Today, Explained - Everything you need to know about tomorrow’s midterms

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the midterm elections are tomorrow. A pair of Vox’s congressional reporters take a tour of key races before Ezra Klein takes a deep breath and talks stakes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today's show comes from Quip, a better electric toothbrush. With Quip, you can get brush heads delivered to your door every three months for just $5. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25. If you go to getquip.com slash explained, those refills I just mentioned, the first pack of them is free with a purchase of your Quip electric toothbrush. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Tara Golshan and Ellen Nilsen, you two have been covering these midterm elections and Congress for Vox this entire year. And it's finally here.

The election's tomorrow. Let's go through everything we can expect, starting with the Senate, where I'm told, Tara, that the Republicans are looking like they might hold on to it. Yeah, so the Republicans are really on the offensive in the Senate. There are 35 seats up for reelection and 26 of them are held by Democrats. And of that 26, 10 of those are Democrats who hold seats in red states, like states that Trump won in 2016. So there's a lot of ground that Democrats have to defend here. And which races are the most contested and up for grabs? So there's the race in Missouri, for example, for Senator Claire McCaskill. She is running against Josh Hawley, who's the attorney general in the state.

She's always kind of gotten lucky in the past. She had kind of Republican candidates running against her that made huge gaffes or were problematic candidates. And this year, Josh Hawley is a really kind of clean Republican candidate. So Republicans think that they have a good chance to knock her out. In Florida, there is Senator Bill Nelson, and he is running against Rick Scott, the governor of Florida. And that's kind of been up and down in the polls a lot as well. And then in Indiana, for example, Joe Donnelly, one of those pro-life Democrats, is running against Mike Braun, who's this outsider business type. And he's also been doing pretty well in the polls. So it's everything is really a toss up.

People are neck and neck. Elle, where are Democrats most focusing their attention right now? So there are a number of states beyond the ones that they're just sort of trying to desperately hold on to in red states. There are a few potential still long shot, but potential pickup opportunities. Obviously, Democrats across the country are very excited about the prospect of a Democrat, Beto O'Rourke, winning in Texas. He has kind of stirred up a lot of progressive energy nationwide by very much running to the Democratic base rather than sort of the middle. And while that's exciting people nationwide, it could potentially not bode well for his campaign because Texas is a very conservative state, and he likely won't be

able to win without picking up a share of moderates. And then in Tennessee, Democrat Phil Bredesen, a former governor, is running against Marsha Blackburn. He's running very much to the middle, very much a moderate candidate, not really trying to make waves. It's also worth noting that the two kind of biggest pickup opportunities for Democrats are on the West Coast in Nevada and Arizona. And Nevada is there's a really vulnerable Republican Senator Dean Heller who's running against another one of those kind of boring Democrats, Jackie Rosen. And and that is one of the biggest opportunities for Democrats this year. And then in Arizona, they have to fill Jeff Flake's seat because he's retiring. And so it's an open race where Democrats think that they've made more ground in the state. So Kyrsten Sinema is the Democrat running there. And she's running against Martha McSally, who's this Republican. She's like an army background. She's kind of like the perfect Republican candidate. And we've seen Kyrsten Sinema kind of have a lot of controversy as a Democrat. So it's going to be, I think, a bit of a tough race for Democrats, but still one of their biggest chances. So things are looking less

good for the Republicans in the House, right? Shifting to the House. Yeah, things are looking bad for Republicans in the House. Republicans are basically on the defensive in the House, whereas Democrats are on the defensive in the Senate. And Democrats have widened the battleground a ton. And we have to sort of put this in perspective because usually the party that's in power does worse in the midterms. That's just kind of a consistent historical trend. But this year, it's kind of magnified because we have a very unpopular Republican president and Donald Trump who is spurring enthusiasm and turnout. You know, all these people that were kind of devastated after 2016 and said, what can I do to change something, decided to run for office.

And a lot of these candidates are women. Females from both parties are running in huge numbers. Record numbers of women are donating and record number of women are turning out. And we should note that this is already being called the year of the woman. Over 230 female candidates running for the House, more for the Senate and governorships. But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of Republicans retiring. But beyond that, there are just a lot of endangered Republican incumbents

in the House. And I think it's important to say that the magic number here is 24. Democrats need to win 24 seats to take back the House. Obviously, their battleground is upwards of 100 seats, so there's a lot of ground for them. But if they don't get 24, then no dice. So with these races being much more contested than they may have been previously, are there entire states that might turn a little more purple? Yeah, I mean, there are states like Pennsylvania, for example, where Trump obviously won Pennsylvania in 2016. And that was part of the reason that he was elected. But they also had to redraw their congressional maps. And it was previously very gerrymandered

towards Republicans and now is more middle of the ground. And you can really see an opportunity for Democrats there where they could change the tide of the congressional delegation altogether. I would just add that some of these states have always been purple, but it's just because there's this kind of structural disadvantage for Democrats and in states like Pennsylvania was gerrymandered pretty badly. North Carolina is egregiously gerrymandered, you know, Wisconsin, Ohio. So these states have always been purple, but I feel like we kind of think of them maybe more as red states because of the structural disadvantages that Democrats have. Well, speaking of gerrymandering, governorships are really important for redrawing district lines. Ella, how many of those are on the table this time around? There are 36 gubernatorial elections in 2018. And many of those are important for Democrats for many different reasons. But there are seven key governor's races that could really have an impact on Democrats having a say on gerrymandering. So the reason that governors are really important

in this is because if you look at a map of state legislatures across the country right now, it's like staring at a sea of red. Republicans control two-thirds of the state legislatures across the country. And so in many cases, those are the people that decide what congressional districts are going to look like. And the reason that governors are important in this is because, again, in some states, not all, the governors can veto the congressional maps if they don't like it. And then, you know, it might go to the state Supreme Court or some other, you know, neutral arbiter to kind of figure it out. So how many of these governorships might be up for grabs for Democrats right now? Realistically, I would say six. So the important states are Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. There are close races in all of them.

But I think that Democrats are looking pretty good in states like Wisconsin and Florida and Michigan. I think it's a little tighter in Ohio and Georgia and Pennsylvania. I mean, Tom Wolf is the incumbent. He's a Democrat. He's probably got this thing locked up. But there's a shot that Democrats have more of a say once the next term rolls around. And what's up with that Georgia race? We did like a whole ass episode on that two Fridays ago.

But what's the short version? Right now, Democrat Stacey Abrams is running against Republican Brian Kemp, who is the current secretary of state in Georgia. There have been a lot of charges of voter suppression and particularly like racially charged voter suppression targeting black voters. And again, there's this dynamic playing out because Abrams is a black woman. Kemp is kind of like the Trump-style Republican against, you know, this wave of new Democratic energy in Georgia that there are legitimate fears that it could be suppressed. And just this weekend, there was an update in that race. Yeah. What's going on, Tara? So over the weekend, Kemp decided to launch an investigation into Democrats because there's this breach into the state's voter files. And he has kind of elevated it to the FBI.

And he wants them to look into whether or not the Democratic Party was involved in this. Of course, this comes days within the election that he is running for. There's a lot of controversy about this. So coming from two people who've covered this for months and months and months, are there themes in this election or is the theme just like, not Trump? Something that we're really watching are the kinds of Democrats that are going to be elected. While Trump kind of created this huge moment of reckoning within the Republican Party, Democrats on the same vein have had this tension between the progressives in their party and the more moderates. And in this election, where

Democrats are really trying to flip seats that are held by Republicans, we've seen two different paths of how they're trying to run their candidates. Are they going for these kind of progressive firebrands that are really shaking up the party? Or is it this run-to-the-middle moderate Democrat that's going to be claiming all of the glory this year? And we've seen both sides of it, but in reality, a lot of these suburban districts are probably going to be won by the more moderate Democrat. And that's going to say a lot for what happens

if they do flip the House and Democrats are in control. Where is the party going to go? Tara Golshan and Ellen Nilsen cover Congress for Vox. Up next, Vox's Ezra Klein compares this midterm election season to his many past midterm election seasons and talks about his expectations for tomorrow's election. It's so nice to be in here using this. Steven Yates, you like built the studio that we are sitting in right now. We built this. You also recently had a birthday. I had a birthday in September. And

you also have a fiance. I had a fiance. I now have a wife. Oh my God. I blew it. What did that happen? Two weeks ago. Holy smokes. Congratulations. Thanks, man. It was all because of Quip. But she did for your birthday, buy you a Quip. She did all because of Quip. But she did for your birthday buy you a Quip. She did buy me a Quip for my birthday. And how did you feel about the Quip? It is a fantastic brush for your teeth. Is it? Oh, it's great.

You loved it. It's beautiful. And you got a free refill coming on the way or something? That's how it works? Got a couple refills, got some toothpaste coming. And after that, they just come to your door on the regular, five bucks a month. Yeah. Well, for all those who maybe want to get

their fiance, spouse a quip, it's getquip.com slash explained. Do you think Allie went to getquip.com slash explained? I'm sure. Yeah? Does she listen to the show? Huge fan. Oh, maybe she'll hear this. Definitely.

Oh, great. She's tuning in. Allie, you're the best. Ezra Klein, you've covered a lot of midterms. How many midterms have you covered? At this point, who knows? How does this one compare? The stakes of politics seem so incredibly high right now.

And the end of this midterm has been so suffused with bullshit, the scaremongering around this caravan. The only thing that feels a little bit comparable to me is 2002, where there was a kind of like a very, very aggressive scaremongering campaign levied against Democrats related to terrorism. But that at least had its roots in a genuine terror attack that had actually happened in this country. Like this caravan thing is a, just like it's pure Trumpist invention. It's like not a threat to America. We do not need to be sending troops to fight it. But, you know, I think we're operating in an environment where it's very hard to know what the election is about. And maybe that's the way this really does differ from any midterm I can remember. The complete lack of agreement on what this is about, with the exception maybe of Donald Trump.

But if you look at the campaigns Democrats are running, they're not really running campaigns about Donald Trump. They're running campaigns about health care, about the economy. They're almost running a campaign from Earth 2 where the election is operating in a normal political atmosphere and Marco Rubio is the president. And then the Republican side of the aisle, it's like, who knows, right? It's like a caravan. It's, you know, the media. They're trying to throw kind of anything on the wall to see what sticks. Some candidates are running as Trumpists. Some are trying to run as just like normal Republicans from another universe. There's such a confusion and a fracturing over what it is we're even talking about that it's been very hard,

I think, to get a conceptual handle on. Obviously, Democrats and Democratic voters across the country are really fired up. Is there a similar situation on the Trump side? Trump's going around campaigning for all sorts of candidates and saying a vote for blank candidate is a vote for me. Is that going to work for him? You never know what voter enthusiasm is like until the vote actually happens. So I want to be careful not to make predictions that will make me look stupid in 24 hours.

But from polling, it does not look like Republicans are as fired up as Democrats. And from history, it is generally the case that in midterm elections, the party out of power has a lot more enthusiasm than the party in power. It does not seem like this is going to be an exception to that rule. The place Republicans are going to find some sucker is that the way the Senate map is constructed this year, just Democrats are defending a huge number of seats. I think they're defending about twice as many seats as Republicans are. So Democrats can actually do pretty well and still even lose seats. And so I think Donald Trump is trying to focus there. I think he's he's trying to focus on on where he can win and what he can do. And, you know, I think there is evidence that his rallies and so forth, they help turn out Republicans, but they also help turn out Democrats. There's a funny thing where Republicans, they want Trump to go to rallies in like rural areas. They want him to be like far away from the population centers, but he likes doing rallies in big population centers. But when he does that,

then there's a huge amount of like Democratic counter-protest and it also turns out his opposition. So there's a kind of funny dynamic around him. And I don't know, I don't think we're really going to know how it turns out until after the vote. The votes are counted and analyzed. I think something like 30 million people have already voted. Is that a sign that voter turnout is going to be bigger than usual? I think voter turnout is going to be bigger than in most midterms. The correct thing to do with early voting is to ignore it. If you've been following the early voting predictions, for instance, you might remember that Hillary Clinton won Florida in a landslide in 2016. So don't pay too much attention to early voting.

Well, on that note of early voting, early expectations, even polling, I mean, I feel like a lot of people felt they got burned by polling in the 2016 presidential election. Are you feeling that way, too? Are you looking at polls about how people are going to vote tomorrow? I have a few thoughts on this. So, one, the polling in 2016 was not that off. It was, in fact, more at least nationally precise than it was in 2012. The thing is that in 2012, the direction of the polling error was in the direction of the person who won. And in 2016, the direction of the polling error

was in the direction of the person who lost. So, you know, another way to think about this is like if polls are off by 1%, but that 1% changes who wins, that's going to feel like they're off much more than if they're off by 3%, but the 3% doesn't change who wins. What's going to feel like they're off much more than if they're off by 3%, but the 3% doesn't change who wins. What people want to know from polling is who's going to win, not necessarily the exact margin. So I'm not burned by polling per se, but I think you want to approach it with a healthy skepticism. Something that Nate Silver keeps saying is that within his models, there's a 40% chance that either Democrats do not take the House or Republicans do not keep the Senate. 40%. It's like, that's pretty big, right? Even though they

have Democrats have an 80% chance of the House and then Republicans an 80% chance of the Senate, there's a 40% that one of those two is wrong. And now because we're not just polling one thing, we're polling dozens and dozens and dozens of House races and Senate races and gubernatorial elections, all of with their own different dynamics. It's a tough job. Polling this midterm is going to be a tougher job than normal. And so people should vote. That's the bottom line. If Democrats win control of the House tomorrow, you got any sense of what their agenda or legislative priorities

will be? What they're going to do first? Are they going to try and impeach someone? The first thing Democrats are going to do is they're going to pass a package of pro-democracy reforms that include things like curbs on gerrymandering, efforts to create automatic voter registration, to fight voter suppression, to expand voting rights. I think something Democrats are becoming more and more attentive to is the fact that there's a weakening of democracy itself. There's a lot of efforts to keep people from voting and also just the way the system has evolved. You're having weird things like elected officials choosing who gets to vote for them through gerrymandering. You're having a lot of efforts to make it just harder for people to register. So Democrats want to attack that. This bill is already out there. You can actually see what the Democratic agenda is. They get no

coverage for it. And they've already said that this is the first thing they will try to pass if they get the majority. Now, if Republicans keep the Senate, that won't pass. It's not going to get over Donald Trump at all. But I do think it's a pretty big statement of what might be coming down the pike if Democrats win back power in 2020, where I think they're much more conscious of the structure of elections and democracy as a problem. And so if they're going to be able to do good policymaking in the long future, they're going to have to work on that. And so I think you always want to see this kind of thing as a practice run for when they really do have power. And that's what I think they're going to be doing.

If by chance the Republicans keep the Senate as they're predicted to and keep the House as they're not predicted to, what are they going to maintain? Or did they get all their big policy pushes done in the past two years? So let's say they get up to 53 or 54 in the Senate, which would be very helpful for them. And let's say they lose seats in the House, which I think we know will happen. But they keep the House, right? They keep it with a thinner margin. So now what could they do? They could try to take another run at Obamacare appeal. Maybe they could go back to that Lindsey Graham bill where they give the states less money to implement their own health care programs and try to wash their hands of the resulting uninsured crisis. But I think they know that's not going to be a good look for them. There has been talk about doing more tax cuts. Republicans do love

tax cuts. That tends to be the thing they can do. There's a lot Donald Trump still wants to do on immigration, like fully funding his wall and other things. You could imagine that. This has not been a party that has been doing much in the way of ideas. And it's not a party that is in particularly good shape for that going forward. Like an interesting note is that policymaking has been very centralized in Paul Ryan's office during the past couple of years. He's basically been the guy writing Republican policy. And I think it's notable how unpopular of a job he's done at that. But it has been him, right? The Obamacare thing really was coming out of his office.

And he's stepping down. And so I think we expect that Kevin McCarthy will be the next leader of the Republicans. He's a much less policy oriented guy. So we'll have to see. But they have not been spending this period building either an intellectual foundation or broad support for more big moves. And so if anything comes, it's going to come in the same way it has been, which is like this rapid fire, you know, writing something in the dead of night, coming out, finding it has a bunch of problems, trying to withstand the bad press about those problems and trying to get it over the finish line.

But it's not like they have a whole agenda that they're running on. I wonder, I mean, we don't talk much on the show about undecided voters, but what do you think a voter who's walking into the polls tomorrow who maybe doesn't have a strong party affiliation and feels like there's these two different, very disparate arguments being made about the future of this country should be thinking about as they cast their vote? I mean, one, you know, I think it is a real problem that there's so much effort right now to blur the decisions and policies that are actually being advocated, right? I think if you would say, listen to Republicans, you would not have a clear idea of what their policy agenda is on anything really but immigration, where they've gotten a lot clearer. And so I think that it is a political tactic to confuse people. And it's one that has to be countered. And it is one that requires a certain amount of energy from citizens to get informed. And I know it's not made easy for people. Like, I know that. But if I were talking to an undecided voter, I'd say, like, these are very different visions of America being put forward right now. But one of the things I think people miss a little bit is that political parties,

they have to play to the actual electorate they have, not the one that could exist. And so one reason I wish more loosely affiliated people came into the political system, more undecided voters, but also more non-voters, is that if politics looked more like America, if the electorate looked more like the country, the parties would have to appeal to that electorate. And one thing I think particularly that is true with the Republican Party right now, because they've been winning elections while winning minorities of the votes, right? They did that at the presidential level. If they keep the House, they'll do that at the House level this year. That's been true at the Senate level, is they're playing to an electorate that is narrower, whiter,

older, and just more conservative than the electorate they would have to be playing to if we had more fulsome participation in this country and if that participation were allowed to express itself into political outcomes. So it's like there are things you can't change just by voting, but it would be good for the parties to have to do more to appeal to a broader cross-section of America. And so there's this whole thing where people feel like, you know, my vote doesn't matter. But in the aggregate, of course, your vote does matter, but it doesn't just matter in terms of who wins. It matters in terms of who the parties are trying to appeal to and so what ideas they have to take seriously.

Ezra Klein is the host of The Ezra Klein Show from Vox. And there's an episode near the top of his feed right now you might be interested in based on this conversation today. It's titled, What Nate Silvers Learned About Forecasting Elections, and it features an interview with a guy who's really into polls named Nate Silver. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thanks again to Quip Electric Toothbrushes for supporting the show today. The Quip Electric Toothbrush is backed by over 20,000 dental professionals. We're talking about like a baseball stadium's worth of dental professionals telling you that the Quip Electric Toothbrush is the way to go. The website to go to is getquip.com slash explained. Your first

pack of refills is free with your first purchase of a Quip electric toothbrush. Check it out. Sarah Cliff, you host the Impact Podcast here at Vox. I do. Friend of Today Explained. Good friend. But we're big fans of your show. And I talked a bit about it on Friday, but I thought it'd be better if you talk a bit about it. So this season is all about interesting, crazy policy experiments. And our first one is about my hometown of Seattle and what happened when they gave every single resident a hundred bucks to donate to political campaigns. And we don't want to give away what happened, but why were they doing this experiment in the first place? So the idea was you can't really get rid of big money in politics right now because of the Citizens United decision. But they came up with a kind of unusual idea. What

if we just flood our elections with small donations? Did Seattle just have a ton of free money to give away? Seattleites, being the liberal people they are, they actually voted to raise their own property taxes. To do this? Yeah. So it's very rare where you see a ballot initiative that says increase our taxes pass. Yeah. It's kind of insane. It does sound that way. And is it fair to assume that this is what the whole season is kind of about? Like crazy ideas that have support in communities and then we see where they go?

Exactly. And, you know, it's not just about Seattle. We're kind of looking at issues that exist all across the country and then going to a place that decided to do something like radically different and seeing kind of what happens next. The Impact, wherever you find your podcasts.

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