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?
00:07:38 · Tracy Alloway, Nate Silver
[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? [00:07:53] S2: As compared to general elections or presidential elections, turnout is relatively speaking more important. in midterms. Differential turnout is almost always a factor in some of these bigger waves. I'm not an early voting expert, but there are people who are pretty good at it, right? It can be very ad hoc if you don't kind of set clear rules ahead of time. And they seem to be seeing good numbers for Democrats, better numbers in the polls. I don't know, because the polls are really good for Democrats, right? But it provides some more consensus evidence for it, particularly high turnout among Black voters who may fear being disenfranchised. high turnout or not high turnout, but comparatively high turnout among unlikely voters, people who in the voter files have voted no more than one in the past four elections. Democrats are getting a lot of those, but they're getting more than Republicans, right? I think some pollsters are finding there's very little D to R crossover. If you're any type of Democrat at all, this is not the year to indulge in a moderate Republican, right? Maybe a little bit of the reverse. But like, I mean, things tell a consistent story. It's just kind of this existential thing about whether people believe the story or not.