Why the Midterms Suddenly Look So Bad for Republicans

Today, the midterms.

Last year, Republicans were overwhelming favorites to maintain their majority in the

U.S. Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

The prediction market, Calci, gave them an 80% chance to hold the Senate through most

of 2025.

But that has suddenly changed.

Calci now says Democrats have over a 60% chance to win back the Senate.

Now prediction markets are not magic on questions like this.

They often function more like a mathematical summary of conventional wisdom.

But many of the political forecasters that I trust most agree that Republicans are in deep,

deep trouble.

How did things change so quickly?

What if the polls are wrong?

What if the polls are right?

Today's guest is Nate Silver.

We talk about the state of the race, the state of polling, the reasons behind Donald Trump's

collapsing approval rating, the difference between Trump 2.0 and 1.0 and what Democrats

might be finally doing right.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plane Edge.

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Nate Silver.

Welcome back to the show.

Derek, thanks for having me back on.

So let's get your basic temperature check first.

What is the state of the midterm elections?

The state of the midterms is increasingly blue, I suppose I'd say.

Like as of Labor Day, the basic picture was Democrats were pretty heavy favorites to

flip the house and the Senate was a toss up.

You can debate if there was a slight tilt toward Democrats or not.

Since Labor Day, Democrats have gained about two and a half points in the polls.

The equivalent of a presidential national poll for congressional races is called the generic

congressional ballot.

It just asks, who do you plan to vote for in your congressional district?

Sometimes they name the candy, sometimes they don't.

That shifted from about a six point, six and a half point Democratic manage to like a

eight and a half or nine point Democratic manage sometimes even more in polls of likely

voters.

So people that they think are actually going to turn out in vote.

We have seen D plus 11s and D plus 12s and D plus 13s, things that would pretend a very

large wave.

We always have to caution a couple of things.

One, the polls can be off and we have experience with that in recent elections, particularly

polls under rating Republicans, though it can go the other way too.

Number two, I think a lot of this is about the kind of most recent rise in gas prices going

from $4 a gallon to more like 450 diesel is even higher.

If somehow prices go down by November, then that might be a saving grace for Republicans.

But yeah, we've gone from Senate or the House was always going to be leaning Democratic.

We can talk about the history of midterms and that usually happens.

But the Senate, you can no longer fairly call a toss up.

That's a cop out.

They both the race by race polling and the national polling.

The polling now leans Democratic.

I want to get jump into race by race polling in just a second.

But first, to add a little bit of a circle context in early 2025, most people thought that

the Senate was completely out of reach for Democrats.

I was looking at betting markets, not because my betting market is kind of guy, but just

because it's a really good snapshot of like elite consensus in any particular time.

Kelsey predicted had Republicans at 80% to keep the Senate after the 2026 midterms.

Even through this summer, Republicans were still significantly favored to keep the midterms.

What did that consensus rest on and why do you think it broke around August, September?

I think there's both a macro story and a micro story.

But let me start with the macro story.

I think your average political observer, including the people who are willing to actually bet

on their opinions on prediction markets, underrates what I would call the thermostatic

nature of public opinion, meaning the temperature goes up, people want to turn the dial on the

other direction.

It gets too cold, gets too hot.

Right now, all around the world, incumbent parties are very unpopular.

In the whole history of the United States midterm election since World War II, you almost

always have backsliding, a backlash against the incumbent party and how those two trends

are converging.

All the think pieces that you read in late 2024, early 2025 about like a conservative

vibe shift, like those stories mostly haven't held up well.

Some ways they have, I think we're past peak like woke 1.0 for example.

But all those stories about, oh no, this is a huge mandate for Trump.

I think Trump took that too literally and did a bunch of stuff that was going to cause

a lot of pain for voters.

So the tariffs, but particularly the war in Iran, where he ran on no more Middle East

or more.

He ran on lower gas prices.

Those two things were explicitly violated.

One of the micro level, Democrats have what I would call a candidate quality advantage.

We had a lot of consternation in the summer about what's going on in Michigan and what's

going on in Maine.

And those are probably the two more problematic states that are blue, purple or blue states.

Those are still closer races than you think they might be.

But in states like Ohio, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, you either have really strong candidates

or like in Texas, you have a really weak Republican candidate.

And one problem with the Republican party being a party, you know, if you want to call

a cult following around Trump, I'm not sure it's a cult thing so much as an incentive

thing, right?

That if you're not loyal to Trump, you're cast out of the party.

That creates really big problems.

That creates synchophantic candidates who are maybe not ideal for their state.

And so yeah, so a state like North Carolina, North Carolina was at swing state in 2024,

Trump won it by what two or three points.

You would expect in this nine point D environment, you'd expect North Carolina to flip.

But other races like Texas, then candidates make a big deal here.

I wonder how you feel about this theory that around the time that everyone was writing

those vibe shift essays and of 2024 beginning of 2025.

There was this idea floating around in the political ether that said, Republicans are strong

because they have an identity and that identity is Donald Trump.

And Democrats are weak because nobody knows what they stand for.

They have no identity.

They have no national political brand.

But it's interesting right now that the specific definitive nature of the Republican brand,

it's adherence to even worship of Trump is arguably dragging down the party because Trump

gets to select candidates like say, Paxton and Texas that are not the strongest possible

candidate that you could choose in Texas to go up against someone like James Talleriko.

Whereas in a weird way, the heterodox, messy nature of the Democratic party, the absence,

you could even say of a Democratic party brand at the national level has allowed Democrats

to find, select, allow the people to choose certain candidates who fit the representative

electorate in each state.

And that's put them at even more of an advantage than the generic party ballot would suggest.

How do you feel about this thesis of the, let's call it like the ironic strength of the

Democrats brand weakness?

Yeah, a couple of things.

One is that midterm elections are typically about the incumbent party and the president.

The fact that Trump decided to hold a midterm convention, by the way, opposite the NFL

opener, which was kind of silly, but like that's exactly what you don't want to do.

You don't want to make it about you.

You don't want to make it a big loyalty test.

But no, it's absolutely right that like Mary Peltola, the Senate nominee in Alaska, you

know, barely within the same party in some ways as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

But they both have certain strength for their state, right?

Look, I think El-Sayed is, quote unquote, more progressive than might be optimal if you

were kind of playing fantasy politics.

But it does come from the state with the largest Arab-American population in the country, right?

He has a lot of Michigan ties.

He played lacrosse, right, as a football fan and like so that might send off some of

the rougher edges that you might get if you had him run in Alaska.

That wouldn't work or something like that.

So yeah, Democrats, you know, in some ways the disarray and the chaos as long as voters,

you know, in Texas, for example, you had Talleriko chosen by voters instead of Jasmine Crockett,

who was more of a partisan bomb thrower and Talleriko is more above the fray.

And that's probably in a red state gives you better chances there.

And so believe it or not, you know, I actually, I like the primary system and giving voters

a say is smart and not in every race.

I mean, you know, again, Maine is still kind of messy and Susan Collins is a strong incumbent.

But yeah, to have 50 different identities in three different states is almost an advantage

for a midterm.

It may very well be a disadvantage in 28.

I would expect the Democratic primary to be very, very messy.

But those dynamics are on hold for the next 35 days.

I want to go over some of the individual states and we're using here your proprietary

forecast model flipper, which people can find on silver bullet, your sub stack.

In terms of races that seem safe-ish, you've got Kupu over Wattley in North Carolina by

nine points, Ossoff over Collins in Georgia by nine points.

As I list these for people watching or listening, I'm listening to the Democrat first because

these are the states where Democrats are either ahead or tied.

Brown is up by six in Ohio five to six points.

Then you get to some that are closer to the margin of error.

Talleriko leads Paxton in Texas by three Jackson over Collins in Maine by three.

L. Syed over Rogers in Michigan by three.

Flanagan over to FOIA in Minnesota by three.

Peltola over Sullivan in Alaska by three.

Turek over Hinson in Iowa by about two.

I think you've got Hamilton nearly tied with Marshall and Kansas, Osborne independent,

nearly tied with Ricketts in Nebraska, Andrews nearly tied with Graham in South Carolina.

You're hearing these names.

If you haven't been following the polling recently, we're talking about Democrats being

either ahead or competitive in places like South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Alaska.

These are in some cases archetypal red states to give you a chance to sort of like pick

at this buffet of states in a way that's actually interesting.

Which of these states do you think Democrats are likely to do better than the national consensus

right now? And in which of these states do you think Democrats are in a worse position

than the national consensus?

I should say, so those are the first step in the model, which is called flipper.

Those are the polling averages.

And then the model blends that with a bunch of other stuff, but mainly looking at like,

where does the state line up historically relative to where the national environment is?

So the full version of the model is skeptical about those last three-ish states that you mentioned.

Kansas and Nebraska, South Carolina, the poll show, oh my gosh, this is really close.

But you would need Democrats nationally to probably stretch into the double digits,

which some polls show. But the default expectation would be that those are like the

cherry on top of the Sunday and require a really disastrous environment for Republicans.

You're talking about like a 10% chance essentially in the year.

The model says it's high because you know, you try, you have mixed signals.

The polls say that these states are close to toss-ups.

History says they shouldn't be.

And the model says, okay, I'm going to kind of hedge between no chance and 50%.

So there shouldn't be the range of 25% or something depending on the state.

Yeah, those are ones that would be more skeptical about the ones that, you know,

to me, the most solid pickup for Democrats after North Carolina is probably actually Ohio.

So you have Sherrod Brown, who is a former senator. In fact, in polls,

a lot of Ohioans still think he's a senator there. He only lost in 2024.

He outran Kamala Harris in 24 by six or seven points.

He was reelected in 2018 in a very similar environment to what we see now by like,

by six points. So comfortably enough.

So that might be the easiest pickup for Democrats.

But they're also playing defense.

They're playing defense in Michigan.

At one point, the polling was closer there or even favored Mike Rogers.

I think Democrats have mended fences a little bit since the contentious primary in Michigan.

I'm not sure I buy that Minnesota is as close as the polls say.

Although, keep in mind, this is a state where you've had major benefits fraud scandals involving

illegal immigrants. Minnesota has been kind of the epicenter of a lot of ice activity,

the epicenter of the George Floyd protest, obviously.

So a lot of very liberal activity in that state.

I don't know if there's a backlash to that and to Tim Walls.

Peggy Feinagan is a legal lieutenant governor in Minnesota.

I would expect things and the model builds us in.

I would expect things to revert a little bit more toward partisan

defaults by the time we get to November.

When you have polling errors, it's often not in the swing states.

It's often in these more exotic states.

With that said, in wave elections, things that people weren't expecting to happen happen.

In 2010, Scott Brown, this is actually in January, but kind of a precursor to the very bad midterm

that Obama had. Scott Brown, when a Senate race in Massachusetts.

In 2017, again, a precursor, Democrats when a Senate race against Roy Moore in Alabama.

So these things can happen when you combine a really tilted one way or the other electorate

with a really strong or weak candidate.

Tell me where your forecast lands today. We're talking Wednesday, September 30th.

And taking the historical perspective, how normal or abnormal is that midterm result?

It's quite normal. And that's why I think the forecast isn't as bold as it seems.

We are forecasting the Democrats to win the popular vote for the US House

by around eight points. And they lost it by two and a half points in 2024,

similar to Kamala Harris's loss to Trump. So at 10 or 11 points swing, the average swing

from the presidential year to the midterm, first of all, it almost always favors the opposition party.

And the average is about seven and a half. So all really saying is Democrats are beating the

point spread by three points roughly. And that reflects Trump in very unpopular.

It reflects the race by race, polling, a little more for the House than the Senate.

So it doesn't seem that wild, right? It's the same magnitude that you saw in fact in 2018,

which was the previous data point when Trump was on the ballot. And in 2006 under Bush.

And the Bush data point is relevant because there was no equivalent to September 11th in Trump's

first term where he got this big surge of popularity. But in 2004, Bush won re-election. And

Democrats were like, well, fuck it, it's just a center right country now. We're just going to

bend the knee. But by the time you got to 2006, and then beyond, you had Hurricane Katrina,

you had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You didn't have in 2006 yet many hints of the

housing bubble and the financial crisis, but by 2007, 2008, you obviously did. So in second terms,

and Trump is, you know, second non-consecutive term, the bottom can fall out of presidencies.

People get fatigued. People within the party are repositioning themselves for the forthcoming

election and trying to distance themselves. The tricks that worked for a candidate,

I used to check some of you from basically there, but like, you know, the keen sense the

candidate might have had about what the electorate was like four years ago or eight years ago.

You know, politics changes fast. They're no longer all that relevant. You know, you have,

Trump has been very bullish recently on AI or what he's now calling, I guess, super

intelligence. He's really out of step with the American public. The public by like 80-20

majorities is like, we need to slow this thing down. And he's like, now this is just fake news and

whatever else. And like, and now it seems like he's kind of relitigating the trans stuff and

all the things that, you know, I think we're effective for him in 2024. But when when you're the

party in power, then people don't care as much about like how crazy Democrats are because,

by the way, no matter what happens, Trump is going to be president when the new Congress takes office

in January 2027. People, the reason why you have this consistent backlash is people want to check

the president's power, particularly when the president does, you know, misinterpret and overreads

his mandate. By the way, a lot of this has been not through acts of Congress,

it's been through executive action that Congress has either been powerless or unwilling to check.

And so, you know, and this happened with Biden too. Biden did a whole bunch of stuff on

immigration, on stimulus spending. When all voters want, I was just like, we're sick of Trump

and Trump fucked up COVID and we want to return to normalcy. And that's not what they got. And I

think now people feel like things feel a little bit chaotic again. Prices are high, especially for

gas. There is anxiety around AI. Trump is always kind of flailing around in different messages from

different people. And like, you know, Americans have been unhappy with the direction of the country for

25 years now. It's almost a disadvantage now to be the incumbent party, I think, at least in a macro

way. And, you know, at 80 years old, I'm not sure that Trump is as nimble to navigate the

currents of public opinion as he might have been in the first term. I mean, he was less unpopular

in the first term and they still had a very bad midterm in 2018. You know, for as much as it might

seem like the model is being competent or overconfident, you know, that's the closest precedent you

could possibly have in Democrats gained 40 seats in the house that year. You know, there's

something very strange in a kind of Groundhog's Day way about 21st century presidential politics

or electoral politics. It's almost like if you knew nothing about politics, except you

looked up one Wikipedia page on the electoral outcomes of presidential and midterm elections.

If you just like glance at it for 15 seconds and that was your entire exposure to 21st century

politics, a reasonably smart person would come away with like three-ish conclusions. Number one,

practically every presidential election is decided by low single digit percentage points.

Number two, every single midterm swings against the incumbent often significantly. And number three,

whenever a president is lucky or unlucky enough to make it to a second term, people get exhausted

by that president and by the time they're in their, you know, second year of their second term,

basically everyone wants to kick the guy out the door. It is interesting that we seem to be locked

in this reality, playing it out over and over and over again. And I wonder if someone who is

interested both in the granular details of like is Peltola ahead by one point or three points,

but also in the macro stories of modern politics. Why has that narrative been so sticky? Like,

why does it seem like we are kind of locked in that particular Groundhog's Day story?

So for the midterm, a lot of it is what we'd call like, it's kind of like the sports illustrated

cover jinks for like the kind of sports fans in our collective audience where, you know,

by definition, whichever party is defending Congress is a party that won Congress last time, right?

So they were at a comparatively speaking high water mark. If they're at a really high water mark,

like Obama and Democrats were in 2008, well, that seems good, but it also means you have

much more exposure and much more territory to defend. On the other hand, if you just barely

squeaked by, I mean, there was some doubt about whether Republicans would win the House in 2024.

It took longer to call the House than the presidential election. Well, then you have a different

set of problems, right? You're already on thin ice. You might overreach more and it doesn't take

very much for the House to flip. I mean, the only reason why the GOP has any chance at all in the

House and it's diminishing is because there was some redistricting that probably brought them

an additional margin of seven or eight seats, although some of those gerrymanders are not going to be

strong enough if there's a big enough blue wave to to inundate it. But yeah, these are, these are,

these forces kind of go back to like the dawn of modern American politics and, you know, midterms,

even more than presidential elections are like a big advertisement for like the kind of political

science macro level views of politics. For presidential years, that gets debated a lot more in

presidential years. The best political science says the economy matters quite a bit, but that's

a little bit more personality driven. But midterms, I mean, it's the most durable trend I wrote at

Solar Bulls any other day. The most durable trend in kind of American political history is that

there's a backlash against the president's party at the midterms. Yeah, no, it's, it's, this is like

a silly metaphor, but it's almost like the parties are like two pairs of jeans that don't fit. It's

like we put one on. It's a little too tight. We put another one on. It's a little too loose, but

another one on. It's a little too tight. And so there's, oh, there always needs to be a course

correction, no matter what decision is made on behalf of the electorate, but there is no perfect

fitting gene. And maybe that speaks to the fact that neither party perfectly represents the electorate.

Or, you know, I think I was talking about this with Madaglaceus. And it might even represent the fact

that both parties are doing a pretty decent job, maximizing what they can get in each particular

midterm or national election that that explains why every national election is so close and every

midterm represents an unbelievably predictable swing against the incumbent. There's one other

element here that I wanted to get your, your head on at the macro level, which is the democratic

coalition has changed quite significantly in the last few decades. Democrats in the 2000s, 1990s

were not overwhelmingly the party of upper middle class college educated people. Like a lot of

those folks were voting for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney. Now they're voting for Democrats.

And those voters are more likely to show up in off-year elections and in midterms,

which might explain why Democrats tend to or sometimes overperform their off-year in midterm polls

and underperform national presidential elections where less education, less educated and more

infrequent voters are more likely to go to the polls. To what extent does your model build in the fact

that the democratic coalition has a higher propensity to vote in midterms in 2026 versus say 1994?

So basically the way we do that is by looking at comparing polls of likely voters and registered

voters, especially if a poll asks both versions in the same survey. If they say, well, Democrats are up,

you know, today there was a survey of the Wisconsin governor's race. And the Democrat was up one point

among all registered voters, but up three points among likely voters. So it's a two point gap

and that represents the enthusiasm gap. That's been a pretty typical number. In fact, some polls show

a larger gap than that. But yeah, so here, the dirty little secret about polling is that it's very

hard to have unbiased polls these days, right? We're not in the era where a pollster calls the

family landline and it's a big event when somebody calls, right? And it's like, oh, you know,

it was my friend calling to go out to play pick up basketball or no, it's a pollster. Oh, how exciting.

I'm happy to answer this question. This never happens. Now people have, you know, a lot of polling

is done online anyway, but you know, people who are more interested and enthusiastic about politics

are more inclined to answer polls, especially the less rigorous version of polls, which might seem

like a big problem, right? And it is a big problem. However, people who are more enthusiastic are also

more likely to vote. So what I think happens is that, you know, the lower the turnout, then

you're almost having two wrongs make a right that yeah, you know, the people who are enthusiastic

enough to answer a poll is probably a pretty good proxy for who's enthusiastic enough to vote in

like an off-year election. In a presidential year election, and turnout is now relatively high

in the US compared to historic norms, everyone's going to vote more or less or a very high

percentage of registered voters are going to vote. And so if you're missing voters for whatever

reason who are, you know, going to go to the polls grudgingly and vote for Trump and maybe not

want to talk to a pollster about it, like that creates a problem, but, but, you know, but I don't

think that like, you know, a lot of people have gone from excited about Trump to Lukewarm

on Trump or Lukewarmly negative even. I don't think those people are going to vote for Democrats,

right? But I'm not sure they're going to turn out for somebody like Ken Paxton. They may say,

you know, I'm just going to send my Tuesday night watching TV or going out to dinner with my,

my wife or my family or whatever else, right? Trump hasn't delivered on on his promises. And

Paxton seems like a bad guy. And if they elect Hal Arbiko, it's not my problem. Like I think there's

going to be a lot of that, but that, yeah, that's a big question. How big will that, will that

enthusiasm gap be? If it's really big, some of the polls that show these really big double-digit

Democratic leads have like a five or six point enthusiasm gap. You know, the last time we saw

that was in 2010 when you had this, frankly, catastrophic midterm for Obama, you know, lost 63 seats,

that 20 tens at all types of records and was a big come to Jesus moment for people that thought,

oh, now we've elected our African-American president and now we're a liberal country. It's like,

no, you know, so that would be that would be, you know, 2010 would be election that would,

that would feel, be in my nightmares, like, as if I were a, a Republican.

I think it's important to say that there is a gap between forecasters like you in prediction

markets that are seeing a blue wave and some other political experts in pundits, like say,

Charlie Cook, that are seeing a much more even race or at least have until very recently.

It's clearly as you can, can you explain this prediction gap and tell me why you think it exists?

I think the real reason, well, I'm trying to figure out how polite to be to the, to the expert

forecaster to call them, so Cook Political Report and I think they're afraid of

what they think of as going out on a limb and being wrong. So what happens is they kind of start

out assuming that, oh, we're going to be in like a toss up B 2004, 2016, 2012, you know, like you

said, Derek, all these presidential elections are close, right? And they start out by assuming that

that's going to be the environment. And then they adjust it. It's a little bit of a lagging

indicator. You know, they're adjusting those ratings pretty aggressively now, but prediction

markets and polls and forecast like flipper picked up on this a few months ago. So they're a little

bit lagging, but like my big problem is that like that assumption is wrong in the first place. You

should not assume in a midterm year that you're going to be in a neutral environment. You should

assume that there should be a backlash against whoever had a good election last time. And so like,

that's the part that I think is really hard to justify it with that said, they're sometimes smart

about the interview candidates. They talk to people, they pick up internal polling, but like as a,

it's not a, you know, in forecasting, we call things like there's calibration and discrimination.

Discrimination means, you know, how much can I distinguish, find details between one race

and the other, you know, again, I think in sports metaphors, of course, but like, you know,

that, you know, that Brock Purdy is a better quarterback than Justin Herbert or whatever, right?

Calibration might be, how important are quarterbacks overall? The big macro questions,

and I think they're not very good. Well, maybe that's more rude than I want to be.

I think you don't have a rigorous approach to the macro level questions that the more political

science-based kind of models and forecasts take and that people who are, who are betting, I mean,

we're a little higher in Democrats than prediction markets, but within, within reason, pretty similar,

you know, those have also gone from 50, 50 in the Senate to like 63, 65% Democratic depending on

which market you look at exactly. But their incentives are different. I don't want to get in the

industry stuff too much, but look, at this point, I am sure that if Democrats have a

disappointing year, disappointing year might mean still picking up the house and winning

two or three Senate seats when they need four. That would, at this point, be considered

disappointing. I'm sure that polls on prediction markets and models will all get

criticized if that happens. But look, I didn't design this model to be particularly aggressive.

There are lots of years like 2016 where we had Hillary Clinton favored, but had her favored by

much less than prediction markets or the conventional wisdom did, and we're telling people,

be careful here. It wouldn't take very much for Trump to sweep these Midwestern swing states.

You know, this election, I think, kind of because the wave, what kind of came on

slowly and then all at once, you know what I mean? Like, so I didn't necessarily expect

there to be this further Democratic shift after, after Labor Day.

You know, and that's changed the Senate from toss up to, to lean D, and the house from likely D to

likely plus, let's call it, you need a big polling error at this point. So, so something did change,

and I feel like the conventional wisdom is kind of catching up with the first stage of it,

and is now kind of like processing the second stage, but there was nothing, there was something

baked in that said Democrats would further surge after Labor Day. Oftentimes now, after Labor Day,

campaigns are kind of anti-climactic, right? If you think about the 2024 race,

all the really monumental stuff that people will remember, like the debate between Biden and Trump,

Biden dropping out, the very scary assassination attempt, or attempt to plural actually,

against Trump, RFK Jr. dropping out and endorsing Trump, all that shit happened in the summer,

and then by September, things were more static. That's often how things are, but not this time,

something else, you know, some type of bottom fell out for Republicans in a way that

that has shifted the same model that had it 50-50 before, is saying things have shifted,

and it's quite consistent across all these different polls that you might want to look at.

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I think the most likely candidate for the thing that fell out of the bottom for

Republicans is the fact that the war kept going on, kept going on, kept going on, and the

economic side effects of the war kept showing up, whether it was in inflation or 10-year

treasury, which maybe the typical American doesn't care about, but they're looking at mortgage

rates and they don't like seeing mortgage rates higher than 7%. They do notice when gas goes from

three to four to four dollars and 50 cents. One way to get into this question of the war,

because I don't want to ask like a boring question, like, has the Iran War been bad for Trump?

It's been pretty bad. You made this really interesting point in a recent essay on your

sub-stack where you pointed out that where is in 2024? One of the really interesting takeaways from

that election was that Democrats lost the most voters ironically in blue states and in blue

metros, like Queens, the Bronx. They just got walloped, New York state. And this year it seems

like the opposite is happening. That Democrats are picking up the most voters or moving the needle

the most, not just in blue states, but in states that are often deep red places like Kansas,

Nebraska, South Carolina, we're polling shouldn't be anywhere close for Democrats. And in fact,

it is very close. What do you think is going on there? Why is the blue wave happening in red states?

Well, Derek, part of it is what you and Ezra wrote about in abundance, right? Where if you live

in a in a blue state or a blue city, you have probably witnessed various problems with how these

states are governed. If you don't live in a blue state or a blue city, then Republicans are 100%

responsible for what's going on in government right now, right? So like Minnesota, again, the state

where Democratic polling along Amy Klobuchar is doing well, the governor's race. But you know,

that's a state we could say it was poorly managed because of because of, you know, Democratic

excesses and things like that. And we know people don't like that. We know how they reacted to Biden

and Harris in 2024. So I think that's I think that's part of it. You know, I think part of it is,

you know, you saw in 2024 just a little bit of erosion in the black vote and in the Asian American

vote, you know, and those can be partly generational things or big generational divides in all

these votes. You know, actually one big problem for Republicans is like, you know, there were actually

a lot of like Zoomers and like especially younger men who voted for Trump in 2024. And a lot was

written about this. You know, who's not going to turn out in midterms, young men couldn't give

a fuck about midterm elections most of the time, right? So that's a that's a group that like that

probably might help Republicans again in 2028 depending on the candidate. But like that's

triple. You might have a lot of drop off voting from from 2026. And then also you have, you know,

so if you want to get really in the weeds on gas prices, if you drive by a gas station, you see,

oh man, gas is more in New York, right? 450 a gallon. But diesel is like 680 a gallon or something.

Okay, so where are diesel fuels used more? Only 2% or something of American cars are diesel. However,

used by truckers a lot, used in agriculture a lot, used in petroleum production a lot,

and used in home heating oils is basically diesel. So what I call the tornado alley states,

I have agriculture or oil and a lot of trucking like those are states that are being hit hardest

by the combined increase in energy prices. And those are mostly in in the middle of the country.

Also states like cold states like Maine and Alaska, these a lot of home heating oil like, you know,

by the way, let's just going to get colder by the time we get to November. And if if prices

don't come down, then that's going to be more problematic for Trump too. And they obviously have

very important set of elections. What do you see as the politics of AI right now? Because in one

way, there's a comment that you made earlier in this interview where you said Americans are moving

against artificial intelligence as a general matter. There's certainly against the construction

of data centers anywhere where they can see or smell or hear the humming of a data center.

But then you get that Trump essentially saying, I love super intelligence. This is great.

And like half of this truth social posts are AI slop with Donald Trump, you know, put on the head

of like, you know, some professional wrestler. So if that's all you knew about this situation,

you'd say, well, obviously when a high quality polster like say the New York Times asks Americans,

which party they prefer are not official intelligence, they'll say, you know, Democrats by 25 or

something. But instead the Times just did this and Americans said Republicans by two, which I don't

see necessarily as a clear indication that Americans adore GOP AI policy. I see it more as a kind of

ambivalence, a kind of like molten messiness around the politics of AI that hasn't quite settled

yet. So I wonder how you see AI, a playing into this midterm at all, be who you think has the

advantage in making it work for their side right now. Yeah. No, this is in a very primordial stage of

politicians, many of whom are 60, 70, 80 years old, having to formulate positions about things

that they had never thought about before. Yeah, look, people don't necessarily even know which

parties stand for what on AI stuff. What they do know is they don't like data centers, they want to

slow down. And they have a lot of anxiety about, you know, like one thing that helps the AI

regulation case, which in some polls is a head three to one or four to one is that you can be

for AI regulation for lots of different reasons. You can be worried about job loss, you can be

worried that your students are cheating in school, you can be worried about AI takeover, you can be

worried about pollution, you can be worried about, you know, removing destiny from humanity and

these kind of philosophical things and whatever else. And like those objections can span the left,

the center and the right and kind of all converge on the same place. Meanwhile, like the

the lab leaders in the AI labs are not the most persuasive messengers to the general public. Those

are very kind of unique and weird cultures. You know, the fact that like you have Trump

preeding about or probably the screen about like effective altruism and things like that. You and

I know what that is. I wrote a book that covers all this domain, but like it's deeply weird. But

like, but when Trump goes and says super intelligence is great, like, you know, that's exactly what

people would say not to do. And like, you know, and like Ron DeSantis is pushing back on

on Trump and things like that. And, you know, by the way, a lot of recent these data centers are

popular too, is that like people don't trust these big tech companies. So when Trump has

Samultman and Dario and Zuckerberg are like all at the White House, like I'm not sure that

necessarily helps if the lab leaders or Trump necessarily. It's just kind of like

it's kind of deeply weird. I'm not sure that I would have expected Trump to be this

aggressively kind of pro AI president. And I kind of think that, you know, this might be a case

of his like political instincts slipping a little bit because I would think this would be a very good

populist issue that these big liberal rich Californians who are weird are trying to take your jobs.

Like that should be like catnip for populism. And instead, Trump has run in the direction. I think

maybe he's concerned that, um, that, uh, you know, if there is a perceived bubble in in AI, then you

could have the bottom fallout of the stock market, which could make things even worse.

Potentially, by the way, you know, I think the stock market is worth watching. There was a big run-up

over the late summer. Um, that is a period when Republicans seem to be at least holding their own

in polling and it's been declining a lot or fluctuating a lot since then, you know, the stock

market is a very visible indicator too. But like, yeah, that's kind of, I don't know. I mean,

Trump's never going to be in the ballot. Again, at least unless something deeply wrong goes on with,

you know, the security of American democracy. Um, but yeah, I think he's, I don't know if he's

losing his fastball a little bit or what. And then the decision to go to Iran, where with Iran is,

you know, one of the biggest blunders in like the history of American politics, right? It's not as

though, I think maybe he got cocky after, after Venezuela. But it wasn't as though

anyone thought this was going to be easy. Like Iran's deterrent had always been, well, go ahead,

we have a lot of mountains, we have a lot of Egypt ports, go ahead and invade us, you know, you're

going to be stuck here forever. Um, and, you know, because the Secretary of Defense or War,

I'm supposed to call it now, is, is, you know, a former like TV news anchor. I mean, it just,

you know, fuck around and find out. It's been the motto of recent presidencies.

I think that if you compare Trump now to this, this, this force of nature who had this incredible

crocodilian impulse for not only the weaknesses of his opponents, but also the issues that Americans

wanted to hear about, but his own party elites didn't want to talk about like immigration,

build the wall. He doesn't even have that anymore. And so it's like all he's got right now are

truth, social posts of artificial intelligence, images of him falling asleep in the Oval Office,

and extremely loud support for issues that are polling under 40%. It's like, it's kind of a

miracle that is polling as high as he is. And at least the next question for you, which is,

I am surprised how few Republicans at this late hour have more have not more explicitly

distance themselves from the president, considering how, how badly he is polling. Um,

instead, you know, you've got, you know, folks like Paxton of Texas giving speeches at that

Republican midterm convention, which, you know, where the audience was leading some pledge about

Trump being the greatest president in US history. So basically explicitly yoking himself to someone

polling in the 30s. Why do you think Republicans have stuck by a president whose polling declines

don't seem to be stopping? Well, he's, he's very punitive to people who, who don't support him.

I mean, you do see some, you see Ashley Henson, the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa,

who's one of the, one of the more normal, I guess you'd say Republican candidates is like, well,

I'm not so sure about this Iran thing, same with Mike Rogers and Michigan, and those are two of

the better, I would say, more conventional Republican nominees. But I'm not sure that like,

I think we might be at the beginnings of a little bit of a, of a preference cascade to use that term,

where, you know, I think except for Brian Kemp in Georgia, there aren't many Republicans can say,

well, there's no cost to defying Trump. Usually there, there is a cost, but like,

but like after the midterms, then I'm not sure that cost is going to be that large. Like, if he loses

the midterms, I mean, if he loses, well, depending on how they're perceived, right? If it's a

democratic wave that takes the Senate, let's say, with at least, you know, well, any Senate margin

would probably qualify as, you know, enough of a, of a pret fall for Trump. But like, then you might

see the bottom really, really fall out from Trump as people position, I mean, you know, even on Iran,

Trump's vice president, JD Vrance, has leaked all over the place and make clear, I'm not so sure

about this war in Iran, either don't blame me for it. You know, contrast that with,

with Kamala Harris being unable or unwilling to distance herself from Biden on like literally any

issue in 2024 and like, that seemed like a very bad, bad, um, for Trump because we have seen like

one of the more rapid declines in Trump's approval rating lately. You know, again, I think a

lot of his gas prices, but, you know, you've seen now on, on Republican and right wing leaning

podcasts that Trump just isn't mentioned, all that much anymore. That's going to be the first stage

of it is, okay, well, it's just not, you know, you know, it's like when you have a parent with the

progressive condition or something, right? Maybe when you have a bigger family gathering, you just kind

walk on edge shells around it, don't talk about it as much, but, um, but, you know, and also just the

passage of time because Trump had these two non-consecative terms, it feels to people like he's

in president forever. It's almost like a, like he jokes about, or maybe isn't joking about in his

mind. It's almost like a third term anyway. And, and that, that fatigue, as we talked about, is

one of the other, you know, fundamental factors, uh, like after Obama was relatively popular in a

second term as compared to other Bush or, or Trump is, right? Still wasn't popular enough to prevent

Trump from being, being elected. So, so there's that syndrome too.

One more question on the Republican Party and its future before we end with the Democratic

Party's emerging identity. Let's say the Democrats do win the Senate in the midterms in November.

The primaries start basically 14 months later, 13 months later, right?

They started in November 4th, right? I mean, de facto, the beginning of the election.

Sure. 24 hours later. Sure. Yeah. Okay. This is, this is my point. Um,

I mean, a world in which Donald Trump is seen as a loser the day after the elections is a world

where the 2028 election, I think, significantly changes because rather than think, well,

that path to the Republican nomination flows through the coronation by Donald Trump.

Instead, it opens up this really, really big door to, no, Donald Trump's a loser. You,

you don't want to be coordinated by the loser. You want to be someone who crafts a similar message

while also maybe being able to grab a part of that mega coalition that Donald Trump is losing his

grip over. So maybe talk a little bit about how you could imagine a successful democratic

Senate victory in November playing out in changing the 10th of the 2028 election.

Yeah. Look, if you look at prediction markets or the conventional wisdom or the polls,

the two leading candidates to be the GOP nominee in 2028 are Trump's vice president, JD Vans,

and then his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. They're going to have trouble distancing themselves

from Trump. And then apart from those two, it's like, there is nobody on the lead lap in the kind

of Trump skeptical name, partly because, you know, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, a lot of those

candidates did run in 2024 and got blown out. Nikki Haley won Vermont, I think, literally,

or something and DC, but one of the left here, Republican party or the left of GOP and the

hollowing out of the center right is a big problem. You might have like the Tucker Carlson type of

of lane and he's been more critical of Trump potentially. You've seen Ron DeSantis

become more critical of Trump lately, but it's, you know, you look at prediction markets and you see

JD Vans at 50%. And I, you know, that's a little hard for me to buy. Maybe it's 30% or 40% but like,

I think JD Vans is a smart guy. I don't think it's a natural politician. And what if Trump has a

bush like 29% approval rating, right? In 2008, you didn't have to chainy running to replace Bush.

I was thinking I had the exact same thought. I was like, imagine if Dick Cheney were 20 years younger

and Rand replaced George W Bush and was pulling in the 20s, it would be insane.

It would be completely insane. Yeah. And you kind of had that play out in the milder way with

Kamala Harris kind of and like that didn't really work either. And like, so yeah, I look,

and because, you know, in the primaries,

early positioning matters. There are some momentum driven effects because media attention, money,

staff talent, all these things are somewhat scarce resources. And so the strategy says that you

have to make your moves fairly early if you're not established. And the only the only two people

who are kind of guaranteed a playoff spot, right, are are Rubio in vents right now. I'm not

saying they're prickly strong candidates. I'm saying like they have the public profile. They

don't need more media attention per se. But like otherwise, it's kind of a free for all.

Yeah. I feel like if I'm advising Vance or Rubio, it's like,

leave office in 2027. Like get out of the administration to give yourself some kind of

reading room from Donald Trump if you're actually going to start campaigning on turning the

page for the Republican party because to George W Bush point or, or, you know,

the Obama point, there's all sorts of presidents that are second term, are polling terribly.

The idea that the vice president of the candidate already polling terribly would announce

themselves as, you know, just someone to carry forward the torch. We just saw that it didn't work

for Kamala Harris. And that was against an unpopular opponent. It just seems like a very, very tricky

strategy. My personal bias is that a really successful night for Democrats in November leads to a

very, very chaotic primary on the Republican party. Just as there's clearly going to be a chaotic

primary on the Democratic party. So let's end there. I feel like the two watchwords right now in

Capitol D Democratic, Democratic politics are affordability and corruption. And probably the

person who has fused those two words most successfully is John Ossoff. I wonder how you

feel about this affordability corruption fusion that a lot of Democrats seem to be running on.

Where do you think it points the party in the next year and a half?

I mean, I'm a fashion. So I still call it like inflation. I think affordability sounds a bit

like a euphemism. But, no, look, those are good messages. I mean, they're different in that the

affordability thing, nommies that term is a little bit more acute. Or maybe it's car like too.

It's both chronic and acute. People feel still the big jump we had in the price level. What was it?

Five years ago now, I think still has reset people's internal expectations for how much a

barito costs or whatever else. It's not quite as clear for me that the corruption stuff matters

as much. But there's so many examples of it. I mean, look, I think Ossoff is a very talented

candidate. And the most effective candidates are able to convince all the different wings of the

party that he represents them. Kamala Harris had this problem that the centrist thought she was

super left. And the leftist thought she was super centrist. It was kind of like the worst of all

worlds. And Ossoff is a little bit more in the Barack Obama mold of someone who can straddle

those different constituencies. And that is important because the different party is not a cult

of personality. They have the opposite problem. They're a hurting cats problem. And it represents a

fairly wide range of ideological ground. And so, you know, and they tend to

pick somebody who can be the least unacceptable to the different constituencies. And a lot of times

that is like a Kamala Harris like Cadd, who is, you know, a kind of clubhouse lawyer and who is like

negotiating the internal dynamics of the party well, but may lack vision for how to sell that to

anyone outside of the tent. You know, Ossoff seems to have more gifts as far as both the inner and

the outer primary, if you will. With that said, it is interesting. Like, first of all,

people are going to look at what happens in Michigan and to a lesser extent,

Maine, right? Like, let's say Democrats lose LSAED in Michigan and lose the Senate

by one seat as a result. I mean, progressives will never hear the end of it, right?

You know, I think the progressives would rather have LSAED win and an air majority. If you get

like a really big majority, where like Democrats do win one of these like Kansas, Nebraska,

unlikely type races in Alaska, for example, then I think it almost like flips in the direction

where it's like, boy, we can do really well even these red states if we nominate moderate candidates.

And I think that, you know, so it's these relatively fine points, because to some extent,

the primary is a coordination game. Everyone's expectations and narratives kind of create their own

reality in some ways. And so relatively small things, you know, LSAED winning by one point,

instead of losing by a tenth of a point might dramatically affect how not the reality,

not from like a data standpoint, but from like a perception and narrative standpoint and

cause some wild deviations and, you know, and how the party thinks it's going to be Republicans in

2028. Yeah, I could absolutely imagine a world in which LSAED wins and John Asaf wins. And

within two weeks, we're talking about them as two of the front runners with the 28 nomination

of the Democratic Party, in which case it's going to be a Democratic ticket that is very big on

bench pressing, I guess. We're going to hear a lot about how like Democrats are the new weightlifters

or something, you know, the CREATINE party. And look, we don't have time to go. I think, you know,

I think Gavin Newsom has long been an overrated front runner. You know, I think AOC,

would be compelling in many ways, but it seems like she might be more interested in running

for Senate. She's very young. You know, I am a seller, I think, of Democrats

renominating Kamala Harris, even though she polls pretty well, I think I mostly,

most of think that's kind of familiarity and name recognition. So, I mean, that primary is

really, really, really wide open. Even remember, like the last time we had a Democratic primary that

was contested in 2020, like literally, like, what was it? Like 23 Democrats ran?

Or something like that, right? Like I followed all them on Twitter because it was my job to do it.

I'm like, this is all my fucking Twitter feed right now is all these Democratic candidates. And like,

I'd imagine we'd have even more of that in 2028.

I agree. Nate Silver, thank you very much.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Derek.

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