You guys know your jobs, right?
I'm not introducing you. You're introducing yourselves. Okay. It's a whole new world.
Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gayen Duke.
And I'm Nate Silver. We are back.
As folks may know by now, Nate, Claire, and I are getting back together to start a sequel, if you will, start a new show. Before we get to our official episode, first episode, which is launching Wednesday. It's like episode... Okay, this is like episode 0.5.
It's a mini... It's the introduction to our...
It's a mini episode, as our friends at Crooked have been calling it, which is a new term for me, which I like.
Our first episode, dear listener, launches on Wednesday, September 9th. So, mark it down on your calendars. Subscribe. Smash that subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts. You get the drill. But before we sort of dive in with the midterms and Trump and like the parties and everything that is going to take up a lot of our time for the coming... I was going to say year, two years, three, whatever it may be for the rest of...
We wanted to turn the mics on, warm up, talk a little about where we've been, what we're doing with the show, how we ended up here, answer some burning listener questions, and also play...
Do you even have listeners yet? How can the listeners have questions if we have no listeners at this point?
Hey, I mean, aspiration...
Write us some questions. I don't have an email address for you yet.
I mean, the folks on social media dropped some questions. I'm like, I mean, mostly people were very enthusiastic, which we were so excited to hear, right? Like, uh...
Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker retweeted us, which was...
the only thing I care about.
I actually haven't seen it.
Tell me if she has Twitter.
Okay. So, let's talk a little bit about what we've been up to for the past... So, Claire, we haven't sat down for an official podcast since right before January 6th, 2020.
Well, you know what? I went back and looked this morning. I departed 538 in December of 2020. So, in my memory, I thought that I was still employed by 5... Am I allowed to say 53?
Yeah, that's a joke. They just bleep it out.
Yes, please bleep it out. No, so I think my last podcast episode with you guys must have been December 2020. So the election had happened, but I do... I mean, I have very vivid memories of watching January 6 happen at like the same desk and on the same computer where I recorded all the podcasts. So I smooshed it all together. But like, yes, we haven't been together in this form in 5 years. The last time we were, I guess, together in person, we did not know what the world had in store for the country, us, the parties, whatnot.
First, let's talk about where we've been since December 2020, then we'll talk about where the country's been since December 2020. So, Claire, why don't you pick us up?
Okay. Um, wow. So, I... so much actually. Um, I freelanced for a while. Uh, I made a podcast about Hollywood and pop culture for The Ringer, which was actually super fun. I had sort of like my rom-com year of like not doing as much about politics. Um, which was really fun. And...
wrote a cover story for New York Magazine about Andrew Yang.
Yeah, that was fun. And then, um, I kind of got like my dream job, um, which I still have. Um, I am a writer at The New Yorker. I cover media and politics, and I'm currently on leave from that job, um, writing a book about the MAGA movement and Bobby Kennedy, and um, you know, which I'm really excited about. So I'm kind of on leave for a year and doing that book and reporting for it and writing it, and so...
Yeah, that's my kind of like quick...
So tell me, Claire, what's up with all these beef tallow chips? Are they going to make me live forever?
Well, Gayen, a lot of people think it's a cleaner fat, a cleaner oil, right? That's a... Oh, that's a whole... You know...
I'm so excited for this book to come out and be able to ask you all of my quirky health questions.
I mean, by which I mean unpasteurized milk.
What have you been up to?
So, they called the herd at ABC 538 one at a time.
We're going in order. Actually...
We are going in order. First man down.
Yeah. Exactly. Uh, no. I started a Substack newsletter called Silver Bulletin. I took about two seconds to come up with that name. Thank you very much. But it's kind of stuck now. Um, and it's kind of my dream job in some ways, right? I'm my own boss. I actually have incentive to work hard. Don't get me wrong. I worked my ass off for ABC News for most of it.
You do work hard for most of it. Important caveat there.
For the first like eight and a half years, the contract, until they totally [__] around at the end. Um, but no, the newsletter is great. We've been able to build or rebuild most of the models that we have. We have a team of four counting me right now. Um, and now I have this show with you guys that I'm very excited about.
We're very excited to have it with you.
Yeah.
So, I left 538/ABC last, which would have been March of 2025. I'll be honest, it felt like, if we're really like pulling back the curtain, it felt for a while like I was recording a podcast on the deck of a sinking ship. Like all of my main sort of friends on the ship had gone overboard and I was just still there, you know, every day turning up the mic and whatnot. But anyway, so 538 went down early March of 2025. I started a new podcast called GD Politics, which is a play on, yes, both my initials, but also goddamn politics. I think the way that many people feel about politics these days. Started it on St. Patrick's Day in honor of one of my best friends, one of my best Irish Catholic friends.
Thank you. And my parents' anniversary.
Yeah.
So yeah, we kind of got the podcast up and running two weeks after 538 went down. And I'm still talking with folks who used to work at 538 like Nathaniel Rakich, Mary Radcliffe. I'm talking to pollsters and all different kinds of authors, some politicians. We made news with Lisa Murkowski. She told me she would consider becoming an independent under the right circumstances.
You have a... the podcast is great. There's so many... I mean, and also just, yeah, just like a shout out to all the 538 expats who are now like scattered to the winds but are all doing such...
We've secretly infiltrated all of media to make data journalism present everywhere.
But anyway, so I have been doing that for the past year and a half now and it's been a lot of... it's on Substack. Um, so I've been working with Nate over on Substack, which has been a lot of fun. And it's kind of my dream job, too. You know, I get to have a lot of fun conversations with many different smart people. And now I get to have, which I'm going to continue doing that, by the way, that other podcast, but now I'm going to have more fun conversations with more people I love right here every Wednesday.
We should say why we're doing this show. I think when we first started talking about it, it was basically just like we want to do what we used to do. We want to have a smart conversation and we don't want to change it that much. And in some ways that's, you know, we talked to a lot of different people. In some ways that's why we ended up at Crooked, um, because I think they had listened to the old show and kind of knew what we did, um, and liked it, and we didn't really want to, you know, curb our analysis or sort of maybe strong opinions or things that came across on the show. We just wanted to make our show, and um, and that's kind of why we've ended up here. You know, we're all journalists, um, in one form or another. And um, that's how... that's what we're going to do on this show. We're going to be journalists. We're going to have our analysis. And I don't know, I'm excited we landed here.
Although it is nice to work with a team, right, instead of having everything... because people say, 'Why don't you just put your shows on the Substack?' And by the way, I'll still have video interviews on my Substack that aren't related to like this content necessarily. Um, but yeah, I don't know. I've been experienced enough to be kind of an old media hand, and I just got good vibes that they were really interested and engaged.
A couple things. One, I think to your point, Claire, Crooked basically said, 'We want to support you in making the podcast you want to make.' And that was really exciting.
And we asked a lot of questions.
We asked a lot of questions. And one of them was like, of course, Crooked is a progressive, democratically aligned media company. And we are not a democratically aligned podcast. Just to make that crystal clear, we never were. We still aren't, and we won't be. You know, we have opinions and analysis that sometimes the left likes and sometimes the right likes. And people can make their own conclusions about what sort of biases and opinions we may be secretly hiding or we may say upfront.
When people thought we were getting married.
I mean, all kinds of fanfiction based on both politics and our personal lives.
But to be clear, Crooked said we don't mind that you're not Democrats, that you're not progressives, that you are journalists and analysts first, and we want to support you in doing that. And we said fantastic because that's what we want to do and that's what we're going to keep doing here, which is trying to reflect the world as it is and analyze it that way instead of telling people either what to think or the way that the world should be or whatever. Which, Claire, you mentioned that we want to do what we did back in the early days of 538 or the earlier days of 538, which is true, but as we've all mentioned here, we've changed, we've grown a lot in the past 5 years, and also...
So the environment in which we're in has changed.
Yes, media and vertical video and all that. We've taken now our fourth pivot to video in the past decade, but numbers have changed, right? Like we used to joke about the Scottish teens and predicting [__] on the 538 podcast, but now it's not like a niche thing anymore. Polymarket and Kalshi are out front. All of these media organizations are doing collaborations with them. There's, you know, the polls are coming hot and heavy. There's the eternal conversation about whether the polls are getting worse or not, how hard it is to reach people. We've just had big polling misses in some primaries. We can debate how expected those kinds of polling misses should be. There are new polling upstarts, etc., etc. And so, the media environment has changed. We've changed, but also the numbers environment, you know, hashtag still counting, the numbers environment has changed. And so I just want to hear a little bit how we're going to approach maybe this new environment or sort of why this work is more important than ever.
Some of these trends like the interest in prediction markets, the interest in sports gambling, right? These are things that like I've always been interested in and...
The world has caught up to Nate Silver.
It's really just we're kind of living in your weird little...
It is a little weird. It is a little weird where you walk into a sports arena, you walk into Madison Square Garden, they have the Kalshi or Polymarket concourse. I forget who sponsors what exactly. Like that's a little weird. Certainly some notion... You hear this notion sometimes that like, oh, people are just going to... we should just cover policy and civics. You know, no one needs to look at polls. Like, yeah, [__] that. People actually want to anticipate what's going to happen given how important elections are. That's the most natural impulse and the most newsworthy impulse I can imagine.
And the people who cover policy well should keep doing it too.
Yes, absolutely. But elections, I mean, you know, have you noticed that there's almost no overlap now in the way that Democrats and Republicans vote in Congress among voters? It's a little bit more ambiguous, and I think people... I think the swing voters become more underrated than overrated. Um, but like, you know, when you are deciding who wins an election, voting in an election, that everything is kind of baked in from there for at least the next two years, right? There's not a lot... I mean, there, you know, obviously there are stumbles and policy misfires. If anything though, the equilibrium we're in now is that because you have this rapid-fire switch back and forth. By the way, it wouldn't surprise me if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 and then they're also a one-term president. And you have this ping-pong effect, but it's almost like because they know they're going to lose power quickly and become unpopular quickly, they therefore rush to do everything they can in the first 100 days and bear the consequences of that. And yeah, we're almost taking turns now instead of building durable majorities. I don't know how stable that is. Um, but that's an important dynamic and...
Yeah, we're in the middle of potentially trend-shifting things during politics. I feel like when we were covering, when we first launched the podcast in 2016, we were always talking about the party decides, right? That was the current theory going on. And I feel like over the past decade, oh my gosh, that we've been doing this, we're in this weird...
interregnum of there were sort of traditional...
American party politics, and now we're a little bit in this wild west. And I think that's interesting, like what's the next... what are the trends of the next 10, 20, 30 years going to be? And I also think, you know, some of the stuff we're going to talk about on this podcast, AI, right, that, you know, the sort of popularization of gambling culture, um, all of that stuff is going to play in some way politically.
Yeah. I mean, the 538 Politics podcast became popular during the 2016 election cycle, which was...
I didn't even know we were going to do a podcast. On my second day of work, they were like, 'You're doing a podcast.' I mean, that was a real trip, that election cycle, but it set in motion a lot of the trends that we've now been talking about for the past decade. The reality is that Trump is going to leave office, and there are going to be likely new dynamics that set in, may start as soon as this fall, the midterms that we're going to be covering. But I think one of the things that made me most excited after doing basically a decade at 538 to still be doing this, start a politics podcast right back up again, is that I do think we're in a period of change. Like the Democratic primary in 2028 is going to start in four months and it's going to be absolutely fascinating. And to the point about these trends, I do wonder if at a certain point we become so polarized, the trends in education and what become so... they extend to their logical conclusion that something kind of breaks and something new is created. Back in 2016, we were always like the system is very stable. It's a two-party system. Third-party candidates have no chance. Independents have no chance. You know, the American political system is the way it is. And you can oftentimes bet on that and be right. But at a certain point trends reach their logical conclusion and something shifts. Either, you know, the populists in the two parties may see eye to eye and reshape the... the more establishment parts of the two parties may see eye to eye and form common ground. There are different ways, you know, there are different ways right now that you can see things breaking open. We've never had more independents in American politics. Like people are just really dissatisfied with the two parties, and the two parties, the coalitions within them don't make a ton of sense necessarily. And so I'm excited to cover something that will be, I think, dynamic and hopefully dynamic in a positive way.
Yeah. The last really major shift in American politics that played out over, um, you know, anywhere from the 1970s through the early 2000s was...
the shift of southern Democrats into conservative southern Republicans, right? And in some ways the map, if you look at the map from 2000, Al Gore versus George Bush, a few states have changed, right? Georgia, so forth, Ohio, Iowa in the other direction, still about 80% the same map. And yeah, I don't know. I think people might underrate the chance of a seismic shift. Of course, pundits have been talking about this for years, but like two things. One is, you know, if AI is as transformative or half as transformative as the labs claim it is, you're going to have great destabilization to the political system. We can debate if the AI optimists are right. Um, data centers are kind of the early canary in the coal mine for that, maybe, right? The other thing is more and more, um, you know, look, I build models, and classically in models we're trying to predict how do different demographics predict voting behavior, and the big ones are always race and religion, right? Um, increasingly though you see these really big divides with respect to age on Gaza, for example, in New York here with support for Mamdani, for example, um, where Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, uh, really, really sharp age splits. Not always as simple as young people are progressive, it's actually a little more complicated, but like, but when you see that, then you're almost guaranteed to have generational change coming, you know, breaking news: old people die off, except the electorate, right? Um...
Yes.
So, in classic form, we were like, let's do a little feed warmer. Let's turn the mics on. We've practically recorded an entire podcast episode now. But we wanted to, before we go, play a little game because it has been a long time since we've all been together in a studio. And we were reflecting on that time when we were discussing in our editorial meeting, you know, what we want to talk about. And we're like, okay, let's try to settle on the most important number that defines the period that we were apart. So, say, you know, January of 2021 to now, August of 2026, what number either during that time is most significant to the political shifts or whatever themes that we've seen, or in this very moment, what number is the most significant? So, uh, Claire...
I have two numbers. Maybe I misunderstood the directions. Can I do two numbers? I'm going to do two numbers. Or should I do one number?
Do one number. Then we'll come back around for...
