3: The Polls Look Fantastic for Democrats. Should We Believe Them?

- And in that election, the polls were pretty good. And like under estimated, for example, Beto, O'Rourke in Texas. - You always say his name with a little like, "Genese call." - What do you think? - Can you say Taloriko? - How would you say Taloriko? - Taloriko. - James Taloriko? (laughing) - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gail and Direct. - I'm Claire Malone. - I'm Nate Silver. - On today's show, the closer we get to election day, the better the polling gets for Democrats. But are the polls to be believed? We're gonna dig into the latest polling and ask what errors we might expect. Then say we wake up on November 4th. And Republicans have kept democratic Senate candidates at bay everywhere but North Carolina and control of the House is still unknown. How would we explain that scenario? Okay, now say we wake up on November 4th and Democrats have swept the Senate battlegrounds and even won in Kansas. How would we make sense of that? We're gonna get into the bull and bear cases for Democrats this November. - I love it. - It's funny. I used to babysit for this family. And when the kid was like three and people had asked him what his dad did, he said he worked with bears and bulls 'cause he was like some kind of banker. It was very funny. Anyway, that's what I think. - Or it could be a Chicago sports writer. There you go. - There you go. - Good Chicago plug. - Okay, but one thing that we wanna do is just sort of level set a little bit and talk about the current state of the midterms what's been happening in all these Senate races this week. What's the big news? So I'm just gonna run down a few quick little items that have kind of caught our eyes. First of all, Kamala Harris, heard of her. - We Kamala, who? - That's right. Campaigned with Abdul El-Sahed in Michigan, which is notable because not a lot of other Senate candidates want her to show up at their races. And in fact, some have preemptively disinvited her. In Maine, there is a pro-publica piece that came out. - Publica or publica? - Publica, as my years of Latin class would tell me. I guess you're right. It would be Publica, like Publias Maxons. Anyway, pro-publica reported that there was a stall, a federal investigation that had been circling Maine Senator Susan Collins. And now that's all the news in Maine is whether or not Susan Collins's broader circle might have been actually doing some sort of shady financial things. Diesel prices hit an all-time high of $6.51 per gallon this week. Just that's not a Senate candidate, but that's a factor. - That matters more than the first two. I mean, that Susan Collins didn't matter, but like that gas prices are causing a lot of the Republican problems, I think. - And they're making it into commercial, you know, that Senate ads and things like that, like the actual. - Gas prices are their own ad, right? You drive on the highway and like you literally see an ad saying things shit's expensive. That's a bad ad for Republicans. - It is. Well, just one more item on this list of what's been happening. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, campaigned in Iona, Braskin, Kansas. And he told reporters that those states should be, quote, "Fact guy layups for Republicans." - So what's a fat guy layup? Is that hard? Isn't a fat guy layup like not easy? - I think it's when you stand under the board and don't have to move. And he said, "If you told me six months ago that I was gonna have to be spending my time in those three states, I wouldn't have believed you." And you gotta give him points for quotability and just being honest. - Yeah. - We're gonna talk more about the Republican midterm struggles later in the episode. But now I kinda want you both to give me what's your 30 second pitch for the state of the midterms? Galen, go. - Okay, it is post-labor day, obviously. But the way that that has manifested for Democrats is its median voter time. You see Mary Peltola in Alaska being like, we love oil, drill baby drill. We are going to get the price of diesel down. Like she is talking about opening up wildlife reserves for drilling in Alaska. And then you see James Calarico, for example, in Texas, being like, there are two genders. Let me explain why Charlie Kirk agrees with me that God is non-binary and so does the Pope. He also came out and said that there should not be gender affirming surgery for minors in the state and the trans girls should not participate in girl sports. So pivoting to the median voter pretty aggressively in those two places and really across the country more broadly, trying to play as aggressively as they can to get across the land in these harder states. Then for Republicans, the natural thing for them to do is to run away from Trump, right? And you've seen it a little bit, you know, in South Florida, you've seen a little bit from Susan Collins on the issue of, you know, Canadian tariffs and the like. But it's just a much more complicated relationship on the Republican side. Like each candidate on the Democratic side can choose their own adventurer, right? If Abdul-Elsaid wants to align himself with Kamala Harris, probably wouldn't advise it, but that's his choice. On the Republican side, Trump has been hugging the Republican party clothes for so long. It's hard to break loose at this point. >> Okay, that's good. I will note that you are a how tall ahead. You love-- >> It's a fascinating. >> It is family freedom. >> Yes, you think it's a-- >> Are you going to Alaska? >> No, I haven't either. We should do an Alaska cricket show. >> Live show in Alaska. Anchorage, here we come. >> Yeah, I like it. Okay, Nate, same thing. Let's say a minute and 30 seconds state of the midterms right now. >> Yeah, I've been galing out like at least two minutes. >> Yeah, well, that's fine. >> But yeah, everything's inflation here. >> I'm going to be a little more macro zoomed out. Recent polling suggests that possibly the bottom is falling out from Republicans and Trump. Democrats are ahead now by almost nine points on the likely voter version of the generic ballot, meaning when you account for enthusiasm, differentials, you're routinely seeing some of these polls print numbers like plus 10 or plus 12. That would be-- make for the biggest shock since 2010. We can go back and define kind of what the biggest shifts have been in recent midterms. We had a poll in Iowa this week where Josh Turrick was up by eight points. We have polling in Kansas and Nebraska showing-- if you believe the polls, you probably should take them with a little bit of a grain of salt, showing those states is near toss-ups. It's hard to find any polls that don't show James Hillary go ahead. And Trump's approval is as low as it's ever been in at least in the second term. >> Yeah, I actually just want to give some of the latest in Senate race polling because we've gotten a lot of stuff in the last week. So let me just run it down. Nate already mentioned this. But in Iowa, Democrat Josh Turrick is up eight points on Republican Ashley Hinson in a Marist poll. In Texas, James Tayloriko is up by six points according to Marist. In Michigan, Abdu el-Sayed is up seven points against Mike Rogers in a suffix poll. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton is leading incumbent Roger Marshall by two points in a recent poll by Emerson. And that's just to name a couple of. >> It's a little-- it's a slightly cherry-picked list. >> Oh, 100-- if you were at a polling hour right now. >> Yeah, I mean, we should say for people who are not familiar with our ethos, you're supposed to look at the polls in totality, not just to take individual ones. But we're kind of gearing up to a point of, there's a lot of recent polling. How should people sort of be smartly thinking through this? >> No, but usually you see one funny thing about this cycle is that usually you see their spammy Republican pollsters, just like their spammy Democratic pollsters. This year, the kind of spammy Republican pollsters are kind of sitting out. Like, Rasmussen reports actually has pretty good results for Democrats, for example. Republican campaigns are not releasing a lot of internal polls. You hear anecdotal accounts of their internal polls suggesting a very bad environment, too. So it's oddly-- the polls are oddly in consensus, right? It's just kind of a question of like, do you believe some of these bigger numbers for them? >> Okay, that's a good set-up, Nate, because I want to say, before we jump into the actual politics of everything, we want to take a step back and look at the polls themselves and how believable they actually are. So, Galen and Nate, you guys are kind of in the thick of day-to-day, holy stuff, data-e-stuff. You know, in the past five or six years, I've done a lot more sort of media reporting and conventional politics reporting. I'm now sort of in the thick of reporting. I'm like American medical skepticism and the Maham movement. So I kind of wanted to use today to also just like, you know, ask you guys questions about broadly pulling in data and the state of it. So to just track back to the primaries, there were some very notable polling errors in Wisconsin's governor's race and Michigan Senate primary. They were both off by double digits. Are the general election polls generally higher quality? And I think also we should tell people, like what do we mean when we say a higher quality poll? They're generally more accurate. Why are they more accurate? Because you have much stronger priors or baselines when it comes to general election voting, right? So first of all, maybe only 15% of the votes are in play. So it's much less fuck up a bull. Whereas in the primary electorate, you, you know, every contest is kind of sewage and eras and you can fuck up that entire 100% of the electorate, right? Also in general elections, there's a lot of persistence based on partisanship. So if you shift the overall climate from bar plus two, which is what it was in 2024 to D plus eight, right? But relative to the uniform, 10 point swing would give you a fairly decent guess about how an individual state of district would poll. That tends to bound, like, none of this is pure polling anymore, right? are randomly dialing numbers on the phone and everybody answers it's all modeled and to have more structure that are assumptions like basically the polls are like are little mini models that's the way to think about it. I think we can be quite specific about this which is when folks look at what happened in Michigan during the primary we're talking about a statewide primary for which historically speaking the average error in those polls is about 12 percentage points which is crazy which is it's not the margin that's not right average that's the average now if you cast forward to statewide general election polling historically the average error is more like 4 to 5 percentage points so just like even if you take away the specifics of what's going on this cycle and I should also say that's statewide races in you know in the general election if you want to talk specifically about the popular vote nationally in a midterm the average error is 3 points so those average errors are significantly smaller than what we see in primaries the reason for that Nate laid it out a little bit is because in a place like Michigan you have no fucking clue who's even gonna show up in that election right because independence and Republicans can vote in a very competitive democratic primary if they want to especially when there's no competition on the Republican side whatsoever and so trying to model turnout in that environment is pretty hard now we are currently in a high turnout environment we can expect that probably over 50% of eligible voters are going to turn out in this midterm and when that happens everything gets compressed as Nate said closer to the baseline now we still don't know like our people who are really upset with Trump gonna who are maybe more usual Republican voters but are really upset with the current circumstances will they turn out those are those are tricky decisions we have to talk about Latino voters who may be regular voters and that they turn out in every election but they've been switching a lot back and forth because they don't have like a close affiliation with one party or the other there are still plenty of places for the polls to fuck up in the general election but just historically speaking we're not talking nearly about the bands that we were talking about in the primaries let me let me get to do a standard correction because it's going to probably won't have 50% of the voting eligible population show up that has only happened recently in 2018 98 I think we was it not 2018 oh excuse me I just misspoke I don't know what the fuck okay keep that in keep that in keep that in correct let the record show only I somehow zoom back 20 or only in 2018 did recently did 50% of the eligible population turn out in a midterm right first and we should say the the first midterm where Trump was president right so the first kind of big reaction yeah unless you might be right Nate because I would imagine that democratic turn out is similar to 2018 but I don't know if Republican turn you know it's it's really tricky to try to guess that the stuff but that's kind of the one of the tail risks for Republicans I guess we're preempting our next segment partly is that like voters just like I don't give a fuck I voted for Trump in Republicans so many times right they seem to be out of ideas gas is really expensive the Democrat in my district is a wacko but I don't give a fuck I'm just going to watch like you know football whatever that night instead of instead of voting still counting is brought to you by incogni I mean we're weirded out by how much of your internet presence and data is available yeah it's kind of crazy all my everything you need to know about me is in in the cloud somewhere that seems probably like a stupid risk for me to take Claire isn't it well let's talk about something that doesn't get enough attention corporations profiting off your personal data without your consent bad bad use of consent that's right data brokers companies you've never heard of are quietly collecting your home address phone number even your family members names and selling that information to anyone willing to pay no opt-in no transparency just pure surveillance capitalism and that exposure is exactly what scammers and bad actors are using to target people for identity theft and fraud I want to sell my own data and profit from it that surveillance socialism date okay that's where incogni comes in they act as your personal privacy advocate filing legal removal requests and getting your information taken down across more than 420 plus harmful data broker sites automatically and on a recurring basis since brokers try to relist your data every 30 to 60 days those persistent scoundrels I mean the double works hard but data brokers work harder that's right incogni is independently verified by Deloitte you can track everything from their iOS or Android app and if you're on the unlimited plan the exposure scanner even hunts down your info on new sites blogs and forums with real human teams handling those manual takedowns for you didn't Deloitte used to be Deloitte and Tush what happened to Tush where Tush go Tush is still at the club they left her behind oh Tush and the best part incogni Cogni offers a full 30 day money back guarantee reclaiming your privacy shouldn't be a luxury they can't harm you if they can't find you use code counting at incogni.com and get 60 percent off an annual plan that's incogni.com/counting I and C-O-G-N-I dot com slash counting code counting can I ask a question so just to go back the idea of what do we mean when we say higher quality polling and when we're taking you know like for instance when we're looking at primary polls and you're saying you're basically building models in some ways I guess that means right that the person has to take into account the news on the ground and see who is most affected by that what is it what are the what makes a good in this era where fewer people pick up the phone where there are more internet polls what makes a person a good pollster they have to have some sense for how reliably they're reaching different segments of the electorate who are they oversampling who are they undersampling like can I pause there for a second yeah the New York Times Sienna College poll or like Emerson what are they literally making phone calls are they doing in internet those are very different yeah no but I mean like what are like what are the mixed match will I think more polls and not now are done by the internet the times have been pretty dedicated to keeping a phone sample I don't know if they're using internet on top of that or not I mean you know phone is nice and that you have more a phone number belongs to a person it used to belong to a household actually not belongs to a person for the most part you know many states have registered voter lists to which they attach phone numbers although also email sometimes but like um classically imagine you're sitting at home when the 1980s and oh my god somebody calls on the phone that's really fucking exciting you know that might happen only a few times a day your hope it's your friend wanting to go to like pinball pizza um everyone in the 80s was a loser who never got called to go out continue but no it's a pollster oh that's even more exciting um try to take this poll now but but it's different when like when you volunteer to participate in a poll then that increases non-response bias you know if you're a democrat and you see Trump fucking up on Iran and you see um you know there's good news the Democrats in the polls maybe you're more excited now you listen to whatever your crooked media package like wow I feel good about Democrats I'm gonna answer this poll and so like that's the whole problem right we are not no poll would claim to be reaching a truly random sample of the population it's all quasi-random and then the good pollsters understand how that might bias their data and try to correct clear to answer your question when we started podcasting together there was a different answer to that question yeah we very explicitly said the gold standard for polling is live-poller polling yeah and we saw that over time that was not reliably getting the best results over the past decade and now gold standards is mixed method so you're doing live-color polling you're doing text messaging you're emailing I would say if you want to differentiate and that's expensive right and you're trying to reach now response rates are what like 1% you got to reach a lot of people in order to get say 600 people 500 people in a nationally representative sample when we want to caution people about low quality polling sometimes what we're talking about is online opt-in panels or online opt-in polls which you know naked name names if he wants to but these are oftentimes some of the polls that you will see are the most rapidly responding to new news developments you got but also it's not that their their polls are always bad they're they're providing a service and that it's faster and cheaper and they can do more of it but we also want to look at some of the high quality polls too and those low quality polls the problem is like if you're volunteering to participate in a panel online about your political opinions you are nothing like many Americans. This is my question like one of my broader and you know we're going we're burrowing a little bit deep and like what does it mean to be a high quality poll but one question I've had in the last few years is as Trump has always been obsessed with polls now we have all these like weird gimmicky partisan polls I mean do people have less trust in polls and therefore are they less likely to you know answer the survey answered the text message answer the phone call does that like are we trusting polls in the way that we don't trust journalists as much. I mean Republicans might have lower institutional trust in general right that's that's not the problem it's not so much that like I mean the shy Trump voter thing is kind of questionable I don't want to rehash like polling debates from from whatever 12 years ago at this point but like no it's more that people if you don't trust the man the machine the person calling you on the phone or sending you an email to participate in a survey then then yeah people people with lower social trusts don't participate in polls as much and that's a slightly separate distinct problem from enthusiasm. Which is specifically why you can't just wait according to like partisan ship or we're having because a Republican who's willing to hang out with you on the phone as a pollster is different from a Republican who's not willing to hang out with you on the phone. It's kind of irreducibly problematic. Yes. I want to talk about herding because everyone loves talking about herding and polling and. Herding? Never heard of her. So it's basically when we see a bunch of polls, forecasts, race ratings start to coalesce around a similar consensus. Could it be that everyone is picking up on the same thing in the electorate or is it herding? A.K.A. kind of like social pressure group think I pretty much know what Nate is thinking because I see his. No. Look. Glad to. Are you a mineweater? You a clairvoyant? I'm clairvoyant. Ooh. But I'm. Like right now, are we seeing herding? I don't think we heard anything hard at all actually. From pollsters? Yeah. We. We're seeing some pretty bold. We're seeing some. Pollsters. I was going to use a non-PG analogy. But yeah, pollsters use it. I don't know. I just curious. There's not like. Marish like. Fuck it boys. Turek plus eight. Like that's kind of bold, you know? But don't you always say that bold like outliers mean that people are feel free to publish numbers that are off and that you should do that, like you should publish the result you get. And like. Don't we. Isn't that something that you were award? Can I just say one more thing here? That is absolutely the case. And I think that's totally what we're seeing. And it's important to say, I don't think we explicitly said this at the top. When you read all of those polls that were really good for Democrats, those were outliers, right? And so in Texas, we're seeing like last week a plus seven for Talleriko came out. Another plus six or seven came out this week. But interspers between those were seeing plus ones. We're seeing plus twos. We're seeing Gina Inahosa, the gubernatorial candidate in Texas. I'll buy four and then down by five. I actually don't think we're seeing hurting at all. I think it's. And in some ways, part of the risk here is, you know, long term, we want to put everything in the average and that's going to get us closer to the result. History tells us that. But in an environment where people are using a lot of different methods to try to get to the answer, there is a possibility that there's like a. A type of poll or a group of high quality pollsters that is getting closer to the actual result. And they're sort of. Maybe they're the ones who are consistently showing that Democrats are by more than you would expect. And everyone. And the people who are showing it more 50/50 are using a different method or lower quality pollsters, whatever. Like in some ways, publishing an outlier is suggestive of being a high quality pollster. So I do worry that potentially when you just average those two kinds of polls together, you get something a little more muted. And that's where, come election day, that like average error of 3, 4, 5 points in one direction or the other can come into play. Like if the polls that are really bullish on Democrats are right, there is going to be significant error because average, it's closer. It's more muted. I mean. Here's. Here's what I think is the. Tell me I'm wrong, fight with me, Nate. Here's what I think is the most important thing going on right now. If you take the polls at face value, especially the polls like Marist or whatever the polls that don't seem to feel pressure to hedge or heard for better or worse, it might be for worse than the end, they suggest that Republicans are losing ground among Hispanics and among rural working class white voters, right? Who are the exact two groups that Trump gained the most from, from the course of 2016 through last year, like those two groups, exactly. Those are however also the same groups that tend to be, I'm going to use the term under-sample loosely, right? But like, those are the groups where the polling error tends to be concentrated as well. More so the working class white voters than Hispanic voters, right? So it's kind of like a little bit, in some sense, or nothing. It's a start where it makes sense where people are finally fed up of Trump and the very voters that move to his coalition were like, you know what, this is all bullshit. He promised them we're foreign wars, he promised cheap gas and we're getting the exact opposite. He's been in power for, you know, it's almost like a de facto third term he's been around so long. He's 80 years old. This is fucking bullshit. I'm checked out, maybe also for Hispanics, some of the ice stuff plays in, maybe not. But like, you know, if that group reverts and kind of makes a map less polarized, then all of a sudden, these like purple red states like Iowa start to come back and become more competitive again. If it's a big polling error though, then all of a sudden you're kind of stuck in, forget about the Senate, right? The House probably Democrats would salvage, but, you know, that's why it's, I mean, right now Republicans best hope is that the polls suck again. Is there, are there states where you think come election did, there's the, they are the most vulnerable for a potential polling error? I think from a forecasting standpoint, the most interesting state is like Kansas, actually, right? That's a state that, what does a Democrats have at one of the Senate see there since 1932? If some dork is up in his basement, looking at the Wikipedia page from the 20, 20, 20, 26 midterms, 20 years from now or some AI bot who embodies a dork personality or something of the, of the still counting audience. No, I love, I love browsing. I love browsing. I have a glass of wine, browse Wikipedia late at night, right? Wow. It's pretty good. Shit. That's pretty good shit. Um, but, you know, if Adam Hamilton wins in Kansas, that will be the signature kind of election of a way verging on like a 1994 or kind of 2010, almost, almost realignment. I want to echo what Nate said a little bit, which is that we're looking at two potentially different kinds of polling error. I'm, look, I'm more convinced of the swing in the Latino vote in, for example, Texas, which would put, towards Democrats, which would put, you know, probably at least two of the five opportunity districts that Republicans redrew to try to pick up still in Democrats' hands. And part of the reason I'm more sort of bullish on that narrative is because we know that the Latino vote, there is like a core section of Latino voters who vote, but don't feel like solid Democrats and don't feel like solid Republicans and, and when you swing, right? So if a voter stays home, you gain sort of one, the opposition gains one point. If a voter swings, you gain two points because you go from negative one to plus one. So swings are really valuable in this kind of an election. And I think because we've seen so much movement in the Latino vote over the past 10 years, I believe that there is a real swing happening. I don't, I would not suggest that the Latino electorate in 2026 is going to be the Latino electorate in 2028. We've seen massive differences between midterms and presidential, I would be a little, we have heard this story before about like the real white vote, the white working class, the non-college educated white voter sort of moving towards Democrats and then that story like coming up short, come election day, that I, and like, look, there is evidence to suggest that there's a reason for this, Nate wrote a whole piece about the price of diesel in the middle of the country, which is especially hard hitting areas that rely on agriculture. So I don't think we would all be shocked or something like that, but that's a story where the signal is less clear to me. Okay, I want to get into the politics of all of this. It seems like Republicans are seeing these polls and responding to them, kind of in interesting ways, obviously we quoted John Kennedy at the top, sort of being blunt about how poorly Republicans are doing, but we've also watched JD Vance campaign in what's supposed to be a safe, safe, red state, Kansas. We've seen the Republican frontrunner in Florida, the gubernatorial frontrunner in Florida, scrub his site, his website of all Trump mentions, there was a Florida congresswoman who won re-election by 20 points. She broke with Trump on immigration and then Republican candidates like Ashley Henson, Mike Rogers and John Houston and Ohio are all calling for the end to the war in Iran, which is very notable. So I guess like the blunt question is, can Republicans outrun Trump, Nate? It's pretty hard, given that any rational voter would have to conclude that Republicans have supported Trump in near lockstep for six years now. Maybe because he said pretend that I'm on the ballot, I mean, literally. As predicted, the Republican midterm convention didn't help very much. Look, in Flipper, our model, Susan Collins does literally get a bonus for defecting from Republicans often ish, not as often as Democrats would like, maybe not as often as it would be in her narrow best interest. But there are not very many Susan Collins as in Joe Manchin's left when you're electing a senator, you're kind of electing a member of parliament where they're going to vote with their president until there's a kind of loss of confidence. By the way, Joe Manchin campaigning with Susan Collins. Oh, I know that. I mean, what a cute couple. Yeah. I think the answer is actually pretty straightforward. Republicans will outrun Donald Trump. Donald Trump is net negative 20 points of truth, nationally right now. Because if they don't outrun Donald Trump, then we need to stop talking about Kansas and we need to start talking about like South Carolina and Mississippi. And so yes. You know, because ultimately Democrats have their flaws and this is not just a referendum on Trump. It's going to be a choice between a Democrat and a Republican. Republicans will outrun at least where Trump is at this very moment nationally. But I don't think that they have the freedom to do so nearly as much as they would like. And that's because no matter how many ads you run about like the trans issue or immigration or crime or Democrats being weird. And yes, the media and voter thinks Democrats are fucking weird. That's never going to overcome the earned media of gas prices, the Iran war, inflation across the board, things like things that people are generally aware of and not even just the earned media in the media per se as Nate started this podcast with every gas sign in America is an ad for Democrats. You know what, you know what, Democrats benefit from is Graham platinum having shut the fuck up. Graham platinum great for silver bulletin content, absolutely. But like Democrats had a lot of their weirdness over the summer in the different primaries. You know, Francesca Hong lost him as constant, Graham platinum ultimately exited with Rue in Maine, El Sayed and Michigan is the one that draws the most focus. He's also I think the most disciplined of that trio, which is the reason why he's still around perhaps. And like, now that storyline is kind of old news, but yeah, there are asymmetries. Democrats are running against Trump Republicans are running against Democrats. I guess you can complete this. I'm going to say Trump running against Republicans kind of is doing lots of things that aren't their best interests. That's for sure. Like I'm Donnie press conference. Yeah, but it is so interesting to watch like let's take JD Vance. I mean, JD Vance sort of a fascinating character to watch campaign on the midterms trail. Because in some ways all I can think of is this is him practicing to campaign for 2028. And his line, particularly when he's in places like he was in Iowa, I believe when he said this, where he he trots out the line, which he's had, because he does kind of speak in like the millennial internet sort of like shit posting vernacular often. But he was just his whole thing is like, you don't want to vote for the weirdos, right? Their whole thing is like James Talleriko is weird. Talleriko, you mean Talleriko, or like, you know, Rob Sand and I, because he was in Iowa, you know, Rob Sand, they're all weirdos, right? And it's it is interesting because the if you look at the Democratic Senate candidates, I mean, they are all like, you know, they are all like shopping at the Bonobo sale, right? They all wear slacks, you know, like, the pants that I'm currently wearing, I'm alone. I'm not going to answer us, but no, but these guys are like nor like normies, right? They're they're not like James Talleriko's whole, I mean, you said this at the top, right? The sort of shift to the medium voter or they tried to become exactly, right? And and that is such an interesting thing because JD Vance is what was my point with this? I mean, I think your my point is is basically that because Republic, because JD Vance faces such a tightrope to walk with this, right? Because the war in Iran, you're seeing all of these, you know, Ashley Hinson and Mike Rogers just had these in addition to saying like and the war in Iran, it's all about like, you know, fuel prices, right? We said this is top, right? That the fuel prices are the one of the most important issues. So JD Vance is kind of the only line you have to play. A little bit is look at these weirdos and Democrat like, you know, L. Syed's version of this is like, I lift, right? Like, which is funny, because I mean, but it's but it's everyone just being like, I'm a normie. And that it's it's the normie versus weirdo line is so strange, particularly when there's such actual real bread bread and butter things going on. And it's such also a contrast with the way that these primaries play out, which the primaries on both sides are people pulling out of like their purses, just like things that are really out of line with where the American public stands. On net, Democrats have won the candidate quality sort of conflict over the past several cycles, right? We have seen Republicans elevate, you know, I mean, well, can Paxen carry lake like twice? Yeah. Um, you know, Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano. I mean, we have seen just bad candidates put up by Republicans, Democrats, as much as like the populist left starts getting angry with the establishment. The establishment has helped put up Sherrod Brown and Mary Peltola and candidates that I think are have a better shot of winning those states than like a Francesca Hanger or whatever else you might say. And the candidate that is representing the progressive left in Abdul Al-Sahed is struggling more than you would expect in a state like Michigan. You know, this makes me think of, did you guys read the AOC interview that she gave to the times? I don't wait for when you're ready. That's right. So, so AOC basically, you know, I think to her credit, right, modern politicians sort of do a little bit grasp that we all, there's no kind of like game played, right? There's no a little bit like, oh, I don't know. I'm thinking about it. She's kind of like, yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm going to see how the midterms go, which is sort of a just a real policy way of saying like, yeah, I want to kind of see how progressives do, you know, and I found that very revealing. Well, look, the one thing Democrats don't have is they don't have to declare like both a field tea to Donald Trump or to anybody in the party, really. Like, if Democrats were only allowed to run the people that thought like that Joe Biden had a good debate, for example, in 2024, right? Like, you just have to believe the craziest stupidest shit if you're going to like always be on Trump's good side. Like, I mean, I don't want to go too much of a ramp, but like, why the fuck is Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, like a former TV news anchor, and why even in Trump's interest was he invading Iran? I mean, like, that kind of thing, like, you are really having problems with selection bias issues. We're selecting for people who are very craving and they're willing to sit please Trump, and that just really constrains the variety of candidates you might have. Some of them are kind of trollish and charismatic and good on Fox News and good on social media, but Democrats have more ways to make mistakes. But, like, ultimately, I actually like the primary process. I might not agree with who the voters choose in every district, but how many voters are doing some degree of a vending here, right? He said, French is going, no, that's a bridge, that's a bridge too far. We'll take our chance with El Sayed, Jasmine Crockett. No, it's not my flavor of anti-establishment candidate. We'll go with Alarico. And I don't know, I, you know, voting is good. Why don't we trust voting? He's good. A controversial stance now. Can I, can we just close this out with a flipper? You know, the first time he said it, you didn't squeak. And I, I weirdly missed it. Okay, the last week flipper gave Democrats a roughly 60% chance of winning the Senate. This week, it's 67%. And we talked last week a little bit, talk. I think you threw some shade about how Raiders at election expert Raiders were under arresting Democrats, which you've also written about. And then you tweeted this week. I can't believe I'm citing your tweets, but here's what I've come to. You tweeted that things are getting worse for Republicans in a way that, quote, isn't actually all that common in the midterms. So can you, can you break that down? Why is it, why is it worse than it would be regularly? Flipper is a large language model train of the brain of a bottle of those dolphins. They're coming. Uninteligible even to me. No, look, I think it's actually very simple. Every day, the polling seems to get worse for Trump. And that's unusual because usually, look, I wrote an article three weeks ago saying, hey, we're about to hit Labor Day. Don't get too excited. Probably nothing will happen because most of the time things are pretty baked in in these in these 24/7 365 news cycles where everyone's partisan all the time anyway. There are some elections that break late. 1994 is a classic example of an election where, where things looked pretty bad for Democrats, but they control the House for years and years and years and years, right? In the damage of it, the scope of it only became clear late in the election. After Clinton had won this actually very tricky, complicated three-way race against Bush and Perot. Another example that kind of comes to mind a little bit is 2008. This is kind of the election where the regional538.com made its name. Financial crisis. You had a financial crisis coming in mid-September, right about now. You also had in mid-2008, you had this very contentious 50 state, whatever district of Columbia, whatever else, very, very, very long primary, famous primary between Clinton and Obama. It took a while to repair the damage from that primary and up through the selection of Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention. People thought that race was pretty close. And then it's like just a collective weight of eight years of Bush, the unpopular wars in Iran and Iraq, excuse me, Freudian slip, and Afghanistan. And then financial crisis on top of that. And it kind of, and you know, it's just Obama won by what seven and a half points or something. I think it actually reflected an admirably good performance for John McCain, given what a cluster like everything else was. I mean, the October surprise was basically just that there was a financial crisis in that election which I think, you know, we can sometimes err when trying to draw too close comparisons between elections, but I do want to say that that served as something of a free radical in that election, right? Everyone's out campaigning, Obama's all about the Iraq war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then everyone has to go back to Washington and deal with the fact that the banks are collapsing and, you know, we are not at that place with this AI conversation, but the backlash to the data centers, the backlash to the Iran war, there are, I feel, more free radicals, if you will, in the electoral political ecosystem. Then there would have been in 2018, right? Like, in some ways, the issues that are facing America today are like, and look, this isn't just happen since Trump made decisions here, but in some ways, tailored specifically to challenge the Trump coalition. So, with all that, like, we have gotten as observers of American politics, as sort of rank-and-file Americans gotten so used to everyone saying, "Oh, like America's stuck in the mud. We're so partisan polarized. Nothing changes." Well, well, well, like, okay, to a certain extent, yes, the baseline is much closer together than it was in 1994, but the wisdom of the crowds still mat, like, people react to things that they don't like. And I think there's more, there are more unknowns it feels like in American politics right now than there have been in a minute. Yeah. I. No. Well, it's like a vibe. I mean, we've been talking about the, what was the great word that was coined the vibe session, which, you know, which was mostly like sort of like a late Biden era thing, but I think the vibe session continues with like an AI flavor. And what's, you know, this gets a little bit into what we want to talk about next, but when I'm thinking about how AI will atmospherically change the election or motivate voters, I actually find myself a little stumped because as we talked about last week, AI hasn't yet broken down neatly into polarized categories. But then I was actually listening on the train here to Ezra Klein's interview with Jensen Huang, who it is, first of all, I think Ezra did a, Ezra is like sort of the perfect interviewer for someone like him because he kind of comes, he like knows his, he knows Huang's like tricks a little bit and has interesting answers for them. But I found it to be a fascinating conversation also alienating. Like Jensen Huang had this line where he was like, our brains aren't going to need to know certain things. For instance, I don't know my address or my phone number. And I was like, but he is dramatically less weird than like Altman and Darryl. I know. And to me, it was such a, we are just meeting these people, right? Now we, now we, you know, we are just meeting people at Bill Gates. I mean, this is coming from Mahaworld, right? But Bill Gates, a famous businessman, is now polarized in his own way. We know all about him. We've spent years talking about his charitable giving. We are only just getting to know the AI people and we are afraid of their technology. And so I think that that will, will be a huge issue in 2028, like, people need to get their heads on about it now. But that's, yeah, I don't know how it's going to affect them. Let me, let me, let me, let me cite some, some data that's supposedly what this podcast is about. Right on, man. All these dirty hot takes gallop every month, publishes a survey, which is one of the more informative surveys. I think in American politics, they ask voters, what do you think the most important problem is facing the country? The answers are pretty obvious, high cost of living slash inflation, 13%, fuel oil prices, which probably should be grouped with that, another 4%, economy in general, 11%, the government slash poor leadership, 30%, war in the Middle East, 7%, those are all things that are directionally problematic for Trump, right? And then you get immigration, which is 10% much lower than it was a couple of years ago, or probably favorable for Trump, where, by the way, then you get some shit, you get racism as 4%, you get poverty as 3%, where do you think AI ranks, what do you think the percentage is? 1%. I don't, it might not even be on there. It is one. Advancement of computers slash technology, which hasn't appeared very often before. So going from zero to one is often the hardest thing, and so, but I think it might be contributing to voter sense of chaos and for voting, I think about when Biden lost people in early in his term, right? It kind of came when there was yet another COVID variant, and then there was chaos from the withdrawal in Afghanistan and supply, which some people were like, I thought you're going to fucking solve this shit and return to normal, and we don't have that. And with Trump, it's like, I thought we're going to have lower prices again and no more stupid fucking foreign wars, and we don't have that, and on top of that, I don't know what the fuck to make of all this AI stuff doesn't sound like anyone has a plan, but you've clearly not been very responsible, so we might as well elect Democrats as a check. I mean, this is, you know, one of the reasons why you see backlash at the midterms is voters actually like a balance of power. It's almost hardwired. We are not in this cycle voting on the president. We're going to have a Republican president for the next two and a half years. But voters tend to like, if they think the president's not done a great job or even a good job or even a passable job, let's at least check his powers and have some bipartisan disagreement. Yeah, I mean, you seem skeptical when I said there are a lot of, there are more unknowns than usual in American politics right now. And in some ways, the fact that the issue, the number one issue being the economy has been so stable suggests perhaps it is not so unknown. What I think about in the context of all of this is the way that political entrepreneurs can use a new issue. In this case, it's AI, but like to go back to the early 90s that I'll try to do this quickly, Ross Perot in 1992 was a political entrepreneur. Voters did not necessarily understand the dynamics of the debt and deficit and the bond market and interest rates and all that jazz, but what he said in the midst of a recession and joblessness and all of this, all of these things that Americans felt bad about was the debt and deficit is your problem. It's responsible for everything. This is back in the day where the debt and deficit were far lower than they are today. But he in his own kind of charismatic way as a political entrepreneur said, I'm going to make you understand your problems in life through this lens. And he got, I mean, in a moment, but he got like 20% of the vote. A political entrepreneur in a similar vein today could seize on AI or they could seize on interest rates or whatever. But I think that just because Gallup shows 1% of Americans feel that AI is the most important issue in America today does not mean that it's going to necessarily stay that way or that a political entrepreneur couldn't make a connection that made all the top of the sort of those issues, the economy, bad governance feel like an age. So let's stress test this blue wave polling scenario. First, let's make the case that the polls are right. And that we even see a three point polling error that underestimates Democrats. They're doing even better than it's saying that they will do right now. And I'll paint the picture. Democrats flip the house easily. They pick up several Senate seats, including Kansas. >> More of several, yeah. No, if the polls, if they take the polls at face value and Democrats beat the polls at face value that you maybe shouldn't be taking a face value by three points on top of that, then they win not only Kansas, they win through Osmorn, they win Nebraska, like South Carolina and shit like that gets close, they might win the Texas gubernatorial race. >> So in that scenario, what are the factors that are swinging with that huge blue wave? >> That all the chickens came home to risk for Trump. I think it's the simplest version of that, right? Years of bad advice on the Middle East leading this disastrous war in Iran, Trump from the very start of his second term, initiating tariffs that did not resolve voter's concerns about the cost of living, overreaching on his best issue immigration, continuing with the corruption, and people are tired of the show, people are tired of the show, and I think one thing you learn, so because 1994 is kind of comparable to this, or maybe 2010, those are both interesting because they came after you had these big transformations, right? >> 1994 being New King Rich in the Republican leadership. >> New King Rich, it's like Clinton won after 12 years of Republicans, and boy, it's going to be a new transformational, and then you have Hillary Claire, you don't ask, don't tell on things like that, and all of a sudden, Trump is like not so far, this is a pretty conservative country, at least in the 1990s, it's still a center-right country, more so than it is today, I think. In 2010, Republicans are like not so fast Obama, right? We elected you because Bush was a fucking disaster, we didn't want Obama care and all this stuff that you're trying to do, and we haven't had any president recently that kind of stayed within his mandate. You can argue about Obama because Obama had a bigger mandate, right? But Trump was a reaction to the fuck-ups of Joe Biden, where those are Joe Biden's fault or not, the overreach of Democrats and the fuck-ups of Joe Biden. People were not asking for a war in Iran, they were not asking, particularly for terror, absolutely. Trump, to his word, did run on tariffs. They were not asking for all of this, they just wanted to have some normalcy again because Democrats were weird. No. overreaching and spending too much money and letting too many immigrants in. And Trump has gone way beyond that and is 80 years old and has a lot of stupid people giving him advice. And it's all kind of hitting now in one cycle. The bottom is falling out to repeat myself. - Can I ask a question in that scenario? In this scenario where it's a huge blue wave, let's spin it forward to what we always like to do, which is like the next presidential election. For someone like AOC who's sitting on the sideline election night and sees a theoretical huge blue wave, does that mean that someone like her is emboldened to run for president? Does that, what does it, what does it look like? - I mean, I think it does mean that somebody like her is emboldened to run for president. Should it mean that somebody like her is emboldened to run for president? I'm not so sure that's the case. People need to keep in mind that midterm electorates look a lot different than presidential electorates. And on top of that, this environment is a referendum on Trump. Not just people may like sort of talk alarmously about Trump's third term, he's term limited. He's out. The next presidential election is going to be a fight between two people that are not Donald Trump and Joe Biden. - Andy Beshear. - Andy Beshear getting out there. - Whoever nobles to. - Whoever it may be. - Yeah. - And look, could some of the dynamics stick around in that the next Republican nominee is hamstrung by a lot of, by the coalition that Trump created and hamstrung by a lot of the decisions he's made? - Sure, I don't necessarily think that JD Vance is in the position he would like to be to run for Trump's third term. And just me saying Trump's third term should give him nightmares in terms of his electability. But I do think that also taking an L side, for example, win in Michigan or a toy Jackson win in Maine to mean that AOC can win the presidency. I think it would also be misguided. It's just applying lessons learned from one specific scenario to a quite different scenario. - Yeah, I think that if there were that massive Louis scenario, Louis scenario, in some ways it makes the 20-28 election so much more unstable because then it gives these Republican rebels like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey, whatever that cohort, it gives them much more ammunition against JD Vance. Someone who is frankly not very charming on the stump. - Yeah, we all have our taste. - Yeah, I mean, listen, I think he has some, this is just like we were talking about candidate quality. He's quite smart, but also I think a little, I think he has rough edges. So that to me makes the Republicans race a little more unstable. It gives more credence to the independence or it gives more credence to Marco Rubio, whatever you might say it. But it just makes things, and then you can think about, well, if certain more fringe Republicans or populist Republicans started to surge, does that give more permission structure for someone like AOC or does that make Democrats say like, "Whoa, let's just swoop in and get the most "electable white dude we can find." - Yeah, I know, I think if, so first of all the progressives want, they'll say it to win Michigan, right? That's gonna be a litmus test, fair enough. But I think I agree with that, Claire. Like apart from that, if Democrats have this huge blue wave and the stories about Kansas and Alaska and Iowa and Nebraska, those are all a pretty moderate set of candidates. And so that becomes how Democrats actually nominated normal people who like hunting and fishing and shit like that. And they won Kansas for the first time in 1932 and they won Alaska. And I think that becomes that overshadows the story. I mean, maybe, you know, maybe if El Saida has a great election too, right? If Democrats win by nine points in Ashland, he wins by seven, okay. We can say, well, technically he was one point under- - And everyone's gonna laugh at me with my thoughts. - But like, you know, maybe you have some actual happiness and among the Democratic Party for once. Of course not, right? We're just gonna spend every single show next year talking about Democratic infighting. But Claire's point too about like, you know, the day after the midterms is a day that Donald Trump really, really becomes a lame duck. Putting all your eggs in the Trump basket has not worked very well this time, right? You have lots of Republicans like Hanson and Iowa saying, yeah, we should probably end this Iran more, but they've done absolutely nothing. I mean, you know, there are these kind of like toothless resolutions that say, you stop the Iran more, Trump, they don't even vote for those toothless resolutions. But like, it's like, you know, it's, it's, yeah. Even as unpopular as Biden was, I don't think you saw a lot of like non-Jerrod golden Republicans or Democrats directly saying, yeah, Biden fucked up. And now you see that with Republicans. - Okay, so let's do the opposite. It's not a blue wave, the polls are off. This is like the 10% scenario that you've given in your forecast model, Nate. And that is that in an election night, the House is too close to call. Michigan Senate race is too close to call or it's going to a recount. Republicans have won Maine. The Democrats win North Carolina, but it's a close call. What's the case for this? - I mean, in some ways it says something that my job in presenting the bear case, I think it's actually harder than Nate's job in presenting the bull case. I didn't think first what I'd have to emphasize is there would be a significant polling error in that situation. And who would the polls sort of overestimate their support for Democrats? I think we'd go back to where we were earlier in this conversation, which is working class white voters, Hispanic voters. And it would suggest to me that after 25 years of partisanship, polarization, being sort of king, being the guiding light, I mean, we haven't in this century, I would say, had a complete blow out election. Like you would have had in the second half of the 20th century American politics with Reagan. - Or 2010, because in 2010 you went from a terrific couple of elections for Democrats to very good, so that the margin of swing was enormous and that's based in white. So the swing there is ginormous. And that story is about turnout. That story is about Democrats not turning out. And so what Republicans would need for this sort of bearish case on the current Democratic polling is for their voters to turn out. And the story we would tell there is like, cash does actually matter. And for as much as the national press pays attention to all of these races, a lot of sort of rank and filed voters in Iowa and Texas are not nearly as tuned in. They're gonna see all of, they're gonna see Telefrico, who are gonna see like a hundred million dollar Telefrico bomb dropped on them over the next month and a half. And that the people who were ready to stay home because they don't like Trump, not switch ballots, not switch candidates between parties, but stay home because of Trump. Or like you know what, these people are weird. They're creeps, all of the things look like Americans aren't goldfish, they remember how much they didn't like Biden, which is why when you switch from sort of a likely voter model to a registered voter model, you still see that Americans prefer Republicans over Democrats on immigration. They're reminded of all of the things that they didn't like. And they say, you know what, as much as we don't like Trump, we know we don't like these weirdos. And look at the polling. I mean, the Democratic brand is still in the garbage. They still pull worse than Republicans on brand. You still see all these Senate candidates saying, I don't like the national party, right? Like I did choose and I am a Democrat, but look at, they're basically, you know, making that like, hey, hey, hey, I'm different. I'm just thinking. - Basically the surprising outcomes involve a combination of things, right? It's not kind of when magic bullet factor. So almost certainly some degree of polling error that these very working class whites and working class Hispanics are actually not returning to Democrats are just being mis-sampled. You know, maybe Trump manages to get gas down to three, 75 of a gallon instead of four, 50, maybe the GOP advertising puts defines enough for Republican or enough Democrats being weird. And maybe Democrats lose a lot of the quenflips, right? They lose Michigan by half a point. They lose Texas by half a point. They lose Ohio by a tenth of a point. That kind of thing can happen too. You know, even with all that, even in that 10% scenario, the House is probably close. - Can I ask just like a historical precedent because I always think of the 2016 election where everyone was surprised and it goes to that sort of white working class, underrepresentation in the polls. But what is, would people are trying to visualize what that sort of bad scenario for Democrats would look like? What's a historical example of a polling miss? - The polling misses in primary elections tend to, like in '94, the polls are pretty far off 'cause they underestimate how big the GOP was. - Even in midterms, right? - In midterms, yeah. I mean, there is some analogy to 2022 where there was a red wave in the narrative that never really materialized, but it actually wasn't all that present in the polling if you were looking at the data more carefully. - Listen, listen. - Listen, listen. - Listen, listen. - We don't even have to go that far back. The polls are actually pretty fucking wrong in 2025. Now, they were wrong in that they underestimated Democrats, which is why I think my bearish case might be a little bit harder. But in 2025, again, in the same way that you can't sort of say that 2026 is going to be an indication of how the next presidential will go, you can't say that 2025 is that indicative of 2026 'cause it's a much smaller electorate. But still, that is what happens when a bunch of your voters stay home? and you've pissed off enough people that there are boat flips around the margin. And because like in a midterm environment, we don't have the wall to wall coverage that we have during a presidential where like nobody in America doesn't know that there's a presidential election, there will be people in America who have no idea that there's a midterm election. - I would love to live in their lives for a little while. - Because that's the case, it's weirder things can happen. - Yeah. - And you know, I'm trying to make the bear case here, which is that the pollsters just get it wrong in terms of who's not gonna turn out. - This single thing, if I were a Democrat that would make me feel most confident is 2018. In 2018, Democrats flipped 41 or 42 households depending on how you count. They won the popular vote for the US House by 8.6 points, which is exactly like the margin that Flipper has right now in the House. That was the one example of what happens when Trump, is on the ballot in a midterm. You can argue conditions are worse now. The approval ratings are similar. People's objective view of the economy is quite a bit worse though than it was in 2018. And in that election, the polls were pretty good. And like under estimated, for example, Beto, O'Rourke, in Texas. - You always say his name with a little like, - Genistic class. - What do you mean? - How would you say Telereco? - James, Telereco. Why are you allowed to like, when you're allowed to like adopt a fake foreign accent, I'm just trying to say when we went to California for the first time, right? And like there were old enough to pay attention to this kind of thing, right? To have this like white preppy waiter who was so excited to like practice his like perfect pronunciation, like salsa vanity or whatever, right? Like it was like, no, you can't. It's not, it's appropriation. You can't do that. So it's what we call the study abroad effect that everyone comes back second semester junior year. And they're like, I went to Ibiza. - It's like Madonna moves to London for what, two years. And it's like, I just can't help myself. - Remember when Lindsey Lohan moved to Dubai. - And she had to, and she had a, - I'm not gonna imitate her accent. - She had a crazy, collegiate accent. Okay, wait, I wanna end this discussion just with again, what would the really huge polling error mean for the 2028 election? Would that affect it? On either side, how would that push towards 2028? If Democrats just really did poorly. - Well, I mean, if the polls are really wrong this time around, we're finally out of a job. So lucky us, no. I mean, I think that if the polls are wrong in a big way this time around. And like, you know, it's complicated. I've mixed feelings about that. It's just like one more argument in favor of like this feeling already that all data is bullshit. Don't pay attention to the polls. We don't actually know anything sort of the scientific method at least in so far as that's concerned is broken. And these things are not quantifiable sort of shut your ears and eyes to it and vote or whatever, you know, however. So I think in many ways, it would be this feeling of like all these free radicals. We don't know anything, just work based off. And we've already seen, this is what I really wanna say. Democrats shift away from prioritizing electability to prioritizing more ideology. In 2018, we saw in leading into sort of 2019, 2020, over and over and over again, in polls that a majority of Democrats cared more if that the candidate could beat Trump than that they reflected their value as a Democrat. I think we already saw in the primary process that Democrats are pissed off and they're willing to vote like pissed off people who aren't just focused on, you know, the winds above replacement score of any given candidate around the country. And I think if the polls are wrong in a big way, in either direction, in this election, it will add credence to this idea. We actually don't know anything about politics and we might as well just work off of our emotion, which at this moment is anger. - We need a hard reset and if we go to like, if we play to the progressive ideology on the Democrat side, that means we're gonna get more enthusiastic people and turn them out and that's the thing. - And it's those are another data point in sort of favor of don't trust the institutions, right? Like, which is already a populist impulse of they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, let's go with the feeling. - If the polls underestimate Democrats, I think I know I was gonna care within reason, right? You know, 'cause they're already saying Democrats are gonna have a pretty good election. If Democrats have a really, really good election instead, there's like not gonna be very many people who are like, I feel shaved about this because I expected slightly less and I got this good stuff for free. Like, that's generally not how it works. - I was talking about Republicans too, in this case. But yeah, go ahead. No, but like I do think it's important to talk about that and I wouldn't have felt as comfortable kind of emphasizing this as much a week or two ago, but you have seen consistently in these very red states, Democrats polling and districts, by the way, including in districts where Democrats were tried, you know, we're supposed to be safely gerrymandered out of the district and in Texas and Florida that might not be enough, you know, I feel more comfortable emphasizing that and not just saying, well, technically it's in Flipper than I did a couple of weeks ago because there's just more evidence for it. And again, there's real world shit too. Look at like actual voter registration statistics. Those shifted Republican for many years. Now they're shifting Democratic again. Look at turnout in the primaries. Look at voting and special elections. Look at again, the objective facts about gas prices and the objective history of what happens when you have a lame duck second term president and like look what happened in 2018 and like it's just kind of the, the bowl case for Republicans or the bear case for Democrats is actually kind of hard to make apart from the fact that like polls fuck up again. - Well, we hope you loved this edition of "Fair as Bulls." - And otters. - And otters. - Time does an otter make. - Wink wink. - Oh, what side does an otter make? - What's your number? - That's actually good. - Okay, that's it for today's episode of "Still Counting." Listen wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on youtube.com @stillcountingpodcast. We will be back next Wednesday evening for another episode. - "Still Counting" is a crooked media production. Our team includes Saul Rubin, Emily Four, Claudia Shang, Charlotte Landis, Ms. Reed Churlan, Johanna Case, Ben Hesko, Mazda Groat, Katie Long, and Adrian Hill. Our music is like "breakmaster cylinder." Our production staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of American East. (upbeat music)