Central Air - Central Air Live with Nate Silver

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comAs noted last week, we don’t have a regular episode this week, due to the Memorial Day holiday. We’ll be back with two episodes next week — one with Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and one with content from Welcomefest, including an interview with Mark Cuban. We do have some bonus content for you: a Substack Live chat we did with Nate Silver of Silver Bulletin on Wednesday, reacting to Tuesday’s primary election in Texas and assessing Democrats’ odds of retaking the Senate. There’s also a free preview of that for free subscribers. Enjoy!

Hey, this is Josh Barrow. As I mentioned on last week's show, there is no regular episode of Central Air this week. We're going to have two episodes for you next week. But we have a little something special for you. We did a substack live conversation with Nate Silver. Normally, we distribute the audio of these and the video replays only to paying subscribers. But we have a preview here for you, conversation with Nate about the Texas primaries and a look broadly at the outlook for Democrats in Congress, especially. in the Senate. We talk about Maine and Alaska and a number of other states. So we hope you enjoy this conversation. If you want the full conversation, if you want our deeper dive on Republicans' efforts to frame James Talarico as kind of a girly man, and whether that might work. Also, conversation with Nate about poker and the World Series of Poker, which he's currently attending in Las Vegas, and a discussion about sports betting. I think we should probably prohibit it again, or at least we should make people do it in person, not on their phones and not doing proposition bets. Nate speaks up with some more libertarian ideas than I have about that.

So anyway, if you want to hear the whole thing, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can upgrade and become a full paying subscriber. You'll get this full episode and you'll get every full episode. We would love to have you over there. Thank you. We are here with Nate Silver today. Nate, thank you so much for joining us from Las Vegas, where you are for the World Series of Poker, as I understand it? Yeah, I thought I'd give you the very explicit Las Vegas backdrop. I know it's probably not ideal from like a production value standpoint. But I wanted to give you some sense of, some sense of place.

Are you somewhere in city center right now? Yeah, I'm staying at city center, exactly. Okay. It's an eight-minute walk. The World Series poker venue, lots of good restaurants and stuff on the way. So it's carefully, carefully chosen. I think the aria looks like the world's nicest airport terminal.

There's a generic kind of continental design quality. Casinos actually have interesting properties where, One reason why they're all quite curvy is because you don't want to create any right angles where people might decide, I keep losing my money, when to exit the casino, right? You want to be smooth and fluid. There's always a slot machine around the corner or something else, right? Right. It's quite intentional, actually. So we'll come back. We'll talk about some of the poker stuff in a little bit. But I want to start with the big news of the week, which is the primary that just happened in Texas, thumping victory there for Ken Packer. who will be the Republican nominee for Senate against James Talleyco, the Democrat. And so, you know, Democrats have spent more than a decade getting their hopes up about Texas

and getting them dashed over and over again. Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points in the election a year and a half ago. How do you handicap this race? Is this a toss-up like some people are talking about it? Would you rather be Ken Paxson or James Talarico? I mean, Josh, not what saying that the real big news the week is the New York Knicks reaching the NBA finals. The sweep. For this other stuff you're worried about, look, prediction markets have it almost 50-50. I think I would rather be Ken Paxton. The fact that it's probably in the range of 55-45 is a big sign of progress for Democrats in Texas

and a big sign of trouble for Republicans potentially. Look, when we've seen in the past, one party finished up its primary and the other party is having a very heated primary. That party is sometimes punished in the polls in the interim, right? Paxton and Cornyn were going after each other for literally months. It's been a slow-moving primary, right?

Talarico's been able to get fairly favorable media for a couple of months. You know, I do think some of the stuff about him being too much of a kind of lib for Texas is worth taking seriously

because of Texas's serious lack of track record of electing any Democrats to any statewide position since, like, Lloyd Benson, basically was a last senator elected from Texas as a Democrat in 1988.

You know, Paxton, what's the whole Simpsons joke where like Monty Burns, like so many different maladies, right? He has so many different scandals. I don't know if they, I don't know if they cancel out or whatever else. Obviously, some of this is a little bit subjective in terms of like, you know, is Talarico going to break through in a new way? Texas is quite urban. It's pretty young. And things like that, you know, I think he's actually not as strong a candidate as Beto O'Rourke. But, yeah, look, if you kind of do the math, let's just look at the polls between Tala Rico and Pakistan. from before Tala Rico won, right?

That's kind of more even. And that showed a tie, basically, right? Another way to back into that, we have a map that shows the generic congressional ballot, which is currently D plus 7, and it translates that to every state, right? That would show a generic Republican

and a generic Democrat. It's about a four-point Republican edge in Texas. Do Paxton's flaws outweigh Tala Ricos by four points of vote margin. Possibly, we've actually done research on the effect of scandals and maybe, you know, three to five points is a realistic range for today. It might have been, you know, it might have been more in the past. All these things have narrowed. Tala Rook is going to have a lot of money. But like, you know, if I had to, if I had to pin down a ridiculously precise guess, then

then maybe Tala RICO loses by one point, Beto lost by two and a half, two point or something like that. But like, obviously, this is a contest that Republicans don't want to have to contend with. And Democrats inherently are fighting a somewhat long-shot battle in the Senate, right, this time around. There are four pickups they need. There are two, quote, unquote, easy pickups, right? Maine and North Carolina. Not which are really that easy. North Carolina is... I think North Carolina is pretty easy at this point. North Carolina, people don't know. North Carolina actually moved toward the median and 2024, right? Democrats didn't win it. They've come up narrowly a lot of times, but it's a little bit like almost like Pennsylvania. We're like, well, you know, Pennsylvania is part of the blue wall.

Trump can never win there. And then Trump won it two out of the past three general election cycles, right? Usually that meant, there's nothing magical about losing by two points versus winning by, by one point. Maine is its whole own entity. Right. I suppose I think that like, I mean, so one thing, too, Maine has become bluer. Wait, so sorry, hold on. Before we, before we, before we, before we, get into Maine. I want to, I want to, I'll do one more thing about Texas and then we can, we can turn and do the national map. You mentioned like a four point penalty. One data point we have is, is that Paxton ran a point and a half behind Greg Abbott last time they were on the ballot together in 2022, which kind of doesn't feel like that much to me, given, you know, all the parade of horribles about

Ken Paxton. But I guess, you know, that's, that's three points of margin if you run one and a half points behind and then the other candidate runs one and a half ahead. Right. So that's sort of like almost enough combined with the national environment to get, I mean, that sort of, that actually gets you to Tala RICO minus one, which is what you posited a moment ago. I just wonder about, you know, the baseline people use is that Ted Cruz race in 2018, where he won by two and a half points. I wonder if Paxton is actually a worse candidate than Ted Cruz, because Ted Cruz, not only is Ted Cruz very right wing, he's sort of right wing in a way that's almost designed to be unappealing to the MAGA base, and he's always had this sort of uneasy relationship with the president.

And so I wonder if like when people say, you know, well, Democrats are like, well, we came close and now Republicans have this really bad candidate. I wonder if Ken Paxon is even the worst person they've put up because I think Ted Cruz might still be the worst person they've put up from an electoral perspective. I mean, like Ted Cruz has a certain cringe factor. But like Paxton kind of does too. It's like not like he is like the, you know, sexiest looking guy or whatever else, right? And like, he's not like, he's not like a smooth demagogue type. No. Even anyway, right?

There's a lot of ammunition to fire. But then there's a question of like, you know, Subeto did have an advantage where he almost came within two and a half points of like doing relatively well as Democrats used to do among the Hispanic vote in rural, South Texas and West Texas. And having this conversion in the suburbs where he did very well, right, and came up two and a half points short. you know, how will Telarico do among the Hispanic vote? Turnout was very low in the Republican runoff yesterday in South Texas, places like Star County, like lower to the point where it almost seems like a tabulation error or something. I don't know if that indicates like a lack of, but like, you know, but those voters shifted more than like almost anyone in the country. Some precincts in like Queens

also, right, but working class non-white precincts. Shifted toward Trump in 24. In 24. 20 and 24, that probably eight-year shift, a low-key strength for Hillary Clinton, by the way. She actually did better among Hispanic voters and people give her credit for it. Yeah. But for the eight-year shift that's been by vote margin, probably the biggest counties in the country anywhere. However, if you look more carefully, what it really reflects is much, much, much, much higher turnout among Republican-leaning or conservative-leaning voters there, right? It's growing fast. Turnout really shot up.

And so it's like not like necessarily even mainly or primarily a persuasion story. I'm sure that's part of it, right? But it's like people who are who are in often fairly poor conditions who feel disconnected with the electoral system. If you like neither party speaks to them, they found someone they thought was a champion of their interests in Trump and they turned out to vote, right? If it reverts back to very low turnout among that kind of Trump curious share of primarily often, by the way, Spanish speaking, voters in South Texas and they don't turn out at all, then, you know, Democrats might capture the older Hispanic vote that remains more blue, remains more traditionally Democratic, and then that might be fine for them potentially. Let's look at the national map now. I mean, and we can start with Maine. But the like, as you know, Democrats need to pick up four seats to get control in the Senate, which is a tall order. The prediction markets have it almost at a toss-up at this point. Do you think that's a reasonable read? Yeah, if we kind of work through the math, right? So look, let's put it like this. If Democrats don't win North Carolina, then they have deeper issues, right? Then it's another polling fuck up or some momentum shifted. Or we have AGI and GDP growth is 17 million percent by November or whatever.

I'll take the under on that. Maine, you can imagine being a little bit more sui generis, right? Where, I mean, Collins beat her polls by a lot six years ago. But yeah, so then let's say they win those two. Right. So then you have to win two more from a plausible list of like five to six states, right? You have Ohio, you have Alaska, which is a pretty good one for Democrats, right? You have Iowa, you have Florida, you have Texas. You have some long shots like Nebraska potentially. But it's like, can you win two out of six games as an underdog, basically? So you only have to win two out of six, right? But you may be 30% in each one. And that's, That's a math problem. That's a math problem that models are good at solving. Our model's going to come out in roughly a month. All this fucking redistricting stuff is making it a little longer to, you know, recalculate the census data and things like that.

But it's within the realm of, within the realm of reasonable, certainly. Don't end up normally having those races end up being correlated in ways where one party ends up running the table more often than. Rachel Bightcoffer told me they're not correlated. They, okay, so very, our audience will appreciate that joke. They are, they are correlated. They're not as correlated as presidential races, especially in midterm years. Like we saw in 2018, for example, Democrats had spectacular performance in the House. They also lost the Florida Senate race.

Bill Nelson lost to Rick Scott, right? By half a point or something, right? In 2022, I think it was. We also saw some regional variation where, like, Democrats had four, four as unpopular as Biden was for playing defense Democrats had a relatively good 2022, but they did very badly in the Northeast and in Florida again, right? So there can be like regional quirks, like Alaska's a state, and our model will account for this. Alaska, you'd expect to be totally on its own planet, not that correlate with the other outcomes, right? Maine is a, I love Maine, when Nate's top five states, right? Maine's a fucking weird state though, and you have two fucking weird candidates there.

And so like Maine could be operate discreetly from the rest of the states, right? Whereas Ohio, for example, Ohio you would expect to more follow national trends. And is that something about like rural like whites or like not very religious whites? Like you have some of these states like New Hampshire that have relatively swinging electorates. And my sense had been that that has to do with the particular kind of demographic of like. Like white voters who are not that religious, but swing around more than some other, you know, I mean, like the performance that Democrats put up among black voters doesn't move around that much from cycle to cycle. Yeah, secular whites are an interesting group. You know what I mean? Like if you go around Maine and you drive around rural Maine where I've been spent a lot of time, right, you won't like see like Confederate flags and stuff like that. But you'll see iconography that codes is very rural.

And then you'll see some like, you know, LGBT flag, right? And not just like the rainbow version, like the complicated version with like the all the extra stripes and stuff like that. Yeah, you'll see that flag in like a rural barn that if you didn't know where you were you the Chevron. It's called the Chevron. No, well, it is a this the shape is a Chevron. You know, like the like the they call it the progress pride flag, but the like the triangular part. We've given you people too much. Well, it's like, I mean, it's like, you.

you know a Chevron gasoline state? Like the logo is a Chevron. They didn't, the standard oil of California didn't invent that. But anyway, mechanically, the way to look at it mathematically. So you get information from the generic ballot, presidential approval, national polls on what national trends are. And so the question is like, how similar is a state on relevant demographic variables? So race, religion, age, compared to national trends, right? In Maine or Louisiana, say, right? You have demographic subgroups that you don't have very commonly in the rest of the country. In a state, it's a very Hispanic or very black. I mean, Texas is actually more representative than you might assume. I mean, Texas has a little bit of everything, really, right? It's more conservative. But you have a big black vote in Texas.

You have a big Asian American vote in Texas, right? You have great colleges and universities. So Texas actually follows trends more than a state like Mainewood, for example. Whereas the French Canadians. I'm working on this big geography project. You know, I feel like there's an alternate history where, like, where, like, French Canada is pretty powerful. You know what I mean? It's a really underperforming region in Acadia. It's beautiful, man.

Like, where they win the French and Indian War or something? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, like, where we're all speaking French or Dutch or something. It's not so obvious that, like, to have all of North America be, like, three big countries is kind of an amazing accomplishment. That's not trivial by the world. the way, right? Yeah.

I don't know. My thing about, my, like, hesitation with Texas specifically, and this is a very, like, bad heuristic, I'll admit, there's no data here, is that my mother, who is, like, an MSNBC, like, you know, Plato, platonic ideal of an MSNBC resistance person, whatever she says, it's not going to be popular anywhere. She's constantly in love with this woke pastor man. And, like, just the fact that she's even heard of this person is a really bad, really bad taste thing for Talarico. Like, it doesn't sound good to me.

The one thing that, and, you know, I try to remember that I'm not the median voter, and I find James Talarico extremely annoying. Like, I really hate this sort of, like, progressive pastor style. I think that it's, I think that it's, like, smug and moralistic in the same way that certain Christian conservative. are. And I relate to voters who might, like, I think, you know, if you're a, if you're a somewhat conservative voter who's repelled by Kent Paxton and trying to talk yourself into a voting for a Democrat, like, I'm pro-choice might be a message that you don't like, but like Jesus, I'm pro-choice, I think is like an even worse message for that voter. And yet, you know, Joe Rogan really liked James Tala RICO when Tala RICO appeared on his show, which is not something I would have predicted

and makes me wonder if there's a certain kind of independent voter, like with Rogan, like not even, not especially religious one, who sees something in him that I don't see. So I don't know. Like my gut instinct is that he's like an off-putting candidate for Texas. They're just going to run over and over that video of him saying God is non-binary and there are six sexes and talking about, you know, his, you know, working through the problem of whiteness and all this stuff.

It feels, it strikes me as very bad for Texas. But I try to remember that just like the people who are fanboys of his, I'm not a normal Texas voter. So I'm wondering how the normal Texas voter feels about it feels about. I think you also have to assume, as with Platner, that there is a bunch of opo that hasn't dropped yet. Stuff that wouldn't necessarily work that well in a Democratic primary, but which is going to kill in the general. And like, you can assume that about Paxton, too. I don't think there's a lot of, like, unexploited oppo out there against Susan Collins at this point. but you just have to assume that we're going to find out that he has said things that sound

noticeably wilder or has done things that are noticeably more off-putting than what came up in the Democratic primary. I mean, look, he did win a – it was a highly competitive Democratic primary, right? Jasmine Crockett got a late start in her campaign, and by most reported analysis, was not as organized as she might have been. But look, I might have the same – look, I wait my personal in the – instinct about Canada, it's at like 0.02, you know what I mean? My subjective, my subjective prior.

I will admit that, yeah, I have the same instinct about Talibico. I find him a little bit Tim Walsian in the sense that like it's kind of like, oh, he's a football coach, he's a man's man, but like in a very lib-coded way. Whereas I, even though I find many of the things that Graham Pletner has done offensive and repelling, right, to me, I see, I understand the appeal more. And because I know Maine better than Texas, grandfather's like literally from like the city where I used to go as a kid, Sullivan, Maine.

I understand his appeal to that electorate, right? And I don't know Texas as well. The youth helps, I think, quite a bit for Tala Rico, right? We've seen in a healthy way, I would argue, voters having become miffed by all these, this older generation of candidates, right? He seemed like he's kind of a breath of fresh air. But yeah, I mean, there's a long file of clips that can be unearthed, I'm sure. I mean, in Taylor Rico's defense, God, he is obviously non-binary.

I mean, it's not a dick. Well, I mean, so it could, it's her story, not history, you know, it could be either one. When people, you know, when I've complained about this before, like, people like want to argue the theology with me. And the point is not the theology. The point is that he is using Christian. as a vehicle to like to argue for an orthodox liberal political platform. And that's the thing that I think people like the implication is that like you should think

that's that's that was this week's free episode of Central Air Free special episode from our Substack Live. If you want to hear the whole thing, our discussion of whether Republicans will successfully paint James Tala Rico as kind of a girly man. If you want to hear about Nate and why he's good at poker and why I'm not that good at poker. and if you want to hear our discussion about sports betting and whether we maybe need to ban it again. Go to centralairpodcast.com. You can upgrade there. You'll get the full episode. We'd love to have you. Thanks.