Pod Save America - Poll Me Twice, Shame On Me

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and Galen Druke — the hosts of Crooked Media's new show Still Counting — join Lovett to talk about the Senate races they find most interesting and Trump doing everything in his power to help Republicans lose the midterms. The crew, who you may remember from the FiveThirtyEight podcast, dives deep into the numbers, breaking down what polling errors we should expect this November, what kind of candidates overperform versus underperform the national average, and the science behind Nate's midterm election forecast model, FLIPR. Subscribe to Still Counting on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Poncev America. I'm John Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Nate Silver, Claire Malone, and Galen Drew, who are launching a new podcast with Crooked called Still Counting. It was great to get the gang back together. We talked about Trump's politics and what he would be doing if he were actually trying to help Republicans win the Senate. We talked about the races they're watching, including Michigan and the challenges facing Abdul El-Sayed and the broader battle. between the left and the center left and how each are trying to define what a Democrat is. We talked about political modeling and what it can tell us and what it can't tell us.

And all in all, we had a great time. So do me a favor. Subscribe to Still Counting and enjoy the episode. Gail and Claire, Nate, welcome. This is awesome. We feel welcome. Thank you. We do.

Thank you for having us. This is so exciting. So I'm just, first of all, a huge, fan of all of you and I'm so excited that listening to you now is going to be on crooked because I get so hooked, especially as we get close to election day. And so as a favor for our listeners, I am going to save, I have several very pedantic questions about modeling. And I'm just putting them at the end.

And if people get there and they don't want to hear those questions and be part of it, that's fine. And so out of respect for the real political sickos, I'm going to keep to politics. And then for the model sickos, I have a little section at the end to talk about statistics and data. But I do want to start with Donald Trump. Nate, your model has Trump approval at around 39, disapproval at 58. We've joked about Trump trying to lose the midterms. The trade weren't with Canada, the focus on the ballroom, the dismissal of concerns about data.

the war with Iran, and hosting a midterm convention to make it all about himself. If Trump were making state-of-the-art decisions based on the data, what would he be doing if he were trying to help Republicans win the midterms? Galen, you want to you take it first? What would Trump be doing if he wanted to win the midterms? He would probably end the war in Iran as quickly as possible. He would undo whatever tariffs still remain after the Supreme Court decision. and he would probably try to elevate people within the Republican Party who aren't him.

You know, we saw during Trump one that whenever he would chill out and step back from the media and put himself a little bit less front and center, his approval rating would go up. You know, I think that, like off the top of my head, I'd say, that's one thing you can do. But I think there's a bigger challenge this time around, which is that what people are really upset about is the economy. And so even when Trump disappears from the media landscape or stops tweeting or stops doing whatever, people don't forget about how pissed off they are about prices and inflation, the war in Iran, and things like that. And so that kind of strategy, I think, while it may have worked during Trump 1, won't work during Trump 2.0.

What he really has to do is make people feel materially differently about their lot in life when it comes to inflation in the economy. So he shouldn't do a photo out at Costco with like some gallons of milk. or McDonald's. Yeah. Well, you know, his schick about, like, trying to lower the cost of gas at those four gas stations where he, like, purchased or if he, like, rented them out to make gas cheaper or whatever. Like, I mean, nice schick, but, like, if you could just do that for 340 million people, I think that'd be what he want to do.

Oftentimes the worst decisions in a presidential term get baked in early. You know, look, what he should do is collaborate with Elon Musk to, like, build a time machine. undo his decision to go to war in Iran. Quagmires aren't planned. Quagmires are the result of poor planning. But it's also, it's interesting, like the baked in thing is so true because now I'm thinking, like, what could your advice? There was like six months ago, all of Trump's advisors were saying, you have to talk about affordability, affordability. And I'm even thinking back to November of 2025, like right before all the war started. And then that means like, it was like three weeks before Venezuela. That was when Trump was announcing all of that.

of the, okay, we're doing deals with the drug companies, we're getting you cheaper drugs. And, like, that was kind of Trump's stride, right? Like, I'm doing deals, and it's going to be cheaper for you. And they started the Trump RX website. And I think that was kind of, like, peak his comfort level. I mean, they were still talking about you need to incorporate affordability into your agenda. But then it kind of, it's almost like the confidence high of the dealmaking kind of got there. And then Venezuela happened.

And then it was sort of like this sliding scale of, I mean, you can armchair, psychologize all you want, then it sort of slides into Iran. Yeah, I know. I'm sure he thought, well, Venezuela went good and didn't consider the fact that Iran is literally like 10 times more complex, notoriously so. No, look, I think he's kind of like grasping at straws. We're renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America, which a joke sounds like an amusement park where everyone gets tetanus.

He's trying to get attention. And like, and look, if you, so we are roughly on the one, anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. And there were a couple of moments when you felt like Stephen Miller and Trump were going to double down on authoritarianism. There was obviously all the ice stuff that happened a few months after that. And they kind of are doing less of that now. And it just seems like it's gimmicks and he's out of ideas. He's also never particularly cared about Republicans' fate in the midterms, right? If he had, he would have never have endorsed Ken Paxton. I mean, I think

Tala Rico is a good candidate, but you probably need a Ken Paxton level below replacement level candidate to win as a Democrat in Texas still. He didn't care about losing those two seats in Georgia in the runoff in 2021, I guess it was. I'm going to get my years confused. Yeah, no, which is why

I think John's asking a hypothetical, which is if he were going to behave as if he wanted to win the midterms, what would he do? And he doesn't seem to behaving that way. Yeah, I guess it's, let's say he is not obviously better economic fundamentals, not continuing a catastrophic war, launching a new trade war with Canada was also an interesting choice. But politically right now, right, he's hosting this midterm convention.

You have reporters chasing Republican House members to ask if they're willing to go. You have people like Mike Rogers, who is in a tough race in Michigan, deciding to go, which I thought was an interesting choice. this midterm convention is presumably not what a president would be putting on if you were trying to be the most helpful because he's trying to recede and let them run against him, which seems also unacceptable. Claire, what do you think? It's funny.

I should say, like, it's interesting to think in this way about, like, what he should do, because we're so used to sort of the analysis of the after-the-fact with Trump. I mean, like, I think that's our mode of thinking. But it sort of speaks to the problem that the Republicans are going to have to face for the next, you know, five to ten years is what comes after, right? And it's it's almost like, you know, it's super awkward right now, right? You kind of can't, you know, to not have like screeds against you on social media. Maybe you have to show up to the midterm thing and yet you know the right thing to do. Like, J.D. Vance embodies this problem, right?

Hence all the, I mean, I'm not saying I know who leaked a lot of those meetings about Iran strategy, but like it was to J.D. Vance's advantage in a tough situation to sort of say like, hey, there's some voices in the room saying maybe we shouldn't go to war with Iran. Yeah. You know, and now you sort of see these little matchups between J.D. Vance and AOC, right, going back and forth. And then, you know, I'm sure J.D. Vance has in the back of his mind, like, what did Tucker and, you know, Massey talk about at their little dinner? you know. So it's basically just a microcosm of a problem that they're all going to have to deal with in the next two to four years. Yeah, that was quite striking, especially the compare and contrast against Kamala Harris's unwillingness to distance herself from Joe Biden is that J.D. Vance is preemptively distancing himself on one of Trump's worst issues.

And if you look at the history of presidential second terms, there isn't the same high floor that you have in first terms. You can look at Bush, for example, I don't know if Nixon's a fair comparison. By the way, also, and I'm somebody who is very much on that Biden was too old train, 80-year-olds are not very good at change, right? 80-year-olds are not very good at multiple channels of negotiating one way and tacking the other way. Like, that's an issue, too. I'm not sure if he has quite, you know, it's little apples and oranges with Biden. But, yeah, look, our job is to forecast a landscape of, like, what's possible now.

And historically, in recent mid-term, the environment doesn't change that much between Labor Day. and the election. You don't have debates, for example. You don't have, you know, a focal point of national news unless Trump does something people don't like for the most part. It's very hard for any president, even Obama realized this, to make positive news by commanding the spotlight. I mean, I think that sort of tells us exactly what we need to know about what this convention is going to look like and how Republicans are going to run between now and election day, which is, okay, you think back a year ago, Charlie Kirk's assassination, that was a very unifying moment for the right because it reminded them everything that they don't like about the left amidst a presidency

that was starting to feel difficult. Now, of course, that was a solitary actor or not somebody who's representative of the left, et cetera, but still for Republicans, it's a rally and cry. We feel under siege. We feel under attack. And so I think that what we're going to see at this convention and what we're going to see throughout the next two months is trying to pivot towards, remember all the things that you don't like about Democrats. And those are many, right? Like, After all of this, voters still trust Republicans more on the issue of immigration, not just the border, but immigration in general. They're still skeptical of Democrats on the economy and inflation. And so really, it's important to remember here when you see all these polls coming in that are positive for Democrats, that's not because Americans broadly like the Democratic Party, like what Democrats are offering.

It's just because Republicans are the ones who are the main character right now. and so they're voting against Republicans. To the extent that, you know, it will work to a certain extent to say these guys are socialists, they don't care about crime, they don't care about inflation, they don't care about illegal immigration and things like that. And so to the extent that Republicans can remind, especially more MAGA-inclined voters, remember, these guys are still out there. And if they get back in Congress, they're going to make your lives difficult or you're not

going to be happy with the result. Like, that's their job for the next two months. And you look like you're fighting the last war sometimes. I'm someone who thinks like the they, them ad, was probably a pretty effective strategy against Kamau Harris in 2024. But if you're refighting the woke wars, it kind of feels like you're living in the past a little bit.

There's a whole new constellation of issues from Iran to AI. You know, by the way, there's both a lot of history with Trump and with midterms in general where these almost always go badly for the president's party, even when the president's more popular than Trump is. And Trump has always almost done poor. throughout his two terms, one and a half terms, I guess now, when he himself is not on the ballot.

Whatever you say about Trump, he does have a certain kind of charisma. Maybe we need a new word for it. No, I think he has. People like to pretend it's not the case or to say so as some like kind of failing. But of course, he's extraordinarily charismatic. We know that because when you see J.D. Vance at the podium trying to insult Joe Biden. It's like, ugh, this made us uncomfortable. He's a sick man.

Why are you saying this? But Trump could do the song and dance, and it would work. Hodge Save America is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Boy, do we love Magic Spoon here. Huge fans of Magic Spoon. I got a whole bunch of boxes right in my pantry. It's a great. Got the Magic Spoon Spoon.

My kids love that. Yeah, it's great. I think it's really cool. Magic Spoon figured out how to turn treats into something you can actually feel good about eating. Magic Spoon treats are crispy, airy, protein-packed snack bars with 12 grams of protein, seven grams of fiber, zero grams of added sugar, two to three nettee. carbs and certified gluten-free and they genuinely feel like a treat not a sad health bar they're perfect for tossing in your bag keeping in the car grabbing between meetings or crushing

when a sweet craving hits at night flavors include marshmallow chocolate peanut butter double chocolate and more very nostalgic very dessert coated i love dessert coated uh but without loading you up on sugar these hit that sweet tooth itch while still doing something for you and if you already know magic spoon for their cereal yes don't worry that is still iconic magic spoon is easy to find. Just look for MagicSpoon at your local grocery store, and they just rolled out treats nationwide at 7-11. And if you haven't tried them yet, check out MagicSpoon's new protein pastries, a high-protein low-sugar take on the classic toaster pastries you grew up with. You can get $5 off your next order, including the protein pastries at MagicSpoon.com.com slash cricket. That's Magickspoon.com slash crooked for $5 off.

This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. S Squarespace provides all the tools you need to promote and get paid for your services in one platform. Whether you offer consultations, events, or other experiences, Squarespace can help you grow your business. Squarespace offers a complete library of professionally designed and award-winning website templates with options for every use in category. No matter where you start, your website is flexible to what you need with intuitive drag-and-drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled, visual design effects on brand AI content,

and more ways to list what you offer. No experience required. We did our wedding website on Squarespace. Really? Mm-hmm. That's right. That's right. Ari really was a really on the one-tink twos. Yeah, they did a great job. But so did Squarespace. Every Squarespace domain comes with advanced privacy and security tools included to ensure your domain reigns online and protected. Plus Squarespace provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life. Whether that means building a website or adding professional email service, don't wait to claim your name. Invest in your dream today. Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash crooked to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace.com slash crooked. So let's talk about the Senate, actually.

First of all, just which races are you watching most closely this cycle? Claire, why don't you kick it off? I mean, Michigan, I think, has become the obvious answer. And the most, I feel like every cycle, there's one race where kind of the media and voters, like there's the dramatic sort of tension and attention goes to it. And it's obviously, was it, was it the tipping point in the, in the forecast? Was it the most...

I think in our forecast, Texas is the most frequent. Texas is the most frequent, okay, yeah. Which is boringly in line with conventional wisdom, right? But, you know, most polls have Tala Rico narrowly ahead there. Yeah, but I think Michigan, for me, displays the most complicated dynamics of the Democratic Party, right? So in races like in Texas, right, you can kind of say like, okay, this candidate is trying to do the thing where it's, I kind of look like an act like an independent or like a very conservative old school blue dog Democrat, right? I talk about God and religion, right?

We're talking about Tala Rico. Michigan has more of these modern party dynamics, which is, I mean, I was just reading on the train over here, right, how Jewish groups in Michigan are reacting to Al-Saiad's apologies. The apologies aren't enough. it's pretty extraordinary that some of the Democrats aren't endorsing in that race. I mean, it's sort of like this, you can imagine if it were a really heated Republican primary, there's a lot more coalescing,

whereas in this phase of the Democratic Party, it's sort of people kind of, the factions are eating each other a little bit, which I actually wasn't, I don't know if I expected it to the degree that it's existing. And it's sort of making for an interesting, you know, drama of,

clear to me. This is all fascinating because you can kind of put it into buckets how you want to analyze the midterms, which is, one, the overall environment, very blue. The generic ballot right now favors Democrats by a six to seven points. Great. That could be a blue wave environment. You analyze it according to the map. It's very red, right? Like the median Senate seat that Democrats would have to sort of in general, not let alone this red map in the Senate, like the median Senate seat is, four points more Republican than the nation. And on top of that, they're going to have to win in places, Democrats are going to have to win in places like, say, maybe Iowa or Alaska or Texas. Then, you know, candidate quality is a separate lens that you can look through. And so James Talleyaker, I don't really see him as a blue dog. Like, yes, he's a pastor. It's more the, it's more the aesthetics. We used to talk about that a lot. Yeah. But, like, his vibe is very, like, he is the most generic Democrat you can possibly imagine. Like, he's not center left. He is just out now sort of, he said weird, woke things.

Yes, he's a, he's religious, but like, he's religious in a lefty way. He's not. I know, but the religion in a lefty way is still even stark in the Democratic Party. Like, candidates who talk about God and religion, like, I was in Iowa 10 days ago, and, like, Rob Sand is always sort of slipping it in there. Like, it does actually, I do think it's a thing in the modern party. He is center left. And he knows how to run against both parties.

Like, James Tyler, he did do the thing on immigration where he said, you know, the open border policies of Joe Biden were nuts. And, like, that's, that is sort of table stakes for what a Democrat needs to say in order to win in a place like Texas. But I would say he is generic, average, whatever. El-Said is a below-average candidate. He's going to underperform in Michigan, right? Like, a Democrat should be winning this cycle in Michigan by, like, seven or eight points even. Probably at the top of the ticket, the governor, Jocelyn Benson, is going to win by close to 10 percentage points.

I think we can expect already that that's going to be closer to, like, a five-point race. And candidate-qualling meaning because you think. think that he has been so divisive to the party itself. Yeah. And also that he is viewed as extreme because he has taken more left positions on any number of things. And it is also approach in the way that you talk and whether you're sort of more of a firebrand. And then you look at somebody like Mary Paltola, who is an out and out good candidate, who's also changing the contours of the race in Alaska. And so you have, I think, a really interesting, and these factors are going to be pitted against each other. What matters more? Does the blue wave come crashing

down and sort of none of these candidate quality issues end up making the difference in the end. Is it the case that we are so stuck in our partisan ways that red states are going to stay red, blue states are going to stay blue, even in a very politically dynamic environment politically where there is a blue wave? Like, I think these are some big questions that we're going to get answers to. In some ways, the math is pretty simple. All these states, Alaska, Texas, Iowa, etc., are roughly the R plus 11 or R plus 12 states, meaning in a neutral year you'd expect them to vote for Trump by 11 points, 10 points call it, right? The national environment is around a D plus 6, D plus 7.

So you get to all these states that with average candidates should be a three or four point Republican win. Can Democrats make up for that with a candidate quality advantage? In Alaska, you might be on that happening, potentially. In Ohio, where Brown is kind of a quasi-incumbent and won a tough race in 2018. in a similar environment, you know, that you might have more confidence about. In Texas, I do think, I mean, Tala Rico's fundraising is quite astonishing. I do think it's more about Ken Paxton being a weak candidate than TAL.

Tabloid fodder. Yeah. And in Michigan, I mean, that's the thing. So, Michigan, it should be D plus 7, D plus 8. So if you have like a four-point candidate quality disadvantage, and we can talk about what that means, that might not be enough there, right? El-Sayed has a bigger cushion, or Democrats have a bigger cushion in Michigan. than Republicans do in, like, Alaska because the environment is so blue.

And by the way, I think they're, look, I'm one of those people who believes that more moderate candidates do do better. I think there's lots of empirical evidence for that. It's not the only dimension of candidate's strength. He is somebody who has an impressive background, El-Sayed. He's a charismatic person when he's speaking. Like, honestly, I think a lot about... Tucker Carlson likes him. Sure.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's... It's true, yeah. I don't know how much... Jesse Waters likes them, too. Jesse Waters couldn't help, but, like, I don't know how much the Tucker Carlson endorsement is a feather in his cap, but...

Are we going to talk about circumcision on this podcast job? It's all I ever want to talk about. No, but the actual... Wait, what you're... When you're... It's like, I don't think that's necessarily... But it's, I think it's the... You know, with Mom Donnie, I think we're watching the Mom Donnie.

Like, what else... Like, what you have to do, no matter... matter who you are. Like, you know, Al-Saiy it is a particularly divisive candidate right now, given where the party is. But no matter what happens if you're a candidate, you have to, in a primary, afterwards you have to mend fences. And oftentimes, you moderate. Like, if you look at Mamdani, who's now in office in New York, holy smokes, right? Like, with a smile on his face, which I think is genuinely a real part of this, right? Like, it's like the friendly face of democratic socialism. Like, I think that goes a really long way. But, you know, you also see it

with like AOC and the squad in Congress or some of the members of the squad in Congress. Like you sort of enter the, for lack of a better phrase, the parliamentary environment of, okay, I have to make deals, I have to, you know, work the back rooms. It's not just about what's happening in front of the camera. And I think, you know, I think El Saeed is in a tough place with that because of where the broader party is.

And I, and where Michigan is. I mean, like, do you want my hot take? I do think that this is going to get clipped and get me in trouble. Oh, no. People in the national media. Okay, go on. Okay. People in the national media care disproportionately about Israel and Gaza and Palestine relative to if you serve voters, not how they feel about it, but how much importance they attach to it.

That's not a hot take. Okay. But I don't think people realize that, right? And so, you know, I'm from Michigan. Michigan's remarkable for having a bit of very. very high Arab American population, but it's two percent, roughly, of the voting pool. It's not 20 percent or something like that. It did move a lot. Deerborn, Michigan, the most Arab American city in the country, gave what, only 40 percent of its vote to Kamala Harris, a big Trump

vote, a big Jill Stein vote, a big other vote. But at the same time, like, you know, Michigan is a swing state because its demographics, on average, are pretty similar to those of the country as a whole. Well, this is a question. I mean, how much should El-Syad And like that vote, right, the Arab-American vote, that turned against Harris and the Democrats because of Gaza, how much does it make sense strategically if you're in El-Said's campaign thinking about turnout, right? Okay, like he's not going to win over the establishment part of the party. Like, how much can it be a turnout game? Like, because I remember, you know, I live in a part of New York that's really South Asian. Yeah.

And on election day here, it was like they did the same thing that Trump did, right? Which is low propensity voters, right? Like, this is your first time voting an election ever or in a couple cycles. So, like, strategically turning out the deer-barned vote, how much does that make sense? Or how much is that a winnable strategy? If it's 2% of the Michigan population, I just don't think there's enough of the voter to make the difference. In a mid-term. But we're talking about margins here.

We're talking about, like, you know, oh, our fundamentals forecast says they should win by three points. Like, you know, one or two points matters in that context. I mean, I'm always someone in general who thinks turnout is a bit overrated relative to persuasion. But that's less true in a midterm than in a presidential year. Turnout is lower in midterms. You can have these big enthusiasm gaps in the past. They can be as large as like five points where if you poll register, I think in 2010 and 2014, the Obama coalition, which did so well in presidential years,

did not motivate voters very much at all in the midterms. It didn't quite translate. I don't know if it was the young nature of that coalition or what. But, like, you know, Obama's privilege weren't good to begin with in 2010 and 2014. but like that enthusiasm gap really expanded that quite a bit. And by the way, with Trump's disapproval rating at almost 60% in some of these polls and a negative 20, you're not going to have Democrats win the House popular vote by 20 points, right? What you might have is a lot of people who are souring on Trump because he's a lame duck,

because of Iran, because of tariffs, because of Epsteingate, because he's just been in office a long time. They just won't turn out to vote. they'll be watching football on Sunday and not take the time to vote the next Tuesday. And so that's where the lack of enthusiasm could translate. And by the way, people don't realize they think, well, his approval rating might be 38%, 39%, but they're all really enthusiastic backers. Like, actually not that either. And our tracking, his very favorable number is down to around 21%.

So, and this is fatigue that you very often get in a second term. And because we're in a modern news cycle, it feels like Trump and president forever, basically. right? When I read accounts of like something Obama did as president, right? Like it feels kind of totally foreign, you know, the Mets were in the World Series in 2014. I'm like, Obama was president. That feels like ages ago. Ebola doc. I mean, that's what I. Ebola, yeah. On sort of where Israel and Gaza fit in, Nate, you may be right that it has more salience among

maybe a smaller subset of like hyper-engaged people and sort of maybe political elites. but that can be a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on how you want to describe it, because that also led to tens of millions of dollars coming into the race to try to turn people against Abdul. And then that becomes a challenge for him to rebuild after a primary in which he was deluged with negative ads. And so, you know, clear to your point about, you know,

people moderate when they get to the general in a strange way, in part because we're in this sort of post-2020 kind of revision in which people go back and sort of restate or undo things they said in 2017, 2018, 2019 through maybe 2021. They kind of do their moderation during the primary, right? And so what does Abdul done since? He has not changed his political positions. He really just kind of apologized for a statement that was a, a, a, a, divisive about an attack on a synagogue, right, in the efforts to try to repair relationships

with the Jewish community. But that had come after the primary. And so he's sort of, he's in a difficult position, right? Because he, like, it's not about moderating, right? There is a kind of specific. And it's not about his issues. Right. Right. It's now about a controversy. Right. It's about a controversy. And there are people for whom his remarks after the primary maybe were either, could have either too little too late or there was nothing he could say to undo the fact that they have this fear, some rooted in Islamophobia, some based on just disagreeing with him on his position on Israel. So I do think that's like a challenge. And regardless, right, like anytime we're talking about Abdul specifically, even his strengths, you're not talking about Mike Rogers, right?

Because I think whatever your position is in the ideological fight, it is pretty clear that if this is an election about what Mike Rogers will do in the Senate and how he will side with Donald Trump, that is the strongest place Democrats could be, which is why on Fox News it's Asa Sampiker and Abdul side-by-side day after day after day.

Like, I have trouble picturing what Mike Rogers looks like. Right? Honestly, I think he might too. Like, I don't think Mike Rogers knows what Mike Rogers looks like. He is, he is, he is, but this is his strength, right? Because Mike Rogers is, sure.

No, totally, yeah. I am generic Republican. old school, I'm not a Trumpy person, that should give you some reassurance, when in reality, right, the fact that he's going to that midterm convention tells you something about his balance between donors and Trump and what's happening in Michigan. Look, one of my hot takes, too, is that American voters are actually pretty rational in the aggregate, if not individually. One of my hot takes is that people are just good, innately.

Salt to the earth. Salt to the earth, Michigan. That's what I say. I'm always saying that. So you see a lot more cross-partisanhip in gubernatorial races, right? There's a Republican governor of Vermont. There's a Democratic governor in Kentucky, Kentucky, for example. Kansas.

Kansas. You don't see that as much. Kansas has not voted for a Democrat for Senate since 1932, I think, or something like that. Because people correctly infer that maybe I think Mike Rogers is a good guy. He's still going to vote with Trump 90% of the time, which, you know, You could literally name on one hand the number of members of Congress who routinely vote against their party. You know, Susan Collins, kind of. Jared Golden is retiring.

Murkowski has a system she benefits from in Alaska where you have a top four system where you can actually and rank choice voting. So people are kind of rational to say, I might be worried about, they'll say it's position on this or that. But he's going to vote against Trump. And that's what I care about when Trump has a 30. 37% approval rating in Michigan or whatever. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I mentioned that I think that he is a sort of below-average candidate. That doesn't mean that he's going to lose. As we mentioned, he has a good amount of cushion.

And I think, John, I would be curious for your take on this as well, because we all remember from the 2012 election, or at least all of us millennials, in this room, remember from the 2012 election, when Romney's advisor was like, oh, you know, we're going to shake him up, like an extra sketch for the general and moderate him, right? And it's important to remember that people, first impressions matter to like be your mom about it or whatever. And the first impression that people got of Al-Sayyad was a fighter and somebody who's fighting the Democratic Party, right? And so I think for a lot of people, that gives them the sense that, oh, we already think of the Democratic Party as quite to the left. You ask Americans broadly, is the Democratic Party too moderate, too conservative, too left-we?

Americans broadly feel like the Democratic Party is already too left wing. He's positioning himself to the left of the Democratic Party in a battleground state. So a lot of people, and this is an identity thing, too, we know from social science that when voters look at women and in particular candidates of color, they view them automatically as more to the left. They assume that their policy positions are more to the left. He was a lacrosse bro, though. I mean, he comes across as very bro-y. And in the same way that, like, you know, in this ad-eathing. he has where he's on Senate Islander. He's like, has a football and things like that, right?

And, like, it's kind of, like, coming across like a... Or the grandparents are. That's fair. And look, John can tell us how effective it is to sort of moderate and reposition yourself and pitch a different maybe side of yourself in the general election. It clearly wasn't successful for Mitt Romney. But I think it is something that will be a little bit hard to do because of that prime. And it's not just because, you know, APEC dumped a mountain of money against him. It's also because voters think the Democratic Party is already too far left.

If you position yourself to the left of the Democratic Party, you are even further away from the mainstream. Look, we're a representative democracy. I think flip-flopping is fine if you're saying, I'm trying to meet the voters

halfway to where they're at, right? I've never... Flip-flopping should be normalized. But that's like a normative take. That's not how American politics necessarily works. Like, what's the point of mind if you can't change it?

I've gotten in years long of arguments with internet leftists about, I think the data says that you're more to the center that helps on average, right? I've just found the whole El-Sai'a discourse a bit weird because he has gained ground in the polls. Immediately after the primary, Rogers was ahead by one or two points in the polling average, and now El-Sai adds up by three or four. And that reflects like consolidation of the Democratic Party. And there was a lot of nationalism.

But it's more, I think it's... Oh, I totally agree. But it's a lot of it is just, it is literally private party politics, right? And the fact that, like, I mean, I said at the top, like, this is where the race where the drama is as a member of the media who formerly covered, like, campaigns in that way. Like, obviously there's something going on here, right? Like, we gravitate towards, like, the New York Times Politics Assignment Desk and the Wall Street Journal to a lesser extent. Like, that really does drive a lot of the way that race is covered and the way. You know, and we lost scrutiny on El-Sayed increased when the main race became less interested.

seem because Grand Platner dropped out. Oh my gosh. It has actually been so funny to me. I've been thinking about that. That we're all like, all right, who's this guy in Maine? And then like Susan Collins did have the really hilarious. I saw that. I'm not going to say anything about the fact that the mother of his children is his

second cousin. That was so. Second cousin. All right. So fucking funny. Oh my gosh. So funny. Where was it going to?

Oh yeah. But like now we're just like, okay. So now we're doing Michigan. And like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Back this truck, right the fuck up. This is a fantastic exercise for us to learn something about the American voter. Testing and sort of a left activist in a battleground state is a really interesting thing for Americans to find out about whether or not Elsaid can. And look, it's going to be a blue wave environment.

So, like, I don't think that most voters are going to. to drill down on did he underperform, did he not, whatever, they're just going to be like, if he won, he won, and like, the left is ascendant and they can win in battleground states. And if he doesn't win, then I think, you know, there's going to be some recriminations with the Democratic Party, whatever. But, like, this is not just, like, ooh, you know, like, if we can't talk about, like, rape allegations, we have to talk about the fact that there's, like, you know, an Arab-American Muslim guy running in Michigan.

Like, this is a genuinely interesting race. Pod Save America is brought you by Cook Unity. I love Cook Unity. I had it today. I had it today. I will have it tonight. I had it last night. I had the chicken meatballs with quinoa, which were very good.

And I think tonight I might have the crab cakes. Wow. I eat it. So we're just, look, look at those two different ways you can use it. Because for me, I don't have it at night. Like this morning, I went to the gym. I raised home. I had pad crapp pow with pork.

That's what I had for breakfast. That's right. That's right. Wow. And last night for dinner, I had chicken, and macelle. after I did love it or leave it. I went home and had that.

So it's Cook Unity at night, Cook Unity the morning. You're talking to some Cook Unity boys right here. We're the Cook Unity boys. Cook Unity is the first chef-led meal delivery service that makes your meals in small batches inside local micro-kitchens. Do you think the kitchens are small too? They're little it's oompa-lumpas. Across the U.S.

Not factory, so every dish arrives with the kind of freshness you'd get at the restaurant itself. Meals from Michelin-Stard chefs, James Beard Winners and Food Network stars. Go to cookunity.com slash cricket or use code crooked before checkout. for 50% off your first week. Cook Unity works with some of the best chefs

in the country to bring creative, delicious meals to your door. Hundreds of dishes to choose from. Menus updated constantly. Over 10 dietary preferences, high protein, low sodium, GLP1, Pescitarian, gluten-free, all the good ones.

Over 25 global cuisines, Mediterranean, Korean, Thai, Mexican, Italian, and more. Taste what happens when real award-winning chefs make fresh, small-batched meals just for you. Taste what happens.

Go to cookunity.com slash crooked. enter code cricket before checkout to get 50% off your first order. That's 50% off your first order by using code cricket or going to cookunity.com slash cricket. Yes, whatever happens, I think people are going to try to find ways to confirm their priors, right? Because let's say Abdul, look, I desperately hope that Abdul wins, but let's say Abdul wins and he underperforms compared to other results. People will say, oh, that is evidence that the left isn't as strong electorally.

but I think rightly people will then say, but also he was dealing with tens of millions of dollars dumped on his head in a primary that kind of put him back, right? Like, people will find a way to sift through the data. I think part of the reason they don't believe the polls is because instinctively, for reasons based on, I think, some bias, but also just evidence that, like, oh, they just assume that a left candidate is going to do worse. They see the fighting over anti-Semitism.

They see, like, Fox News focusing on. all of this and they think, oh, these, the polls were wrong in the primary, right? They gave them too big of a lead. And so maybe they're wrong again, and it's either tighter or we're behind, even if the model, the flipper model, has him at 60% to 70%. Nate, is it going to be Lucy in the football with the polls because, or do these polls correct for what they got wrong in the primary? I'd say a couple of things. One is that there is a long, long history, including a Michigan, particularly of primary polls being way off. Bernie Sanders was down. 20 points in the polls, in the primaries, and was it 2016.

It was the biggest forecasting error in, like, the history of our polling database, basically. So if you can have a 20-point error, you had, by the way, a 20-point error in Wisconsin in the Hong race. So polling is very, very difficult in general, but much more so in the primaries. In general elections, you have anchors, you know roughly which people are going to turn out and what the demographic makeup will be in a state like Michigan, where it's, quite regional. You don't really have that in a primary where there's sometimes very high turnout, sometimes very low. Young voters can now be overrepresented in polls because they're online. That used to be the opposite problem. They wouldn't answer the phone, right? There might be

issues with that potentially where, hey, youthful enthusiasm is always a hell of a thing to have, but there's a bias sometimes in which voters poll survey. But the thing is, like, I think all the indicators are kind of surprisingly rational in this election. If you look at the history of midterms, if you look at special election results, you can talk about Republicans, big corporate money raised, but Democrats are raising a lot more individual contributions on a race-by-race basis. You know, you can look at the aggregate amount of turnout in the primaries for Democrats and Republicans. You can look at states that have had nonpartisan primaries like Alaska and Washington State, for example.

I don't know. You can look at generic ballot, look at Trump approval. So both the polling and the non-polling indicators align pretty well. And the models do say, the models do say that El-Sayyad's likely to underperform. And so he'll probably win by two or three points. But there's a big margin of error on that, in part because polling is inherently uncertain. And he's a – you know, he has weaknesses and strengths, right? He's not just a Francesca Hong who seems totally disinterested in reforming her past views

and doesn't come across as a very frankly charismatic politician. I just want to, can I put a couple of numbers, less than it sound like I'm fully talking out of my ass? Like when I'm talking about like above average candidate, below average candidate, I'm referring to work that friend of the pod Lacha Jane has done over at split ticket, looking at do candidates over or underperform a generic Democrat in any given race. And so you can look like who's the most underperforming. Democrat in America. It's Ilhan Omar. She underperforms the generic Democrat by about 13 percentage points. Then I think it's Pramela Jaya Paul and then Summer Lee or something like that. And then after

that it's Elizabeth Warren. And, you know, Elizabeth Warren, I think underperforms a generic Democrat by about 13 percentage points. All women and women of color, I will point out. Well, except for Elizabeth, well, I guess there's the debate about Elizabeth Warren. If you really want to react that one. I said women, comma, women, comma, and women of color. Just to point. Taking me back to what, November of 2020. But so, so to be clear, like, there's evidence backing this up. But like most, like, for example, if you look at AOC, she is a talented politician. She performs out about a generic Democrat level.

You can be to the left and you can make up for it with your political talents. But there is just some evidence of candidates like this underperforming. And so I think that is where some of the maybe anxiety within the Democratic Party comes from. And I just want to add one thing, which is to put a number to what you said, Nate, the average error in a governor or Senate primary, so a statewide primary, is 13 percentage points. 20 points is more than that. So, yes, it's still a larger than average error.

But you should not go into these affairs, thinking that the polls are going to get you within two or three points of the answer because they never have. Yeah, the margin of error is like literally, if you calculate it empirically, meaning based on how accurate polls actually are and not the sample size. it's like literally a 25 point margin of error. When you hear a primary poll, especially for a down-ballot race, a 25-point margin of error, you have to apply that in your head to get somewhere close to reality. Then why are, look, 25-point margin of error in races that are often decided by a couple of points.

Like, why not, look, let's just take that money and I don't know, like, let's do something fun with it. You know what I'm saying? Oh, Nate, I want to ask you one question because you wrote, you know, we've been talking about sort of, which candidates overperform, which candidates underperform. Now, there is this problem, right? Because even if candidates that are further to the left may do worse in a general election, the Democratic base is really dissatisfied with what centrist and center-left Democrats have been offering. There's a lot of anger and mistrust because if the bargain is, you get less than you want, but we win, and then we don't win, it doesn't really work. And so I think there's like two big

problems in there. And you wrote a piece about what your questions were for the sort of center left as you defined it. One is, what does it take to persuade people inside of a primary, right? But more broadly, what is it that the center left is offering that is not just, like Jerusalem Dempsoxos talks about this at the argument, right? Like, what is the center left that is not just incremental or cowardly leftist, right? Or like people that want part of the left agenda. Like, is there a way in which you could have a liberal politician who, in the way that Obama did, in the way that I think, you know, Bill Clinton did at the time, that can have a vision that is as big and clear and a worldview as defined as that of a Bernie Sanders, but that isn't

from the left? Well, look, liberalism is not the same thing as leftism. And in fact, it's liberalism that kind of was the dominant political philosophy of the late 20th century, pretty much. And liberalism, if you look at how it's defined in Europe, means, you know, you want more liberties, so you want free speech, you want free markets. You also are concerned, though, typically about institutions like rule of law. And liberalism is trying to solve the problem of like, okay, we want to give people freedom, basically, but we don't want to have total anarchy here. We're not libertarians, exactly. And so how do we mediate that?

Liberal societies often tend to be very rich as well. So you have the luxury maybe of letting people kind of have their cake and eat it two. Different strands of liberalism will we distribute more or less. But yeah, I wish American media discourse separate out those two things, right? To say I care a lot about like individual freedom. I care a lot about institutions. I, you know, and I think as an empirical matter that market-based solutions work better than central planning, like those are things that are fairly coherent and consistent across different strands of that.

But like, look, the average Democratic voter or the average media member is not going to care about abstract political philosophy so much. I think the establishment, I think the center left, right, the centrists or the center left liberals have kind of let themselves be defined with a democratic establishment when they shouldn't be. The notion that Kamala Harris was a centrist, I think, is ridiculous. You know, she is a, the Democratic Party, the mainline of the party is a progressive party. Maybe not leftists. I mean, kind of cross-theistic progressive. You kind of need, I mean, I think what you sort of need is, I mean, Obama, Obama was sort of classic where you need like a service policy, right? So he had, we're going to reform the health care system.

Elizabeth Warren, that I felt that that presidential primary was notable because Harris and Warren and Christian Gillibrand were all running and they were all talking about child care as an important economic issue. That felt like a real sea change. That's like a sort of service policy that you can have. So you need almost like, A, the rhetoric and aesthetics of a big tent liberal party. which is positivity, no sort of litmus tests. I mean, I think Bernie Sanders in 2017 went on this interesting tour where he was endorsing pro-life Democratic candidates. I can't remember what city it was.

Maybe in Nebraska, something like that. Yeah, and Bernie on guns. Yeah, like, from Vermont and things like that. So it's basically like we need positive rhetoric, a big tent, and like two big, splashy, bread and butter policies that help people, and then kind of these tertiary things of like, well, here's the social issue that you might care about if you're on the far left,

and that's something you're voting on. Yeah, it's interesting. My take on your question, John, you mentioned that, well, Democrats get less of what they want, but they win. To me, I think the exchange is a little bit different, which is we were in a place in 2024, where actually like Democrats didn't really want, or like Democrats and left leaners didn't really want like the immigration policies, for example, that Joe Biden was offering. And so what you,

what you really want to do is give them close to 100% of what they really, really, really want. Say that's like healthcare. Say it's a public option, something like that. And then you want to sort of break with your party on issues. where either Democrats don't really care or Republicans are on the right side of public opinion. So you say, for example, and this is where the vision comes in, I'm so left on health care.

You know, I want, you know, X, Y, and Z, whatever. Like, I'm Bernie Sanders, but better on health care. And guess what? Joe Biden, you do the James Tala rica on immigration. Guess what? Joe Biden completely fucked up on immigration. We need a secure border, and we don't think that people should, you know, the position of the Democratic Party from here on out

will be that, you know, one illegal border crossing is one illegal border crossing too many, and we take this issue seriously. And so the idea of like what Kamala Harris tried to do was like be in the middle on everything. That's what like Susan Collins tries to do is be in the middle on everything. And that is, I mean, that can be popular in some contexts. At this point, like I feel like those years are a little bit behind us. Right now, if you're going to feel authentic, if you're going to feel like you have a vision, right? You want to go left on one thing, unauthentically left on one thing, but go right on another.

and I mean, we're going to go back to Barack Obama. He was like, to the left of Hillary Clinton on the Iraq War, but then to the right of her on basically everything else. Bill Clinton, again, he was like to the left on health care, but then he was to the right on crime. And so these visionary Democrats that you've mentioned are not saying, hey, left, I'm going to give you everything you've ever wanted. They're saying, I'm going to give you the thing that you can't live without, but then I'm going to appeal to the rest of the country on the things where Democrats have shit the bed. Yeah, the thing I would add, though, it's like, right, like, that is a kind of whatever, mercenary way to look at the different sets of issues, right? But a great politician, both on the matter of being persuasive, but also I think great

in the sense of being driven by a genuine sort of set of ideological precepts, right? Like, there is a, there is a, you can make an ideologically coherent argument for believing in free markets, believing in Medicare for all, because you believe in decoupling health care from the job market because of your understanding of the way markets work and believing in having immigration that is sort of generous but also very well kind of controlled legally, right, like a generous legal regime, right? Like there is an ideological worldview that would be the kind of classic liberal worldview that could be made, that could piece these things together with a story that is kind of exciting to hyper-engaged people in part because it can be

both optimistic with, it can be sort of big and grand without assuming that the biggest and grandest answer will be coming from the far left. There just hasn't been a center left or a kind of liberal figure since Obama, who seems able to do that. Yeah, if you look at the polling going back to like the Iowa Democratic caucus in 2008, Obama won both among the most liberal voters and the most moderate voters. their moderates were convinced he was a postpartisan pragmatist, and because of Iraq and things, the liberals were convinced that he was a true, I should say, more left, progressive, right? A real progressive. Kamala Harris is a polar opposite of that.

Progressives think she's a centrist. Centrist thinks she's super woke and far left. And to some extent that just gets to like to raw political talent. I don't want to keep going back to Michigan. You know, I think El Coyed has a fair amount of like raw political talent. And yet. I do. Yeah. Well, it's rhetorical when you say, I don't want to keep bringing up this thing.

You're like Susan College. Exactly. You don't want to talk about Troy Jackson's second cousin. Who cares you slept with who's second cousin? Not me, Susan College. Rob Sand might be the... Rob San might be among the more talented. I think that's a great example because this is what he's doing.

He's running against both parties. And in an environment where the Democratic Party is not popular and the Republican Party is not popular, you want to put yourself above the partisan fray. And Rob San does that literally every campaign. He does something, Rob Sen does something that I see. He, first of all, like, those, that great interview with Jonathan Martin where he was just like, nope, nope, nope, great. But I saw him talking about education in an eye, in a sort of in a town hall or just a small sort of whatever political meetup of some kind.

And he basically was so straightforward. He said, look, I'll be dealing with the Republican legislature. These are the things I think can get done that I think would be helpful, right? There's a kind of like treating people as if they're smart and being pretty mad. being pretty direct that I think because it's a state race and not a national race, I think there's like some space for that, right, in part because you don't have to be as worried about kind of the traditional partisan dynamic and anything you're saying kind of kind of being dumped on your head from either the right or the left.

I was there, like I talked to him a couple weeks ago and went to a bunch of the town hall. Like I kind of did the like the journalist's day with Rob Sand when I was out there for other stuff for my book. And it's interesting. There's a couple things that I think, one, it's like he's been in the state for a long time doing these kind of, I guess, wonky. Like being a state auditor is a little wonky, right? And he wrote like the book about the big lottery scandal in Iowa. He kind of does the Iowa thing where it's like, I'm going to show up.

I go to all the town halls. And he is a little bit, he's kind of, like when he's on the stump, he's kind of doing the like, awes shuck. but then there's like a little acid thrown onto it. Like he'll like twist the knife a little bit, which is interesting. He's also a former runway model, so people like looking at him, right? Like there's also like the thing. This is the first thing Claire showed me when she got back from the trip. Oh, yeah.

Have you seen his old modeling photos from Milan? I don't think the Milan photos are really being, are a huge help in Cedar Rapids. No, but no, but what is. What is true is that he did go to, he went to the East Coast for college, but then in a way that I think like, you know, people with political ambitions do, like, and also he grew up in Iowa and wanted to go back there. But like, he went to Iowa for law school, right? He, like, stayed in the state. But when you actually hear him talk about issues, he often does skirt. Like, I went to a town hall where a candidate, a voter kind of, like, kind of laid out this, like, question for him to take a big smack at, like,

big ag. And he didn't, right? Big agriculture business in Iowa. And he didn't, right? Which I was like, oh, that's an interesting thing that just happened here because he is dealing with a, you know, a state with vested business interests and also, again, a Republican legislature. But he was like, I texted a couple of people and was like, this is like a very notable political talent. In the same way that like my former classmate,

John Alsoff, is really good on camera and a very sort of poised presence. And those are, there are people who are, I don't know what John is like on the stump, right? John were going by. We're going by John. No. But like, I don't know if he's good on the stump, but he's very good, like, in the way that AOC is very good sort of being the sort of big communicator via video, which is incredibly important in this age and like Obama, you know, like Obama. And that we haven't had in quite some time.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. While we're big fans of BetterHelp, the real story is the feedback from people using it every single day. That is the real story. That's the real story. The media won't tell you about it. BetterHelp has an average live therapy session rating of 4.9 out of 5 based in over 1.7 million client session reviews. The feedback from real people who have actually used a service speaks for itself. More than 6 million people have used BetterHelp globally. BetterHelp therapists have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands-on experience. They'll hold all required education, training, and certifications across a range of mental health specialties,

meaning the perfect therapist for you could be a few clicks away. BetterHelp makes it easy to get started. Answer a few questions, get matched with a therapist based on your needs, and switch therapists at any time if it's not the right fit. therapy it's so important so important i gotta get back into therapy oh wow yeah what are you doing what i'm doing love to leave it i was talking about i was talking about the intrusive thoughts i have just from the walk from backstage onto the stage and it horrified the crowd yeah that's a perfect reason to go to therapy i don't that's a that's the better place for that john do you ever

maybe you can get better help if i'm on the street all right and like i will see like let's say there'll be a commotion or people arguing about a traffic spot or something, you know, just see something. I not only imagine them fighting and then a crime and then a death and then a trial, I am standing on the street. I am a, I am testifying at that trial. Wow. Like that's fully the full story unfolds in a second of two people just being mad in a parking lot. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a mental, that's, that's something I should get talked to somebody about. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about the news. Yeah.

For you, it's the news. Visit betterhelp.com slash PSA. That's betterhelp.com slash PSA. Now, we do, I could keep talking to the three of you, but I do want to just close with some very quick, and as I promise, quite pedantic questions about modeling. I'm going to bring the model up on my laptop. These are, these are, all right, I'm going to go. You can take these.

I'm going to try to get through a few of these. all right, in your deluxe model, there are, let's say, three kinds of data, polling, fundamentals, and ratings by expert. Presumably the fundamentals. Incumbency, say economic conditions, fundraising, whatever you're incorporating are in some way reflected in the polling. And then the ratings by experts are also reflective of the polling. So I just want to understand qualitatively, what does it mean to include data that is dependent on the other data? For example, does the fundraising data slowly recede because of the, the fundraising advantage would predict a change in polling as the election gets closer,

or does the fundraising data continue to matter as you get closer to the election day, even though presumably that would have to be accounted for in the polls if it does matter. So, we've lost it. This is the part where Claire and I pull out. I'm so sorry. I just start doing shots at the table. You guys, listen, I'm sorry.

Is this okay? I really have, these are things that have annoyed me for a long time, okay? Can I just, can I do that? Please do. Okay, I'm sorry. Answer number one. polling gets more important as you get closer to the election. It's more accurate.

You get more of it. So it becomes more of a polls mostly model by election day. Number two, the reason we look at fundraising is because it's a measure of grassroots support. And one of the few things you have that isn't a poll that is actively data collected within that election that shows people movement or people power. So we only look at money raised from individual contributions, not pack money. we actually put a big multiplier within state contributions because those are much more likely

to reflect how voters in that state feel. So, like, I think... And how do you decide what that multiplier is? Like how... Empirically? Yeah. Empirically, what could that possibly mean? That could...

What the fuck does it mean to empirically weigh the value of a grassroots donation? Come on. John, do you know that they went to the University of Chicago? He does... Oh, yeah. Listen, I... I feel like we've been learned here on our...

false pretenses. This is what this is really about. I want you to know, Nate. I almost went to the University of Chicago Law School, and I spent two days at that place. And after that experience, which felt like six years, I did not enroll. Go away. So, so, but seriously, how do you purically know? If you draw, draw a scatter plot. We have lots of data for Congress. That's one nice thing. We have data on every congressional is going back to 1990s, so thousands of races. Draw a scatter plot of fundraising versus the outcome using all fundraising data. Then draw one using only in-state fundraising data, and the in-state is a tighter fit, because that reflects, like, how much money you have to spend in a Senate race? Like, Taller...

But that's not my question. But that's not my question. I agree that in-state fundraising is more valuable than out-of-state fundraising. I am asking, how can you possibly decide what the multiple is of the in-state fundraising? Because whatever you're doing, you are weighting the value of the fundraising in-total. So the weight that you're applying to the in-state fundraising in some way determines the entire, the impact it has on the overall model. And I'm saying, how do you decide empirically how to wait that information? Through the magic of multivariate regression analysis. Yeah.

Because we have a lot of data, you can take a bunch of factors that, you know, in Michigan, El-Sayyad's raised a lot of money, by the way. It's another factor. On the other hand, El-Sayyad is very progressive. If you have thousands of races, we can compare those two things. You can disaggregate and say which factor is more important over the long run. Just like with kind of the same thing as like the money ball type. analysis where you can say we have hundreds of baseball players. We can say what contributes to winning.

Is it batting average or OBP or home runs or pitching or whatever else? It's the magic of big day. You look skeptical. No, I'm not skeptical. Some of this is skepticism. Some of this is genuine curiosity. I'm not really sure what the balance is. We'll have to run a bunch of simulations to figure out what the answer is there. But I guess because part of it right is then, so you use that scotterplot to determine the influence of the of the fundraising, right? But a lot of that data is then also going to be in the model in other ways as well, right? Like you're going to take that outcome data that has determined the value of the fundraising, it's going to go in the model in another place. And I guess when you're running 40,000 simulations, okay, how smart are those

simulations? Do those simulations inside of each simulation, is there an understanding that the quote unquote random? I'm not using that word. I'm saying the, the, the, the, a randomized sample that is taking place inside of those 40,000? Is that a smart randomization that understands the ways in which various data is dependent? It's a super fucking smart randomization, John. I'll tell you that much. No, there were a lot of models in 2016, like famously, like the Princeton Election Consortium model had Trump with only a 1% chance of winning.

The New York Times model had them at 10% or something. Our model at 538 had him at 30%. instead of 29%. And the reason why is because our simulation architecture was better. Because errors in the polls are correlated. Okay. So the correlation of the errors is accounted for in the random sampling that takes place when you're running the 40,000 samples.

And we can do fancy stuff, right? We can say, one simulation will test. What happens if Democrats really overperform among the Hispanic vote, right? That has a big impact in Texas and Florida, maybe not, much in Michigan, for example, or what happens if Republicans have low turnout, but Democrats win the persuasion battle and things like that. So, yeah, we're actually, we have microdata on every congressional district and how they're related. And then how do you make sure that in your random sampling, in which inside of those random samplings, there's an understanding

of the relationship between the data, that you are then randomly sampling what the correlation could be when you're running those random samples. Do you know what I'm saying? Because I'm really good at this, and I've done this kind of thing for a long time. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard.

But this is what I'm trying to understand. Like, I'm sorry, I'm like putting on a, I very rarely get to sort of like, you know, math out to this degree. You have to have a lot of knowledge of the system. So one very important thing about politics, most important thing in some ways. Since the 1990s, we've had more and more polarization.

Oh, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is my fault. Is what's happening here basically, like, you know, when you go to your doctor and, like, they're really smart. But at the end of the day, the doctor, being a doctor is an art as much as a science? Is that what you're trying to say here that it's as much of an art as it is a science? Or am I... Well, first of all, when you make predictions every year, you get a lot of feedback, right? You can say, where'd my model fuck up and where, you know, and you're being accountable.

We're putting this out there for a little price of... Do you ever take the model and go back and run it on a previous election? in real time to see how it would have done? I mean, inherently, you're using past data to guide the parametization of the model. But you have to be careful because, like, we have these things that are called overfitting in statistics where you can be overly literal. Oh, a candidate whose name starts with C and ends with N and as a woman, right, they always lose general election, right?

So you don't want to nominate anybody with last name C if they're a woman kind of thing, right? You have to look at, this is why you actually have to know something about politics. You know, we can't use the same model that we would have when we first had a congressional forecast in 2010 because the climate is much more partisan. Things like candidate quality, things like incumbency matter much less than they once did. And you can observe that in the data, but also you can observe it by being a smart person who understands American politics. Right, but that's where I sort of, this is where I struggle to, I like have like a philosophical. I struggle. I'm not saying in a pejorative way. I genuinely struggle to understand what qualitatively a model is, given that every election is unique and only run once and that the polling on which you base it is both kind of you're trying in the data to account for both the unknowable, unknowables of what will happen and the unknowable knowables of what people think at this exact moment. And it's hard to, and I don't know if the model knows the difference. What I think people miss is that unpredictability, is predictable that people should know.

Wow. Hey, man. People should know that in a gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, where literally three candidates dropped out within the final month of the race, you don't have any fucking clue where the race is at based on a bunch of shitty internet polling by college kids, right? That's predictable. We don't forecast congressional primaries because the model would have these margins of errors of 25 or, or 30 points.

It's predictable that in midterms, the error used to be a little bit higher than in presidential elections, although it's actually reversed, reversed lately to some degree. If you don't have a lot of polling in a race, if you have contradictory data, you should be less confident about those forecasts.

But look, a model is, in a literal sense, it's a computer program. It's a computer program designed by me. Yeah, right? Did you get that, John? Yeah. It's a structured way of thinking, right? It's saying, okay, here's all the,

a shit I know about American politics. And here's all the data I have, and we have lots of data in politics. If I'm looking at the model, am I really looking at you? Is the model but merely a mirror? Claire and Galen, I'm so sorry. I would like... No, it's fine. He's not telling you some things, I'm sure, because it's IP protected. Oh, that's what... Because I would love to, I really am, like, we have these 10,000 word methodology sections. I want to get... So, Claire and Galen, now, I had pitched a name for this show, and the name was Alpha Dogs. And nobody but me liked this name. And I just want to understand what...

It's too male. But it's too male. It's too male. It reads male. Even though I do believe I am an alpha. Alpha. It is too male. I didn't even realize that this was one of your pitches.

The main pitch that I don't even know that it had your name by it, but that I assumed was from you was show pole. No, in fact, it wasn't. But thank you so much. I think showpole would have been a great name for this. I put my initials by that. By then, I was like, I can live with that. But perhaps, Claire, two male.

Two male. Two male. Thank you to all three of you for taking the time to talk today. We're so excited about still counting. Everybody, please go subscribe. Nate, thank you for indulging me on this. I am, I am, like, have, I really am interested in, like the, sometimes I actually think my problem is just really that I worry that,

and this is what I've worried about, certainly in 2016, was that people, they're not as responsible with what the model means is what you're responsible. They don't take what you're saying about it. They just take the number. But I am just sort of interested in the sort of what it means to be modeling an election and the difference between like sort of prediction and sort of whether a model is predicting the future or trying to predict the present, you know.

but for another day, I think, for another day. And so everybody, subscribe to Still Counting right now. Right now, Gailen, Claire. We agree. We agree. Come join us. The pool, the weather, the water is warm. We have lots more data and hot takes than folks heard today.

That's for sure. We didn't even get to Kalshi. I wanted to talk to you about Kalshi. I'm afraid to start making bets because I think it's going to be a problem for me because I, you know, I got... Don't get George Santos. I've got the devil. I've got the devil in me.

Should we start a crooked in-house, like, fantasy league? How often will Nate swear on fake money on Calci on policy? Because obviously we don't bet on politics for like a sense of propriety or whatever. Because of NCAA rules. Because of NCAA rules. But we could start a fantasy league where we do bet on politics. Rejected. We can see who wins.

Thank you all so much. And we'll see you soon. Thanks, John. Thank you to Gail and Nate and Claire for joining. You can subscribe to Still Counting. The first new episode is going to be up on September 9th. And we at POTS America will be back in your feeds after the holiday. And we'll see you then.

Podsave America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari, with Reed Jirlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Heffcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.