Breaking News from Pod Save America - Democrats Surge Ahead of Republicans in Major New Poll (w/ Nate Silver)

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

A major new NYT/Siena poll shows Democrats surging ahead of Republicans as voters sour on Trump. Dan Pfeiffer is joined by Nate Silver to break down the latest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The New York Times just dropped a brand new poll less than 50 days before the election, and we got to talk about it. And joining me is the one person with an even more unhealthy relationship with polling than I have. Nate Silver, he's the founder of Silver Bulletin. And more importantly, for our purposes, the co-host of Crooked Media's brand new show, still counting alongside his co-host, Claire Malone and Gail and Drook. There is a new episode of Still Counting coming Wednesday evening, and every Wednesday after that.

Nate, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Dan. Yeah, usually I wouldn't think an individual poll is worth it. But I think in this case, there's an exception both because the New York Times is one of the highest quality pollsters out there. And because this does match a trend that we've detected elsewhere in the Silver Bulletin data, that we've seen a series of quite strong polls for Democrats, both nationally and locally since Labor Day or so. Yeah, it's like it is the cardinal rule that Nate's ever been telling. of us all for well over a decade now to not take any individual poll too seriously, throw it in the average, throw it in the model, and then look at the trends. But you were right. Obviously,

the New York Times is a, it's a high quality poll. I think the New York Times pollsters ask some pretty interesting questions. They kind of get at the underlying political dynamics. And I think mainly it's because everyone talks about the New York Times-Syana poll. Like it has, it drives the discourse more than anyone else. So as you mentioned, there's been a bunch of really positive polls since Labor Day. A lot of those are some partisan polls, some polls with a spot of your track record. Yeah. This, you know, this eight point, you know, actually almost nine point generic ballot margin for Democrats among likely voters is consistent when we've seen this. Well, it's also consistent in what we've seen in your model, right? That's what you're seeing, correct? Yeah. So we have two

different versions of our generic ballot average. One is just take all polls as they come. And then one is that you make an adjustment for likely voters. Turn out. is not as high in the midterms as it is in presidential years that used to favor Republicans. When Republicans dominated the suburbs, you get the soccer moms, proverbially coming out. That started to shift a little bit in 2006 and so on. But now, anytime that turnout is lower, like in off-year elections and special elections and Supreme Court elections when there's not a major race in the ballot, Democrats see really well there. Historically, the opposition party is more fired up to than the president's party.

So one detail from that poll. Let me bring this up here. So 88% of Kamala Harris voters from 2024 say they're likely or very likely are almost certain to vote compared to 82% of Trump voters. And we live in a polarized country. It's about 50-50. So those little differences matter. And that's what drives this small but important gap between the registered voter result, which was plus seven and a likely voter result, which was plus nine, depending on how you round it. call it plus eight and a half. That one to half point gap is consistent with our modeling. It's

plausible, right? It's not like saying there's a six point gap or something. But, but, you know, that might be the edge that gets Democrats over the hump in, in Texas or Iowa or Ohio, et cetera. Yeah. So eight points is basically, I think in this poll, it's all the margin they found is almost exactly the national popular vote margin from 2018. Yeah. How big a blue wave does this, does this poll suggest to you. We're just all the point together. Yeah. So one thing we do have to remember is that not only did gerrymandering help Republicans, although not as much as they were hoping for, but also it reduces a number of competitive seats. You might have 30 or 40 seats in the country that are highly competitive. In a way, your Democrats might win 25 of those or something, right?

But we're not going to see numbers unless things get really, really, really insanely out of hand, we're not going to get like the plus 53s or 46s or plus 62s, the really big scoreboard numbers that we were used to from past cycles. But given how parliamentary voting in Congress is, people are very loyal to their party for better or for worse. The margin doesn't matter as much beyond when you get the point where you have a Congress person out on sick leave or, you know, Congress people are old. They die sometimes or retire or have scandals. You don't want like a Mike Johnson type of small working margin. But yeah, at a plus eight, Democrats would comfortably, we would assume, win the House.

The Senate's a little bit trickier. Yeah, I wanted to bring that up because we have to win, to get the Senate majority, we got to win at least two states that Trump won by 11 points. So how do we make up that gap? And can I say, because I looked at your polling at your flipper model over at Silver Bulletin, where you were pretty optimistic on the Senate seats. Yeah, look, I should clarify here. POTSAE of America is a partisan-ish show and still counting as that.

So I'm not going to, from my perspective, from my personal perspective as a partisan Democrat, I found optimism in your model. And the model has grown. Since we launched the model a month ago, it's gone from like a 52, 55 percent Democratic Senate advantage, which is still basically a coin flip to now like a weighted coin flip, right? When you get to 58 or 59, you know, if you're betting on an NFL game, that's like home field advantage, right? It doesn't guarantee anything, but it's worthwhile. And that's based both on national polls, but more importantly, the state polls.

So even with a D plus 8, well, Republicans have like a R plus 11 state in Texas and Ohio is a plus 11 in Florida. They're all like plus 10 plus 12. So you need both the generic ballot, the national. environment to be very blue, but you also need candidate quality advantages, probably clearest in Texas where, say what you want about Tala Rico, you have a kind of quality disadvantage, though, relative to, for Republicans with Ken Paxton. You know, we have a variable for scandals in our model. Paxton is lucky. We're only, only one scandal is allowed for each candidate. We summed them all up into one number, right? And so he doesn't get double or triple or quadruple panelized

for stealing pens and whatever else. You know, Alaska is a race where there's a lot of proof of concept with Mary Peltola. There's proof of concept in Ohio with Sherrod Brown, who won in a very similar environment as an incumbent granted in 2018. Yeah, so in theory, North Carolina should be the easiest race on the map for Democrats at a plus eight. States like Georgia, you wouldn't think would even be competitive then. I mean, Osaf would seem like a pretty strong incumbent. But, you know, but there are still, would still be some reasons to worry. In Michigan, we've seen El Sayyad go from he was always the favorite in our model

because our model is saying it's a blue year, Michigan's a purple state do the math and he can be a somewhat underperforming candidate and still win and that's consistent with the polling shows now but there are other worries you know some polling shows New Hampshire

surprisingly close some public shows that's a toss up today we can have a longer conversation about the expert I do want to have this long conversation about the gap between the modelers and the observers. Yeah, they're extremely underconfident, right? A lot of times I'm dealing with, you know, infamously, there were forecasting

models in 2016 that had Hillary Clinton with like literally a 99% chance of winning, and we had her with 70, 30% for Trump instead. And I was trying to scream into the ocean about like, this is not a sure thing. This is actually a pretty close race. 30% chances happen all the time. But the expert forecasters have the opposite problem, right? They just don't want to be tagged with the wrong prediction, and so they push everything into toss-up, number one. Number two, if you implicitly try to figure out what political environment they're assuming, it's like a neutral presidential year type environment.

Like for 2008, we know in presidential years, it's hard to have a big edge in the race for Congress. But in midterm years, it's the rule that you have a big edge. There are exceptions. 2022 was a partial exception, but we have this example. But we have had a previous midterm with Donald Trump on the ballot in 2018. Some things are better for him now, but a lot of things are worse. Those are a lot more concerned about the economy than 2018. Maybe they're more concerned about Democrats, Democrats' image is not good at all.

But we have this precedent of like, yeah, it's pretty common to have the opposition party, have an enthusiasm gap, and that translates to a plus seven or a plus eight. What's less common is how red the territory is in Texas, Alaska, and states like that. But the polling shows that just the extra couple of points at Tala Rico is getting about running against a Ken Paxton instead of a John Cornyn, Mary Peltolla, probably being a truly special candidate, those things held. And likewise, if El-Sayed is a below-average candidate, just in the sense of maybe being a little too liberal for a purple state, at a plus seven or plus eight, those. Those things might not matter as much. Hey, it's John. Last year, 2,500 people joined us at CricketCon for conversations with some of the smartest

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number of discounted tickets are still available. Get them before they run out. See you at Cricket Con. Yeah, New Hampshire, same thing, which is state even bluer than Michigan is which goes to that point. Yeah, New Hampshire, it's like, I mean, it's, you know, look, New Hampshire has been close many times in the past to elected Republican governors. You know, the rest of New England has become even bluer like Maine, the migration into Maine is people from blue states. New Hampshire's different, little weird libertarian, you know what I mean? Beautiful state, by the way. I like going there for the primary every year. But New Hampshire's a little bit of a different beast. But still, you have two fairly normal candidates. It tends not to surprise that much compared to some other states. You don't have like rank choice voting or something like you have in Alaska. You don't have a Democrat trying to win for the first time in 30 years or whatever like in Texas. So like that's a case where averaging the fundamentals, as we call them, with the polls would still have it be lean, if not likely. D and, you know, look, we have these things called prediction markets now and they are aligned

for better or worse with the statistical models quite well. They're not very well aligned with the Cook political report. The Cook folks are very good at like saying, okay, this candidate he might think looks good on paper. Actually, she's not raising any money and she's really weak on the stump and she's going to lose this debate and we know her internal polling is bad. It's good for like distinguishing between candidates, the same type. But their overall picture of the race is, in my view, miscalibrated. And I don't think you can then, what they'll probably do, to be frank, is they'll probably say sometime between now and late October, the wave will come in. Right. But that's not how elections work anymore. We both know we're both in the news cycle.

We know that like in midterm years and presidential years now, people are paying attention from Memorial Day onward, not Labor Day onward, which is still to say, it still is a nice, convenient time for Democrats to have picked up momentum in the polls are generic ballot average by design. It's a noisy polling series. So by design, it moves pretty slowly. We've seen a one-point gain over the past week. I think a lot of that is attributable to the shift to likely voters. Probably the rest of it's attributable to gas prices. They're up 17 cents or 20 cents or something in the past week. It's a very visible indicator. And I don't know. It's, The polling can be off.

The polling was off in 2016. It was off in 2020. It was somewhat off in 2024. It's been pretty good in midterm years. But we're talking about small samples here. But still, we're getting to the point now where you'd say the polls established Democrats as a pretty clear favorite to take the House and maybe a marginal favorite to take the Senate. It's always hard when you're kind of near that 58, 42 or 6040 line to know how to describe it.

It's like we're in the game and we have a very real shot. Democrats have a very real shot, but, you know, like, it could break either way. You'd rather have their hand to play. It's still a difficult hand where Republicans have a lot of outs, right? I mean, Democrats, both parties really, you know, you look at Bob Casey losing, you look at Mandela Barnes losing in Wisconsin, you look at Nelson in Florida in the last midterm. Like, those are three seats that are now gone from the Democrats' map that were lost by a point or a fraction of a point.

You know, I guess I can buy that Tala Rico is the slightest favorite. I'm not sure I buy that. He's up four or five, like some of these polls show. I mean, that would be a stunning victory. Yeah. Yeah. So Democrats read this poll and found a lot of things to like in it. Do you see anything there that should cause Democrats to worry?

Or is there anything else you're looking at that are sort of, you know, the known unknowns or whatever else that should keep Democrats up at night. as we go through the last 50 days here? I just say, I mean, it's a possibility of a systemic polling error again. Although I would say that we have had other evidence apart from the polling. We have a lot of information, for example, on what turnout is like in these special elections and in the primaries, right? I think that data is sometimes over high, but still, it's telling a consistent story.

And history, too, is telling a consistent story. For lame duck presidents, and for that matter, any president at their mid-prud president at their midterm, there is typically a backlash. Democrats have raised a lot more money, not through the parties. They've raised not very much of the DNC, as you know, but individual candidates are ahead in most of the Senate races. We actually look at within state fundraising. That's more reliable, and Democrats still lead on that measure.

Yeah, I mean, the worry is that there aren't currently 51 races that Democrats can count as sure things or close to sure things, right? Even if you say, if you're being generous and saying, let's count Assoff as he's going to win unless something disastrous goes wrong with the polls. Cooper is up by eight or nine points, right? Don't worry about New Hampshire. Don't worry about Minnesota as much. It's still only one confirmed flip, right? So the Democrats need to win a bunch of these coin flip or coin flip plus type races.

That's what a model can help you calculate is, okay, you have a bunch of. weighted coin flips. They're correlated in weird ways, right? If there's a polling error in New Hampshire, you might have the same polling error in Maine, similar states like that. But yeah, I mean, you know, I think the concern would be polls have shown good things for Democrats before. They've shown that partly because they underestimate Republican turnout. Now, they've underestimated in presidential years when Trump's on the ballot, not particularly in midterms. That would be a contrary, very important, I would say, contrary piece of evidence. But, you know, You'd always rather win elections with persuasion than turnout.

When you flip a voter, it counts as like a plus two. You go from a minus one to a plus one. Turnout's important, but it's half as important, and it can be harder for pollsters to measure. All right, Nate, this has been very interesting and both illuminating and concerning in some ways for Democrats, which is kind of where we live on Ponce de America. Nate, thanks for joining us. You can hear Nate alongside Claire Malone and Gail and Drew. on Crooked Media's new show, Still Counting.

As I said, new episodes drop every Wednesday evening. Subscribe is Still Counting wherever you get your podcast. It is a fabulous listen or on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Still Counting Podcast. And if you haven't subscribed to Positive America on YouTube yet, I don't know what you're doing. Now is a perfect time to do that. Nate, thanks so much and talk to you again soon. Thanks, Dan.

We'll talk soon. Awesome. Thanks, buddy. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Ferris Safari with Reech Erlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroate, Ben Heathcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.