Plain English with Derek Thompson - Nate Silver on Why This Midterm Election Could Be the Weirdest in Decades

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Earlier this year, it appeared that Democrats were going to get destroyed in the midterms. Joe Biden's approval rating was in the toilet, inflation was raging, and everything was going wrong. It wouldn't have been historically shocking if Democrats lost seats in November. The party in power typically loses seats in midterm elections, thanks in part to the electorate's preference for balance. But then something weird happened. Joe Biden's polls went up. And up. And up. Republican Senate nominees starting flailing across the country. Today, Democrats are favored to keep the Senate, and they have doubled their odds of holding the House. How did this happen? FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver joins the podcast to explain the big picture and analyze the most fascinating individual races, from Pennsylvania to Ohio. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nate Silver Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. On today's episode, we have Nate Silver. offering his analysis of what is turning out to be an unexpectedly weird midterm election year. So a general rule of midterm elections is that the party in power loses. This is as close to an ironclad law as you can find in politics.

Republicans were in power in 2018. They lost. Democrats were in power in 2010 and 2014. They lost. Republicans in 2006 crushed. Democrats in 1990. demolished. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, 1998, 2002, but it tends to require something like a geopolitical earthquake, like 9-11, to break the trend. For most of the last year, it seemed like 2022 would be a typical midterm election year, namely that Republicans would sweep in the Senate and the House. I felt like the story was almost baked in. I mean, how many times on this show have I said, Joe Biden is in the doghouse?

with voters. Democrats are screwed as long as inflation is at 40-year highs. But something quite strange and very interesting has happened in the last few months. Maybe it was the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Maybe it was gas prices falling for four, five, six straight weeks. Maybe it's Democratic legislative accomplishments. Maybe it's COVID shrinking from the news cycle. But whatever it is, something's happening. over at 538, Nate's election forecasting site, Democrats had a 40% chance to win the Senate just two months ago. Today they have a 68% chance to keep the Senate.

In that same time, their odds of winning the House have doubled. So how did Democrats' fortunes rebound? How certain should we be that the polling in 2022 is accurate? And more deeply, what does it say about the Democrats' fortunes rebound? the Republican Party, that in a year when inflation hits 9%, and Americans collectively think the economy sucks, the GOP is still struggling to find competent candidates who can compete in purple states. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Nate Silver, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thank you for having me on. I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan. it is great to have you here. It is great to meet you voice to voice. So let's start with the news. In Alaska on Wednesday, Mary Peltola, a Democrat, defeated Sarah Palin in Alaska's special House election. And this is just the latest special election where Democrats have either

won or significantly overperformed Joe Biden's edge in 2020. What are these special elections telling us about Democrats' chances in the midterms? Yeah, I mean, so in general, we have seen a big shift in the climate over the past few months, which you can date to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, but there are also other factors I'm sure we'll talk about later on. The Alaska results, I mean, on the one hand, whenever a Democrat wins in Alaska under any circumstances, something went wrong for the GOP, right? and you don't expect things to go wrong in a state like Alaska when you're in some supposed red wave year,

which I think even much of a kind of doesn't believe at this point, right? On the other hand, you do have a ranked choice system being implemented in Alaska, and that helped Democrats win, where Sarah Palin is still a very polarizing figure up there. She was in second place, as candidates were eliminated, one at a time, and then Nick Begich, who was the more moderate Republican, had his votes split enough away from Palin toward Pelotola that she won by a couple of percentage points. There were also a fair number of wasted ballots.

We saw this in the special, excuse me, in the New York mayor's race here in New York, we have ranked choice voting, that not everyone actually fills out all the choices from one to four, one to five, depending on the jurisdiction. And so therefore, being in a... a second choice in theory may not translate in practice. And so Palin may have one if there weren't as many wasted votes. But still is the pattern now of, I think, five special elections since the

Dobb's decision where it's not only like not a red wave, it looks like a fairly blue year, if anything, right? These results are not that far out of line with what you saw in around to 2018. That needs to be balanced against other evidence. as well as kind of historical priors, as I call them, or precedents, basically, in which usually the president's party struggles at their midterms. But this is real data now. This is not theoretical polls, and we've got to have a conversation about, like, how reliable are polls these days.

Democrats are very motivated to vote. I should mention, too, the Kansas abortion referendum, which lost overwhelmingly. And Kansas is a little bit more moderate than you might think it's not Alabama, but it's still Kansas. and it lost by a lot, and so on very high turnout, so clearly something has changed in the elector. We're in an environment that looks more and more like an unusual midterm climate.

To set the stage here, why is it that parties in power are historically more likely to lose during midterm elections, and how much should we lean into that historical precedent for 2022? So it really is one of the more robust historical precedents in politics. because it's been reliable for many, many years. There have been exceptions. 1998 is one that's attributed to Monica Lewinsky and the backlash to the Clinton impeachment attempt, 2002,

which was after 9-11. In 1960, you basically had a neutral year after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, I should say, right? You go back in 1938, I guess it was, after the Great Depressioners at 34. Maybe I'm screwing that up. But those are pretty few and far between in behind more years, like 2018 or 2018 or 2010, where you have a pretty big backlash against the president's party.

The reason for that is somewhat disputed, but one idea is that voters want balance, right? Voters are actually kind of lowercasey, conservative in the sense of not wanting a lot of policy changes. Typically, the party comes into office and gets, say, trifecta, meaning they have the presidency, plus both branches of Congress. They'll pass a bunch of new legislation. Maybe it goes too far. Obamacare, for example, a policy that is now fairly popular. was unpopular at the time in 2010.

And so voters are trying to backlash and make sure that there are checks and balances on each party's authority. So what's potentially different this year is that the Dobbs decision shows how much power the Republicans have even when they're out of power. Through the Supreme Court,

where you know have a 6-3, I think, frankly, very active, conservative majority. They are exercising a lot of political power and they struck down a policy that was Rovi-Wayne, that was a very popular precedent. And so that might be the reason why the theory is violated here, right? It kind of seems more like sides are battling back and forth over who truly has more power, despite the Democratic trifecta, that was brought to voters' attention in a really dramatic way by the abortion decision. We can talk about things like January 6th or Republican threats to electoral integrity

or whatever else, right? To some extent, that's kind of theoretical. You can talk about how, oh, well, if Republicans get into office, they'll do this, and that could be really bad, right? But you actually have a living example of that in this Supreme Court decision. In political science, what you're talking about is sometimes called the thermostatic theory of public opinion, this idea that voters prefer there to be enough balance in government that you often have this pendulum swinging from Democrats to Republicans, then back to Democrats, and that this especially happens during midterms. It's like as if voters think of midterms as the perfect opportunity to express a backlash to the party in power. But to riff on your points, there are many sources

of backlash, right, because the White House moving too far in one direction, left or right, that can be a source of backlash. But Congress being seen as being too mean to the president, as I suppose people thought they were being in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that can be another opportunity. The Supreme Court overruling a popular and longstanding precedent in Roe v. Wade, that is an opportunity for voter backlash. So we just might be in a very strange midterm year where voters are more interested in punishing Republicans for going too far or remaining too far to the right than they are in publishing the party in power. So enough theory, some hard numbers on the Dobbs decision.

On 538, your website, Joe Biden's approval rating bottomed out around 37.5%, which is really, really bad, the week of July 21st. On July 24th, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. And since then, Biden's polling is sharply up. What else has happened since mid-July that you think could explain the Democrats' turnaround? certainly for the Senate where you have direct control over appointing Supreme Court justices, then Supreme Court decisions might be particularly salient, I think. Maybe for Biden, yeah, I mean, gas prices going down and inflation in general, having abated a bit is important.

You do have a series of policy accomplishments now by Biden and the Democrats that you didn't have before. you have COVID cases have been actually cases have been fairly high but you haven't had a new wave of deaths on the scale of like the Delta variant or something like that and so yeah I mean in some ways the news has been relatively good

for Democrats the other factor though is that you have a lot of I'm not sure what euphemism to use but wacky Republican Canada right? Sometimes that means candidates like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania who is just inexperienced, making a lot of stupid gaffes. Sometimes it means candidates that have far right views on abortion or January 6th or other issues. You have also a active shadow campaign for the GOP nomination

in 2024. So that means both you have Trump resurfacing as a political figure and a lot of the problematic candidates for the GOP have been Trump selections. But you also have other Republicans, namely Ron DeSantis, trying to out-compete Trump and out-conservative him. And so, you know, voters have a very kind of salient reminder of what Trumpism looked like of what the stakes are in 2024. And it just, it doesn't feel like a typical sleepy midterm environment. Yeah, all the factors that I have written down, you basically just name checked. So number one, obviously the Dobbs decision is weighing very heavily, especially, it seems, on the minds of women, suburban women, and independent voters.

Number two, inflation and gas prices seem to have a relatively mechanical effect on presidential approval and support for the party in power. People really don't like paying more for gas prices. Number three, I'd actually like you to comment just a little bit more about this, is on COVID. I do think that moderates elected Joe Biden to kind of like banish bad vibes. They didn't want to think

about the president being a lunatic every hour of the day. These are moderates, independents. They didn't want to think about COVID all the time. But then Biden got elected. He's not a lunatic. Okay, checkbox number one. But then the vibes soured really quickly

because inflation rose and all these variants started spilling out of the world into America and people had to think about COVID more. And they just got frustrated with the president and the White House for not banishing those bad epidemiological vibes. I do think it might be underrated to a certain extent

how much the decline of COVID as a national issue has had a beneficial effect for Democrats. Do you think that theory is a little bit over my skis, or do you think there's maybe something there? No, look, I mean, I think in general, if you kind of think back to COVID and how profoundly disrupted every aspect of life was for depending on what city you're living in, right?

A year or more than a year, right? And how many people died, right? It's just so gargantuan as a scale of a problem relative to their things. In some ways, it's shocking that it didn't have bigger and more obvious political after effects. But for sure, I mean, Biden's approval rating turned downward initially in midsummer 2021. People attributed that to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the time. timing also lines up quite well with when you have concerns, appropriate concerns, about the delta variant, right? And where cases really took off and where people started to feel kind of

almost like, oh, despairing, we're kind of in this never-ending cycle of variance forever. Whereas for better or worse now, I mean, people have stopped caring about COVID. If you look at polls, you say, what is the most important issue facing the country? Like, literally, COVID's at 1% or sometimes won't even register. It's in the asterisk zone, as we call it, from kind of revealed preferences. I mean, even in New York, which is a blue city,

I mean, we actually do have a mask mandate on public transit and in like train and airport stations. Maybe a third of people are asking if that. People have just entirely stopped worrying about

COVID for the most part on a day-to-day basis. I do think it's a pretty big fact. it definitely kind of produces more of a return to normalcy because I think you had begun to see like the splitover COVID policy were more in the Democratic coalition by the time we got to late last year, for example, right, where it was, you know, the vaccinate and relax crowd against the kind of COVID-Zero crowd, maybe it was one way to characterize them.

And those fights were pretty vicious. As a vaccine relaxer myself, I participated in some of them. But to remove that issue from the table, with a caveat, though, that, you know, I think epidemiologists are still concerned about seasonality and they're still concerned about new variants. We have now vaccines that will be approved shortly to target BA5. But, you know, it's still like a lingering concern that could resurface in the future. But, yeah, we shouldn't forget how dominant a forced COVID. it has been over our lives for the past couple of years, and if it's a little bit more in the background now, that's important.

I want to talk about candidate selection in a little bit, because we're going to talk about some specific Senate races where candidate selection comes into play in a second. But I want to turn to your work at 538. You have several forecasting models that I am starting to check on a weekly and semi-daily basis. And these forecasting models are, of course, dependent on the quality of polls.

Polls famously missed badly in the presidential election of 2016. They missed a lot more that I thought they would in 2020. How are polls doing this year? And is there any reason to think that in midterm elections, when Trump is not on the ballot, we might be able to place deeper faith in national polling? So there are a bunch of questions here that it might help to unpack. You know, one question is why were the polls so inaccurate in 2016 and 2020? And let me start by giving kind of like the steel man case for if you're defending the polls, right?

So, polls, if you're actually just kind of calling a bunch of people on the phone, most of them don't answer. maybe 5% or 10% do. And so it's always been kind of like a leap of faith that the people who do answer your poll are representative of the people in the population as a whole. But of course, that's not true. In general, like old white women are the most likely to answer pulse or phone calls

and like young black men are the least likely, right? But you can tell because you may have a database of registered voters in your state and you're like, well, our sample here has a lot of old white women, not very many younger blacks or Hispanics. And so what we can do is say, well, we know what we think turnout should be.

And we can therefore wait the poll where now every young black man that we find in the poll counts for 3x and every old white woman counts for 0.2x, right? And therefore, we synthetically create an electorate that kind of has the right turnout that we expect to actually see in November, right? That works well enough as long as you have identified the right variables by which political

opinion varies. But what if there are some factors that you're not accounting for? People who attend college are much more likely to answer pollster's phone calls, for example. They are more politically engaged. They consume more news. If a pollster calls and says, I'm from so-and-so polling agency, they may be excited. right um well it used to be that there was little correlation between um education levels and

voting patterns if you go back to 2000 for example pulled the 25 most educated counties in 2000 half of them voted for bush and not gore right now those same counties voted for Biden over trump i like something like 35 or 40 points on average right so did you attend college is a very important predictor of political behavior it's also predictor of answering polls. And so therefore, if you're not adjusting for the educational accomplishment of the people in your poll, then your poll is going to be skewed and have too many Democrats, right? That's a basic excuse for what happened in 2016, that you have the shift along educational lines and pollsters hadn't thought through about this problem enough ahead

of time, and that caused the error, right? Education polarization is, I think one of the most interesting things happening in politics right now. Because it's not just the Democrats becoming the party of the college educated. It's also the Republicans are becoming the party that stands against everything you can associate with college, whether it's wokeness or corporate labor or public health. And you're saying the shift has been so sudden and recent that it briefly threw off the accuracy of polling because companies were calling around and it was all these college educated Democrats were picking up the phone. So it made the electorate seem way more democratic than it actually was.

So that's 2016. I thought the pollsters learned their lesson. Tell me what happened in 2020. There may also have been some effects of COVID. In particular, Democrats were all much more likely to lock down, and they were literally at home with lots of time on their hands to answer polls. Republicans are still going out to local Applebee's or whatever, I'm not sure. But there's big differentiation in people's availability.

in 2020. One thing that's funny about 2020 is that if you look at polls on like the day before, I guess it wasn't a day, right? But polls before COVID became like a dominant issue in like late February 2020, those polls did quite well. Those polls predicted like a narrow Biden win where it wins Wisconsin by a point and it's close, right? Those polls are pretty good.

The polls in November were not that good. And so maybe the pre-COVID polls had been fairly good, right? Now, there is a question about whether Trump in particular has particular effects. I mean, he was literally a celebrity, and he will kind of turn out voters who might be low-propensity voters, including, for example, low-propensity Hispanic voters. If you look at South Texas, for example, there was a major. surge in the share of the GOP vote from 2016 to 2020, but there's also a major surge of the number of voters. It was known for very low turnout, South Texas, and you had, I think, a lot of Hispanic voters who did not participate in the system at all, who actually were kind of turned

on by Trump. And a pollster might say, oh, you haven't voted before, you're not a likely voter. We're going to screen you out. Also, these are Hispanic voters who may speak Spanish at home. They may not have as high socioeconomic status, as they may be harder to reach in phone polls or on internet polls for that matter as well. And so if you have these low propensity, lower socioeconomic status Trump voters, well, that was going to be a big problem for the polls in 2016, 2020. It might not be in 2018 or 2022 because they might not turn out for for Blake Masters or something, right?

And in elections that haven't featured Trump on the ballot, the polls have not had a Republican bias since 2016, including in these special elections where, if anything, the polls have underrated Democrats a little bit. There hasn't been a ton of polls that wouldn't generalize too much from that. But Democrats have kind of beaten their polls in this 2022 post-Dobbs environment.

So altogether, there are three biases to think about when it comes to the accuracy of polls. Number one, college bias. Number two, the COVID stay-home bias of 2020, and number three, a Trump bias that we can maybe ignore this year because he's not on the ballot. I think this is a good time to talk about your forecasting models and what they're actually predicting will happen in November. So you have, on 538, a light model, which is basically what election day would look like

right now based on polls alone. And then you have classic and deluxe models, which add factors like fundraising and past voting patterns and the opinions of experts. So if we look at the House right now, if you look at the polls only model, it gives Republicans a pretty narrow chance to win, only a 63% chance. But your deluxe model gives them a 76% chance to win. Can you help me understand the difference? So if you look at the generic congressional ballot, which is just a question that asks voters, which party would you prefer to control Congress, or which party do you prefer to elect in your district that tends to reduce about the same result. That favors Democrats by about one point,

right? That is a change before the adopt decision. There have been a two or three point GOP lead on that measure. So the question is, if Democrats win the generic ballot by one point, do they win the House or not? It's actually one other complication I want to get to first, though, which is that that generic ballot average consists of polls that are often among registered voters. In a midterm, you typically have mediocre turnout, and so people actually turn out to vote may not match the entire university registered voters. Typically, in a midterm year, you would expect the out party, the opposition party,

in this case the GOP, to have more voter enthusiasm. And in particular, in the past, Republicans tend to vote more regularly at midterms that may be shifting now, as you have Democrats, you know, the more kind of educated coalition that may be different now than it was in the past. So one question is, if you have Democrats ahead narrowly among registered voters, then how does that translate among likely voters? Maybe it's more like a pure toss-up or at one point, GOP lead. Another question is, given redistricting, where the GOP is, has a slight advantage from how districts are drawn, not a very big one, but a slight one. Does it translate purely one for one or 50-50? But anyway, Light does that math and says,

you have this very, very narrow lead among registered voters of the Democratic generic ballot that translates to the GOP being a very slight favorite based on polls alone in the House, right? The more other ingredients you add to that, the more skeptical the model becomes are the GOP's chances of losing the House. Historically, obviously, it's been very rare for the president's party to lose seats or to gain seats at the midterms, right?

Biden, although his approval rating is up, is still a relatively unpopular president. These expert ratings that we look at that have some predictive value still project a GOP gain in the House, albeit a muted gain and not the ones they were hoping for before. So the more bells and whistles you add to the model, the more it tends to hedge back toward the kind of default prior, which is a GOP, winning the House, although it's become much less sure of that than it had been before. The so-called deluxe model now has Democrats with a 24% chance of winning the House as we're taping this. They were as low as, I think, around 12% when we launched the forecast in late June.

Right. So Democrats have doubled their odds of winning the House, but they still only have essentially a one and four chance. It's different when you look at the Senate. In the Senate, your deluxe model now has Democrats with a 68 percent chance to win. Democrats are basically almost as likely to win the Senate as Republicans are to win the House, which is pretty interesting. What explains the difference? I mean here, and we should also mention it, like, if you go to, like, the light version of a Senate model, it has Democrats at 82%. Right. So basically, in the Senate, you have a lot of polling in key individual Senate races, which you don't really in the House, right? In the House, you're lucky to have, like, one poll of a district. In the Senate, most of these races have been polled four or five or six times in the past few months. And those polls quite consistently tell a good story for Democrats, right? So a race like, Pennsylvania, from first principles, you might expect Pennsylvania to be a very close race. It's a purple state in a what now looks like a purple year. But instead, Federman, the Democrat, is up by seven or eight points over Dr. Oz in a state like Arizona, another state you'd expect to be close. But Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, has a pretty sizable league over Blake Masters. And then even states like Ohio that shouldn't be close, right?

Ohio is only a pretty red state. But you have the Democrat Tim Ryan basically tied with J.D. Vance, who is the author and venture capitalist turned GOP, Trump and Dorse Dominique, and they're running about even despite Ohio's now fairly strong Republican lean. So this individual state-by-state polls tell a very rosy picture for Democratic. Democrats where they not only are they favored to keep the Senate, they actually are favored to add a seat or two, which could have implications going forward, obviously. But here we're not kind of getting more questions about, like, can you take these polls at face

value, right? One basic problem is that it's September 1st. The election's not being held on September 1st, right? It's being held in November. So it might be true in Ohio that if you had the election today, that it would be highly competitive. However, Tim Ryan has had a big advertising advantage that will probably even out. The GFP is going to come to the rescue advance. I would think advance is not that well known. A candidate that name recognition will increase relative to Ryan, who is a U.S. representative who ran for president in 2020. And so, there are reasons to think in some of these races that things will tighten by November. I want to jump into some of these specific Senate races.

So starting with Pennsylvania, you've got the Democrat, John Federman, running against Oprah's favorite carpet-bagging doctor, Mehmet Oz. And Federman, according to 538, has a 79% chance of winning in a state that a lot of people, as you said, thought Republicans were going to pick up in November. And this in particular has just been a really strange election. Federman suffered a stroke. He has been very scarce on the campaign trail. He's been, you know, posting a bunch of memes, making fun of Oz for not being a real resident of the state of Pennsylvania.

He started a petition, for example, to name Oz to the New Jersey Hall of Fame. There's a lot of silly lessons that I think one could take or that maybe the Internet is taking from this race. Like, for example, the Democrats should just nominate a bunch of really big dudes who meme their way through elections by just being super funny and that those ingredients might be enough to get someone through a tough race in a purple state. but I wonder what do you see as the most significant lessons of a state like Pennsylvania? First of all, historically inexperienced candidates tend to underperform the fundamentals. And you've kind of seen that play out in, I mean, I generally think like political humor is kind of terrible. I think some of the Oz memes, including some of the self-owns are kind of funny, right, where he had this infamous video of he's like, shopping for ingredients at a Wegman's trying to complain about in place.

is buying ingredients for crudite. Crudite. Crudite. Which I think is like the least relatable possible food, right? If you were like, yeah, I'm getting a sushi platter. People would make fun of me for being like rich, but at least people kind of like sushi, right? Or crudite.

Well, at least sushi doesn't have an accent d' goo over one of the letters. Like, Republican candidates should not have public messaging that has accent de goo or axon groves, I think, in their messaging. Like, you do not want to come across as explicit. an explicitly accented francophile. But anyway, keep going. You know, and then I think he wasn't prepared for this line of attack about being from New Jersey and, you know, voters tend not to like carpet baggers.

There is some empirical research on that. You know, and then things like, so Fetterman has a stroke, which is like a pretty serious issue, right? I mean, for sure. And he's avoiding debates for that reason. But instead, like Oz's spokesperson said, well, maybe if Federman had eaten more vegetables, he wouldn't have had the stroke, right? Which is, you know, I've been to Pennsylvania.

It's not a state I would associate with healthy organic produce, right? It's a state of the affiliate cheese steak and, like, delicious, like, giant greasy sandwiches of different kinds and fried foods of different kinds. It's just like a, I'm not saying this is an issue that is going to turn up that many voters, but like, if you are Oz, then can you find ways to raise doubts about Federman's stroke, which is, again, a legitimate issue as far as people governing going forward, right?

And instead he kind of steps in it. And so experience, I think, I think matters a fair bit. He's a guy that's like easy to make fun of. It's not quite clear why he's even like running for. Senate exactly. No, it's kind of bewildering. I don't understand why he's doing this at all. He's completely trashing whatever reputation he had from his television career in order to do what, not barely even run for office. I mean, he hasn't been particularly visible on the campaign trail. The thing that I must worry about is Fetterman at this point seems so likely to win that I'm in advance

worried that Democrats are going to take the wrong lessons from the Pennsylvania election and assume that the way to win elections against famous Republicans is just to meme your way through it. But Dr. Oz is such a terrible candidate. I'm not sure any particular campaign lesson should be taken from this particular showdown. I actually wanted to move to Georgia for a second. This is where the Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock is for now narrowly holding off the former football star Herschel Walker who was a for whom Trump was a major in public supporter. I've been a little surprised how close this election is. Georgia is, you know, a purple state. This is a midterm year. Herschel Walker's public comments have been somewhere between utterly crazed and mere gobbledygook.

What is interesting to you about the Georgia election right now? Yeah, maybe in some ways, why is Walker not paying more of it? Can a penalty, I guess, is one question, especially because it's like, it cuts both ways, right? It's not just that Walker's a weak candidate. It's also that Warnock is, you know, potentially a very good one. It's a very compelling life story, right, is one of the more persuasive speakers among the Democratic caucus that you'll hear potentially. But, you know, Georgia is one of those states where there are some swing states that are swing states because you have a lot of swing voters, right? Like in New Hampshire, which is kind of like weird, like white secular. upper middle class kind of pseudo-libertarian, right?

Those are voters that are like cross-pressured and tend to flip parties a lot, right? In Georgia, it's just kind of a matter of you line up your coalitions on each side, and they happen to be about 50-50, where Democrats have obviously African-American voters, there are a number of big colleges and universities in Georgia, and an increasing number of professionals of all racial persuasions that are moving to Atlanta and its suburbs. The GOP still has lots of conservative evangelical white voters, though, in Georgia, outside of Atlanta still wins by large marches.

And those coalitions are about 50-50. They're pretty immovable. Democrats have managed to turn out just slightly more voters in 2020, obviously. And so it's a cliche. That might be a race that comes down more. to turn out, right? People will tolerate a bad Republican nominee in Georgia because they would just never consider

if you're like an evangelical white voter somewhere in rural Georgia. You're just not going to consider voting for a Democrat under any circumstance. Before we get to Ohio and Arizona, which I kind of think of as their own story because those candidates are backed by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. I want to do a quick stop in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin seems to me like maybe the most surprising state of affairs for Republicans. This is where the Republican incumbent, Senator Ron Johnson, is rather stunningly in a toss-up against the Democratic challenger, Barnes. Barnes was actually leading in the last three A-rated polls that you recorded at 538. Long-time incumbents are not supposed to lose in midterms when the other party is in power? Do you agree with the general sense that Wisconsin seems to be

like the largest and deepest red flashing light for Republicans right now and worrying that this is the exception to the general midterm rule? I mean, this is, if I had to flag one race

where if I had personal money in the line where I'd be a little skeptical about the model, I'm not sure I buy that Wisconsin is as close as the model shows it. Oh, the polling has been pretty consistent. But Wisconsin has the state it's had the worst polling in the country over the past several election cycles.

So that's one where you might want to put a little asterisk by it. I think the case for it is that, you know, Johnson has been a very conservative member of the Senate in a state that is purple. It did ultimately vote for Biden in 2020. The other senator is Tammy Baldwin, who is a progressive, you know, openly lesbian senator, right? Wisconsin still has enough progressive elements. And Johnson is this very pro-Trump has spoken sympathetically about the events of January 6th, right? He is also not the most articulate guy, has had somewhat a half-fast approach towards interest in being in the Senate. Wisconsin has high turnout.

It's a high political engagement state. So you can maybe tell a story where he underperforms by a couple of points. Wisconsin's another very close state. I'm just a little aware because of the particular history of polls getting things wrong in Wisconsin. So moving on to Ohio and Arizona, this is where we have J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, Republican candidates, both sponsored by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. They're both underperforming. and I don't want to overstretch in my attempt to create a narrative here.

But the subject that I want to end on with you is the subject of candidate selection. It's kind of hard to ignore that the Republican Party has two very different billionaire kingmakers, Peter Thiel in California, Donald Trump in New York, who have gone about backing candidates that are mostly significantly underperforming in their particular race. And I wonder what you make of this candidate selection problem. The Republicans seem to have

because it really is a story that you can tell about a lot of the states that we've just visited. It's a story you can tell about Herschel Walker in Georgia. It's a story you could tell about Memadaz in Pennsylvania.

Both of these were backed by President Trump. Both of them are significantly underperforming what we should expect. Why do you think the GOP has this candidate selection problem? Well, here's we get into question

about, like, what is the GOP, right? Yes, that's exactly right. It's a formal structure. There's a Republican National Committee that has some degree of formal powers, right? It's a series of elected officials who have various formal and informal influence, some of whom are retired or are informally aligned with the party, Peter Thiel, for example. And then you have the Republican voters and they have conflicting incentives. they have imperfect information.

I mean, look, in general, if you had told the Republican Party, again, understand that that doesn't really make sense as a term exactly, right? That, like, you're going to get Roe v. Wade overturned, a historic victory you've been waiting for for 50 years, but it's going to cost you two or three seats in the Senate. Would that be worth it?

I don't know what they'd say. It might be pretty close, right? You know, so the GOP has made like a lot of compromises to try to, well, I mean, in nominating Trump, in some ways the bargain McConnell was making is that Trump will cause lots of problems for the GOP, but Hillary Clinton will nominate liberal Supreme Court justice, and Trump will nominate conservative ones, and as long as that's true, well, it's worth making a big sacrifice for that. So maybe I'm going to answer the question very directly. I mean, I think the GOP is kind of, in some sense, getting what it bargained for. Yes. I was just thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking this is several chickens coming home to roost, right? This is the Federalist Society

anti-Roe chicken coming home to roost. The Supreme Court has moved significantly to the right of public opinion, and now Republicans are being punished for their success. This is the price of politics. And then you have Trump, who is both behind the scenes boosting candidates and directly in the mainstage spotlight with the Mar-a-Lago search and seizure. And this is where I want you to tell me if my analysis is going a bit off the rails. But I have noticed a subtle shift in the way that some Republicans talk about Trump, putting together his horrible record of handpicking Republican candidates for Senate and this Mar-a-Lago mess. So you have the big-time conservative pundit, Ben Shapiro, who wrote a long Twitter thread earlier this week pretty explicitly blasting Republicans for being enthralled to the

idea that Trump is some unique shaman who can overcome the threat from the left. Just today, or maybe yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed, criticizing Trump's, quote, vendetta politics, saying he seems to care more about settling scores than promoting his own party. This is a conservative editorial panel. And then Fox and Friends, the Fox News Morning Show, of which I'm not a typical viewer, saying so many negative things about Trump that he's now accused them of going to the, quote, dark side. So I'm not trying to write Trump's political obituary right now.

Too many people have tried to do that and looked absolutely ridiculous. But do you think we're seeing some kind of movement, some kind of subtle inflection point among Republican elites, where this attitude, toward the role Trump plays in the Republican Party seems to be shifting a bit. Yeah, Trump has this reputation for being teflon electorally, but his track record's not really that impressive, right? He beat Hillary Clinton, despite losing the popular vote,

and she is not a strong nominee. I'll leave it at that, right? He lost re-election as an incumbent, which is pretty rare. the GOP had a bad midterm in 2018, which is typical, but maybe a little bit worse than average. They have done kind of poorly in these various special elections. There are now increasing signs they'll have a disappointing 2022. And so, yeah, I mean, part of the problem, I think, for the GOP is that they don't really have, like, other role models of kind of what an electorally successful candidate might look like, right? I mean, Bush's left office as being very unpopular, and I think Republicans might feel as though

Bush didn't really leave them in a position where they were conservative goals accomplished, right? He kind of left them with a Roberts court that that Republicans thought was not serving their interest, right? He left them with unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, right? He left them with fiscal policy that was not transformatively. changed at the very least and then create a big backlash that led to Obama winning. And so, you know, Republicans don't really have successful examples of like non-Trump candidates

winning, I guess. I mean, the closest substitution seems to be Ron DeSantis in Florida, who is very Trump-like in, and this is a whole wormhole we could go into about how much is DeSantis like or not like Trump, right? But, you know, part of the kind of devil's bargain they're willing to make is that, you know, I think they kind of think that they aren't sure if they can win elections without Trump either. And so they're willing to be very tolerant of Trump. And now, you know, to some extent, maybe the inmates run the asylum, right? We no longer have like a smoke and mirror system of primaries. We have primaries by popular vote.

Ranking Filed GOP voters are fairly loyal to Trump still. You know, I do think that in 2024, it's likely a pretty competitive race if it's Trump against DeSantis. You know, in some ways, voters might want a new storyline, right? Trump's arguments about electability, even though. he will claim the election was stolen, falsely, of course. You know, voters would I still ask, well, if election was stolen and you're not in the White House, what's to prevent it from being stolen again from you, right?

You don't seem to have a plan here, really. I think DeSantis is somewhat skilled about winning news cycles. I think if you do have kind of like, you know, Fox News being subtly, probably not explicitly anti-Trump, that could have some influence potentially. So I think 2024 is competitive, but like, but, you know, the GOP accepted Trump as their flag bearer had kind of a free option to remove him from office and barbed running officer again after January 6th and chose not to take that. And so this is kind of the barger in their left with, but they have gotten something out of it. They gotten a rovers swayed overturned,

and that's worth a lot if you're a conservative Republican. Yeah, they've gotten things out of it. I think that the arrangement that the Republican Party is in with Donald Trump right now, it's just so, it's not only bad for democracy in some big picture ethical way. It's also just bad for the Republican Party as an organization that wants to maximize its election victories, it seems to me. Like, we're in a situation right now where there's a lot of Republican pundits who say that if the FBI indicts Donald Trump, that will almost guarantee his nomination. And it's like, I don't disbelieve that. That might be true. That might be exactly the course of events that when Republicans see Trump under attack, they are more elected to vote for him. But this idea that like when the GOP becomes more attracted to Trump, when he does incredibly unpopular things that pass such a high threshold of terribleness that the FBI indicts him for obstruction of justice and the espionage act, like, that's a terrible habit to cultivate when your job as a party is to try to win national popularity contests. So it's a very rough marriage that they're in right now.

I don't want to get, I don't want to end on like, you know, huffing capital D Democratic opium here. I actually want to end on a slightly more sober note for Democrats, which is that, you know, based on my reading of you and some other pieces, one thing that we seem to know about the home stretch of midterm elections, and that is precisely what we're in right now, is that there's a fairly ironclad rule that things typically get worse for the president's party as we get closer to election day. Why don't you just end on that note?

is it the case that things typically tend to swing to the party out of power as we get closer to election day in the midterm? So I think this might be a little bit overstated, but it's basically true. I think the reason is just that voters are not paying that much attention to the election months ahead of time, right? And about now, after Labor Day is when they were traditionally tune in. And so all that means is like the patterns that were maybe kind of latent all along begin to lock in, right? Your voters say, well, Democrats are in power now. We want to keep them in check.

And so now that I've thought about it more, sure, my senator might be a nice guy, but I'm a swing voter. I'm going to vote Republican in this election for balance. You know, although again, to kind of bring this somewhat full circle, typically what happens after it loses a presidential election is that a party will cleanse itself of the previous nominee and or the previous kind of forces that led to that losing campaign, right? So you have a new, fresh alternative. You have the contract with America in 2000 or 1994, right? Or you have in 2018 these new kind of suburban moderate Democrats are

presenting a different face of the party than Hillary Clinton did, right? You know, the GEP is not has not pivoted from Trump, right? So that's another reason why you might expect the quote unquote fundamentals to be to be violated here potentially is that it's offering the same or maybe even a more extreme version of the platform it offered on a losing basis in 2020, including the former nominee still playing a very large role, decisive many primaries in the party. And so, and so in some sense, why would you expect it to be different than 2020. That's so interesting.

I don't think I'd ever put that together quite like that either. The idea that parties themselves learn from losses and moderate in response to losses. And that one reason why a naturally moderate country might have this kind of pendulum swing between parties is that they swing ever so slightly toward the party that is moderated in response to losing the election two years prior. But that's not happening at all with the Republican Party. they are accelerating in the opposite direction, which means to a certain extent,

while I still don't think that Democrats have, are very likely to win the House, we might be able to throw out some of the history of midterm results in 2022 because this year is just so anomalous in that way. Yeah, if you have history, condition on people behaving in a certain way, and they violate that behavior,

then the history becomes less useful, for sure. Well said. Nate Silver, thank you very much. Thank you, Derek. Talk to you soon. I'm Derek Thompson. That was Plain English. Thanks very much to our producer, Devin Manzi. If you have any questions, comments, ideas for future episodes, please shoot us an email at plain English at Spotify.com.

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