We’re Back! What’s Changed in US Politics?

- You guys know your jobs, right? - Mm-hmm. - Yes. - I'm not introducing you here, introducing yourselves. - Okay. - It's a whole new world. - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gaelin Drake. - I'm Claire Malone. - And I'm Nate Silver. - We are back, as folks may know by now. Nate, Claire and I are getting back together to start a sequel, if you will. Start a new show. Before we get to our official episode, first episode, which is launching. - It's like, it's like episode, okay, this is like episode 0.5. - It's a mini, it's the introduction to our website. - It's a mini-sode, as our friends as at Crookit have been calling it, which is a new term for me, which I like. Our first episode, Dear Listener, launches on Wednesday, September 9th. So mark it down on your calendars. Subscribe, smash that, subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts, you get the drill. But before we sort of dive in with the midterms and Trump and like the parties and everything that is going to take up a lot of our time for the coming, I was gonna say, year, two years, three, whatever it may be for the rest of the year. - The long campaign. - We wanted to turn the mics on, warm up, talk about a little about where we've been, what we're doing with the show, how we ended up here, answer some burning listener questions. And also play-- - We don't even have listeners yet. How can the listeners have questions? We have no listeners at this point. - Hey, I mean, ask for a question. - Right answer questions. I don't, I don't have an email address for you yet. - I mean, the folks on social media dropped some questions. - Yeah, yeah, that's what we started. - Mostly people were very enthusiastic, which we were so excited to hear, right? Like-- - Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker retweeted us, which is-- - The only thing I care about. - We can't shut them off. - I actually haven't seen it. - I don't know if she has Twitter. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what we've been up to for the past. So Claire, we haven't sat down for an official podcast 'cause right before January 6th, 2020. - Well, you know what, I went back and looked this morning. I departed 538 in December of 2020. So in my memory, I thought that I was still employed by 5-- Am I allowed to say 538? - Yeah, it's an interesting joke. - They just bleep it out. - Yes, please bleep it out. No, so I think my last podcast episode with you guys must have been December 2020. So the election had happened, but I do-- I mean, I'm very vivid memories of watching January 6th happen at like the same desk and on the same computer where I record all the podcasts, so I smushed it all together. But like, yes, we have been together in this forum in five years. - The last time we were, I guess, together in person, we did not know what the world has to store for the country. The parties, why not? First, let's talk about where we've been since December 2020. Then we'll talk about where the country's been since December 2020. So Claire, why don't you pick us up? - Okay, um, wow. So I. It's so much, actually. I freelanced for a while. I made a podcast about Hollywood and pop culture for the ringer, which was actually super fun. I had sort of like my rumspring a year of like, not doing as much about politics, which was really fun. - We're a cover story from New York magazine about Andrew Yang. - Yeah, that was fun. And then I kind of got like my dream job, which I still have. I am a writer at the New Yorker. I cover media and politics. And I'm currently on leave from that job. Writing a book about the Maha movement and Bobby Kennedy. And, um, you know, which I'm really excited about. So I'm kind of on leave for a year and doing that book and reporting for it and writing it. And yeah, that's my kind of like quick. - So tell me, Claire, what's up with all these beef tallow chips? Are they going to make me live forever? - Well, Galen is a lot of people think it's a cleaner, cleaner fat, cleaner oil, right? That's all that's a whole, you know. - I'm so excited for this book to come out and be able to ask for all of my querty help. - All of your. - Yeah, seed oil, seed oil, uh. - Pull them out. - I mean, I. - Which I mean, um, unpasturized milk. - Raw milk? Yeah. - What have you even up to? - So they called the herd at ABC 538 one in a time, right? - We're going in order. - We're going in order first man down. - Yeah, exactly. - No, I started a sub-stack newsletter called Silver Bulletin. I took about two seconds to come up with that name. Thank you very much, but it's kind of stuck now. And it's kind of my dream job in some ways, right? I'm my own boss. I actually have incentive to work hard. Don't get me wrong, I work my ass off for ABC News for most of it. - For most of it, important caveat there. - For the first like eight and a half years, the contract until they totally fucked around at the end. But no, the newsletter is great. We've been able to build or rebuild most of the models that we have. We have a team of four counting me right now. And now I have this show with you guys that I'm very excited about. We're very excited to have it with you. So I left 538/ABC last, which would have been March of 2025. I will be honest, it felt like if we're really pulling back the current, it felt for a while like I was recording a podcast on the deck of a sinking ship. Like all of my like main sort of friends on the ship had gone overboard. And I was just still there, you know, every day, turning up the mic and whatnot. But anyway, so 538 went down early March of 2025. I started a new podcast called GD Politics, which is a play on, yes, both my initials, but also goddamn politics. I think the way that many people feel about politics these days started on St. Patrick's Day, in honor of one of my best friends. One of my best Irish Catholic friends. - Thank you. And my parents' anniversary. So yeah, we kind of got the podcast up and running two weeks after 538 went down. And I'm still talking with folks who used to work at 538, like Nathaniel Raichich, Mary Radcliffe, I'm talking to pollsters and all different authors, some politicians. We made use with Lisa Murkowski. She told me she would consider becoming an independent under the right circumstances. - The podcast is great. There's so many, I mean, and also just, yeah, just like a shout out to all of the 538 expats who are now scattered to the winds, but are all doing such amazing things. - We've seen what we've infiltrated all of media to make data journalism. It's present everywhere. But anyway, so I have been doing that for the past year and a half now. And it's been a lot of, it's on Sub-Stack. So I've been working with Nate over on Sub-Stack, which has been a lot of fun. And it's kind of my dream job, too, you know. I get to have a lot of fun conversations with many different smart people. And now I get to have, which I'm going to continue doing, by the way, that other podcast. But now I'm going to have more fun conversations with more people I love right here, everyone. - We should say what we're doing the show. I think when we first started talking about it, it was basically just like, we want to do what we used to do. We want to have a smart conversation. And we don't want to change it that much. And in some ways, that's, you know, we talked a lot of it from people. In some ways, that's why we ended up at Crooked. Because I think they had listened to the old show. And kind of knew what we did. And liked it. And we didn't really want to, you know, curb our analysis or sort of maybe strong opinions or things that came across on the show. We just wanted to make our show. And that's kind of why we ended up here. You know, we're all journalists in one form or another. And that's what we're going to do on the show. We're going to be journalists. We're going to have our analysis. And I don't know. I'm excited we landed here. - Although it is nice to work with the team, right? - Yes, totally. - Everything, everything. Because people say, why don't you just have put your shows in the subsec? And by the way, I'll still have a video interviews on my subsec that aren't related to like this content necessarily. But yeah, I don't know. I've been experienced enough to be kind of an old media hand. And I just got good vibes that they were really interested and engaged. - A couple of things. One, I think to your point, Claire Crooked basically said, we want to support you in making the podcast you want to make. And that was really exciting. - And we asked a lot of questions. - We asked a lot of questions. And one of them was like, of course Crooked is a progressive, democratically aligned media company. And we are not a democratically aligned podcast. Just to make that crystal clear, we never were. We still aren't. And we won't be. You know, we have opinions and analysis that sometimes the left likes and sometimes the right likes. And people can make their own conclusions about what sort of biases and opinions we may be secretly hiding. Or we may say upfront events. - I'm wondering people thought we were getting married. All kinds of fan fiction based on both politics and our personal lives. But to be clear, Crooked said, we don't mind that you're not Democrats, that you're not progressives, that you are journalists and analysts first. And we want to support you in doing that. And we said, fantastic. Because that's what we want to do. And that's what we're going to keep doing here. Which is trying to reflect the world as it is and analyze it that way instead of telling people either what to think or the way that the world should be or whatever. Which, Claire, you mentioned that we want to do what we did back in the early days of 538 or the earlier days of 538. Which is true. But as we all mentioned here, we've changed. We've grown a lot in the past five years. And also the environment in which we're in has changed. Yes, media and vertical video. And all that we've taken now our fourth pivot to video in the past decade. But numbers have changed, right? Like we used to joke about the Scottish teens and predicting on the 538 podcast, but now it's not like an niche thing anymore. Polymarket and Kalshi are out front. All of these media organizations are doing collaborations with them. The polls are coming hot and heavy. There's the eternal conversation about whether the polls are getting worse or not. How hard it is to reach people. We've just had big polling misses and some primaries. We can debate how expected those kinds of polling misses should be. There are new polling upstarts, etc, etc. And so the media environment has changed. We've changed. But also the numbers environment, you know, hashtags still counting. The numbers environment has changed. And so I just want to hear a little bit how we're going to approach maybe this new new environment or sort of why this work is more important than ever. Some of these trends like the interest in prediction markets, the interest in sports gambling, right? These are things that like I've always been interested in. The world has caught up to Nate Silver. It's really just like we're kind of living in your weird little weird. It's a little weird. It's a little weird where you walk into a sports arena. You walk in a mess. It's where garden. They have the Kalshi or Polymarket. I forget who sponsors what exactly. Like that's a little weird. Certainly some notion. You hear this notion sometimes that like oh people are just going to we should just cover a policy in civics. You know, no one needs to look at polls. Like yeah, fuck that. People actually want to anticipate what's going to happen. Give it how important elections are. That's the most natural impulse and the most newsworthy impulse I can imagine. And the people who cover policy, well should keep doing it too. Yes. Absolutely. But elections, I mean, you know, have you noticed that there's almost no overlap now in the way that Democrats and Republicans vote in Congress? Among voters, it's a little bit more ambiguous than I think people, I think the swing voters become more underrated than overrated. But like, you know, when you are when you are deciding who wins an election voting in an election, that everything is kind of baked in from there for at least the next two years, right? There's not a lot of, I mean, they're, you know, obviously there are stumbles and policy misfires. If anything, though, the equilibrium we're in now is that because you have this rapid fire switch back and forth, by the way, it wouldn't surprise me if a Democrat wins a presidency in 2028. And then there also a one term president. You have this ping pong effect. But it's almost like because they know they're going to lose power quickly and become unpopular quickly, they therefore rush to do everything they can in the first 100 days and and bear the consequences of that. And yeah, they're, we're almost taking turns now instead of building durable majorities. I don't know how stable that is. But that's an important dynamic in the middle. Yeah, we're in the middle of potentially trend shifting things during politics. I feel like when we were covering, when we first launched the podcast in 2016, we were what we were always talking about the party decides, right? That was the current theory going on. And I feel like over the past decade, oh my gosh, that we've been doing this. We're in this weird interregnum of there were sort of traditional American party politics. And now we're a little bit in this wild less. And I think that's interesting. Like what's the next, what are the trends of the next 10, 20, 30 years going to be? And I also think, you know, some of the stuff we're going to talk about on this podcast, AI, right? You know, the, yeah, the sort of popularization of gambling culture. All of that stuff is going to play in in some way politically. Yeah, I mean, we, the 532 politics podcast, became popular during the 2016 election cycle, which was, I didn't even know we were going to do a podcast. But on my second day of work, they were like, you're doing a podcast. I mean, that was a real trip, that election cycle. But it set in motion a lot of the trends that we've now been talking about for the past decade. The reality is that Trump is going to leave office. And there are going to be likely new dynamics that set in may, may start as soon as this fall, the midterms that we're going to be covering. But I think one of the things that made me most excited after doing basically a decade at 538 to still be doing this, start a politics podcast right back up again, is that I do think we're in a period of change. Like the democratic primary in 2028 is going to be, is going to start in four months, and it's going to be absolutely fascinating. And to the point about these trends, I do wonder, if at a certain point we become so polarized, the trends in education have become so they, they extend to their logical conclusion that something kind of breaks and something new is created. Back in 2016, we're always like, the system is very stable, it's a two-party system, third-party candidates have no chance, independence have no chance, you know, the American political system is the way it is. And you can oftentimes bet on that and be right. But at a certain point, trends reach the logical conclusion and something shifts. Either the populists in the two parties may see eye to eye and reshape the more establishment parts of the two parties may see eye to eye and foreign common ground. There are different ways, you know, there are different ways right now that you can see things breaking open. We've never had more independence in American politics. Like people are just really dissatisfied with the two parties. And there's, and the two parties, the coalitions within them don't make a ton of sense necessarily. And so I'm excited to cover something that will be, I think, dynamic and hopefully dynamic and a positive way. Yeah, the last really major shift in American politics I played out over, you know, anywhere from the 1970s through the early 2000s was the shift of Southern Democrats into conservative Southern Republicans, right? And in some ways the map, if you look at the map from 2000, Al Gore versus George Bush, a few states have changed, right? Georgia, Arizona, so forth, Ohio, Iowa, any other direction. But it's still about 80% the same map. And yeah, I don't know, I think people might, might underrate the chance of a seismic shift. Of course, pundits have been saying talking about this for years, but like two things. One is, you know, if AI is as transformative or half as transformative as a lab's claim it is, you're going to have great destabilization to the political system. We can debate if the AI optimists are right. Data centers are kind of the early, early canary in the coal mine for that maybe, right? The other thing is more and more, you know, look, I build models and classically in models, we're trying to predict how to do different demographics, predict voting behavior, and the big ones are always race and religion, right? Increasingly though, you see these really big divides with respect to age on Gaza, for example, in New York here with support for Zeron, mom Donnie, for example, where I do all say it in Michigan, really, really sharp age splits. Not always as simple as young people are progressive, it's actually a little more complicated, but like, but when you see that, then then you're almost guaranteed to have generational change. Yeah, you know, breaking news, old people die off, except they looked you're right. We all die. Yeah. On that topic. Yes. Yeah. Mortality. Yes. We, so in classic form, we were like, let's do a little feed warmer, let's turn the mics on, we've practically recorded it in the entire podcast episode now. We wanted to, before we go, play a little game because it has been a long time since we've all been together in a studio, and we were reflecting on that time when we were discussing in our editorial meeting, you know, what we want to talk about. We're like, okay, let's try to settle on the most important number that defines the period that we were apart. So say, you know, January of 2021, to now August of 2026, what number, either during that time, is most significant to the political ships or whatever themes that we've seen, or in this very moment, what number is the most significant? So, uh, Claire, what is it? Yeah, yeah. I have two numbers. Maybe I misunderstood the directions. Can I do two numbers? I'm going to do two numbers. Or should I do one number? Do one number? Then we'll come back around for one or so. They're a lot of numbers. It's just draft going for a long time. Okay. All right. I'll start off with my, my, my very simple first number, which is two. Wait, wait, hold on. Let's see if, let's see if, uh, Nate could guess what two means. Uh, the number of the second term that he's a lame duck now. The number of presents we've had. No, we saw you. No. I'll tell you. Go ahead. It's a number of wars that have started. I'm thinking of the worthy Ron. Okay. Wait. Oh, no, is my number one number? It's not funny. I was thinking of the number of wars that were that like a miracle. Oh my gosh. My number is even wrong. Three. Okay. Three. Wait, which three? I did this. I feel like I did this at like five a.m. This morning. Wait, I don't even know which, is it Dennis Wailer? No, when is it? It wasn't a little, uh, it wasn't. No, when we keep on calling it, uh, an ex, he kept, he kept it. He kept on calling an ex, an exploit or an expedition. Anyway. Okay, what am I going to do? It's very embarrassing. Three wars. Oh boy. Ukraine. We just start Ukraine. No, I know. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Ukraine. Gaza. Yeah. Any wrong. And they've all had profound impacts on U.S. politics. I can't believe I forgot Ukraine. Wow. But Ukraine, I mean, Ukraine and Gaza have in their own ways. I mean, I think Ukraine has reshaped Republicans in some ways more because it created, you know, I mean, And JD Vance in some ways really kind of got a lot of sort of America first juice by being, you know, the guy who was saying some pretty outtrade things about the Ukrainians. The Conflict in Gaza has obviously reshaped the Democratic Party. And then the war in Iran has profoundly impacted America economy. And obviously Trump's presidency, three. My number's three. No, but two of the three though, because two of the three, maybe the reason you forgot about Ukraine is Ukraine has not had obvious downstream effects on American politics, right? You go to Europe or something, right? I was last summer in Tallinn, Estonia, briefly in Helsinki, Finland, and there, I mean, they're right near Russia, right? There it's much more pertinent. Here it's not. The other two though, for totally different reasons, you know, I'm not sure that Americans would care that much about Iran if they weren't the effect on gas prices and commodity prices, but that's literally the most visible thing that you see. And then look, we could do, I'm sure we could have a whole series about public opinion on Israel and Palestine and Gaza and how that does and does not shape political developments and how that has reshaped the Democratic Party and whether our vantage point in New York is over indexed or under indexed on that, but like, but that's had profound effects on, like I said, the split between younger and older voters in the Democratic Party too. Okay. So Nate, what is your most important number of the past five years? If Claire picked two, then I'll pick two trillion, which is, can you guess what two trillion is? Well, how much does a national debt has grown? I don't know. No, it's probably good. Not one of those debt people. Maybe I should probably grow by a lot more. Two trillion. Yeah, I'm strong. I feel like it's something like the center, like the market cap of like all the AI companies together. It's something. It's the valuation that anthropic is now trying to raise money. And I think they're trying to raise, that's the most important number of the past five years. It was a big fucking flashy number. I want a big number for, for our debut for half debut show, right? How many debut? Look, I'm someone who believes that a lot of politics is downstream, ultimately from technology, that some of the relative stability you saw in the 1950s in post-war America, and this is the time when you had record low partisanship and Eisenhower had very high approval ratings. So before, before Watergate, before Newt Gingrich, still not happening with the Cold War and things like that. That was the era of big major television networks and radio stations where there's a strong gatekeeper effect where they have advertising related incentives to be kind of highly nonpartisan and applicants to change with the internet, right? Social media needs to be a category unto its own. I believe, and I think a lot of politics is downstream from that. Again, I take, I know, compared probably to most politics listeners, I know what counts as being an optimist or a pessimist in AI these days, right? I am more convinced about the transformative power of AI than the average politics observer, less convinced than the average Silicon Valley person working in a lab engineer or something. But people are talking about mass displacement, the tasks that humans used to do, even the biggest optimists in Silicon Valley would probably say in some way shape or form, AI is probably likely to concentrate power in the hands of fewer rather than more people. At the same time, also in terms of how we communicate, I mean, people say in some ways having these three big models, Gemini and Claude and so on ChetGPT are like, they're kind of like the big networks, right? They have actually, believe it or not, the quality information you get from ChetGPT or Claude, probably better than you get from Twitter. OK, I mean, I've tried, there's another conversation about what happened to the internet. So we're gonna talk plenty about AI on this podcast, I think that was a good little preview. We've won up Clare Plenty, Clare chose two, you chose two trillion. I, when we were talking in our editorial meeting, we're like, we're all gonna choose inflation. And so I think we all went out of our ways not to choose inflation. I will just say here for those who are following along, the total inflation that America has experienced since the last time we recorded a podcast together is about 28% over those five years, and to put that into four and a half percent annually over those years, and to put that in context, you know, the same amount of time prior, so like five and a half years or something like that, from July 2015 to January 2021, the country experienced 10% inflation, which is about 1.7% annually. So I think that we have seen inflation obviously, undoubtedly affect American politics, but basically turn populations against incumbents around the globe. And you know, you talked a little bit about this already Nate, but the fact of inflation is that you see it everywhere, and you see it advertised to you on the side of the road at gas stations whatnot, and unlike unemployment, which does affect beyond just the people who are unemployed, because people start getting scared about losing their jobs, ultimately like really high unemployment in America is 10%, right, but 100% of Americans experience this inflation. I have seen an $11 gallon of milk at a New York City grocery store. And I mean, and I believe you. And the other thing that all of that inflation has brought, right, it is upset politics here in America and abroad. It's also been particularly new because we hadn't experienced those kinds of inflation numbers for two decades. But one other thing that it's wrong is higher interest rates, which disproportionately affects young people who are in a time in their life when they want to be borrowing money to do big things, go to school, buy houses, buy cars. And it has sort of frozen a little bit of our economy, especially for younger people in amber, in a way that I think has created a lot of frustration and anger. It feeds, feeds movements, feeds populism and feeds populism for sure. I want to say, I have a runner up number because I thought something else like choose inflation. So clear, go ahead with your runner up number, and then I'll go ahead with you three. You told me to three. You only get to one of your runners up. Oh, wait. Okay. My runner up number is 20. Okay. Okay. You guys are going to guess. I'll just say it. DC is the percentage of US adults who say that they regularly get their news on Instagram and TikTok. And that's up from the 2020 numbers by a lot. In 2020, only 11% of people said they got their news on Instagram, and only 3% of people said they got their news on TikTok. This is so interesting. I wrote a number. Yeah. So, I mean, I think I wanted to choose something that just reflected just the quick and radical changes that have taken place over the past five years when it comes to the media landscape when it comes to how we're consuming things. I mean, as a writer, I am disturbed by how much people love video. Hi. And as a podcast or who's now on video, I love it. But I just think that that, you know, the politicization of social media spaces like Instagram and TikTok, which used to be, I don't know, what are we all doing on Instagram, taking pictures of food? That is just, you know, it's shorter bursts, the information environment is changing, how you're probably watched this clip on Instagram, right? If you see us. And that, I think, has changed the way the depth of people's understanding of certain issues. It's fed polarization in lots of different ways, not just algorithmically, but also like when you're actually watching a clip of something, there's less time to get into the new ones of an issue. So, I just think it's really changed Americans' brains when it comes to negative, negative, negative. Yes. That's what rises to the top of the feed. Exactly. Yes. Nate. With the fifth pick, in the 2026, still counting number draft, I select the number eight. Do you have any guesses what eight represents? The number of times we said fuck on this podcast so far. That's, I take the over on that. Galen, eight is the number of Democrats running for the US House that have lost their attempts at renomination in the primary. That number is typically something more like two except in redistricting years, it was kind of halfway in redistricting year, but most of these are, you know, as the median narrative is more or less correct about, it's either more moderate Democrats and hypocrites that are sometimes just older, older out of touch resistance 1.0 or pre-resistance era older Democrats who are being replaced by younger candidates. And that's something which is a relatively recent trend right in 2020, the party got its way. The party, you know, remember it was like super friends and like didn't Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, like Buttigieg, oh, didn't they all come to the same rally and they're like, in 2024, the party in a complicated way got its way too. was not really a. It was not really a vote in 2024. - Well, though some people in the party didn't like the way it went down. Obama famously. - Yeah, no, and obviously a very contentious process, but like voters did not have a lot of say directly and who received the 2024 Democratic nomination. And so, and look, I don't know if you tie a particular moment to this, obviously being in New York, where you think everything revolves around the city and so Zoran's defeat of Andrew Koma when Zoran, mom, down he started out polling at 1%, then was a relatively obscure political figure until then, like that was a remarkable development, I would say. But that's been a relatively recent change since the last time, even before you were working, even when you were working for $5.38, it was I think less clear until last summer was Zoran that, this is a real, a real big deal, a real real shift. - Okay, so my final number is a little nerdy, I apologize, but if you've stuck around this long, maybe you're a true head and you'll appreciate this, my final number is 15 to 20%. - Okay. - And 15 to 20% is based on research that was done by Yana Kropnikov and John Berry Ryan. They wrote a book called The Other Divide, which I talked to them on the $5.38 politics podcast way back in the day when they published this in 2022. And basically what they were saying was that the main divide in American politics is not left versus right. It's the people who pay close attention to politics and are very engaged on a daily basis versus the people who are not. And it is only 15 to 20% of Americans who are engaged on a regular basis in sort of consuming all of the news that comments out about what's happening in Washington and in elections who are posting on social media. And it's about 15 to 20% of America, it's about 15% of Americans who donate to campaigns and 20% of Americans as of recently who show up in primaries. And so much of the way we understand politics and the conflict in politics is set by that 15 to 20%. And it shapes, and like the media goes, those are the people who are going to rallies. Those are the people who get interviewed, who get put on CNN, who get written up in the New York Times. - Those are the people who purchase media, who purchase subscriptions, who are the readers. - And these are the people who are probably listening to this podcast, but our job is not just to reflect to our audience what they think or their own biases or stereotypes about the world. It's to look beyond that and data helps us do that. And to tell the story of the other 80%, right? And that 80%, a lot of sort of what they don't like about politics is not necessarily that they hate the left or they hate the right, but they hate the conflict that is driven by the 15 to 20% who are so involved in politics. And so I think a couple things. One, when you focus on that 80%, you get a much more diverse set of views. This is your like people who want a border wall and a public option. - Right, it's a heterodoxy of Americans. - People who support legal abortion and are skeptical of trans girls participating in girl sports. And once you open the aperture to the 100% of America, you get a world in which we agree on a lot of things, a world in which a lot of these stereotypes are not, there was this great Washington Post poll years ago that was like what do Democrats think of Republicans and what do Republicans think of Democrats? Democrats think that Republicans are all like millionaire fascists and Republicans think Democrats are all like gender queer or sexuality queer socialists. And it's like America is far more complicated than that. And the way that oftentimes politics gets defined is by just keep this in mind a small subset of Americans. And those are also the people who are deciding our elections. So in primaries of the very least. And so if you don't like this highly conflict driven environment, you actually have to bring more people into the political process, more sort of heterodox and ultimately more quote, unquote, normy people into the process. And I hope we can bring some normy people into the process on this podcast too. - Like and subscribe. - Suspend us to your mom. - No, that's important because it used to be that like the media was more simplistic than voters were, right? Meet the press and crossfire and all these things, the big three networks, Fox always challenge that paradigm a little bit to be fair. And now it's kind of the opposite. Now the media, now, if you look at sub-stack US bestseller list, almost all of that has a pretty strong identifiable partisan link. - Not us, Nate. - Not us. - Not us, we're there. - We're there. - We're there. - We're there. - But that's been a big change too, right? Where the normies have, by the way, sometimes you'll have, say, all this person is pro trans rights, but also pro is real. That doesn't make any sense. Well actually, there's no reason why your stance on all these unrelated issues should be related, necessarily, right? People, this is what parties do. You take a country of 350 million people in a complex, multi-dimensional sphere of all the complex interconnected issues in the world today, and you smoosh it down into a flat surface where there are only two political parties, right? That's what a partisanship is. It makes people think they have to be aligned with one party's use in all these issues when that's actually fucking stupid. It's an important force for understanding how public opinion they should. - I think new listeners are really getting a flavor of the podcast. - Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. - We're gonna have a lot to talk about. And that is the kind of content you can find. Every Wednesday starting September 9th at still counting, but in all seriousness, that's it for today. Thank you so much, Claire, and this has been truly, I mean, I've had more fun in front of a microphone these past 45 minutes than I've had a long time. So I'm very excited for what's to come. As I mentioned, we will be back in your feeds for our first official episode, as if this wasn't really an episode on Wednesday, September 9th, and every Wednesday after that plus bonus content, you can listen to still counting, wherever you get your podcasts, go like, subscribe, comment, whatever. We're also on YouTube, so subscribe, comment like there, as well are pretty pictures of all the video, the lighting in the studio is fantastic. So if you want to see that, you've got to go to YouTube, youtube.com/atstillcountingpodcast. Still counting is a crooked media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our music is by Drake Master Cylinder. Our production team includes Reed Trillin, Johanna Case, and Ben Heffko. Production support from Matt DeGroat. Katie Long, and Adrienne Hill. Our production staff is proudly unionized with writer's guild of America.