Are you okay? Asking someone if they're okay is so triggering. [laughter]
Three healthy individuals doing a podcast. God bless.
Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gayen Drake.
And on today's show, midterms, midterms, midterms. As if we weren't doing that before, but you know, we'll check in on Nate's midterm model, Flipper.
That [laughter] was a weird one. That sounds sort of like a dying cow. Is Clipper okay to continue the theme? [laughter]
Debate the conventional wisdom around a series of midterms headlines and if there's time, answer some midterms related audience questions. So, election season is here. Okay, a little housekeeping here. Nate, did you know that Gayen and I recorded a, what are we calling these? YouTube short.
A minode. Last Friday, we put it up on YouTube.
Pound that YouTube button. Subscribe to Silver Bullet. I think it's smash.
Who came up with that? Who came up with that vernacular?
Smash that subscribe button.
It's so stupid. But I do still want you to subscribe and watch it. It was fun. It was also not that short. It was like 25 minutes long.
Yeah. Claire and I got to have a little fun without you, Nate. We debated how influential some of the quote-unquote October surprises have been so far.
And for folks who are only listening to this in the RSS feed, you're missing out. You got to go subscribe. That's our little like teaser. You know, you got to go subscribe on YouTube too. You can see what hat Nate is wearing. You can... you can see what our homes look like [laughter] or small slivers of our homes. Yeah, we talked about the Ken Paxton leaked audio crisis, quote-unquote crisis there, James Helico having the flu, and of course I would say our favorite story, US ambassador or shall we say former US ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle's honey please annex crisis, which is genuinely my favorite story of the season.
Truly, you asked the most important question, which is now who's going to pay for her wigs? [laughter]
To be fair to Kimberly Guilfoyle, I think it's a combination of real hair and some sewn-in pieces. Yes. Yes. Or maybe it's all real. That's my speculation. It is full and beautiful.
Okay. But we're going to try to record these as often as possible. So if you want more Still Counting content in your life, go to youtube.com/stillcountingodcast and hit subscribe. First, we're going to check in with Flipper, where Democrats have maintained their edge in the Senate and House forecasts, 73% and 93% respectively. Flipper gives the odds of a Democratic sweep of Congress at 73%. Okay.
I will say this is the first week since we started taping that you haven't had an increase for Democrats in the forecast. So you can start to make an argument for a plateau. The generic ballot has ticked down a little bit. I always assume this is mostly because of gas prices. Gas fell from like 4.50 a gallon to 4.30 or something. And Trump's approval rating still very bad, but like ticked up by a point. But we'll talk about this in the context of the show. Like, you know, I think we're kind of entering silly season where the amount of noise tends to drown out the amount of signal.
Has the race just solidified, Gayen?
Well, there was an interesting poll out from Politico that suggested, at least according to voters themselves, 30% said they would switch their vote to a Republican in Congress if gas were to drop a dollar by election day. That would be a precipitous fall. But I don't think you should always believe voters when they respond to pollsters in the hypothetical.
We've been through this many, many times. It's hard to imagine how you will feel in the future if something good or bad happens.
I do think though that there are a lot of material concerns facing voters that if they were to suddenly improve, you would see some of Trump's approval rating bounce back and the like. But it's hard with now less than three weeks until election day to imagine these material concerns improving to the point where you'd see a fundamental shift.
Can I ask a gas price question because you've been gas price banned over here?
Gas price. I feel like this is like the OddLads podcast.
But it's well because Trump obviously made sort of a huge foreign policy decision where he basically rolled back sanctions to allow Russian diesel into the market. I think there's a lot of skepticism about whether or not that actually makes any difference. But his reasoning behind that big move is basically the midterms. Like, is it going to make any difference?
When you see retail gas prices, they're roughly two weeks lagged from oil prices, right? It literally takes the oil a long time to get around the world. And gas prices are a little bit sticky. So, you've seen gas decline from 4.50 to 4.31, the AAA average or something. However, over the past five days, oil futures are up 6% to $95 a barrel. And so that's it, right? That's going to be the last incident that kind of flows through and dictates what gas prices are and to a large extent also energy bills by election day. So, it's probably too late now to undo the Iran war to the point where gas is magically cheaper by election day. And by the way, election day is happening, guys. People are voting in a lot of these states. We can talk about early voting. I'm sure we will. But yeah, I think the cake is pretty baked and it's kind of a question of like, do we have an accurate picture of the bake, right? Or of the cake. Whole Foods is closed. You can't go and buy more ingredients. You know, the CVS is open 24/7, but their ingredients are kind of shitty. You probably wouldn't make the cake better with those, right? And so, like, yeah, we're...
Way to extend that metaphor.
Well, I was thinking about how baked the cake actually is. So, I went through... I mean, the cake is baked in the House, right? Democrats only have to win three or four seats depending on how you count vacancies at the moment, and 93% chance is well beyond Hillary Clinton territory in 2016. If we're using that as a benchmark, I think people feel that the House is baked. In the Senate, I was going through this morning looking at the polling averages to see how many of those averages have now sort of been stable for a while, and here's what I found. In Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, we have seen stability since August or even earlier, right? John Ossoff has been leading by nine points as far back as midsummer. Roy Cooper in North Carolina has been leading by 10 points since April. In Ohio, it's been a three or four point lead for Sherrod Brown since August. Now in Texas, you see that, you know, three weeks ago, James Talarico was leading by two points. Well, starting in August, and now it's up to three and a half points. There's been a little movement in Michigan towards Elissa Slotkin. She's now leading by about three and a half points as well. A little movement in Maine towards Collins. Troy Jackson is now leading by just two and a half points. Some of the bigger movement we've seen, you know, a month ago the polling average flipped in Iowa. Now Joni Ernst leads Cindy Hodge by a point and a half. In Kansas, it flipped at the beginning of October. So now Adam Hamilton, the Democrat, leads Roger Marshall by about a point. In Minnesota, this is interesting. You see things shifting towards Democrats. Maybe if we are to expect the partisanship of a state to have more influence down the final stretch as undecided voters make up their minds. You know, Flanagan's lead over has grown about two points since the beginning of October to four points. You're also seeing a similar thing in New Hampshire, another Democratic state where Democrats have been underperforming a little bit. You know, Chris Pappas's lead over Johnson has grown from three points to seven points since the beginning of September. That's a lot of numbers in there, but we're seeing stability in some of the races where the candidates are well-known and well-defined at this point and some movement in the states where candidates are less well-defined.
I want to just drill down a little bit on the Democrats because in a previous episode, one of our first ones, we talked about how there had been pretty bleak numbers for Democrats in this poll from earlier this year, an NBC poll from earlier this year that showed that the Democratic Party was one of the things less popular than AI along with Iran. [laughter] But there's some Gallup data, new Gallup data that says that, you know, the Democratic Party has increased favorability by six points in the last year while Republicans has fallen by five. What is this? Is it something more permanent? Is it just the midterms, sort of the Trump Republicans being in the spotlight and the war in Iran making everything look bad?
Look, Democrats had all their little family feuds over the summer in Wisconsin and Maine and Michigan. If you look at another Gallup poll, it found that if you ask people which party is more extreme, for a long time to the annoyance of people on Bluesky or whatever, right, the average voter thought Democrats were more extreme than Republicans. That is not true anymore. Republicans have zoomed up in this extremity measure, and if you kind of believe in like the median voter theorem that in general you want to be closer to what people say they want, kind of common sense, I would think, then that's a bullish sign for Democrats too. But yeah, Gayen, you're right that Claire, we haven't seen that much movement in individual states. To the extent we have, it's kind of states coming more in line with partisan fundamentals. Like Minnesota would still be a big underperformance. We talked about Minnesota last week. New Hampshire is looking a little more normal now, right? It's interesting that we haven't seen... I mean, I kind of halfway expect a tick back to Republicans in some of these, maybe the non-Texas red states.
I don't know, you know, when the new Congress, whatever makeup it is, takes office in January, basically the 2028 presidential election continues. Do you have a sort of thought about where the Democratic Party's favorabilities will be? You sort of think it'll come back down to the pre-midterm level?
I think people should be very careful about extrapolating anything from 2026 to 2028, right? However, obviously the narrative that emerges from 2026 can profoundly shape the primary because the primary is kind of like a weird consensus, kind of beauty contest type pattern, right? So if Abdul El-Sayed were to lose in Michigan, that creates problems for progressives. Maybe also Troy Jackson in Maine. Maybe Flanagan in Minnesota, you know, if he does as well as other candidates, and that would bolster them. By contrast, you know, what if Democrats have a really good year and all these white dudes in the Midwest win? Well, you know, that might be good for like an Andy Beshear type or something like that, right? If they have a really bad year, you might have a flight to safety, like, oh, we have a limited map, we have to maximize. I mean, I don't know, but like that narrative will gel quickly.
Yeah, I do want to talk a little bit about the raw numbers as opposed to just the movement. So in that Gallup polling that you mentioned, Democratic Party favorability was at 43%. Republican Party favorability was at 35%.
Neither of those are particularly good. You know, in the aughts, people are trying to compare this election to 2006, and there may be legitimate ways in which it compares, but in the aughts, you were seeing both parties up into the 60s or close to the 60s in terms of favorability. So, we're still in an environment where people are not particularly happy. We have more independents than we've ever had before. People are not particularly happy with the two parties. And I think some of the movement that we're seeing here is Democrats who were very mad at the Democratic Party after losing in 2024 coming home. Right? There's a little bit of wiping the slate clean with some of these new candidates that people are enthusiastic about. 43% though is still quite low. And I would interpret a good Democratic year in some ways as voters using Democrats to punish Republicans who they're very mad at and Trump, as opposed to an endorsement of a particular worldview. If we're going to see those numbers go above sort of 45%, I think it will be because Democrats do a good job of nominating somebody who can inspire a broader part of the public in 2028. Like if you get a charismatic person who can appeal to, you know, both the left and the center and whatever, I think that's where you see that favorability start really going up and eating into independents starting to see Democrats favorably. I think at 43%, those are all Democratic voters, some of whom were probably just disenchanted with their own party.
Yeah. I mean, Nate, to stay on the 2006 comparison, obviously Obama eventually emerged out of this as the winner of the primary kind of on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq war. Do you foresee the war in Iran sort of being a continuing, like this is going to be the biggest issue for the 2028 election? Like...
I mean, it was known to be, everyone knew this was going to happen except the person who was Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. You have to be that stupid to like think [laughter] this war is going to be over in a week or two. Like it's really embarrassing to have this like Fox News TV host who's like doing jumping jacks with Marines and like starting these stupid wars that are causing everyone's... I'm trying not to be too editorial, but like [laughter] you know what I mean?
It's a very strange... I mean, I don't know if we'll talk about this, but obviously in the midst of all of this war, he announced this truly bizarre and I think troubling like public execution. Just a very weird person, weird personnel choices, and that obviously won't... he's sort of like a... I mean, the testosterone stuff, you can just really see it playing in some parodical like 2028 presidential spot.
Yeah. No wolves, no weirds, no whatever. You know, I think if we're trying to compare this election to some other past recent past midterm, there is some draw to compare it to 2018 because that was the other Trump midterm. And then the other year that folks are looking at is 2006.
If I'm picking one, I am picking 2006. And the reason is because the concerns this year are almost entirely material. It's about cost of things, national safety, that kind of stuff, right? In 2018, the economy was just fine. People felt generally secure. Terrorism was a bit of a concern during the 2016 presidential, but it was all sort of shocks to the conscience.
Yeah, exactly. It was shock. Every single thing Trump did led the headlines. It was an outrage. It was Charlottesville. It was can you believe the corruption, the sort of things he'll say, the taco bowl for Cinco de Mayo or whatever. None of that registers anymore. There is [laughter] the taco... I get we do live in a different country. None of that registers in a lot of ways. Trump can say, you know, basically whatever. He can say that John Fetterman has a nice ass, and he can say that maybe we should let foreign entities bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.
I think that was a little taken out of context, but still I don't think it was...
I think it was taken out of context. I think he was saying that the Democrats were ready to let Iran bomb American cities because they didn't want to go to war and he wants whatever. Anyway, I think you're putting some words. There's one other comparison I think is interesting too.
Wait, wait, wait. Is Gayen done with his...
But to conclude, the concerns now are not things that shock the conscience about like weird things that he says about moral outrage over racism or xenophobia or whatever. That has all been put to the side and everything is about one, affordability, and two, a different kind of corruption which is like enriching yourself off of crypto as opposed to sort of, you know, like it feels so innocent now that he was impeached the first time over like a shady business call, a shady call with Ukraine, whatever. So if we're talking about material concerns, which is war and treasure, we're talking about 2006, maybe we're talking about something even more severe than 2006.
Yeah, look, in the first term Trump had the halo that people thought the economy was good, right? And so like all the stupid things that people talk about all day on MSNBC, excuse me, and on Bluesky and whatever else... Trump could say these people are yelling and screaming, but at the end of the day, your paycheck has gone up, the stock market's gone up, gas is cheap, you have a job, and there's no forever wars, right? And that's a pretty good argument, I think. I get annoyed by the way people are like, 'Well, it's good that people are mad at Trump, but they're mad at him for the wrong reasons.' It's like, 'Oh, screw yourself.' You know, [laughter] I don't care.
Saucy today. First of all, lots of coins going in the swears jar. [laughter]
But the other comparison I wanted to make, a little more esoteric one, is to 2014 because that was, I guess that was the last lame duck election, right, in Obama's second term. In that election, the polls were kind of bad for Democrats. But then the bottom really fell out and Republicans beat their polls and Democrats lost nine Senate seats, which, you know, they took forever to regain. And that's interesting because like that's an election where you're in the second term and voters just can't be bothered to turn out for the second term incumbent.
And the Obama base was very disillusioned at that point with the presidency in a lot of ways. It was a weird, it was a strange time sort of. It was like the rise of ISIS there, sort of felt like there was this on the precipice of something. I don't know.
It was kind of a stupid election, right? But people were just... but you know, I don't sense the... you know, what's the case for like Republican enthusiasm for Trump, right? If you look at our Trump polling average, so Trump's overall approval rating is only 37, 38%. His strong approve rating is just 20%. So the term 38% at the peak, right? And so like basically half of Trump's biggest fanboys have gone to nothing more tentative about him. And like, you know, look, where did Trump make big gains in 2024? Well, a lot of it was young men, right? Young men are not going to turn out for Ken Paxton or something. You know what I mean? To rely on like a youth surge of first-time voters is often not very reliable in midterms. And all the arguments polling, our friend Lakshya Jain has found that like this likely voter gap that favors Democrats, it's more among younger voters than older voters. Older voters are happy. The stock market's done well, right? You know, whatever. They don't have to worry about AI and things like that, right? But like younger voters who kind of thought, whatever, I don't like Kamala and, you know, Trump, you know, maybe give me some more money. And like it's... I don't mean to... I don't know, but like it's hard. That enthusiasm gap could, you know, that's what would go from like Senate being a tossup to like the disaster scenarios for Republicans.
Well, listeners can tell us which midterm they think it most resembles in the past. I don't know our email. It's probably something like Still Counting...
1902 with Grover Cleveland in his second non-consecutive term. That was
[email protected].
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Okay, let's move on. We are three weeks out from election day, which means that everyone is paying attention to politics. There are ads aplenty. The narratives are being spun out there. It's conventional wisdom season, Nathaniel. So we wanted to play a little bit of a game called Do You Buy It?
Gayen brings the props out onto the table.
I got the hat. I forgot my GD politics hat. So we got a standard hat.
It's our studio where we're recording.
Oh, nice. And I think everyone should note one of the reasons to tune into the YouTube channel is that Nate is wearing a different hat today. I have a friend who said, 'Does Nate only wear Nick's hats?' And he wears different hats. He's wearing a...
So it's Silver. He's a wolf and he is the Silver with a Y. He's sensitive about both being misidentified and the spelling of his name. And he is the mascot for Silver Bulletin.
I thought it was a dinosaur. I'm not going to lie.
Silver is a wolf. He might bite you if you misidentify him.
Well, it's a nice dad hat.
I think people would be very upset to learn that Fivey Fox has been retired. I mean, he used to live in... Fivey and Silver are friends. Wolves and foxes are a good combination because, you know, foxes provide the brains and wolves provide the brawn, right? And so Silver and Fivey was... I mean, Fivey is a little bit cautious and risk-averse, right? Even though Fivey believes that Disney does not have any intellectual property [laughter] rights to Fivey Fox. And I think that just... people are capricious and angry about the success of Silver Bulletin, right? So, okay. Anyway, this is Silver. He likes eating deer.
Is he for sale? Is he for sale anywhere?
Okay, great. So this is a little merch plug. Okay. But we are playing a game called Do You Buy It? It's about conventional wisdom and we are going to pick out of the hat a selection of recent headlines and news and we're going to decide whether or not the conventional wisdom that underlies the story matters. Capiche?
Yeah. Now, by the way, for readers, we have another segment. It's like the pricing games on Price is Right called Hot Take Hat that may superficially resemble this one. That's totally different. Here we're debunking hot takes. In Hot Take Hat, we get to make our own hot take.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in fact the 180-degree opposite. Claire, why don't you pick first?
I want to hear you. Wow. Producer Saul wrote it and he does have, as we have said before, pretty good handwriting.
Suspiciously good handwriting.
Particularly for a boy. [laughter]
Okay, okay. We don't have to get that anti-woke. [laughter]
Okay. Here's a headline from Pew: With Americans in a sour mood, Democratic voters are more engaged in midterms.
We just talked about it. Thumbs up.
Nate will be taking my turn. [laughter]
Thank you very much. I will not play charades with you.
I think the idea here is that the conventional wisdom is that the more enthusiastic party wins the turnout battle, but is motivation an actual useful forecast for turnout? Claire... and I'm sorry, I blacked out while you interrupted me. What were you saying?
I'm just saying that was a nicely chosen take because we kind of had this conversation like two minutes ago, I feel like. Right. Yes.
I mean, it is interesting in the polling where, you know, when a party is more enthusiastic, they also answer polls more. And the whole question about polling error is like, look, we are not getting a random sample of people in these polls, right? We're probably oversampling Democrats. However, pollsters know that. Number one. And number two, if the people who are more likely to be polled or respond to a poll are more likely to vote, then it kind of is two wrongs making a right situation.
We might... I think that might be a headline down the line.
Okay, I feel like your turn was stolen. So I'm just going to let you pick again. I want to add one thing, which is that enthusiastic and unenthusiastic votes are worth the same amount, but in midterms where there's more of a differential, like not everybody turns out to vote at the same rates as in a presidential, I do think enthusiasm matters more. So we'll just get that caveat on the record, but Claire, go again.
Okay, this is a Washington Post headline: Half a billion dollars in GOP spending does little to move the polls. And I have here the conventional wisdom behind that is that the Republican spending advantage doesn't matter as much as people think. Claire...
Thank you, Gayen. I mean, I think this has sort of been the big story of the last week because Elon Musk's prolific spending, I think like historic political donations to Republican PACs has been a big political reporter story. I think I agree that the spending at this point doesn't matter that much, that the outside factors of the war and affordability and sort of Trump's continuing burrowing his head in the sand and making his candidates stand alongside him. I think I agree with that conventional wisdom.
That was the conventional wisdom. I think the conventional wisdom overrates the importance of money in high-profile races. Although House races are not that high-profile individually. So yeah, I guess I'm agreeing with this evolving conventional wisdom. And also there are a couple of things. One is that if you get individual contributions, you get more favorable ad rates than with outside money. And furthermore, if you have that money early on like Talarico did, then you can buy out ad slots well in advance and develop a campaign infrastructure. To like late outside money, I mean, it's not worthless, but maybe you're getting 20 cents on the dollar and things like that. And I don't know. I think Elon should buy a basketball team or something.
Are you going to see the Alex Gibney doc?
I probably will. Yeah. I've heard things.
I think that Democrats have been using this as a story to try to get their voters a little more outraged, a little more concerned, a little more tuned in. Right? They're already close to the max. But to scare Democrats into being like, 'The cake isn't baked. You know, Republicans are spending all of this money, etc., etc., etc.' Let's be clear, if money bought elections, Hillary Clinton would have been president. Like, the Clinton campaign and outside groups spent literally 200% of what Trump spent in the 2016 election. So money does not... as much as sort of you can make critiques of the amount of money in American politics.
There is not an obvious relationship between who spends more and who wins because earned media is really important. We've talked about this at length. We already talked about gas prices, but also in each of these individual races, people know Ken Paxton very well. People know Susan Collins very well. People know Sherrod Brown very well. I mean, there are some areas where these candidates...
Well, let me push a little bit. Let me inhabit sort of a Republican operative who works for one of these PACs and they'll say, 'Well, a lot of this money is being used actually for like turnout operations.' Does that make a difference versus just ad buys in big media markets?
It might make more of a difference at this point. But there are strong incentives for these consultants to spend money on ads because that's how they make the most money. And I think that in an environment where sentiment is so lopsided and the issues, as I mentioned earlier, are so material, there's only so much this kind of persuasion stuff or even turnout stuff can do. I remember in the immediate aftermath of the Biden June debate where he just completely fell apart, I was on ABC News and the host asked me, you know, the Biden campaign is reporting that they're having so much trouble fundraising now. Like, isn't that a concern? And I was like, what are we even talking about here? How much money would it cost to outdo the earned media from that debate? Every single American seeing that the American president is unable to straightforwardly answer a simple campaign question, debate question, there's no amount of money that can undo that. In a similar way, it's not the exact same thing, but in a similar way, I question if an enormous amount of money can undo sort of the betrayal of no more forever wars, we're in a forever war. The I'm going to bring prices down, gas has increased as a direct result of... overpowers. The zeitgeist overpowers the media buys.
Yeah. And just people, if you pay attention to the news, you're just not seeing anything good for Republicans right now.
Yeah. Anytime you drive by a gas station, it's an advertisement for Democrats.
Old Gassy Silver over there.
That's a good line. That's a good CNN line. [laughter] You got to go on CNN. That's a good line.
He bumps gas. Do you even bump gas?
This is the best part of it all. Nate doesn't [laughter] drive.
And I know that because I have driven Nate around New Hampshire.
Do you not have a license anymore?
First of all, you grew up in Michigan. You grew up in a college town. Claire, Claire, I... have you never gotten [laughter]... have you never gotten a license?
This is genuinely new. Wow.
Sensitive information. This is going to end up on New York Post.
All right. Because it's so weird. I will let you have a turn now. [laughter]
I hope I get a... I deserve a good hot take. AP: Democrats want a blue wave. New Hampshire is exhibit 1A for why that may not happen. Bad take.
I mean, yeah. Has to transfer.
Yeah. Let me translate. So the narrative that's taken hold is that Democrats are underperforming in blue states. Something that we've talked about at length. Right.
They are. But New Hampshire is like not exactly... in the governor's race, they're well down. They'll probably lose that. But the... Ayotte is quite popular and, you know, New Hampshire likes their incumbents, a little bit of bipartisan spirit. But I think the New Hampshire... I mean, we've written and talked on this show about like, I think Minnesota is an unlikely but real opportunity for Republicans.
So New Hampshire is like its own category. You're saying that people shouldn't extrapolate. People overreacted to a couple of polls a couple of weeks ago showing a tight race. It's now Pappas plus seven, which given that Sununu is a former senator and moderate-ish. Well, you know, he's not moderate relative to Trump, right? He's not MAGA, although he was endorsed by Trump. But yeah, no, I think that is a story that feels like somebody needs to get a Silver Bulletin subscription and understand that New Hampshire has gotten back into the range where you'd expect it to be. Unlike Minnesota, which flags up to a four-point lead, but four points versus seven points is, you know, four points is within the normal polling error range. Seven points is in the Susan Collins gravity-defying, right?
I mean, I also think just like from a... we love to talk about, you know, the media narrative and all of this. I think we are at the point where three weeks out, assignment editors are kind of like, well, that's an interesting race, like what's... you know, and I have great sympathy for that and it's still like, you know, you're helping inform people, but there is certainly, I think, at this point in the election, an incentive to just kind of like write some snappy titles.
Well, that's kind of a crazy point, Claire, which is this is usually the point in the cycle where people are like, 'Yeah, let's write about Texas. Let's write about Iowa.' But we've been talking about Texas and Iowa for two months now. And it's like, okay, let's talk about... I guess things are closer than you would expect in New Hampshire. That's not to say that Democrats are going to win everywhere. It's just that the narrative about Democrats overperforming in these more competitive or even red states has truly solidified to the point where we got to talk about something new. Just to put some numbers here, Democrats are way overperforming in red states compared to blue states. If the polls are to be believed, like just let's do this based just on the most recent New York Times Siena College state-level polls. In the five red states where they asked about it, it was like Kansas, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, Democrats were overperforming the 2024 baseline by 16 and a half points. If you look at states that Harris won, the New York Times Siena College did a poll of Maine. They also polled statewide in New York, which is the only other like out...
and out blue state that they did. There was an average underperformance of the 2024 baseline by four points. And if you look at Michigan, which is the only real sort of battleground state that they looked at, there was an overperformance for Democrats around six points. So it is like the redder the state, the better Democrats are doing, which, you know, if you want to make the case against Democrats, you can say, I don't know, maybe the polling is off in some of those redder states as it has been in the past. But you could also say in those redder states, Republican incumbency feels much more immediate. And if we're in an anti-incumbent mood, there's going to be much more of a backlash.
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Gayen, I believe it's your turn.
Even though I've been talking so much.
Oh, I thought that was his, wasn't his question last time.
Okay, here we go. This is a take from The Bulwark. Maybe somebody else can take this take. MAGA's Talerico mental breakdown conspiracy implodes instantly.
By Will Sommer, my former, uh, reporter at the Georgetown Voice who now does great things. Okay. Uh, the conventional wisdom out of that is dumb conspiracies don't stick.
