What We’re Watching For on Election Night

Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with, as always, New York Times opinion contributor E.J. Diaz. Great to be with you always, Robert. And Times opinion columnist Jamel Bowie joins us this week. Hi. Hey, good to see you again. Great to see you, Jamel. And this is our last political conversation before Election Day. We'll spare you any predictions of the outcome, but that still leaves a great deal to say. Incidentally, the Times is making its midterm election coverage free in the app for a limited time. That's access to all of our analysis, polls, and much more. So let's get into it. An election that is unusual for many reasons is just a few days off. What are Republicans and Democrats running on? What might victories in congressional races provide? Will they permit either party to do about the problems they're decrying or to continue achieving what they call success? E.J., I suppose the question I'm starting out here with is, what's the election of 2026 all about? Well, you know, a lot of elections seem issueless. This one does not. This one has really clear contours. And Democrats, in my experience, both being out there and, you know, particularly Mississippi and Kansas, which I'll talk about, but watching. watching it elsewhere, the discipline that Democrats have had in sticking to economic issues and the discontent that people feel with President Trump is really striking. You know, Scott Colom down in Mississippi had the crowds yelling, higher wages, lower costs, save health care, save hospitals. He knows what he is running on. David Jolly, running for governor of Florida, speaks about housing, health care, education, no data centers. Senate Democratic. Chuck Schumer was busy with reporters this week. On the same day, in my case, in the afternoon, and Jamel in the evening, he called us both and wanted to talk about the election. And Schumer said, when we feel comfortable with strong economic issues, we feel in sync with the party and the voters, and it brings us together. And I think you're actually seeing that after all the talk of division. And there is still some division in the party and a lot of soul-searching to do after. But it's really striking. The Republicans are really strikingly not running on Donald Trump's record. And they seem to be running everywhere on Democrats as socialists or communists, on trans issues, and on the threat that somehow Democrats will open up the borders. And they're spending a lot of money to push these messages, but they really are backing away from Trump in some cases. And aren't even trying. They're not trying to run on any achievements of the last two years, even tax cuts. A little bit on tax cuts, but not very much. Jamel, does it all boil down to the election of diesel prices and data centers? Well said. I think that's very well said. I basically think so, with diesel prices and gasoline prices as being kind of a basic stand-in for cost-of-living issues. There's groceries, cost of housing. All these things are very acute. It's very acute for voters. But obviously, when you drive anywhere, you see the gasoline prices. You see the diesel prices. And that's the thing that sticks in people's craw. I think, as far as data centers, that's an interesting one because it is a new issue, right? Like, we haven't gotten very many new issues over the last decade. This is a new issue. AI, and I think sort of the influence of the tech industry in terms of, like, our ability to govern ourselves are these new issues. And the extent to which the president has been a full-throated supporter of building data centers. Has kind of the AI industry behind him has given Democrats this opportunity to really sort of say, you know, not just, oh, you don't want this big behemoth warehouse in your community. But this is this representation of the way that these powerful corporations do not care about your well-being and your ability to just live your life as you see fit. And I am really struck by the fact that the whole AI data center issue almost feels like an incipient progressive era. Like, the last. The last one, where then it was railroads and other big interests. I think you're seeing this progressive energy, not in the sense of how we use it now, but in the sense of how they used it then. Right. To say, we've got to get some of these big, big industries under control or they're going to control us. It's helpful, right, that like railroads, and I wrote about this not too long ago, kind of making this comparison between AI and railroads as these similarly transformative industries that prompted a real effort on part of the public. Right. To assert democratic control over them. It's helpful in both cases that they're so physical, right? Like, a data center is this physical construction. And loud. And loud. And like, it's hot. And it's visceral in a way that I think lends itself very well to being utilized as a political tool, as Democrats, I think, are doing across the country. It's hard to see how any result on Tuesday can leave the Democrats in a position to legislate successfully. But time's up. News reporter Annie Carney has written about what Democratic House leadership intends to do, which is, in a sense, to vote in favor of a kind of legislative program, knowing that it's doomed to be blocked by Senate filibusters and White House vetoes. Does this make any sense to you? I think it does to the extent that messaging bills can be used by national Democrats, by people in particular districts to say, hey, this is what we'll do if you give us the presidency in two years, we're going to do more of this. And I think that there are. There are places where there might actually be real constructive legislation. Budget bills have to be passed. And so I think there will be leeway there for Democrats to say restore funding for Obamacare subsidies, that kind of thing, restore funding for SNAP. But I do think that in terms of the bulk of the work to be done, it is and has to be on the investigative side, that for the past almost two years now, we've had a Congress that is largely disinterested in looking into what the administration is doing, that it's largely abdicated its obligations. Like it's constitutional obligation to exercise oversight over the executive branch. And, you know, it feels like there's a lot there. It feels like there's a lot of material for House Democrats, if Democrats from the Senate, Senate Democrats to engage in lucrative and fruitful investigations of what is happening in this administration. But returning to this idea of passing kind of a legislative agenda. Does it make sense for the Democrats to to preempt what what might come out of the 2028 presidential campaign as the most important issues? That is, as you say, if if two years ago, Democrats had set out an agenda, data centers would not have would not have made the the cut. Could they become wedded to simply restoring Medicare cuts, Medicaid cuts, as opposed to another health care reform act? I think no, I think. One of my heroes, Michael Harrington, talked about visionary gradualism. And I think taking a step forward here can lead to further steps forward down the road. We saw that with civil rights, where there were some weak but still real civil rights bills passed in the late 50s that eventually led to the 64 Civil Rights Act. And I think any Carney story is a really good piece, because what it underscores is Democrats are saying, look, we ran on these issues. And we're going to keep our promises. And it's up to Trump and the Republicans to decide what they're going to do about it, particularly in restoring the all the health care subsidies and Medicaid and food stamp cuts and repealing most of the tariffs. On Jamal's point of you cannot, I think, as some people have argued, well, you either legislate or you investigate. No, Democrats have to do both. And I think one way to look at the investigations. This isn't just about going after Trump. This is about laying out things that we really need to reform in the long run. Jamal had a column on this where, you know, we really need to reform the president's pardon power, for example. We probably need stronger rules to prevent a future president from doing some of the stuff Trump did with crypto and God knows what else. So I think that the investigations can be justified on legislative grounds as well as just telling the people. This is what has happened to you over the last two years. This is a midterm election. There's nobody at the top of either ticket, literally. So that means it's really dozens of elections. And I wonder if each of you could talk a little bit about some of the races that have struck you as being especially interesting that haven't gotten as much attention as the Texas Senate race or the main. So now it may be the Alaska Senate race. What's what's what's struck you as being especially interesting? At the end of the summer, I talked with my editors about where I wanted to go. And the two races I picked out were Kansas and Mississippi. And I picked those out because in both cases, you have very interesting Democratic candidates. Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest Methodist church in the country, 24000 members, really thoughtful guy, talks about himself as an independent minded Democrat and a relatively weak. and we've seen in some ways problematic Republican incumbent Senator Roger Martin, And then in Mississippi, you had an extraordinary Democratic candidate called Scott Colombe, who is a DA, was the first black DA elected in a majority white judicial district, who was really organizing the state very effectively. And so I went there and lo and behold, Kansas is in play. It may be now one of the better Democratic chances of a pickup on Tuesday. And Scott Colombe finally has persuaded the National Party, hey, this is possible. You know, historically in Mississippi, you need a Democratic candidate needs high black turnout, which Colombe is clearly mobilizing, along with the backlash against the Supreme Court's Kalei decision. And about 25 percent of the white vote. He's getting close. Just quickly, I'm going to pay close attention. This is Jamel's part of the world to Virginia House races, partly because they're going to report early on election night, partly because I really respect the two Democratic candidates. They're quite different kinds of candidates. Second District, a former representative, Elaine Luria, against current representative Jen Kiggins. That's a rematch. Luria seems to be ahead at the moment. If she takes that, it's a real indicator of a good night for Democrats. And Tom Perriello has gone back to his district in southern Charlottesville, down to Danville in southern Virginia. And he is also running a strong race. And then just to mention them, Sherrod Brown, I always pay attention to because he has such a voice for labor and your worker rights. And watch David Jolly's race in Florida. David Jolly is running very close. The notion of Florida. The notion of Florida flipping was totally off anybody's radar a year ago. I think he's got a shot. Jamel, what are some races that strike you as especially interesting? Well, EJ, I am interested in the two Virginia races, the fifth district and the second. I say I'm from the second district. I grew up in Virginia Beach. And so it's fun for me. Two of the most interesting competitive races in the state are just like where I live and where I'm from. And to echo EJ, the second district has long been this bellwether. Both these districts are interesting mixes of rural and urban. But the second district in particular is almost like a microcosm of like the political geography of the country. And in every election I've been paying attention to, you know, who wins the second really is a kind of indication of like what the overall houseboat might look like. So I'm very interested in what happens down there. Beyond those two races, South Carolina is fascinating to me. The Senate race. The Senate race in South Carolina. To succeed Lindsey Graham. Another, I'm very parochial. My parents live in South Carolina. So I'm there a lot. You're locally loyal. I'm very locally loyal. But the Times, recent Times-Siena poll has the race as a statistical tie between Darlene Graham, Lindsey Graham's sister, the late Lindsey Graham's sister, and Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate. And that is, I don't think, anything anyone expected. Even with Graham. Even with Graham being a totally novice candidate. I think the expectation was this is South Carolina, one of the reddest states in the nation. Arguably, I mean, you know, all respect to South Carolinians, kind of like a hotbed of reaction in American history. Like it's very, you know, obviously. Beginning of the Civil War, for example. I mean, before the Civil War, you know, nullification crisis in the 1830s, the secession crisis, you know, Jim Crow. Like you got to go down the list since South Carolina tends to be a genesis point for a lot of that stuff. And obviously the state in itself. It's history elected Democrats, but it's never elected liberals, right? It's always been a very conservative state. And so the fact that you have this very competitive race that, much like in Mississippi, backlash to Kalai may be energizing the black vote in South Carolina. There is some real demographic change in the white voters in the state, in migration from other parts of the country, you know, growing educational institutions, you know, major aerospace, aerospace factories. A real manufacturing base. Right. These like kind of political economic changes are creating maybe the space for more partisan competition in this state. And so I'm just fascinated by that. And I had been like asking for months to various people, can someone produce a high quality poll of South Carolina? And we have one this week. And it really is a striking thing to observe. Speaking of polls, by next Wednesday morning, some pollster is going to be or an aggregator of polls. He's going to be looking prescient and declared a genius and others not so much. It'll all be an accident. E.J., what does polling do to our politics? What has it done? You know, well, you had a particularly egregious case earlier in this cycle where somebody put out a poll that he later said was fake. Yeah. And a candidate in Michigan, Senator Mallory McMorrow, dropped out of the race because this poll put her at 9 percent. Right up or fundraising. That's a particularly egregious form of manipulation by polling. You also have some polling outfits that seem to produce results to tilt the polling averages in a certain direction. And those are not helpful. I think in this case, you've got such a multitude of polls that I think we have a fairly good idea of what's happening in a lot of these polls. And we know in the Senate, in the case of the Senate races, a whole lot of them are close and that the line between a Democratic sweep in the Senate and maybe just narrowly falling short is pretty thin. Yeah. And so we're going to overread whether polls are right or wrong. And the last point I'd make is I think there's a bit of a debate about whether the polls are subject to the old problem of undercounting Trump-oriented voters. Or maybe overcorrecting for that problem. In one case, the Republicans will do better than they are indicated. But in the other case, the Democrats could end up doing better than these polls are suggesting. We should note that the impact that a couple of fake polls had briefly on races is a measure of what suckers we are for data. I mean, it didn't take much scrutiny of these polls to get them included in some aggregate. What do you think about this? I mean, beyond the points EJ made about just how the polls are looking, the state of polling, I think it's important as just consumers, as like political news consumers, as people who maybe consume polls, to understand like what they can and cannot do. Like polls can't actually predict. They're giving you a snapshot of what things look like in that particular time. And what that snapshot can help you do if you're a campaign, if you're a candidate, if you're a consumer and observer, is give you a sense of what the landscape looks like. Right. This is the hill. You might have the climb. This is a slope. You might be going down. That kind of thing. But ultimately, what happens is still up to the campaigns, the individuals, like the people who do the thing. And in some cases, the landscape is such that there's no amount of effort you can really throw in that's going to help you overcome the obstacles. But many times, right, it is the case that things are a little more fluid than they look, right, that voters are a little more undecided than they appear to be, that the quality of campaigns EJ mentioned, the Kansas election, that is as much about the quality of Adam Hamilton as it is about the weakness of Roger Marshall. Right. Marshall just does not appear to be equipped to run a competitive campaign. And so even if on paper this looks like a very difficult reach, and it is a hard reach, the fact of a poor incumbent and a very strong challenger changes the game. I think polling, and maybe in some counterintuitive way, should remind us that these things are much more fluid than I think we like to believe. But outcomes can change in big ways in relatively short amounts of time. And I think this notion of things can change in the last week of a campaign has come back to bite predictions over and over again. Things really do change. In that conversation I had with Schumer, Schumer said for him the question is, can massive amounts of Republican money defeat overwhelming Democratic advantages? Because when you look at the non-polling indicators here, early voting, the Democrats have a huge advantage over Republicans compared to where they were two years ago or even four years ago. Trump's approval ratings are just going down, down, down, down. All the fundamentals are there for a very strong Democratic result. And the real key for Republicans is, can they, in the final week and now the final days of the campaign, mobilize enough of their supporters who may not be happy? To come out and say, well, I guess I got to vote for the Republican again. And some of those races could tip on voters who may not use their pencils very hard, may not be enthusiastic about it, but still put their marker in the Republican box. And that's a thing that the polls have a really hard time measuring. Right. Although I'll say, I feel like all of us have been covering politics long enough to know that like— Things aren't looking great for us, but if we can just get our supporters to the polls, things might look better. And I've not seen a cycle where that has ever worked. Okay. I want to wrap up this discussion with something that an old friend of mine, Steve Roberts, told me a minute ago. many years ago. He was a Times reporter back then, back from an overseas assignment in Athens. And I was heading off to London for NPR. And he told me that covering foreign elections, he said, is never about the horse race dimension. And he said, an election reveals something. It tells some story about a country. And I'm just curious, as we look ahead to this election on Tuesday, what, E.J., what story might unfold? What might this election answer? What questions might it answer about ourselves as we see the results next week? Well, I see two interrelated connections here. One, the simple one, is just frustration, anger, disappointment. And on the part of a substantial number of Trump voters, a sense of betrayal. He promised to bring down prices, not go to foreign wars, and all the rest. And he now seems utterly indifferent to the fact that he's not going to go to foreign wars. And he's not going to go to foreign wars. To the promises he makes, he's made, and kind of poo-poos affordability, and really is saying to those working class voters who voted for him, I don't really care very much. He even talks about making a lot of money himself. So I think there's that frustration, exhaustion, anger. But I also sense that this may be the end of a cycle, the end of a 10-year cycle. And that doesn't just depend on whether there is a Democratic sweep or not. I think people are looking for a different kind of politics. And I think it's a marriage of two seemingly contradictory things. I think a lot of candidates on the Democratic side who are saying—and Obama said it in a speech down in Atlanta—people are just tired of hating on each other all the time, having a politics rooted in division and hate. And I think there's this sense, and I think the AI issue really gets to it, that there are just a lot of unanswered problems. We're wasting a lot of our time now when we should be dealing with problems. I've been saying all year that there's a John F. Kennedy, let the get the country moving again campaign to be had sometime in our future. And I just sense that that's where the country slowly is moving. And I think that may be where we are in the 28 election. On a similar point, it's really interesting to look at just the candidates on the ground for Democrats and how they bear a lot of similarities, right? You have—Hamilton's a pastor, Tallarico's a seminarian. You have people who are from nontraditional backgrounds running. There's both a sense of maybe a politics that is less about division, less about hatred, more about trying to understand each other. There's also a sense of like a politics of morality, of sort of like ethical commitment. I've long been fascinated by John Ossoff's campaign for his reelect, which is all about a sense that it's not just the country's gone awry economically, but that we've gone awry morally and ethically, that we're tolerating stuff that we know we're not supposed to tolerate. And I do think that this election might be the beginning of a real—I'm not going to say a majority demand, but a real demand among at least a subset of the public for meaningful accountability. I think there's going to be a sense that among the things that we need to do, that is one of them. Can I say amen to that? I wrote a column a while back saying it was really striking how many Democratic candidates are running on moral issues and how many of them, you know, Hamilton is a prominent example of that, have a real connection to faith. And I think what you're seeing in this campaign, potentially, we'll see what happens in the long run, is that the culture wars are often talked about as moral, about moral issues. But in fact, we're having a real debate on morality in a broader sense, displaced to some degree, culture war politics. And we'll see if that lasts. We'll see if these trans attacks still work. My hunch is they're not going to work the way they did before and that this larger moral debate is something that will begin to take hold in the country. You remind me that when I met Adam Hamilton in Kansas City about 10 years ago, I interviewed him, he mentioned that in this enormous church that he presides over, whenever I talk about politics from the pulpit, there are people out there who are thinking, please, never talk about politics. And others saying, please, always talk about politics. But he looked at those people and that mix, that political mix, was the group of Kansans whom he spoke to every Sunday. And in a way, that's the country that he's talking to. It's the state that he's talking to right now, which is people who are divided about their politics, but on the other hand, might gather together in the same church every week. He said his church is about a third, a third, a third Republican, Democrat, and independent. And that's a pretty good focus group to be dealing with over many, many years. He's been with it for a long time. Okay, it's time to wrap up. And we always wrap up by checking in on what has brought joy into your life since we last spoke. E.J., you start. Well, I take joy in voting every year. And my wife and I early voted on Monday, last Monday. And I love going in. I love all the people working the polls. God bless each and every one of them everywhere in the country. And I developed this love, I think, because my mom, my dad would vote late, my mom would vote early. And after school, I go to vote with my mom. She took me to polls first time when I was seven years old. And the election, the polling place happened that year to be in somebody's garage in the neighborhood. And I still remember, you know, I don't remember many specifics about it, but I remember the whole thing feeling like a party. And everybody in the neighborhood was there and they were talking with each other. It wasn't a particularly bitter local race. And I thought, this is really cool. And from that moment on, I sort of stayed interested in politics. And so that was my real source of joy this week. And I urge everyone who has a kid in their life, whether as their own kid or maybe a niece or nephew, take them to the polls with you because it has an effect on their future citizenship and their attitude toward politics. Okay. Jamel? Thank you, Joyce. I am voting on Friday, early voting, and I'm going to take my kids with me to go cast the ballot, to hang out. We've been talking about the election all week because both my, obviously, I care about politics. My wife cares about politics quite a bit. And so we've just been chatting about what's on the ballot, you know, the candidates and the kids have been asking a lot of questions about that. So we've had a lot of like family conversations, not just about, okay, this is what the Senate is, what the House is, what these elections are. But, you know, we talked to, my son wanted to know, on the ballot in Virginia is a, I don't know, a lot of people. An amendment that would end felon disenfranchisement. And my son was like, well, what's felon disenfranchisement? And so we just had this nice conversation about voting and what it means as a right and why people might have been, lost this right and so on and so forth. And so just first engaging with my kids about this stuff brings me joy. And then I'm looking forward to just bringing them with me to go cast a ballot to participate in this civic ritual, which it happens, you know, they'll probably see people that they know, Charlottesville is a small town. It's the community aspect of it, I think, would be in a real effect. It should be a joy. Election day should be a joy. And they beat Tampa Bay, which ranks 25th out of 30 Major League Baseball teams. So in a way, it was a triumph for low budget, minor market teams as well. Amen. Amen. Guys, it's been terrific. We'll talk sometime after the election. Great to see you, Robert. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Jamal. Thank you. Take care.