I don't care. People should believe whatever they want to believe in. They should vote for whoever they want to vote for. I'm just telling you what the data says here. The single biggest overperformance of the night was James Talleriko in Texas, who shifted that state 25 and a half points to the left. Other big, the second biggest performance, North Carolina. Who's Roy Cooper? Roy Cooper is just as. Like he doesn't even know what vertical video is. Just the most plain Jane Democrat you've ever met. He shifted North Carolina 23 points to the left. So I just want to say here, the data bears out that candidate quality matters and that a component of candidate quality, not everything, but a component of candidate quality is ideology. And the more sort of left word or right word, again, we can also look at candidate performance on the right last night. And who did really well? Susan Collins, the most single most moderate Senate Senator in the chamber. Who did like really fucking bad? Like Ken Paxton, like the sort of like lock stock and barrel, you know, Trump ideologues. Yes. Galen, it's so helpful to have it. Like those numbers spelled out because I think and immediately my first thoughts are, okay, well, AOC said she was going to be making her decision after the midterms, right? Very honest about, you know, what she's going to run for. You know, the reaction on Twitter last night, obviously Twitter is not real life, but Twitter is like, you know, the memes are all like, I'm living out, right? You know, they've got, everyone's going to have their confab and talk about, okay, Okay, what direction are we going to the incoming chair? the oversight committee is saying like lawyer up, right? Like there there is currently this sort of euphoric wave, but what what settles in in the next like week to 10 days will be very interesting to see. I mean, you're seeing we're going to talk about the Republican side and things that are coming out the morning after, but I'm more interested in seeing how this week develops and how people are, or maybe the next couple months and how they develop and how people are positioning themselves, because I think you're right. Like, you know, what do you what do you do with a big overwhelming election like this, right? And I think that this is where, you know, sort of like our job as journalists meets its in politics in a very partisan country, like it meets a little bit of its confrontation point, right? Where people say like, well, what do you do with a big mandate election? If you're progressive, you say like, well, we push our policies, we push, you know, Medicare for all, right? Like we push as far as we can. And then you've got the, well, let's, you know, the people who are more cautious, the sort of it's just the the age old story. And we're just going to watch a play out. And then I think it's very helpful to have those actual numbers of the overperformers and the underperformers. Yeah, the 20, the 20, 28 Democratic nomination is an extremely valuable nomination to have, right? You're running not against an incumbent, but an election where the incumbent is almost certainly going to be super unpopular and has had Republican party under his thumb, making it very hard for them to develop appealing prospects as candidates, right? You're going to have, in all likelihood, conditional upon the Democrat winning a large majority in Congress, at least in the Senate, which is a more durable one, right? You're going to have opportunities to kind of remedy things after, you know, in my opinion, like a lot of misgovernance and a lot of gridlock, too, where this AI issue requires good governance, whatever your position is on it, right? And like, and where both parties need to fucking generational makeover. The candidates, the Democrats on May tonight, yeah, not right, Cooper, but like we're a younger set of candidates. That's a really, really valuable nomination to have. And I would expect Democrats not to be so demure in terms of competing for it right away, right? If you look, by the way, at prediction markets, John Asuf improved his odds a lot yesterday, plus Gavin Newsome, I mean, he's some kind of a perist decline, right? Because like, why would you want to like, there's a new show now. This shows much more popular. Why the fuck would you want, I mean, a candidate from California again, like why in the fuck would, now like Democrats can be stupid. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Again, like, back to like, how many victory laps should we take? The argument that I made that the electorate will not want anybody who has been a main player in the political scene during the Trump era, I think, sticks. And I do think that's actually also a challenge for AOC as much as like this big of a margin might like, and I'm not saying that the progressive part of the Democratic Party can't have a strong viable candidate. I just wonder if AOC's decade in the national spotlight makes her not really a part of the new show anymore. Well, I mean, it's like, it's like take Obama in the post in the post 2006, you know, flush, right, of things. Obama's greatest asset in the in the Iraq war era was his newness and his ability to not be weighed down by everything that Hillary Clinton was weighed down with, right? Her gender included, right? But I think, I can't remember who picked AOC off in the draft. Congratulations. Good job. Okay. But like, I think that's totally right. Vibeshift. Plus 18, Keisha Lance bottoms the first black female black governor, like, just like actual factual historic stuff, it goes back to like, you know, the original, like I wrote this in 2018, the original premise of like the attraction of candidates like Buttigieg and Asof is Obama, ask white guys who are young. And that's a, you know, in the American political climate, those are assets, right? Like, and Asof, you know, whatever he's been playing the game again, the Barack Obama played when he was a senator saying, like, no, no, no, I'm only interested in running for my Senate seat. Well, like, let's take a look at you. Give me over the next few months because, you know, I've, things are about to change over there if he is running. And you've seen credit, you've seen these, you've started to see these little snippy things of like, well, like, maybe his team is too insular. And I don't know, right? Like, I haven't done that reporting. But he is what, what are the betting markets say this morning? Because that guy just like really did a thing last. Well, now, and now if if he or Raphael Warnock were to win the presidency, then you would be able to replace him with the, with the Democrat, if that's in 2028. Yeah, look, in 19, you know, the two best comms, I think 2006 is the most obvious comp that you just mentioned Claire in 1974 is the other one people are bringing up a lot. In those two elections, Democrats nominated outsiders. I mean, Obama and Jimmy Carter are very different candidates. Obama has a lot of star power and was not obscure by any means, right? But they didn't return to like the Schubert H. Humphrey old school labor Democrat, right? They went in a totally different direction with, with Jimmy Carter and, and, and the so yeah, like, why would people want like a retreat? I tend to think, like, tactically, it's going to be hard for like the moderate faction. And we try not to be factual here, right? We try to analyze people can get factional. I think it's going to be like, tactically hard for the moderate faction to say, oh, well, I'll say it underperformed. I mean, yeah, he did. But like, there's arguments that you put into a model and arguments that you use to win arguments in political debate and like, what's a different? I do think the South will look very shiny. But yeah, no matter what part of the sort of like democratic party you belong to, which by the way, a lot of voters don't see their own sort of identity that way. But no, yeah, Gail and I think people on X do. Like, I think the things that look really shiny to Democrats, right? I'm like, I'm sure there are a lot of progressives or folks who are aligned with Democratic socialists or whatever who are very excited about that victory. Like, they won. It didn't end up being all that close in Michigan. And they got the sort of person who backs the policies that they wanted. Like, they can make the argument that they don't give a shit if he's an underperformer. Like, they got what they wanted. I think in terms of, like, broadly speaking, what looks really shiny, like 18 point, an 18 point victory. I think if we're John Ossoff is eye watering. An 11 point or maybe even more victory for James Telleriko in Texas is eye watering. No, I was going to say because I was winding up to my point because I'm tired and being inefficient with my words, right? But I was going to say, I think strategically, though, yeah, the shiny object is like, holy shit, we can win this huge, super majority, kind of like we had a lot of Democrats since it's quarter 2008, right? But like, we can really fucking repudiate this and have these durable majorities. And by the way, the Supreme Court, right? That's the subtext that we haven't mentioned yet where, you know, you have 55 centers and you have a good 2028, right? I mean, eventually, as people get old and retire and die and like, and like, that's an important part of the ballgame. Okay, we're already talking about 2028. So I kind of just want to take the conversation to the other side of the aisle. This morning, some potential 2028 candidates have been popping off. I mean, the first thing I saw this morning was Ron DeSantis, who tweeted 10 hours ago, we're recording this almost at noon that he was basically saying, you know, Democrats are going to get 55 seats, 250 plus house seats. Republicans might not recapture Congress till 2028. They might not have to have a set of control until 2032. I read that as a very clear, like a screw you Trump and all you Trump totes. Then this morning, and I would say a sort of like, hmm, what about me? Like, you know, am I a, am I a pretty girl at this party? And then this morning, I mean, remember his boot lifts? Do you remember all the diagrams about like where Ron DeSantis was wearing high heels? Whether he was wearing internal heels in those cowboy boots. And I think the answer is, yes, he was. No shade. You know, I wear heels. And just this morning, as we've been recording, Vice President JD Vance posted a statement on Twitter and he was talking about conversations he'd had with unnamed posters who told them that voters choices came down to four issues. One, ending the war, two, focus on cost of living in inflation, three, put America first, four, change our relationship to Israel. And he added, quote, everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I mean, yeah. By the way, low key, another seat that Trump cost your publicans was in Ohio because that was a surprise. election. Yeah, by choosing JD Vance, this is running me. Yes. I mean, Marco Rubio are sophisticated diplomat. I don't think has tweeted this morning. What is a vice-revidentist? I have to say about the 2026 midterms. I mean, I would say, again, like a point I made in the livestream last night, speaking of candidate quality, I think Marco Rubio, having come up in the old school Republican party with an actual resume and having to knit together coalitions is doing the smartest thing lately where he's just sort of being like, I don't go here. I go to Venezuela. I go to Cuba. And JD Vance is just, you know, inextricably in the mix, back to Vivek Ramaswami's pretty morally reprehensible ad against Amy Acton, which I saw Chris Christie going off on a rant, like tearing him a new one this morning saying that's what JD Vance will be remembered for. 2028. That's my question to you guys on the Republican side. What's going on here? Boy was Nikki Haley all over TV last night at this morning. Like, not that I think she is the future of the Republican party, but I think it's a real, look, there is still a question mark ahead of the Democratic party. We've just discussed that question mark. There's a real question mark ahead of the Republican party because like part of Trump's innovation was discrediting the entire Republican party that came before me. Trashing McCain, Romney, the bushes, like tagging them with this idea of like, they're for their forever wars. And like also they're the country club Republicans. Like, I'm going to hang out out of McDonald's and hold rallies with truckers and all that kind of stuff. The issue is that he's also now discredited his own version of the Republican party. So I think like the easy take is to say, well, like in order to go forward, Republicans are going to go backwards. And Nikki Haley was out there basically like reciting the three-legged stool of the Republican party of traditional family values, lazy affair economics and hawkish foreign policy or national security. And it's like, I don't know girl, like that actually doesn't really seem that popular from last night's results either. Like the, I mean, in some ways the future of both parties has never looked more similar in at least I, well, sorry, no, no, no, no, the sort of the direction that they probably want to go in in order to win, which is like populist populist. Like cut back on the foreign wars, cut taxes, everybody wants to cut taxes, Republicans and Democrats alike, everyone's trying to cut taxes. You know, I think Democrats have already been trying to avoid the culture wars after last night. Republicans are probably also going to try to avoid the culture wars a little bit more too. It seems like they're actually fighting on closer terrain than they were, I'm curious if you still disagree with this tape, but it seems like they're fighting on closer terrain than they have been in recent years. Look, I just think that Republicans made, I was looking for searching for a more original metaphor, but a deal with the devil in Trump, right? And I don't mean that to mean that he's evil. I mean, in that, in the sense of like, you get your three Supreme Court justices, you get tax breaks for the wealthy, but you pay a lot if I can price for that, right? Because Trump has so sucked out the oxygen from anybody else in the Republican Party, right? Like in some sense, it's kind of crazy that like JD Vance has considered the leading nominee, right? I was going to ask the two of you, if you know the history, I don't actually have like, you know, you see the more common for like presidents and vice presidents to kind of be rivals, right? We haven't seen that recently. We notably did not see with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to the point where it really hurt her. But that item is going to be going to be interesting, right? I mean, that's part of why I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretends to quit, you know what I mean? Because he could get very, very, very isolated and that also could make him dangerous. He has no fucking leverage it. I mean, he has some leverage as the president of the United States, right? He's leverage with our allies and things like that. But like, Republican still made Greenland. Maybe we should let's see how the 2020 election goes if we but he has lost the fear factor. We'll see. We'll see if Heggseth survives this. We'll see if Stephen Miller survives this, right? I didn't answer this question well. I just started talking instead of like giving you an actual name who I think represents the future of the Republican party. I think it looks more than ever like Tucker Carlson and not JD Vance. Somehow, I don't know about that. Like, I know that's a little bit of like a two online take. But I think that that sort of populist. Like, maybe JD Vance could have tried the populist thing, but he's so closely tied to Trump that it's tricky now. Like, who, okay, so let me ask the question to you guys. If you had to pick, if you could just automatically nominate anybody to run on the Republican ticket in 2028, who you're trying to get to perform the best, who are you nominating? Byron Donalds. Okay, good take. That's a good take. But parties kind of zag at 90 degrees in nominations, right? They want, we know, when the previous nominee is seen as a failure or has a mixed record, right? Where probably some people in parties too loyal to them, right? They don't totally do it 180. They kind of change one thing and keep on things the same. I think Tucker is too Trump-like in certain ways. And I don't think he runs. I guess I meant in terms of vibe, but yeah. I think this is, I don't want to get too far down this road of 2028 because we're going to talk about it so much. And we also haven't talked about how the polls did. I think that we, you know, that's something people are hungry for. So, I mean, I guess just Nate, I'll send it to you. How did Flipper do last night, your model? I thought Flipper did really well in two kind of, well, one kind of important way, right? Which is probably the most important way, which is that like, this is a technical way to put it. The result that transpired Flipper saw as far more plausible than most other observers. It is a bit out on the right tail. It's not crazy. It's more like an 85 to 90 percentile outcome. Believe it or not, you have had crazy or polling misses, but like, and, you know, I think it got the story of the election correct combined with the coverage that we've done here, right? And like, that's kind of all you, I mean, the last piece I rose was like, I don't know. I think there's this kind of tail that's not necessarily that thin of like crazy, crazy democratic tsunamis. And like, I think we did it. We've done a good job here, and at Solar Bulletin and Flipper, in its own way of like putting those pieces together and not being all these people who are always fighting the last war, right? Because I go back and forth between like politics and sports, things like sports where they're 16 NFL games every week, right, 100 substantially baseball games, like you understand the short term versus the long term, and you understand like, you know, people overanalyze. Thing happens once it's a new trend. Thing happens twice in a row. It's an iron law. And sometimes things are contingent, sometimes trends reverse themselves. Polarization is decreasing now, right? Or at least in this election, right? Things got closer together. It was also true by the way in 2024 and like, yeah, people just, and a lot of people, we had no fucking guts. They had no guts to project that something good would happen for the Democratic Party after 2016. And yeah, a lot of people are gutless. That's part of it too. Yeah. Claire, when we talked about those final New York Times polls on Monday, I said, you know, this, they were pretty good for Democrats. I said, this aligns with what the preponderance of the evidence already suggests and that my read of it was that they were hedging a little bit thinking that Democrats might do even better than that. And I think sort of like looking in that at that broad picture, the polls were pretty accurate. When you look under the hood, right, there were some notable misses. I mean, like James Tyler, we go way overperformed his polls in Texas. I mean, it seems maybe in some ways regional, like perhaps Democrats did better in the South than their polls suggested. In the North, it's maybe closer, like to be clear, that New York Times Santa College poll of Minnesota and Michigan in the end suggested like a 14-point win from Peggy Flanagan, an 11-point win for Abdul-Assad. Obviously, that didn't happen. That overshot Democrats while under shooting them in the South. So, I actually don't know the technical explanation behind what the Times did or even how that necessarily compares to the averages. I know the averages were not as far out in either direction. I mean, Nate, you've been very critical of pollsters, various pollsters and election predictors, the cycle. Are there any lessons people should take? Should they all just figure out what the Times is doing and do that? Where are you left with the pollsters at the end of the cycle? I'm looking right now at the margin of the election for the gubernatorial race. Maris College among registered voters found Hannah Pingri winning by 11 points due to a completely fucking insane, likely voter adjustment, they turn that into a tie. How much is she winning by 18 fucking points, right? So yeah, fucking trusted. I mean, it's, you also have the Seltzer anecdote, kind of the other direction. Like it's a bit more complicated than like, oh, trust your data, but like that, that's kind of a funny, a funny result. Wait, I would actually, can we say something here? Yeah. The polls on average under estimated Democrats by a larger margin than they underestimated Republicans in 2016. Yeah. And that caused a panic in the industry. Obviously, directionally, the polls were right. Like they called the quote unquote winner. And also, like the nervous Nellies tend to be more in the Democratic Party anyway. And so there's just more of a of a heated and anxiety-related discourse about the data, maybe on the left than there is on the right. But like, I want to remind, that's just a reminder that like, polling error is normal and the direction in which it happens is unpredictable. Yeah, you kind of had three years 2016, 2012 in the presidential race. And then this year, we're like, Democrats had a bunch of narrow leads in all of those years. Like in 2012, Obama actually being his polls by three points of average, but because like he was tied or had won or had two, it turns into plus three plus four plus five, right? And nobody really cares about it that much. And then 2016, you had the three point error going the other way and like people do care. But yeah, I mean, you know, it's not a nightmare. I kind of take that. I mean, this was a four point error, by the way. The national, the national popular vote, the generic ballot average was nine points, favoring Democrats, 13 points in the end. That's four points bigger than Clinton. I'm laughing to myself because I'm all that is popping up as we're having this discussion about polling is like a truism you hear often. And where I have heard often when it comes to women's health and pregnancy and things that happened to your body and the phrase goes, it's alarming, but normal. And I or alarming and to be expected. And I sort of feel that way about the way these conversations are on the polling industry and maybe what less they should take. >> That's really good. You've got a point today. Your five hours of sleep versus our like two to three each really shows. >> It makes our lives or my life at least a lot easier when you have these examples to point to of like, yes, polls can under estimate Democrat. Like from my vantage point, it's kind of the perfect result, right? Like technically, you can say it would have been great if flipper nailed every race exactly. But like, my life is just a lot easier because like, this is going to shake the belief that polls always overestimate Democrats and life that just makes my life less confrontational going forward, right? It just makes things easier to explain. >> What a delightful way to end the show. Nate's life getting a little bit easier. We are going to have so much to talk about over the coming days and weeks. Please, if you're in DC or can come to DC, get your tickets to our live show at crookedcom.com. But that's what we've got for today for today's episode of still counting. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts on youtube.com at still counting podcast. We will be back on Monday with the bonus episode of our live show at crookedcom. Still counting is a crooked media production executive produced by Galen Drew, Claire Malone, and Nate Silver. Our team includes Saul Rubin, Emily Ford, Claudia Shang, Charlotte Landis, Reed Churlin, Johanna Case, Ben Heffkoat, Matt DeGroat, Katie Long and Adrian Hill. Our music is by Break Master Sylinder. Our production staff is probably unionized with the Ryder's Guilds of America East.