Breaking News from Pod Save America - Nate Silver Analyzes Republicans' CRASH OUT Over Losing in the Midterms

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

It’s time for another episode of Speechcenter! Jon Lovett is joined by Nate Silver, host of Still Counting, to discuss Donald Trump and Republicans freaking out over losing badly to Democrats in the Midterms. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR: ZIP RECRUITER - http://ziprecruiter.com/CROOKED CHAPTERS 0:00 - Blue Wave coming? 13:42 - Ad break 14:32 - Trump’s strategy 20:31 - Republicans breaking from Trump 25:11 - Jesse Waters has advice for Dems Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Speech Center. We have a very special guest on the show today. He's the co-host of Still Counting and the founder of Silver Bulletin. It's Nate Silver. Hey, John, how are you? I like that Hollywood sign. Yes, it's cool. In your background.

Yes, it's great. Yeah, we're, la-lame. What's your dream, you know? Now, normally we have the Bullwarks Tim Miller as our sports expert. Today, it's you. How do you feel about filling in those shoes today? I think I probably would beat Tim on sports knowledge. I don't know.

That's maybe a close call. Yeah. It's sort of like how when Megan Kelly went from five, It was like, oh, she's not good. She was just better than the alternative. Tim is just the best gay guy at sports. But maybe I guess you're, yeah, man, I don't know. It's tough. It's interesting. Because I think of him as a sports expert, but of course, everybody is to me. I'm sure Tim can throw down. But if we had like a sports jeopardy crooked edition, I think I'd be the favorite. I think we have to do that for the subscribers. So let's start with this. You have just updated your model with some new data. What have you learned? We have learned that. polling has been very good, number go up for Democrats ever since Labor Day, roughly. Currently, Democrats have a 72.6, unnecessary precision, chance of winning the Senate, and a 92.8 chance of winning the House. And those numbers are up. And we launched our forecast in mid-August. Those were like 55% and 85% respectively. So, but it's become genuinely hard to find good polls for Republicans, with some exceptions. Maine is a state where Jackson is very much not secure in his lead. But, you know, we have seen Democrats shoot up from having a six and a half point lead on the generic ballot to a nine point lead.

And that lead is even higher if you look at polls of likely voters. The pattern we're seeing consistently is that, yeah, there's a lot of persuasion going on. People are tired of Trump and they're tired of 450 gas and the war in Iran. But also, Republican turnout looks like it might be quite depressed. And that might make the difference between a medium-sized wave in which the Senate is still in contention because these are in very red states. And whatever cliche you want to use, the tidal wave tsunami realigning election where things just totally fall apart for Republicans. I should mention that 72.6 is quite close to the number that our model had Hillary Clinton with in 2016. I'm to tell you something.

You're really close. I know. I know that. I know. One sort of indicator that sort of runs. counter to this has been a few polls that show Minnesota's Senate race, the Peggy Flanagan race, as being surprisingly close. How does that affect how you think about this? Putting Maine in a box, because there you have a very strong by the numbers incumbent in Susan Collins. Yeah, Minnesota's a state where the polling has been surprisingly close. New Hampshire has been a state where the polling has been surprisingly close. So yeah, part of what you're seeing, I think, is that, I mean, there are a couple things. One is that there's an anti-incumbent mood, so places where Republicans

are in charge and where Trump's sentiment has dropped the most, you know, it drops more in a place where it was higher, right? You know, larger shift. You know, that's part of the story. The fact that gas and diesel prices are concentrated in the Midwest, because you see on the, when you drive by gas station, it's like gas 448, right, diesel, $16 billion, right? Thank God I. I don't have a diesel car, But truckers use diesel. It's used a lot in agriculture, used a lot in petroleum production. So the middle of the country, kind of tornado alley, like those states are suffering more from inflation and energy prices. And so, you know, that is probably part of the story. There could also be a polling story here where, you know, I use a term last in first out. So where did Trump gain the most from like the Obama 2012 map? Well, among working class white voters and among Hispanic voters. And there's the same groups that have now dropped off the most. in the polls. Sometimes it drop up takes the form of shifting back to Democrats. More of it might just be, and they're not going to vote, right?

They're not going to vote for some boring Republican when they're fed up about gas prices and things like that. So it's a coherent story the polls are telling that, like, you know, Trump's disapproval rating is now 61% or something, you know, in the same polls, it actually had him at 52% when his second term started. So if you have Trump fans turning into Trump skeptics, then the places where Trump picked up the most support over the course of the last three elections might be where he then loses the most support. Remember, you know, Obama won Ohio. Obama won Iowa in 2012 and those states shifted a lot. And, you know, those are states, especially Ohio, where now both the governor and the Senate race are lean D in the polls. That would be a coherent story. At the same time, I think every forecaster, pollster has nightmares about missing Trump voters again like they did. Not in the midterms. It's very important. Not in the midterms, but. in 2016, 2020, and to a lesser extent in 2024.

Right. And you can imagine, right, that even though these groups are in some ways moving together, that Trump's rise and fall with Hispanic voters and his slowly increasing support with non-college educated white voters, while those are in some sense moving together, you would see kind of different effects, say in like a state like Texas, which has a big Hispanic population versus a state like Maine or. Minnesota, where it is whiter and Trump's support doesn't come from as much a increasing vote among non-white, non-college educated, but his sort of success among white non-college educated.

These, like, remote northern states, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington. I mean, it's like, it's a different kind of, you know, you go to Maine and you'll see, like, a gay pride flag and, like a Confederate flag on like the same barn and stuff. You know, Maine's an interesting place. Yeah, yeah. Minnesota's an interesting place. And, like, they're sometimes a little bit contrarian. I mean, look, I think Maine's mostly about people still having, still liking Susan Collins, right?

She has beaten her polls in almost every election so far, which should make Democrats nervous, frankly. New Hampshire is another state that kind of marches to its own drummer a little bit. But you do see regional patterns. And in 2022, I remember, which was a, you know, or 2018 rather, actually both years. 2018, polls projected a big night for Democrats. The first results that came in were from Florida, which were awful for Democrats. And Bill Nelson lost that seat. But everyone else in the map was pretty good for Democrats, right? They lost some of the red states where they had all these incumbents in North Dakota and things like that. But like, but they won the popular vote for the House by nine points, picked up, what, 40 seats or something. So you can have these like regional patterns more so in midterms than in presidential years. So to see a sharp regional shift in the Midwest and less of one in New England, you know, there's precedent for that kind of thing.

So as we inch closer to midterms, Republicans have been sounding the alarm on a potential blue wave. Here's Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, on CNBC warning what would happen if Dems took over the House. If, in fact, the House were to go blue, what do you think the genuine ramifications of that would be? They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body. They will do nothing but go after the president, his family, his cabinet, you know, donors in the party. If you're carrying about your pocketbook, your family's stability, the stability of the markets, you have to keep Republicans in charge because the Democrats do that. They go to lawfare on steroids.

It will royal the markets. It will empower our enemies around the world at the worst possible time. They will be playing dangerous political games for their own benefit at the expense of the American people. By the way, the insurgent left is consuming the Democrat Party. There will be no blue dog Democrats, no free market Democrats left after this cycle. We will not be having arguments and debates about tradition. issues, you know, marginal tax rates and inflation of foreign policy. This will be a battle between whether or not we're going to keep the Republic, or we're going to break this thing down and go down

this dark, dangerous road to Marxism. Republicans have done something pretty interesting, I think, in the last week. If you looked at the issues that are leading voters' concerns, right, it would be cost of living, gas prices, anger about the war in Iran, anger about tariffs. It wouldn't be the unfair prosecution of Donald Trump after the 2020 election, yet they had this big hearing that blew up in their faces. Mike Johnson is saying that the Dow will be negatively affected by an investigative House. What do you think they're trying to do by focusing on investigations of Donald Trump? Look, I think the second part of Speaker Johnson's message might be a little bit better.

Yeah. They probably have some ground to gain on Democrats are the radical left. And although some of those radical candidates were filtered out by the primaries. But, you know, the reason why almost always the opposition party gains ground in midterms is because people want check on on power and they particularly want a check when you have a republican trifecta really a quad facta since the supreme court is a six three conservative majority too right people want to check on power they don't want unfettered trump and trump is not very popular and so like that seems like unpersuasive messaging but like i don't know they have a lot of good arguments to make really

i mean just the directness of the fact that trump ran on no more foreign wars and lower gas prices and the fact that it's so fundamentally contradicted i think does matter and then the corruption and you can layer lots of different elements on top of that and the fact that he's 80 years old. I was a big critic of Biden being too old to even think about running for a second term. Well, he's been in office for a long time. Trump people are fatigued by the president because he's a lame duck. You no longer have Republicans propping him up to quite the same degree. But like, yeah, I think Republicans are grasping at straws because they don't have, they don't have persuasive arguments to make except that Democrats are too far left. But even then,

you're not going to have a Democrat in charge of the White House. So they're constrained in how much power they apply. And the House is reelected every two years. So if people don't like it, then they have an opportunity to reverse course again, which they might in 28. By the way, even though our forecast is optimistic for Democrats in 26, I don't think that necessarily tells you that much about 2028, right? You know, you could have probably a lot of investigations that get bogged down and people find annoying, right? But for 26, people want a check on Trump's power. They're stuck, right?

I do think those are the two halves of the arguments. The first half, I think, is about him speaking to Republicans trying to get the Trump voter out. I think that's why they held this hearing. You see John Husted in Ohio, he is one of the Republicans that actually went to that midterm convention. He's also having Trump come to Ohio. Trump is obviously unpopular. There's a real cost to having Trump in your state, but he clearly thinks if there's any hope, It has to be about driving out the base.

They could say, we're going to concede that we're going to lose the House, right? We want to triage the Senate, right? Maybe Ohio is, North Carolina is probably gone, right? Brown's a strong candidate in Ohio. That's probably gone. But maybe we can hold our own in Iowa and Texas and Alaska. At the very least, we don't want to lose Kansas and Nebraska. this and Nebraska and this next tier more exotic South Carolina.

And some of the polls there, I'm skeptical that the races are as close as the polls show them to be. But the other thing to keep in mind, John, is that, like, it's basic fact of American democracy. But Sanders are elected for six years. So what happens this year profoundly affects, if there were to be a Democrat elected in 2028, their likelihood of having a trifecta and even holding that trifecta past 2030. I know we're looking way too far ahead here, but like six years is a long time. You get a Senate seat in Alaska or Iowa. That lives through the Democrat winning, ideally in 2028, the wave that comes against that Democrat in 2030.

Right. Like that lasts you a long time. If I were looking for sort of negative scenarios for Democrats and if we woke up on the day after the election, what would I be worried about right now? It would be there was a big wave. Democrats did win the House. but some of these contrary factors in Maine, maybe a state like Michigan, and all of a sudden we wake up. And boy, did we overperform in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and lost those by two points.

But then also in Maine underperformed and lost by a point. And then you have a wave that looks a little bit less like 2006 and more like 2018, where you do really well, but you don't win the Senate. Yeah. I mean, Democrats like lost one Senate seat net or two or something in 2018, despite picking up 40 seats in the House. That would be one way it might happen, right? Is death by a thousand cuts that they, that Jackson loses in Maine, El Coyed wins a Michigan by a point,

but they lose Iowa by a point. They lose Texas by a point, right? They should win North Carolina hold Georgia. But like that would, that would probably be the scenario by which it would happen. Because as, you know, you can look at what Flipper does our model. It's running through every possible 40,000 simulations, right?

Where it looks at how all the states are related because, you know, states tend to move together to some extent. But yeah, there are very few sure things for either party. You know, the only thing you'd say is close-ish to a sure thing is North Carolina. If Cooper doesn't win in North Carolina, something's going badly wrong with the polls. Apart from that, everything else is tenuous. Pod Save America Breaking News is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

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The president is traveling to Republicans strongholds to red areas, not to battlegrounds. How is that helpful for Republicans' chances of keeping the majority? I think that the president and his team, as they look at the electoral map, are figuring out where they think he can make the biggest difference. And obviously, all across the country, we need the president to turn

out voters that are his voters. In a non-presidential year, in a midterm election, the challenge is always voter turnout. And in this case, you have a lot of voters out there who might not be inclined to get out and vote. The president going out there and telling them how important it is will help turn those voters out. Whether it's in a red state or a, you know,

a swing state or a blue state. Those are all, you know, scheduling decisions the White House is making. But I think they intend to deploy the president in ways that will help us achieve the best possible outcome in this election. And that is to preserve and protect our majority in the United States Senate and the majority in the House. This is a lot of words to say that Trump is not useful in a lot of the closest races. That's why he went to a Texas Tennessee game in Tennessee. What would you be doing with Trump if you were? Where would you be sending Trump if you were John Thune? We're encouraged to use sports metaphors, right? Yes.

If you go to a baseball game, I'm really good at a baseball game about like knowing whether it's going to be a home run or not because instead of like watching the ball, I'm watching the outfielders and how they're reacting. Right. And this is like this is where the outfielders are backing right up to the fence or trying to prevent a home run and kind of conceding a lot of base hits and small wins, right? You know, maybe it's smart for Trump, because like we said, Senate teach last for six years, right? If they lose Kansas by a point, that's a six-year mistake that they're making. And so maybe it makes sense to, like, defend that terrain, but it's a sign that they're on their back heels. And one thing that's unusual about this election, you know, all the rumors and reports take them with a large grain of salt about, like, Republican internal polling. It seems to look almost as bad as, like, the public polling, right?

You're not having the more Republican-leaning pollsters like Rasmussen and Trafalgar put out these optimistic results as much. And, you know, they seem resigned to their fate in a way that I haven't seen in a lot of elections since maybe 2008, frankly, right? A little bit 2016, right? A little bit. I mean, there were some outliers. But in 2016, it wasn't taken as a commonly held view that there were these missing Trump voters. Some people suggested it inside the Trump campaign. They were telling people that.

But it wasn't like a convention. wisdom. No, look, sometimes nobody knows anything, right? And I don't think there's anything magic about internal polls, particularly the way that, you know, what gets leaked to the public as a rumored internal polls, not the same thing as, you know, what's sitting on a campaign hard drive or something somewhere. But overall, this is one of the more consistent elections that I've tried to forecast in the sense that like every indicator is bad for Republicans except maybe the outside money.

Like, that's the one thing that they have going for them, I think. But you look at history. I mean, we wrote about this silver bulletin this week. On average, in midterms, there is a seven to eight point swing against the president's party. This year, we're projecting 10 or 11 points. So only a little bit better than the historical average. But like, you know, look at the last two midterms with the Republican president. Democrats had a very good 2006.

They had a very good 2018 in both those cases. Actually, Bush's popularity in 2006 is now the better comparable for Trump's than Trump's first term popularity. There's something that I always feel is a little bit missing from the 2006 analysis, which is how 2002 is the great outlier in midterms because it was post 9-11 and it was the rare moment where an incumbent party picked up seats. And there may have been also a little bit of a wind in the backs of Democrats in just that there was this pent-up demand that you should have seen in the previous midterm. The pent-up demand thing is interesting, right? Because you often have like overshooting. And, you know, one of the biggest midterm swings ever was 1994 where people thought Clinton was a breath of fresh air. But Clinton only won with a minority elector because of the Perot factor, right? And he was perceived as overreaching because of what was then called Hillary Care, for example, and things like that. And, you know, but like, look, every president now overreeds his his mandate, right?

Trump was reelected. Well, reelected or elected. I'm not sure what the correct terminology is there. But Trump won his second term in office in 24 because people were. sick and tired of too much immigration, too much inflation, Democrats moving too far left, Biden mistakenly deciding to run for office, Harris not being able to break away from Biden for some reason, right? A lot of pent up fatigue.

And remember, you would have Democrats in power then for 12 the past 16 years, right? So you had, you know, pent up fatigue with Democrats. And now people are like, boy, man, Trump's been in office for like a really long time. You know, Trump jokes about how it's his third term. It kind of almost feels like his third term because he was still the dominant figure. in some ways during the Biden term. Yeah, and ironically, I do sometimes think one of the reasons Biden was punished is that in a kind of primal way as a parent, he failed to solve the sourness of the country caused

by Trump's style of leadership, which he had pledged to vanquish, which ultimately led to Trump's restoration. Yeah, where you saw Biden really get into trouble was, I hope I'm dating this right. It was the summer slash early fall of 2021, where his approval ratings, tanked and never recovered. And it was because you had new COVID variants. You had very high inflation supply chain disruptions. You know, this is a time when you go to a store and I might say, we don't have this in stock. You had the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan. And you didn't have a return to normalcy. People are like, holy shit, we're going through another round of COVID precautions

and more inflation. Right. And with Trump, I mean, it kind of feels similar, right? Trump is kind of a chaos agent and sometimes it's good for distracting people and it's, you know, things don't feel particularly normal right now, right? And I do wonder in the background too if like a little bit of the AI anxiety is playing into this as as well. It's very unpopular. I mean, Quinnapia can a poll out this week that, you know, people are 80 to 15 or something for more AI safety versus charge ahead and Trump is the one calling it like super intelligence now and like so he's very out of touch on on that issue too and just a sense of like people feel trepidacious about the future and at the same time like fatigued about Trump and again I'm not sure it's going to manifest itself in some

like massive turnout but I think you might just have people who are fed up with Trump and and don't vote the gap between what we're seeing in likely voter polls versus registered voter polls has been very large in some of these recent surveys. Yeah there's all. also a dog that's not barking, right, because Trump's unique demand for fealty means that there are very few publicans truly running away from him the way you would have seen in a previous election. It is a combination of the war in Iran, inflation and cost of living, plus the focus on the ballroom, which is also, I think, ballroom corruption, being distracted, being noisy and chaotic. Those have gone from, I think, either strengths or a sort of accepted cost.

of a net benefit, right? Like when the economy was doing well and people thought he was a good businessman, like the fact that he got his beat what beque wet may be disgusting, but not as much of a problem as what we're seeing now. Right. The argument, because, you know, look, there is a lot of news about Trump. Sometimes the stories are silly. Sometimes they're not, right? But like, when the economy is going well, then you have a compelling argument that Democrats are this and that and they're always shouting and always screaming, but you're making more money and stuff is cheap and you have a good job. The birds are singing. The birds are singing. you know like it's kind of it's kind of a good argument right but the minute that you lose people on that and by the way you know the stock market is doing fairly well right but like people under Biden complain that um well there are mixed indicators in the economy the job market is good and you know people feel really negative about the economy the same thing kind of carries over now I mean what what's happening is that you know maybe because of social media maybe because of the overall anxiety level you know the incumbent does not get the benefit of the doubt anymore and that gets to what we talked about

the top of the show about how like, yeah, in some races where Democrats are the party in power or in, you know, Minnesota is a state where a lot of really libshit has happened. Right. You know what I mean? And there's been a lot of attention on the mismanagement of that program, right, which may be, you know, sort of costing Peggy Flanagan, who while not in charge of that was lieutenant governor, right? She was part of the state government. So there might be a tax for her there. Absolutely. But where Republicans have power, which is in, you know, most of the country, although we should, shouldn't neglect governations and legislatures, especially because now that the Pandora's box of mid-decade redistricting has been reopened, if Democrats control, well, we shouldn't say all,

right? Georgia, Florida, Texas are very tenuous for Democrats or maybe lean Republican at this point, right? But, you know, winning a bunch of governorships and state legislatures will help Democrats in the redistricting wars for next cycle too. And that, all this comes down to like, you know, the trifecta potential for Democrats in in in 2028 because again the speaker Johnson was right that like there's not a whole lot of shit that's going to get done in Congress if you have a divided Congress obviously at points in time Trump's political instincts have been like underrated a little bit but I'm going to bring up the Biden age comparison one more time because if you're the reporting on Biden it was kind of like at this point in his presidency where he's losing his fastball a little bit.

And his judgment gets a little bit worse. And sometimes when that happens, then you actually become too differential. So you're like, whoever has a loudest voice in the room. And like, you know, an old cranky person might not push back against something quite as much. And like, I think it's a factor here, a factor here too. Like he should like, you know, there is such an easy kind of populist win on AI. We're not just populist but popular. and he's kind of taking this opposite stance

because he likes his buddies in Silicon Valley. It's just a really mismanaged issue, I think, politically for him. One last clip, Jesse Waters had some advice for Democrats. Let's take a look at that and then we can wrap it up. Half-priced beer would be really smart for AOC. It'd be really smart to do half-priced beer. Come listen to AOC talk. It'd be smart for Abdul El-Said to do that,

but he's too short to reach up to the bar to order the beer. That's a problem for him. Trump's already offering $5,000 in cash. He should just say half off beer if you vote Republican. Why not? It's great to be out amongst the people. It's Trump's superpower, Jesse, to be able to fuse different cultures in America. He can go into these cultural arenas and then get them interested.

None of these other people can't, except for one man. And that's Bernie Sanders. I think every American thinks it'd be funny to get Bernie Sanders a little tipsy and the listen to the guy's old rambling stories. And guess who's the inheritor of Bernie Sanders? Sanders. It's AOC. I'm just glad Trump doesn't drink like Liz Warren. Imagine Trump after a few martinis. Yeah. We've been in a very different place in Iran. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Oh my God. A couple X from moabs. Yeah. Part of what happens here is that like I'm a big believer in

macro level factors, right? There is a lot of news that happens from day to day and people like you and I and people on Fox News and whatever else want to talk about it and want to talk about like the little shifts in the polls in different states. And, And we appreciate our audience for following us on those conversations. But the big macro stuff gets locked in early, which is that like Trump acts like he won a Reagan-style Obama-style landslide. And he didn't. He won by one and a half points nationally because Democrats fucked up in like literally every possible way, you know. I don't think Republicans are underdogs in the Senate right now if he doesn't decide to go to war with Iran.

Right. It's just the, you know, the double whammy of the war itself and the effect on energy prices that literally everybody in the world who's not named Pete Hexeth, like, this was a known problem. You're going to have a lot of problems in the Strait of Hormuz. And they have certainly very incentive to cut some type of deal with Iran and get gas prices down somewhat. But I think Iran is the biggest electoral story of 2026. People like to give Democrats a lot of agencies. sometimes they have it, sometimes they don't. But a lot of times what politics and campaigns really are about is not just like riding a

wave, but kind of being in the resonant frequency of the wave and kind of kicking at the right moments, right? Like just sort of making that wave just a little bit bigger, just sort of getting behind it just a little bit, right? Like people make fun of that video of Troy Jackson having the Bobatie. Fine, I don't really care about that. But what is happening when someone's trying to ride a social media trend? They're trying to take advantage of a little bit of extant interest, right? of like an external bit of attention and kind of try to grab a little bit of it.

And that to me is what we're trying to do in this home stretch, like to make advantage of these moments. And think about like when you're voting, so I'm sure John, when you're voting for president or for senator for Congress, right, then you're in the 99.9 percentile being informed. But think about when you're down ballot, your city council, your judges, right? Think about your information environment for that, right? Maybe you've had one or two interactions with their campaign. you've seen one or two ads. There's some kind of meme-fied version of the candidate.

And like, so kind of what breaks through to these people who are not paying as much attention to politics has always kind of been a mystery. And the whole thing about like resonant, like, you know, look, I think in 2024, like the they, them ad, the anti-trens ad, was quite effective, right? I think that has to be seen as being effective. It felt totally flat when similar techniques were tried in Virginia, for example, last year. So there's like there's like a time and a place for things. You know, people who are relitigating the last war, that doesn't seem to resonate anymore.

People who have kind of heard the same thing before, that doesn't seem to resonate very much anymore. And maybe Trump has just run out of his bag of tricks. Maybe the polls are wrong again. By the way, they can be wrong in both directions. You could have a, like, you know, in 2025, the polls underestimated Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. That's a possibility also. Everybody, please watch and subscribe to Still Count. on YouTube. Go check out Nate's substack, Silver Bolt. And I think I'm a subscriber, so I may have

been ahead of the curve in letting people know that the model has new information, but you should subscribe it and support it. And everybody listened to Still Counting with Nate and Galen and Claire. It is an excellent, excellent way to keep up not just with what's going on in this election, but in the broader prediction markets in polling in data analysis. And that's been Speech Center. Nate, thank you so much. Thank you, John.