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

0:00Hey guys, it's Alex. I wanted to share with you an excerpt from a new series. We are so excited about here at Crooked Media. It is from the folks who brought you the infamous 538 podcast, and it is called still counting Nate Silver, Claire Malone, and Galen Drew have spent their entire careers. Well, most of them breaking down political data, honing their expertise in the numbers behind the numbers, including election results, demographic change, historical trends, and the polls. And on their new show, still counting, they're going to cover even more from politics to prediction markets to AI and even sports. 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. I was a big 538 stand back in the day. I am a huge fan of these three people and what they do. They are smarty pants and my goodness. Do we need to understand the polls heading into this midterm election season? The numbers are confusing. Sometimes the numbers lie.

1:01Which ones can we believe? These are the people we need to turn to. Honestly, this show could not come out fast enough. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. I hope you find it as enlightening as I have. It's a must listen and ideally a must watch. We are thrilled to share it with you. So without further ado, I think I'm just like a little bit nervous. That's why I know I know it feels weird. It feels weird. Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gail and Drupke. I'm Claremalone. 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 Claremalone. And this is our first official episode. Yes, we did a freed warmer. Yes, we talked to Podsy of America. But this is it folks. From now on, Wednesday evening, you're going to get a still counting podcast episode in your feed. And so for, you know, first, I'll say this is what we're going to do on today's podcast. We're going to do

2:01in 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 Claremalone. We all work together at a data site called 538. And I was hired by Nate to be like the normal magazine reporter. To be normal. To be normal. I was hired by Nate to be normal. I was hired by Nate 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

3:04for the year, actually going back in like six months. And I'm writing a book about the Mahat movement. That's who I am. Nate, who are you? I'm Claremalone. Yeah. So my trajectory into journalism, if that's what you want to call it, is highly non-traditional. Before I ever like 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 it name 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 sports a lot of talk about analytics. This was the kind of money ball revolution. So to speak. I was getting 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, improbably took off. But yeah, I, you know,

4:04I try to look at the world. I sometimes do reporting, but I'm looking at the books. I'm reading to you for the books. I do actually do reporting, which for the most recent book involved hanging out in Las Vegas playing poker for a year. I spent all 10 in Vegas. Yeah. It was a nice excuse to look on Valley Miami. But like, 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 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 and and it had a he started five three date, which was at the New York Times, then moved to ESPN, then they closed it. Yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. Now he has a wonderfully silver bulletin, which is a silver dot net. But like, look, we got flippers or mentors model. We got. Okay. I will do a briefer who am I? I was hired by

5:08Nate at five 38. Not in the less weirdness initiative. I'll tell you that much. I was hired to be a podcast. We got five 38. We were hired at about the same time. Yes, we were. We 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. Well, I'm going incredibly well. Anyway, I stuck around five 38 for about a decade where I did basically a combination of field reporting analysis, looking at the data, did things like the Jaymandering project and once five 38 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.

6:11But anyway, enough of that, enough throat clearing. Let's dive into what's I 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. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works. That's Nate's job. But apparently on Apple podcasts, the more you rate and review us, the higher up we go, and the more people see us and then maybe get introduced to the podcast. Basically, we're out here trying to rebuild an audience and it's going to it's like a political campaign. It's going to take all of us. Yes. Okay. Third, I would never do that. That's why we're good. We're doing our direct. We're doing our daily. So the podcast podcast twunk now. Okay. We are officially post-baking. We're officially put I almost wore a white suit coat this morning, which first of all wouldn't have Claire would have popped on your account. A nasty employee. You must not be wearing white

7:11after labor day. It's an old school rule. So yes, we are post-baking, which is officially when we stop wearing white, when we go back to school, it is also historically when people begin to tune into the elections like 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. Did you design the forecast that way to build suspense at the start of elections season? I'm kidding. So when you first launched the Senate favored Democrats slightly, not overwhelmingly, but I think it peaked out about 58% less than a month ago in terms of Democrats' likelihood of taking the Senate. What has happened between them and now? So a couple of things have happened. Number one, people get really sensitive about like 50 versus 55 versus 57.

8:12It's not a big deal. It's like in an MBA game, it's like one point being scored or two points being scored. You take it from nicks 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 probabilities of 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 has been adjusting to those, early 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. I don't know if they're vermorphizing models. I used to be an anti-anthropomorphicizer. Now just to say, the model thinks, anyway, as we've gotten more generic ballot polls among likely voters, they don't show quite as much an enthusiasm gap. I mean, I'm being too technical. Now I'm just, by the way, to interject, now I'm

9:13just thinking about whether or not you think the model could ever kill you. Per discussions on Twitter about AI. You know, I switched from Claude to Chechy PT and then the other person. Because it was trying to kill you. The Claude Opus is kind of weird, right? They would like, they'd be quite stubborn and lazy. What is a Claude Opus? I don't use it. We have the full range of AI use here, which is like Nate has at least 12 AI employees. I use AI. I regularly, but like don't make it code for me. I literally don't use AI. I do not use AI. I don't know what it means. Here's a 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-pulled races in the generic ballot. Look, Trump's approval rating is 38% or so, his disapproval rating is 58% or 59%. He's not very popular, but Democrats aren't that popular either. I think you might be seeing just the slightest bit of a reversion to the mean, but there's lots of

10:15layers in flipper. There are expert forecasts. You know, isn't New Hampshire now a state that's in play? How realistically do we take Tallerico's? You know, the model says Tallerico is a slight favorite in Texas. Do we buy that or not? We're going to get into actually all of these dates. 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 education. 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 do this. It's the state of the race in Game of HUD. Yes, exactly. And I will say I have a GD politics hat here, which is only because we don't have a shamel shill. Because I'm a shamel 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 need you got to stop advertising. I mean, we all love the next. We live in New York

11:17city. But you've got to stop advertising the next for free. We're getting silver bulletin heads. By the way, I'm happy to advertise the next. You know, as long as Dolan doesn't kick me out of it. Okay. Where you are first. Okay. So pick a race out of the hat. 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 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 to like 40 minutes of just like, you know, don't don't like it's, it's, um, well, none of these people have ever been to Washington, T.C. It was, 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 public it was. Anyhow. Okay. I picked North Carolina, which is a bad pick. It's definitely a bad pick.

12:18It'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's over. It's pronounced with a dolphin, it's like Flipper. We've already had a problem with Frizz and the 538 politics podcast brand. We really don't need to give them any fodder. How do you name it, Flipper? Are they good? Because like, are as for regression or like, we know, okay. So, but Flipper gives the Democratic win probability at 86.9 per centage points. Let's put it like that. It's, it's not a sure thing that Cooper wins in North Carolina, but it would be embarrassing. But if he doesn't, Democrats are fucked anyway. That means the polls are probably probably way off again. They need four seats. By the way, Gail and you're saying, well, 50, 50 is that just to cut out. It's kind of a coincidence because like,

13:19we think it's going to be an 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 hand runnings actually a bit on the phone Gail. So, this is Saul. This is Saul. We're introducing producer Saul who has in the 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' night in November 2024 was that North Carolina actually became more purple. And Cooper's is strong candidate. He's the former governor. If he weren't to win, then it means the polls were way off,

14:19were way off again. 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 is a good candidate, 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, 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 suggests that he is a good candidate to run in North Carolina. But he's not running, 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 take a way is Panic at the Disco for Democrats if Roy Cooper loses. Nate, next uh,

15:23race that you're picking out of the hat. Okay. Second there. Of course, this is Rick Michigan. Dramatic pick. I'll say I'd leads by roughly two points in the civil rules and polling average. It's not include by the way a new Glinger of 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're not allowed to save the Americans 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 four and 35 house races, you'd expect Democrats to win by about seven. Michigan Air Force also about a plus seven. The question is can L. Syed be a quote unquote bad enough candidate? I'll explain

16:24what I mean by that, right? Or microtures 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 that. They're not charismatic. Yeah. And there's a lot of research that I think people are in some degree denial about that says in general more moderate candidates how you define moderation is complicated tend to overperform. And moderation and moderation we should say just complicated to define it can often be affected by gender, race, things like that. Absolutely. It's interesting by the way that L. Syed is kind of like playing into this kind of almost like fuck boy image. It's like oh yeah, like women, I like you know it's like he's not like I think it's more like he lifts right? 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 but you know here's the thing even if you believe and we do that moderation hard to

17:29define probably helps. We also understand that polarization is driving everything and actually voters are pretty smart right. Voters might say I understand that Mike Rogers might come across as moderate but empirically he's getting about with Trump the large majority of the time and L. Syed will probably about with Democrats the large majority of the time and we're kind of moving into a parliamentary system where the candidates matter less. So so in a model you might say okay there's like a three or four point penalty here. Seven point question 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 L. Syed by one point and and by the way in my in my tour of Canada ads last night I mean I actually think the way that L. Syed is kind of trying to present himself to general election voters is not moderating on the issues right which is 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 democratic socialist but I think he's sort of running the Elizabeth Warren playbook where it's like I'm a progress

18:33I know 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 shoot 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 like I feel obligated as a Ohio and just say muck fish again but like that stuff um that stuff was that one plan was that one plan wasn't it just came to me it just came to me but that's but that's where he's trying to moderate on is the perception right like of him as it as the like scary which is which is right which which by the way my broaders is playing into by like saying his saying like up the wrong man and you know so there's there's interesting dynamics about what we mean is a moderate candidate there yeah I'll say somebody who got some blowback from in the comments after we were on never in the comments because I had described L. S. I had as a below average candidate reliable to perform below where a quote unquote generic democratic is I

19:38was really talking about the numbers and the perception of I'll say it 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 knockdown dragout fight for the democratic party what is going to decide this race I think the most important thing that 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 kind for example health care safety cost of goods corruption those are the kinds of things that are motivating voters in the selection I mean I looked through all of the polling and really

20:43like 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 and government and corruption then what the economy more broadly data centers flock cameras like these are local issues that are actually like the Warren when you ask people like what's very important to you 50% of voters say the Warren Iran 22% of voters say the Israel Gaza issue 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 was he wrote a book with the sort of prologue written by Bernie Sanders about Medicare for all he's said you know I don't want to now he said I don't want to abolish private insurance those things can co-exist etc and so I think that this is going to be viewed as a test for whether the left can

21:48perform in a battleground state ahead of what's going to be also a knockdown dragout fight in the 2028 Democratic primaries look at we we got the most boring and the most controversial first two picks he is he is a former podcaster yeah wait out from the right a recovering podcaster that that might be too much to overcome I think yeah well we this is amazing because polling groups have asked Americans what are the most attractive and least attractive traits for a candidate at you know these kind of strategy groups can you guess what one of the least attractive traits for a candidate is well now I know podcaster we can never run and well socialist was also one of them he said again he he is not dsa although he sort of is seen oftentimes with aoc and Bernie Sanders and people who align with the yeah yeah I have to hear a lot of it it's like a sake you can't pull all the things considered okay all right thank you what is that that's some rich stuff he just said okay I got Iowa which is

22:53Josh Drake the Democrat versus Ashley Henson currently in the that was an excerpt from the first episode of still counting thanks for listening to you're 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