Senators are elected for six years. So what happens this year profoundly affects if there were to be a Democrat elected in 2028, their likelihood of having a trifecta. I know we're looking way too far ahead here, but like six years is a long time.
Hello everybody and welcome back to Speech Center. We have a very special guest on the show today. He's the co-host of Still Counting and the founder of Silver Bulletin. It's Nate Silver.
Hey John, how are you? I like that Hollywood sign in your background.
Yes, it's great. Yeah, we're La La Land. What's your dream? Yeah. Now, normally we have the Bullwark's Tim Miller as our sports expert. Today it's you. How do you feel about filling in those shoes today?
I think I probably would beat Tim on sports knowledge. I don't know, that's maybe a close call. Yeah.
It's sort of like how when Megyn Kelly went from Fox to NBC, it was like, 'Oh, she's not good. She was just better than the alternative.' Tim is just the best gay guy at sports. But maybe I guess you're... Yeah, man. I don't know. It's tough. It's interesting because I think of him as a sports expert, but of course everybody is to me.
I'm sure Tim can throw down, but if we had like a Sports Jeopardy crooked edition, I think I'd be the favorite.
I think we have to do that for the subscribers. So, let's start with this. You have just updated your model with some new data. What have you learned?
We have learned that polling has been very good. Number go up for Democrats ever since Labor Day, roughly. Currently, Democrats have a 72.6% chance of winning the Senate and a 92.8% chance of winning the House. And those numbers are up. When we launched our forecast in mid-August, those were like 55% and 85% respectively.
But it's become genuinely hard to find good polls for Republicans, with some exceptions. Maine is a state where Collins is very much not secure in her lead. But you know, we have seen Democrats shoot up from having a six-and-a-half-point lead on the generic ballot to a nine-point lead, and that lead is even higher if you look at polls of likely voters.
The pattern we're seeing consistently is that, yeah, there's a lot of persuasion going on. People are tired of Trump and they're tired of $4.50 gas and the war in Iran. But also, Republican turnout looks like it might be quite depressed. And that might make the difference between a medium-sized wave in which the Senate is still in contention because these are in very red states, and whatever cliche you want to use, a tidal wave, tsunami, realigning election where things just totally fall apart for Republicans.
I should mention that 72.6 is quite close to the number that our model had Hillary Clinton with in 2016.
I'll tell you something. Yeah, I know. I know that. I know. One sort of indicator that sort of runs counter to this, there's been a few polls that show Minnesota's Senate race, the Peggy Flanagan race, as being surprisingly close. How does that affect how you think about this?
Putting Maine in a box because there you have a very strong by-the-numbers incumbent in Susan Collins. Yeah, Minnesota is a state where the polling has been surprisingly close. New Hampshire has been a state where the polling has been surprisingly close.
So yeah, part of what you're seeing, I think, is that, I mean, there are a couple things. One is that there's an anti-incumbent mood. So places where Republicans are in charge, and where Trump's sentiment has dropped the most, you know, it drops more in places where it was higher, right? You have a larger shift. You know, that's part of the story.
The fact that gas and diesel prices are concentrated in the Midwest, because you see whenever you drive by a gas station, it's like gas $4.48, right? Diesel, thank God I don't have a diesel car, but truckers use diesel, it's used a lot in agriculture, used a lot in petroleum production. So the middle of the country, kind of Tornado Alley, like those states are suffering more from inflation in energy prices, and so you know that is probably part of the story.
There could also be a polling story here where, you know, I use the term last in, first out. So where did Trump gain the most from like the Obama 2012 map? Well, among working-class white voters and among Hispanic voters. And those are the same groups that have now dropped off the most in the polls.
Sometimes that drop takes the form of shifting back to Democrats. More of it might just be, and they're not going to vote, right? They're not going to vote for some boring Republican when they're fed up about gas prices and things like that. So it's a coherent story the polls are telling, that like, you know, Trump's disapproval rating is now 61% or something, you know, in the same polls that actually had him at 52% when his second term started.
So if you have Trump fans turning into Trump skeptics, then the places where Trump picked up the most support over the course of the last three elections might be where he then loses the most support. Remember, you know, Obama won Ohio, Obama won Iowa in 2012, and those states shifted a lot. And you know, those are states, especially Ohio, where now both the governor and the Senate race are lean D in the polls. That would be a coherent story.
At the same time, I think every forecaster, pollster has nightmares about missing Trump voters again, like they did, not in the midterms, it's very important, not in the midterms, but in 2016, 2020, and to a lesser extent in 2024, right?
And you can imagine, right, that even though these groups are in some ways moving together, that Trump's rise and fall with Hispanic voters and his slowly increasing support with non-college-educated white voters, while those are in some sense moving together, you would see sort of different effects, say, in a state like Texas, which has a big Hispanic population, versus a state like Maine or Minnesota, where it is whiter and Trump support doesn't come as much from an increasing vote among non-white non-college-educated, but his sort of success among white non-college-educated.
These like remote northern states, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, I mean it's like it's a different kind of, you know, you go to Maine and you'll see like a gay pride flag and like a Confederate flag on like the same barn and stuff, you know. Maine's an interesting place and like Minnesota's an interesting place and like they're sometimes a little bit contrarian.
I mean, look, I think Maine's mostly about people still liking Susan Collins, right? She has beaten her polls in almost every election so far, which should make Democrats nervous, frankly. New Hampshire is another state that kind of marches to its own drummer a little bit, but you do see regional patterns.
And in 2018, rather, actually both years, 2018 polls projected a big night for Democrats. The first results that came in were from Florida, which were awful for Democrats, and Bill Nelson lost that seat. But everywhere else on the map was pretty good for Democrats, right? They lost some of the red states where they had all these incumbents in North Dakota and things like that, but they won the popular vote for the House by nine points, picked up what, 40 seats or something.
So you can have these like regional patterns more so in midterms than in presidential years. So to see a sharp regional shift in the Midwest and less of one in New England, you know, there's precedent for that kind of thing.
So, as we inch closer to midterms, Republicans have been sounding the alarm on a potential blue wave. Here's Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on CNBC warning what would happen if Dems took over the House. If in fact the House were to go blue, what do you think the genuine ramifications of that would be?
They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body. They will do nothing but go after the president, his family, his cabinet, you know, donors in the party. If you care about your pocketbook, your family stability, the stability of the markets, you have to keep Republicans in charge because if the Democrats do that, they go to lawfare on steroids, it will roil the markets. It will empower our enemies around the world at the worst possible time. They will be playing dangerous political games for their own benefit at the expense of the American people.
By the way, the insurgent left is consuming the Democrat Party, that there will be no blue dog Democrats, no free market Democrats left after this cycle. We will not be having arguments and debates about traditional issues, you know, marginal tax rates and inflation and foreign policy. This will be a battle between whether or not we're going to keep the republic or we're going to break this thing down and go down this dark, dangerous road to Marxism.
Republicans have done something pretty interesting, I think, in the last week. If you looked at the issues that are leading voters' concerns, right, it would be cost of living, gas prices, anger about the war in Iran, anger about tariffs. It wouldn't be the unfair prosecution of Donald Trump after the 2020 election. Yet, they had this big hearing that blew up in their faces. Mike Johnson is saying that the Dow will be negatively affected by an investigative House. What do you think they're trying to do by focusing on investigations of Donald Trump?
Look, I think the second part of Speaker Johnson's message might be a little bit better, where like, you know, there probably is some ground to gain on Democrats are the radical left, and although some of those radical candidates were filtered out by the primaries, but you know, the reason why almost always the opposition party gains ground in midterms is because people want a check on power, and they particularly want a check when you have a Republican trifecta, really a quadfecta since the Supreme Court is a 6-3 conservative majority too, right?
People want a check on power. They don't want unfettered Trump, and Trump is not very popular, and so like that seems like unpersuasive messaging. But like I don't know, they have a lot of good arguments to make really. I mean just the directness of the fact that Trump ran on no more foreign wars and lower gas prices, and the fact that it's so fundamentally contradicted, I think does matter.
And then the corruption, and you can layer lots of different elements on top of that, and the fact that he's 80 years old. You know, I was a big critic of Biden being too old to even think about running for a second term. Well, he's been in office for a long time. Trump people are fatigued by the president because he's a lame duck. You no longer have Republicans propping him up to quite the same degree.
But like I, yeah, I think Republicans are grasping at straws because they don't have persuasive arguments to make except that Democrats are too far left. But even then, you're not going to have a Democrat in charge of the White House. So they're constrained in how much power they apply. And the House is reelected every two years. So if people don't like it, then they have an opportunity to reverse course again, which they might in '28.
By the way, even though our forecast is optimistic for Democrats in 2026, I don't think that necessarily tells you that much about 2028, right? You know, you could have probably a lot of investigations that get bogged down and people find annoying, right? But for '26, people want a check on Trump's power.
They're stuck, right? I do think those are the two halves of the argument. The first half, I think, is about him speaking to Republicans trying to get the Trump voter out. I think that's why they held this hearing. You know, you see Jon Husted in Ohio. He is one of the Republicans that actually went to that midterm convention. He's also having Trump come to Ohio. Trump is obviously unpopular. There's a real cost to having Trump in your state, but he clearly thinks if there's any hope, it has to be about driving out the base.
They could say, 'We're going to concede that we're going to lose the House, right? We want to triage the Senate, right? Maybe Ohio is, North Carolina is probably gone, right? Brown's a strong candidate in Ohio, that's probably gone. But maybe we can hold our own in Iowa and Texas and Alaska. At the very least, we don't want to lose Kansas and Nebraska and this next tier, more exotic, South Carolina.' You know, and some of the polls there, I'm skeptical that the races are as close as the polls show them to be.
But you know, the other thing to keep in mind, John, is that like it's a basic fact of American democracy, but senators are elected for six years. So what happens this year profoundly affects if there were to be a Democrat elected in 2028, the likelihood of having a trifecta and even holding that trifecta past 2030. I know we're looking way too far ahead here, but like six years is a long time.
You get a Senate seat in Alaska or Iowa, that lives through a Democrat winning ideally in 2028, the wave that comes against that Democrat in 2030, right? Like that lasts you a long time. If I were looking for sort of negative scenarios for Democrats, and if we woke up on the day after the election, what would I be worried about right now?
It would be there was a big wave, Democrats did win the House, but some of these contrary factors in Maine, maybe a state like Michigan, and all of a sudden we wake up and boy did we overperform in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and lost those by two points, but then also in Maine underperformed and lost by a point. And then you have a wave that looks a little bit less like 2006 and more like 2018, where you do really well but you don't win the Senate.
Yeah. I mean, Democrats like lost one Senate seat net or two or something in 2018 despite picking up 40 seats in the House. That would be one way it might happen, right? Is death by a thousand cuts. That they, that Collins loses in Maine, Elissa Slotkin wins Michigan by a point, but they lose Iowa by a point, they lose Texas by a point, right? They should win North Carolina, hold Georgia. But like that would probably be the scenario by which it would happen.
