00:20:08 · Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver, Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal
[00:20:08] S0: I feel like turnout in particular would be difficult for a digital twin to model? Like maybe you can come up with political preference based on demographics, but like predicting whether someone is actually going to leave the House and vote seems particularly difficult to me. But tell me if I'm wrong. [00:20:23] S2: Yeah, we did a little simulation in South Carolina, which is one of the more surprising races to be polling closely. And, you know, and one more, frankly, be a bit more surprised Democrats won. [00:20:32] S1: Right. [00:20:32] S2: But like, you know, what if black voters in South Carolina turned out at 2024 rates and white voters turn out at 2022 rates, like that shifts the top lines by like 10 points, right? It's a deliberately extreme example. And in South Carolina, the white vote is very conservative. But, you know, that's an example of like, you know, because you have had some midterms where 2018 in particular, you had some states getting up to presidential type turnout. But if it's differential turnout, that would you need that for a state like South Carolina to flip. [00:21:04] S3: The Democrats have 14 percent in Mississippi. on polymarket. [00:21:07] S2: Yeah, that one's a little weird. [00:21:09] S3: These are funny states. These southern states are pretty funny, right? Because the top line votes are actually offered frequently fairly close. It's just that every white is a Republican and all the non-whites are not Republicans. And so while it looks really close, it's just like, it's just purely demographics.
00:21:09 · Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway
[00:21:09] S3: These are funny states. These southern states are pretty funny, right? Because the top line votes are actually offered frequently fairly close. It's just that every white is a Republican and all the non-whites are not Republicans. And so while it looks really close, it's just like, it's just purely demographics. [00:21:28] S2: No, so we have a concept in our model that we call elasticity, which is how sensitive is a state to changes in the national race. And that's based on voter-level microdata where we see people clustered at the tails or more in the middle. And, you know, South Carolina, but especially like Louisiana, Mississippi, have very low elasticity. So that's why. So we are lower than polymarket and Democrats in those states. [00:21:50] S0: Actually, since you mentioned demographics, can we talk about gerrymandering for a second? So to what degree do you see that, I guess, backfiring on the Republicans at this point? [00:22:00] S2: So, yeah, a gerrymander where you wind up with fewer seats than you would have under the original maps is a dummymander. Is a term for it? [00:22:06] S0: This is an actual term.
00:22:06 · Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver
[00:22:06] S0: This is an actual term. [00:22:07] S2: It's a term. We have terms for everything in politics. Only poker players have more terms in politics. In Florida, Ron DeSantis drew a map for kind of a presidential year baseline. In presidential years, I expect Florida to remain a pretty red state, right? It's not robust for like a D plus nine climate where Florida goes from R plus 13 to R plus four, right? or something, right? It wasn't designed for that. And if Democrats kind of run the table in Florida, then they could actually wind up with more seats than they would have under the old map, right? In Texas, Republicans hope to make a lot of their gains from, I guess, this maybe frankly arrogant presumption that, oh, now Hispanics in South Texas are now our voters instead of being swingy. And so, like, that probably won't be a dummy mander, but could be a case where the places they hope to maintain gains, you'll have Democratic incumbents holding on. [00:22:57] S3: Intuitively, if you're a mapmaker... And your only goal is to maximize the number of seats that your party wins. You have to take some risks, right? Is this the key idea here? [00:23:08] S1: Correct.
00:23:08 · Nate Silver, Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
[00:23:08] S1: Correct. [00:23:09] S2: I don't even think they necessarily played it wrong, right? So, you know, again, the House is not quite a sure thing. There is a 5% chance. The way the 5% comes up is that if there is a systematic polling error and the map winds up being a little bit less blue, then the gerrymanders become more effective again, right? So there's like, you know, it's probably not enough for Republicans, but there's like this exponential, there's inflection point at which Joe Mandarin goes from not very helpful to helpful for Republicans. [00:23:35] S3: There's definitely some analogy here to like the options market and convexity. [00:23:40] S1: Oh, probably. [00:23:41] S3: I can't quite. I'm not smart enough to articulate it, but there's clear someone smart enough will be able to come up with some what the what we're really what would we be talking about in the financial version of this conversation? [00:23:53] S0: Yeah. Is there a potential upset that you're particularly interested in at the moment or that you think people aren't paying enough attention to?
00:23:53 · Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal
[00:23:53] S0: Yeah. Is there a potential upset that you're particularly interested in at the moment or that you think people aren't paying enough attention to? [00:24:01] S2: I think governors' races don't get enough attention in general. According to our modeling, we could wind up with almost two-thirds of the country being represented by a Democrat, but there are lots of big gubernatorial races where, unlike in the Senate, in the Senate you have lots of these one- or two-point Democratic leads. In governorships, it's the opposite. Abbott is ahead in Texas, but only by a A couple of points. I don't think I'd bet against Abbott given the odds that Flipper gives. But like I think that governor race is really important in part because Abbott is the most prolifically pro data center governor, I think, in the country. And one of the big things I think. [00:24:39] S3: And even he's not that pro data center anymore. [00:24:41] S2: No. So let's say you have at least one Democratic chamber of Congress. Maybe, you know, even if Democrats only got to 50 Senate seats, you don't have the Senate. But like you're going to have a lot of gridlock. I think the one policy area where you could see action before 28 is on AI, right? I mean, if the timelines are even a third as aggressive as the labs think, then they'll kind of be forced to take action. But I'll be looking for, is there evidence that AI had a big effect in this race and that people were seeing this through pro-AI, got punished for it? [00:25:26] S3: My son the other day told me he wants me to bring him up more on the podcast.
00:25:26 · Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver
[00:25:26] S3: My son the other day told me he wants me to bring him up more on the podcast. [00:25:32] S1: Oh. [00:25:32] S3: He wants me to tell more. [00:25:33] S0: Is he listening? [00:25:34] S3: No, but he's like, he's like, he's like. [00:25:36] S0: Just tell me you mention him every day. [00:25:38] S3: Can you make me famous by telling, mentioning me more on the podcast? So I will tell a story. I've mentioned before, he's very into money. We were watching a University of Texas football game the other day and there was this, there was this ad that, for the Abbott campaign. I don't know if it was the official Abbott campaign or one of these outside groups. And it said, Gina Hinojosa's income tax plan will cost your family thousands of dollars. And my son turns to me, he's like, Dad, we're not voting for her, right? Oh, no. It's so funny. And I was like, this is like, you are exactly who this ad was targeted towards. My seven-year-old, you know, it's like, he's just like, Dad, we're not going to vote for her, right? This candidate that costs thousands of dollars. [00:26:20] S2: No, I was watching the World Series, and there were like three straight ads in the Mike Lawler, the Westchester County district, right? I'm like, no, even in New York, you can't really escape. [00:26:28] S1: Oh, my God. Yeah. [00:26:30] S0: Yeah.