Yeah. Look, I think Maine is very sui generis. How do you say that?
Okay. I don't think something can be very sui generis. I think it just has to be sui generis.
Okay. Thanks, Grammarly, Gayen.
Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gayen Drew.
I'm Nate Silver. The University of Chicago. Do you watch the NFL ever where players give their affiliation? Right.
I don't. That's embarrassing. We're not gonna do that.
You're embarrassed of Johns Hopkins.
I mean, I'm not embarrassed. I'm embarrassed to say where I went to college, not that I went to college.
Gayen Drew, Johns Hopkins.
Okay, that I have to do it for you. Claire Malone, Georgetown.
I can sing the whole Georgetown fight song.
We'll spare our listeners.
Okay. On today's show, the latest midterms polling and forecast updates, which means new dolphin sounds to make. Nate, there you go.
And then we're going home to home in on two states. Maine, where Susan Collins, heard of her, may actually have the upper hand according to the most recent Times-Siena poll, and Ohio, a red state that may return Democrat Sherrod Brown back to the Senate, assuming people realize that he is not the current incumbent.
That would help him though, probably, right?
We'll save that for the segment, Nate. Okay.
Okay. We'll also get into the discourse surrounding Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola.
I mean, that's going to be a good one. People have to stick around for that. We're putting it out. Drew Peltola-head will be reporting for duty.
We'll talk about the report of her alleged mistreatment of staffers. Okay. But first, let's start by checking in on the big picture horse race for the House and the Senate. We go to Flipper.
Uh, the fourth.
Should I try it once? That's maybe the first and only time I will be doing that.
For those just joining us, Flipper is Nate's election model. And Flipper right now gives Democrats a roughly 73% chance of winning the Senate.
Hillary Clinton's own... What was she, like 71% I think on election night.
Tough time. Pause. Pause for Hillary Clinton. That's up from about 67% last week. The forecast currently gives Democrats almost a 93% chance of taking the House. So that's a lot. You guys, it seems like Flipper heard last week's bull case for the Democrats, and it liked it. Nate, what's driving the model up for them?
I mean, we've seen just the number going up for Democrats in terms of the generic ballot in particular, to a slightly lesser extent the state polls. You know, look, my thesis is the same as last week: gas costs $4.50 a gallon. I think it's part of it. Part of it is that when pollsters are switching over to likely voter polls, they're finding a Democratic enthusiasm and turnout advantage. Part of it might be just the bottom falling out from Trump. I mean, as that Democratic generic ballot number goes up, then Trump's approval rating is now lower than it was after January 6th when he was...
No, it's as low as it's ever been. Let's keep in mind, too, Trump is 80 years old. He's in his second term. People are positioning themselves for the 2028 election already, and people are tired of this. There's been a lot of Trump. You've seen, for example, Republican podcasts aren't mentioning Trump as much. I get bored by all the Trump crap on all the Democratic newsletters that I subscribe to, right? But...
10 years of Trump and we're all already sick of him. Is that...
Well, I think people are fatigued by it, right? And I think his gimmicks, you know, now we're renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America and artificial intelligence to super intelligence. And...
Do you think the bad... I mean, just curious if you think the week of news last week where it's kind of like some of the pettier aspects of Trump, like the Kennedy Center and saying he's going to knock it down and...
No, I think that's grist for Heather Cox Richardson clickbait, right? Like, I think the people who care about buildings and stuff in Washington, D.C. are a group that's going to vote 99.9% Democratic anyway. But I think it's more like when these core promises are failing, when gas is really expensive, when we're at war in the Middle East, exactly the kind of war he said he would avoid or promised to avoid, his shtick just seems tired and kind of played out, right? The culture wars kind of work better when he's like, 'Well, Democrats say this and that about me, but the economy is good and you have a job and you want more money in your paycheck and stuff is cheap.' And like it makes all of the cultural stuff seem silly. And the other thing too I've noticed is like there has not been a lot of focus on, maybe Mary Peltola aside, unlike Democrats foibless as much. I mean, I don't think the midterm convention in Dallas mattered very much. But it was funny that that was like the kind of moment when Democrats had this takeoff in the polls and, you know, to center the election around him.
Yeah. Gayen, did you see the news that Ken Paxton, there's I think maybe leaked audio that Ken Paxton was telling a group of people that Trump's midterm convention had hurt him.
Might not have been helpful. I mean, that's not really Ken Paxton's issue in Texas. I think it's like a decade of being viewed as ultimately corrupt, even by his own party, having been impeached by his fellow Republicans. Nate said something early on there that I think is worth talking about, which is the spread between what we're seeing in registered voter polls versus likely voter polls. There was a YouGov Economist poll out yesterday that showed Democrats leading by eight points amongst registered voters and 15 points amongst likely voters. I do think we're getting into territory here where people are going to worry about polling error. I think expectations are being set incredibly high. We might be reaching the point where if Democrats win the national popular vote in the House by eight or nine points, Democrats could be ultimately disappointed by that. And look, likely voter screens are as much art as they are science. Pollsters have to make assumptions about who is going to show up based on how you answer the question, 'Are you likely to vote?', some demographic information, and some voter history information. And that can be tricky. I think in a midterm, there's less of a risk of sort of missing out on less engaged voters because less engaged voters are just less likely, people who are less likely to answer polls are also less likely to vote in a midterm. So some of the same issues that plague general election polling might not plague it this time around. But when I'm seeing a seven-point spread between registered voters and likely voters, I'm thinking...
I mean, it is usually fairly...
Conservative, right? Their numbers tend to be in the middle of the distribution in any poll. So for them to be out there is...
Is interesting, maybe unexpected. I mean, I think we've seen elections like 2010, which was actually, you know, the biggest midterm swing in history because you went from, or at least since World War II, because you went from this very, very blue map in '06 and '08 where Obama won basically a landslide against John McCain to kind of a landslide the other direction. So it's like a full 180-degree reversal. That election featured a very large enthusiasm gap. It was something like five or six points difference between registered voters, which at that point Democrats had a big registration advantage, and the likely voter electorate that turned up. So like five or six points is actually not totally out of bounds for a midterm. I mean, like obviously I wouldn't bet on D+15. If it's D+15, then like...
That's the nuclear apocalypse, right? South Carolina flips and 50 House seats flip, right? That's a little bit hard to believe, but I'm glad we're not seeing the pollsters herd. We're seeing, you know, the Harvard-Harris Mark Penn poll. I don't know that Harvard University should be... I don't really like Harvard, so fuck them. But like, if I were Harvard University...
Catching strays, Harvard University. I mean, Harris X has been showing very bold. You're saying this is directed mostly at Mark Penn, I believe.
Yeah, I think Mark Penn is kind of a hack and like I don't know why...
Pollster, just for context, right? Wasn't he famously the Clinton...
Well, he was famously like Clinton's pollster and kind of ran Clinton's campaign in 2008, which of course lost to Barack Obama.
Wildly astray. I want to ask...
I just don't want... I think elite higher ed is probably net harmful to...
Okay, that's a take for another time. But the...
University of Chicago here.
University of Chicago is kind of an exception.
As an aside for folks who are having difficulty following along at home, the reason you're talking about Harvard University's polling is that they partner with Harris X, and their recent poll out this week showed that the generic ballot is tied between Republicans and Democrats amongst registered voters, and that Democrats only lead by two percentage points with likely voters, which is a significant outlier when looking at the...
We welcome pollster diversity. We don't want herding. I just, if I were the University of Harvard or Harvard University...
I'm not sure. I'm not sure that Mark Penn would be on my A-list of people that I want my brand associated with.
Going back to the actual problem at hand, you wrote this week or last week about Democratic gains mostly being in red states. Can you break down that observation a little bit?
Yeah, this might have to do with gas and particularly diesel prices, where you have all these corn-producing states in the Midwest, you know, states with trucking, states that produce petroleum. But that's where you've seen, you know, the most shocking shifts if you believe the polls are in states like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, where you have a quasi-independent, basically Democrat running in Osborn. That's where you stand in Texas, right? So that whole kind of like Tornado Alley row of states is looking pretty twisty for Republicans right now. But...
Falling through on that metaphor.
But at the same time, I mean, we're going to be probably reminding you about this every week. Those are also the kind of states where the polling error has been concentrated in recent years. You know, the thesis the polls are showing is that all these voters that shifted to Trump, so working-class whites and Hispanics, especially kind of working-class Hispanics, are shifting out of that coalition. Is that a plausible story? Well, it makes sense. If Trump is now much more unpopular, then the people that migrated toward him might be the first ones out. You know what, I think that intersects in a funny way with the likely voter stuff too, right? Like I kind of think one story how it gets really bad for Republicans is that these people just don't turn out, right? They're like, Trump is not really keeping his promises. I don't like James Tarico, but I'm sure as hell I'm not going to vote for Ken Paxton. I'm just going to, you know... So the lack of turnout I think is a plausible story. At the same time, like would anyone be really shocked if there was another polling error in either direction? I wouldn't think so.
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, responded to your red states getting bluer analysis with a chart that read, quote, 'The redder the state, the more the polls overstated the Democrat.' Gayen and Nate, do you agree with that?
I feel like it should be like a rhyming, the redder the state, the more the Nate or something like that, right? It feels like it needed to rhyme.
I think this is an interesting suggestion. I mean, he points to actual data going back over several elections.
When I look at the swings that we're seeing underneath the hood, this is how I contextualize what we're seeing. We are seeing significantly larger swings with Hispanic voters and younger voters. We are seeing significantly smaller swings with white voters and older voters. So, we're going to get into this, but a place like Maine, you're not going to expect to swing all that much. A place like Texas, which is young and diverse, you're going to expect to swing a lot. Looking at a place like Texas, I actually don't think that's a prime suspect for questioning the polls as much as say Iowa or Ohio, because Iowa and Ohio, as Nate said, over-represent non-college white voters who polls have missed. And actually, he posted some other data as well, Patrick Ruffini did, saying that in Echelon Insight's own polling, they target places like Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana as being the most likely places to be missing strong Republican voters, which means both they prefer the Republican at the Senate or House level, and they are also going to vote, right? Because there's a lot of folks that pollsters are missing who just, as I've said, aren't going to vote. That would be why I would be looking mostly at the Midwest in that case and not as much at a place like say Maine or Texas.
Did you have a response to Ruffini?
Well, look, I mean, to some extent this is why Flipper combines polls with priors and fundamentals and other kinds of data as compared to our presidential model. It actually, like in 2020, it actually had Maine as a toss-up with Susan Collins even though Sara Gideon led in all the polls because it's like the prior at that point was so strong for Collins. I mean, the other thing I'd say though, if we are in like a D+9 national environment, then through a uniform swing, then like Iowa is only a R+3 state or something like that. Texas is R+, Ohio is zero. So like it's not that crazy. Yeah. But I don't know.
Can I ask, I mean, you mentioned Maine a little bit, like our last stop on our sort of midterms what's new roundup. There were some interesting conflicting signals this week in polling, or last week I guess, the Times-Siena/Portland Press Herald poll of Maine had Susan Collins leading Troy Jackson by three points, 49 to 46. What do you guys make of this outlier? I mean...
It is literally higher because if you look at the polling average right now, Troy Jackson leads by two and a half points. But this gets at something that I was just saying before, which is we are seeing sort of older, whiter populations swing less. And so I think that's part of the reason that you would see perhaps like a stickier population in Maine, but also the fact that, you know, Susan Collins has a long-established independent brand and Troy Jackson is quite literally not the person that Maine voters chose.
Yeah. Look, I think Maine is very sui generis. How do you say that?
Okay. I don't think something can be very sui generis. I think it just has to be sui generis.
Okay. Thanks, Grammarly, Gayen.
Maine's a weird... I love Maine. Maine is a top five Nate state, I would say.
What? It's in the top five. Just sidebar for a second.
New York, Michigan, Maine, Colorado is pretty good.
No, but Colorado is great. Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
He's looking at the United States.
Okay, sure. Have you ever been to Hawaii, Nate?
Once. Yeah. Okay. It was very beautiful. It was way more beautiful, way more expensive than I was expecting.
That sounds right. That does sound right now that Zuck has bought up half of Hawaii, right?
Can I also just say something...
More broadly here, which is that if you look back at the last midterms in 2022, and you compare those results to the presidential results in 2020, you see a red wave in Florida and New York and a blue wave in Pennsylvania in 2022. I don't expect there to be that much divergence this time around. There were unique circumstances, especially around Dobbs, because in states where people literally felt like abortion was on the ballot, they were more likely to turn out for Democrats. Whereas in places like New York, where it wasn't really under question, there was a backlash to an unpopular Biden administration and unpopular Democrats running the state. So I think in a midterm where there is a bunch of different contests with a bunch of different people at the top of the ticket, unlike a presidential election where basically it's a single contest fought across 50 different states, we should expect candidate quality to matter. We should expect campaign money to matter.
It's a heterogeneous kind of election.
Exactly. And so I think in general, broadly, we will see a shift left. But I think the shift left could be, well, first of all, we could see actually a shift right in Maine. We're likely to see a shift right in Maine, but I think the shift left will vary dramatically based on the demographic makeup of a state, based on the candidates that are running there. We shouldn't expect uniformity in this race.
It's kind of interesting because the country in general post, you know, Biden and the second Trump term with all of these conflicts does feel like it is ideologically in flux. And like we've talked about that, like especially in the first show where we talked about like are we in the middle of...
Are we at the beginning of this sort of epic shift of demographics and that's kind of an interesting little...
Yeah. Remember there was actually Democrats lost ground. Kamala Harris lost ground in '24, particularly in...
Big urban cities like New York, right? Or kind of inner city Chicago.
You know, parts of that might be kind of because people think these areas are not governed particularly well. You kind of have the abundance rebellion, right? You know, and if you're in New York, you're still very aware of what it's like to be in a state governed by Democrats. If you're in Kansas, then actually it has a Democratic governor, but you're maybe not as much. So, you know, look, if there is dislike for incumbent parties in general, it's probably...
Worse for Trump. I mean, Republicans have, you know, 75% of the power if I mean the governors, there are lots of Democratic governors still, right? But they have the House and the Senate and the presidency and the Supreme Court, 80%, right? And governors are kind of split. But where you have a legacy of questionable Democratic governance then, you know, but that would be more efficient for Democrats, right? If their margins come down in California and New York and Illinois, they still win them by a lot, but it makes their map a bit more efficient. The electoral college popular vote gap decreased. I mean, no one cares, right? It's a consolation prize, but like that gap actually decreased for Kamala Harris relative to what it was for Biden in 2020.
Okay. So, we want to go a little bit deeper into the political dynamics in Maine. We want to take a trip to Vacationland...
One of top five, hang out with the Bushes.
We're actually going to Aroostook County, mostly Troy Jackson zone. The Maine race dominated the headlines obviously during the primaries with scandal-plagued Graham Platner as one of the central characters in this sort of outside versus establishment debate. Yes, Nate.
Skeptical feels too passive. Scandal-inducing Graham Platner.
Scandalous Graham Platner.
Scandal-induced. I know he's like, he's the cause of, you know, he's not afflicted with scandals. He's a...
He is afflicted with scandal.
Now who's the pedant? Okay. But Nate, he was one of the central characters in the outsider versus establishment debate that we had going among Democrats in the primaries before he dropped out after much haranguing. But I do want to talk about the dynamics of how the race has changed since then. Let's start with Troy Jackson as the candidate that replaced Platner. When he entered the race, obviously there was some relief, I guess, because he was seen as a more generic candidate. But what's our sense now as it's been a couple months, people are getting to know him? Do we see him as a good quality candidate?
Do I sort of see him a little bit differently than generic? But I don't know, Nate. I'll go first, Nate, and then you can pick it up for me, which is, I mean, he used to be a Republican, then he became an independent, and then he became a Democrat.
Generic for Maine, I guess, right? We should say that. And that transformation, on one hand you could say, oh, would make him be seen as somewhat heterodox or somewhat moderate, but I think he is now in the Bernie Sanders 2020 era, which is like when Sanders in 2016, he was like totally progressive on the economic stuff, but on the Second Amendment and immigration and a lot of the quote-unquote woke stuff, that was left totally off of his platform. But by the time you get to 2020, quote-unquote woke was a thing. Woke wasn't a thing. I'm not going to put woke in air quotes or scare quotes. I refuse.
I don't mean to say that it wasn't a thing. I just mean that I'm stealing other people's phrase. But anyway, so by the time you get to 2020, Bernie Sanders is more embedded in the Democratic party and its socially liberal policies, and what I think that Troy Jackson is there now. I don't think he can be sort of mistaken as anything but an out-and-out progressive on every single issue. And he has quite publicly, in Maine at least, jettisoned any of his heterodox views on guns or same-sex marriage or abortion or what have you, and all of those policies, you know, being pro-abortion, being pro-same-sex marriage, and to some extent being, you know, questioning Second Amendment rights, is popular in Maine. So he did that because he wanted to be sort of more in line with Maine, but it makes him less viewed as an independent voice or what have you.
I think his biography also gives like an interesting pushback to that, right? Like genuinely a working-class candidate. I think I read somewhere that he'd be the first, he'd be the only member of the Senate with an associate's degree. So very much, you know, of his place like Aroostook County, which I gave a shout-out to at the top. Is...
Have you guys been there? I actually did not.
I reported on, I reported a piece actually right before the month before the 2016 election about whether or not those voters were going to flip for Trump. And it was, I mean, Aroostook County is basically Canada, huge wide open spaces. In 2016, it was one of the first places where I saw in the north Confederate flags. So that has that kind of culture of like Second Amendment, right? And it's very, and I do think he obviously has progressive politics, but they're also progressive politics based in union politics. And so that adds, I think, an interesting tinge to Jackson.
You go far enough north and it kind of wraps around and almost becomes the south, right? If you hear...
Troy Jackson, he sounds, he's got a little distinct...
Southern French Canadian thing, right? He's kind of plain-looking, a little overweight, right? So he doesn't present as like...
An élit... How, I can't pronounce words today. Is it élit?
I mean, I guess maybe with the French Canadian it would be élit.
I actually don't think it is. Doesn't present as like in that way or this kind of like cosplay Village People working-class person like Graham Platner did, right? No, instead you have him cosplaying as a teenage girl drinking boba tea on Twitter.
Have you seen the boba tea thing?
