00:03:30 · Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway
[00:03:30] S3: But you have to take a kind of leap of faith that the Democrat could win in Texas. [00:03:37] S2: You have to kind of take a leap of faith on some of this stuff. And a probabilistic leap of faith. But at this point, it would be a really bad night for pollsters if Democrats don't win the Senate. [00:03:50] S0: Just to sort of test our priors a little bit. Everyone's treating this as a referendum on Trump, which kind of like makes me nervous when everyone's doing the same thing. But in your view, is that an accurate way to measure it? Like, do we have hardcore evidence that people are voting on Trump rather than voting on a local representative?
00:03:50 · Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver
[00:03:50] S0: Just to sort of test our priors a little bit. Everyone's treating this as a referendum on Trump, which kind of like makes me nervous when everyone's doing the same thing. But in your view, is that an accurate way to measure it? Like, do we have hardcore evidence that people are voting on Trump rather than voting on a local representative? [00:04:09] S2: I think the best evidence is that Trump is no longer featured in Republican campaign commercials, right? Trump is not being talked about anymore on Republican podcasts. However, Trump himself is trying to make himself like the main character of this story when I don't think very many Republicans want that, right? Ironically, they had this Republican convention, was it in Dallas just after Labor Day? And like, that's when Republican polls kind of went from bad to worse. I don't think that's the main cause or necessarily even the secondary cause. But yeah, I mean, the behavior you'd expect if people are being kind of game theory optimal is that Trump is taking a back seat and trying to let his more moderate candidates distance themselves a little bit. And instead, we've seen the opposite, right? I mean, if Trump hadn't endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas, I'm not sure that James Talarico would have a slight lead there. If Trump hadn't chosen to go to war with Iran, I tend to think the Senate would be a toss up and not lean D. So no, he's the central character. And it's also kind of like, It's kind of like the last time Trump is on the ballot, barring extra constitutional shenanigans.
00:04:09 · Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal
[00:04:09] S2: I think the best evidence is that Trump is no longer featured in Republican campaign commercials, right? Trump is not being talked about anymore on Republican podcasts. However, Trump himself is trying to make himself like the main character of this story when I don't think very many Republicans want that, right? Ironically, they had this Republican convention, was it in Dallas just after Labor Day? And like, that's when Republican polls kind of went from bad to worse. I don't think that's the main cause or necessarily even the secondary cause. But yeah, I mean, the behavior you'd expect if people are being kind of game theory optimal is that Trump is taking a back seat and trying to let his more moderate candidates distance themselves a little bit. And instead, we've seen the opposite, right? I mean, if Trump hadn't endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas, I'm not sure that James Talarico would have a slight lead there. If Trump hadn't chosen to go to war with Iran, I tend to think the Senate would be a toss up and not lean D. So no, he's the central character. And it's also kind of like, It's kind of like the last time Trump is on the ballot, barring extra constitutional shenanigans. [00:05:15] S3: Yeah, which who knows? Now, this gets to the question of like, could it be a bad night for pollsters? And there is this seems to this view has congealed in the general public that starting at least since 2016, pollsters always overestimate Democrats. [00:05:32] S2: Yeah.
00:05:32 · Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal
[00:05:32] S2: Yeah. [00:05:33] S3: I think your view is that that's actually just factually incorrect. But why don't you tell us about what we know about polling error?
00:05:40 · Nate Silver, Nate Silver
[00:05:40] S2: So what we know, number one, is that polling errors are correlated. That if a poll misses high on the Democrat in Iowa, probably in a similar state like Kansas or Nebraska, all three states are competitive this year, good chance you'll have a correlated error. So therefore, you cannot look at individual races as a Monte Carlo random. But A, they're less correlated in midterms than in presidential years because you have different candidates on the ballot in every state. That's important. In 2022, we saw this kind of really big red wave in like New York, New Jersey, tri-state area. And Republicans did really well in Florida. The rest of the map was relatively good for Democrats. John Fetterman won and people like that, given that Biden had like a 39% approval rating. You know, number two, we have had systematic polling errors that underestimated Trump in 2016, 2020, 2024, a little bit more modest, but still direction the same, right? In every election in the Trump era where Trump is not on the ballot, You have not had that error. And in fact, in like New Jersey and Virginia last year, you had a massive underestimation of Democrats and governors races. And so like, first of all, it could all be noise, right? If you like code up a, you know, have Claude or whatever, or GPT code up a SIM to just show you like what random polling error looks like in the past 20 elections, it looks kind of like, you know, it's impossible to distinguish it. [00:06:57] S1: Right.
00:06:57 · Nate Silver, Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway
[00:06:57] S1: Right. [00:06:57] S2: But one story might be that like Trump has this kind of magical power to attract voters low turnout voters that also happen to be hard for pollsters to reach and where they get screened out as being unlikely voters. Those voters don't seem to want to show up for like a Roger Marshall in Kansas or a Ken Paxton in Texas, right? It seems very, you know, Trump got a lot of young men last year who flipped to 2024, who flipped to him. Young men don't usually turn out in terms of watching the NFL or whatever, right? And like there's a consistent story where like conveniently this problem of like these missing voters aren't an issue if they don't vote. [00:07:38] S0: This was actually going to be my next question. But like what are you seeing in terms of early signs of turnout? And then what are the chances that a former Trump voter actually votes Democrat rather than just decides not to show up?