Strict Scrutiny - Still Counting: Trump vs. The BLUE WAVE: A Midterm Extravaganza

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and Galen Druke discuss the most competitive Senate races heading into the midterms in this excerpt from their new podcast, Still Counting. To hear the rest, head over to Still Counting and subscribe! New episodes drop every Wednesday evening.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

Hey, Stricties, it's Melissa. We wanted to share with you an excerpt from a new series that we are so excited about here at Crooked Media. It's from the folks who brought you the 538 podcast, and it's called Still Counting. Nate Silver, Claire Malone, and Gayland-Druke have spent their careers breaking down political data, honing their expertise in the numbers behind the numbers, election results, demographic changes, historical trends, and the polls. And on their new show, still counting, they are going to cover even more. from politics to prediction markets to AI and even sports. Yes, sports. You can listen, Justice Kavanaugh.

You'll get rigorous analysis, a few hot takes, but no spin or false sense of certainty. Just the numbers and what they tell us about this moment delivered fresh each Wednesday evening. We are so excited to share this with all of you. So without further ado, here's a sneak peek of still counting. I think I'm just like a little bit nervous. That's why I'm feeling. I know. I know.

It feels weird. It feels weird. Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gaylon Druk. I'm Claire Malone. And I'm Nate Silver. And we're talking too fast because it's the first episode and we're a little nervous. I also read my name. I was like, I'm Claire Malone.

And this is our first official episode. Yes, we did a freed warmer. Yes, we talked to Pod Save America. But this is it, folks. From now on, on Wednesday evening, you're going to get a Still Counting podcast episode in your feed. And so first I'll say this is what we're going to do on today's podcast. We're going to do a midterms extravaganza. We're even going to kind of play a game.

We're also going to talk about sort of the past year plus in Republican voter sentiment. It's been a pretty topsy-turvy year for the Trump coalition. We're going to talk about the convention and all that does, the anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death. Before we get into everything that we have to cover today, though, we should say, welcome back, everybody. Yeah. To our past listeners. spread the word. Welcome to the new people.

Hopefully if you have no idea who we are really, welcome to still counting. Well, actually, Claire, who are we? Who are we? I'm Claire Malone for the script says. We all worked together at a data site called 538, and I was hired by Nate to be like the normal magazine reporter. To be normal.

I was hired by Nate to be normal, period. I was hired by Need to be normal, to be like a magazine reporter person. And then my, I'm sort of a traditional reporter. I am a writer at The New Yorker. I cover media and politics there. And I am currently on book leave for the year, actually going back in like six months. And I'm writing a book about the Maha movement.

That's who I am. Nate, who are you? I'm Claire Malone. I'm supposed to say to a script. Yeah. So my trajectory into journalism, if that's what you want to call it, is highly non-traditional. Before I ever got into journalism, I was an online poker player. I was building baseball models.

Basically, 2008 comes along. I'm living in Chicago. This campus hipster, as I thought of him named Barack Obama, decides to run for president. It was a very exciting time in politics and also a time when there had been in baseball and in sports. A lot of talk about analytics. This was a kind of money ball revolution, so to speak. I was getting a little burned out with the baseball stuff. the poker was not going super well, to be honest.

And so started trying to build a forecasting model first for the Democratic primary in 2008 and then general election. And it just kind of improbably took off. But yeah, you know, I try to look at the world. I sometimes do reporting. But I'm looking at this through a list. He's written two books? I've written two. For the books, I do actually do real reporting.

Which for the most recent book involved hangout in Las Vegas playing poker for a year. I spent a lot of time in Vegas. It was a nice excuse. It was a nice excuse. Silicon Valley, Miami. But I don't do a lot of insider gossip with, oh, what's the scoop about the internal polls in New Hampshire? Like, I think that is actually a waste of time. You're being spun a lot of the time. I think the goal of a model, we talked about this on the Pod Save trailer, it's to force yourself to be more rigorous in analyzing the news.

And explaining how you view the world. And now, and Nate had a, he started five-thier date, which was at the New York Times, then it moved to ESPN, then they closed it, yada, yada, yada. Now he has a wonderfully silver bulletin, which said natesilver.net. But like, look, we got flippers model. We got L.A. NFL model. Okay. I will do a briefer, who am I?

I was hired by Nate at 538. Not in the less weirdness initiative. I'll tell you that much. I was hired to be a podcast, Twink, at 538. We were hired at a. about the same time. Yes, we were. You came from Wisconsin.

I came from straight from Wisconsin Public Radio, which at the time I could not have imagined how good of an education Wisconsin would have given me for what was to come in American politics. My ears just fell out. Things are going incredibly well. Anyway, I stuck around 538 for about a decade where I did basically a combination of field reporting analysis, looking at the data, did things like. the gerrymandering project and once 538 shut down, I started GD Politics, which is a podcast

that I host on Mondays and Thursdays talking to a bunch of people who are journalists, authors, sometimes politicians, pollsters who look at data and try to make sense of it all. I'm going to try to take some of that knowledge that I get from all the people I talk to and bring it to folks here as well. But anyway, enough of that, enough throat clearing. Let's dive into what's on hand today. But first, let me just say, dear listeners, and for our YouTube audience, I'm looking straight to camera for this one.

Previous listeners, new listeners alike, spread the word. Subscribe on YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, rate and review us. Like, I don't know exactly how the algorithm works. That's Nate's job. But apparently on Apple, on Apple podcast, the more you rate and review us, the higher up we go and the more people see us and then we'll maybe get introduced to the podcast. Basically, we're out here trying to rebuild an audience.

and it's like a political campaign, it's going to take all of us. Yes. Okay. Claire and I would never do that, right? That's why you're a good hire. We're like, do our,

do our, do our, never do our deal and so. The podcast, podcast twunk now. Okay. We are officially post- Labor Day.

I almost, we're officially, I almost wore a white suit coat this morning, which first of all, wouldn't have looked. Claire. Would have popped on that. You're a Condé Nast employee.

You must not be wearing right after Labor Day. It's an old school rule. So yes, we are post Labor Day, is officially when we stop wearing white, when we go back to school, it is also, historically, when people begin to tune into the election cycle in our highly polarized and partisan and engaged environment. I think people pay attention a little bit sooner than that. But nonetheless,

we are going to use that as an opportunity to dive into the midterm. So right now, Nate, your model named Flipper suggests that Democrats have an 83% chance of winning the House. And the Senate forecast is split exactly 50-50. I mean, did you design the forecast that way to build suspense at the start of election season? I'm kidding. So when you first launched the Senate favored Democrats. Slightly. Slightly.

Not overwhelmingly, but I think it peaked at about 58% less than a month ago in terms of Democrats' likelihood of taking the Senate. What has happened between then and now? So a couple of things that have happened. Number one, people get really sensitive about like 50 versus 55 versus 57. It's not a big deal. It's like in an NBA game, it's like one point being scored or two points being scored. You take it from Knicks ahead by a point to the Raptors ahead by a point or whatever else. So when you're near 50-50, small moves affect the probability as a fair bit.

That's getting a little technical. There are a couple of things that have happened. One is that we've started to get more polls among likely voters and not just registered voters. And that matters because turnout is relatively low in midterms, higher than it used to be. But as our model's been adjusting to those, earlier in the cycle, it felt like there was a bigger, didn't feel like. I guess, I don't know if it has feelings. I guess we use AI, right? Maybe it's not anthropomorphizing models, Nate.

I used to be an anti-anthropomorphizer, and now just you say, oh, the model thinks. Anyway, as we've gotten more generic ballot polls among likely voters, they don't show quite as much of an enthusiasm gap. I mean, I'm being too technical. Now I'm just, by the way, to interject, now I'm just thinking about whether or not you think the model could ever kill you. Per discussions on Twitter about AI. I switched from Claude to ChachyPT in the middle of the flipper.

Because it was trying to kill you? The Claude opuses were kind of weird, right? They would be quite stubborn and lazy. What is it Claude Opus? I don't use. We have the full range of AI use here, which is like Nate has at least 12 AI employees. I use AI regularly, but like don't make it code for me.

I'm literally spent, you don't use AI. I do not use AI. I don't know what an opus is. But here's the summary version, right? As we get closer to the election, I think you see like a little bit of a rebound in Republican enthusiasm. It's having a marginal effect on the numbers and some of these kind of less polled races and the generic ballot. Look, Trump's approval rating is 38% or so. His disapproval rating is 58, 59%.

He's not very popular, but Democrats aren't that popular either. So I think you might be seeing just the slightest bit of reversion to the mean. But there's lots of layers in Flipper. There are expert forecasts. You know, is New Hampshire now a state that's in play? How realistically do we take Tala Rico's? You know, the model says Tala Rico is a slight favorite in Texas. Do we buy that or not?

We're going to get into actually all of these states. And we're even going to get into Trump's popularity and his coalition and whatnot. But first we're going to play a little game. I mean, not first. We're going to play a little game in order to talk about all of these states. But it's educational. But it's educational. We're not.

A little game, which is we're going to. draw the most competitive Senate races out of a hat and that's most competitive according to the polling averages and that means that we don't know the order that we're going to talk about them in it's the state of the race in Gameofide

Yes exactly and I will say I have a GD politics hat here which is only because you're a shameless shill because I'm a shameless shill and also because we don't have still counting merch yet but I hear it's coming I hope it's coming I think it's coming I think it's, you know, we got to, Nate, you got to stop advertise. I mean, we all love the Knicks.

We live in New York City, but you've got to stop advertising the Nix for free on this podcast. We're getting silver bulletin hats. By the way, I'm happy to advertise the Nix, you know, as long as Dolan doesn't kick me out of. Okay. Claire, you are first. Okay. So pick a race out of the house. Wait, by the way, last night in preparation for talking about all of the Senate races,

I think I watched ads for every single Senate candidate or most of them, just to kind of get a flavor. I was like, I want to see, like, what's? And did it make you feel more optimistic? or more pessimistic about American politics? Well, I have to say it was quite pessimistic. Like, that was after watching, like, you know, kind of close at, like, 40 minutes of just, like, you know. Dun, don't, don't, like. It's, well, none of these people have ever been to Washington, D.C.

It was basically all about, like, how much beef costs and isn't it terrible and insurance companies. And that was both parties. It was like, yeah, it was quite striking how bleak it was. Anyhow. Okay. I picked North Carolina, which is a bad pick. It's definitely a bad pick. It's a bad pick because we're pretty sure that the Democrat,

Roy Cooper, is going to win in his race against Republican Michael Watley. Roy Cooper. And that win probability, according to Flipper, trademark Nate Silver. It's pronounced with the dolphin. It's like Flipper. It's the official. How did you name it? We've already had a problem with furries and the 538 politics podcast brand.

We really don't need to give them any fodder. How did you name it, Flipper? Ours are good because like ours for regression or like, we don't know. Okay. But Flipper gives the Democratic win probability at 86.9 percentage points. Let's put it like that. It's not a sure thing that Cooper wins in North Carolina. But it would be embarrassing if he doesn't.

Democrats are fucked anyway. That means the polls are probably. probably weigh off again. They need four seats. By the way, Gailen, you're saying, well, 50, 50, is that just a cop out? It's kind of a coincidence because, like, we think it's going to be, and everyone thinks it's going to be a very democratic year, but they have to win four seats, two of which are in quite red states. North Carolina is not a quite red state, it's a slightly red state. Like we have in your, your hand running's actually better than that thought, Galen. This is Saul. This is Saul. This is Saul. We're introducing producer Saul, who has in dates,

reading pretty good handwriting. And I would agree with that. That's the only job that might survive the AI apocalypse is like good handwriting. It's rare. What you were going to say is that Trump won North Carolina by three points in 2024, which is a slightly red state. And Harris only, he only won the whole thing by one and a half point, right? So North Carolina actually moved toward the tipping point. It was one of the few positives out of Kamala Harris's night in November 2024 was that North Carolina actually became more purple. And Cooper's a strong candidate. He's the former governor.

If he weren't to win, then it means the polls way out. We're way off again. Right. Yeah. I mean, in terms of overall trends to look at, I think an interesting one here is that we've all been talking about the anti-establishment sentiment amongst the electorate this go-round. Roy Cooper is like a two-term governor. He has...

Good candidate, like well-known in the state. But he is, I mean, he's not really the establishment because he's running against the Democratic party in part. And he's like, you know, I don't belong to anybody. I'm my own man. He's very much been a future of state politics and not national politics. And so I think the benefit of being a governor suggest that he is a good candidate to run in North Carolina. But he's not running, you know, the Republican Michael Watley is not really a populist outsider who can say the establishment has sort of taken the country in the wrong direction, whatever. He's like the former chair of the Republican party in North Carolina. So I think whereas maybe being so entrenched in politics could have been

a vulnerability, the contours of this race are not going to let us see that. Great. So takeaway is panic at the disco for Democrats if Roy Cooper loses. Nate, next race that you're picking out of the hat. Okay. Second pick. Of course. Is this right? Michigan. Michigan. Dramatic pick. Abdul El-Sayed leads by roughly two points in the Silver Bulletin polling average. It does not include, by the way, a new Glengariff poll. I don't think that came out last night after a publication deadline that might cut it down to one or one and a half. Look, we've talked a lot about Michigan. If you haven't listened to any of the previous episodes.

We were on Pod Save America talking about the Michigan race. The basically of the land is something like this. Michigan is about as purple as it gets. It almost exactly follows the national trend. The national trend this year is around D plus seven, meaning in the average state, if you count up all the votes for all 435 House races, you'd expect Democrats to win by about seven. Michigan, therefore, is also about a plus seven. The question is, can El-Sayed be a, quote-unquote, bad enough candidate? I'll explain what I mean by that, right?

Or Mike Rogers is a, quote-unquote, good enough candidate to overcome that seven-point spread. Now the different ways to define bad candidate when a certain type of election nerd like me means that it just means they're likely to underperform the baseline. It doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean that I don't like their ideas. They're not charismatic. And there's a lot of research that I think people are in some degree of denial about that says in general, more moderate candidates, how you define moderation is complicated, tend to overperform. And moderation, we should say, just complicated to define it, can often be effective. by gender, race, things like that.

Absolutely. It's interesting, by the way, that El Sayyad is kind of like playing in to this kind of almost like fuckboy image, right? It's like, oh, yeah, like women are like, you know, it's like he's not like. I think it's more like he lifts, right? He lifts. He lifts. So he's raised a lot of money.

He inspires a lot of young voters. He also turns off a lot of voters. And so, so, but, you know, here's the thing. Even if you believe, and we do, that moderation, hard to define. probably helps. We also understand that polarization is driving everything. And actually voters are pretty smart, right? Boaters might say, I understand that Mike Rogers might come across as moderate, but empirically,

he's going to vote with Trump the large majority of the time. And El Salleahe, we're probably vote with Democrats a large majority of the time. And we're kind of moving into a parliamentary system where the candidates matter less. So in a model, you might say, okay, there's like a three or four point penalty here. Seven point cushion is enough to cover it. In the polls, there's for now a little bit more of a penalty. It's closer to a toss up, maybe El Saya by one point than plus seven. And by the way, in my tour of candidate ads last night, I mean, I actually think the way that El Siyadh is kind of trying to present himself to general election voters is not moderating on the issues, right, which is, I think, kind of, you know, key for his campaign, right?

He's running a real, like, true believers, Medicare for all plan in some ways. he's not actually a Democratic socialist, but I think he's sort of running the Elizabeth Warren playbook where it's like, I'm a progress. No, hold on. Wait, let me finish my thought, which is like, I'm a progressive, but like, don't worry, I'm not here to tear down capitalism. Like, that was her thing. And I, but I think where he is, where you see him trying to, quote unquote, moderate is on that perception of him as an extremist, right? So, like, he has a lot of stuff about, like, he has the ad with his grandparents. He has the ad about, like, I grew up playing football in Michigan.

And like I feel obligated as Ohio and to say muck fish again. But like that stuff. Was that one planned? Was that one planned? It wasn't. It just came to me. It just came to. But that's where he's trying to moderate on is the perception, right?

Like of him as the like scary foreigner. Right. Which by the way, Mike Rogers is playing into by like saying his saying like Abdul Rahman. And, you know, so there's interesting dynamics about what we mean as a moderate candidate there. I'll say as somebody who got some blowback from in the comments after we were on. Never read the comments, man. Because I had described El-Said as a below-a-a-a-verage candidate, were liable to perform below where a quote-unquote generic Democrat is.

I was really talking about the numbers and the perception of El-Said as an extreme candidate. And I think, like, people interpreted that all to be about Israel, because that's kind of where a lot of the comments are sort of, I guess. in the left space online. But I really don't actually think as much as that has been a sort of knock down, drag out fight for the Democratic Party,

what is going to decide this race? I think the most important thing like my takeaway for the Michigan race is that it is a very high profile test for progressives, for the activist left. You said he hasn't moderated that much. I will say on issues like, and I think issues like

defund the police, abolish ICE, Medicare for all, those kinds of things will actually motivate voters more than the Israel question. Because those are the, for example, healthcare, safety, cost of goods, corruption. Those are the kinds of things that are motivating voters in this election. I mean, I looked through all of the polling and really like the Israel-Palestine question, as much as it may motivate activists for the broad sort of base of American voters, it is not ranking up there. It's really, again, inflation, sort of incompetence in government and corruption, then the economy more broadly. Data centers, flock cameras. Like, these are local issues that are actually-

Like the war in Iran. When you ask people, like, what's very important to you? 50% of voters say the war in Iran. Twenty-two percent of voters say the Israel-Gaise issues. So I think, I just want to say here that like when people, when this battle plays out sort of in the general election in Michigan for Senate, I think that the test is going to be. So he has pivoted away from defund the police. He has not pivoted away from abolish ICE. He's pivoted a little on health care. He wrote a book with the sort of prologue written by Bernie Sanders about Medicare for all. He said, you know, I don't want to, now he said, I don't want to abolish private insurance. Those things can coexist, et cetera. And so I think that this is going to be viewed

as a test for whether the left can perform in a battleground state ahead of what's going to be also a knock down, dragout fight in the 2028 Democratic primaries. Look at we. We got the most boring and the most controversial in the first two picks. He is a former podcaster. Yeah. Wait, at corporate media, right? A recovering podcaster, that might be too much to overcome, I think.

Well, wait, this is amazing because polling groups have asked Americans what are the most attractive and least attractive traits for a candidate, you know, these kind of strategy groups. Can you guess what one of the least attractive traits for a candidate is? is. Well, now I know. Podcasts. We can never run. And, well, Socialist was also one of them. He said, again, he is not DSA, although he sort of is seen oftentimes with AOC and Bernie

Sanders and people who align with the, the, the case. It's like a sake. You can't pull your own sake. Here, I'll hold it for you. Okay. All right. Thank you. What is that?

That's some rich fish stuff he just said. Okay. I got Iowa, which. is Josh Stark, the Democrat, versus Ashley Hinson, currently in the... That was an excerpt from the first episode of Still Counting. Thanks for listening. To hear the rest, head over to Still Counting wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Or watch us on YouTube at Still Counting Podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday evening. Don't miss them.

I'm Nate Silver. I'm Gaylon Druk. And I'm Claire Malone. We're back. This time with our friends at Crooked Media, for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah. Numbers are hard, takes her easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually say?

How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world? And how do we use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Stillcounting on YouTube.com slash at Stillcounting podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts.