I had a band in college called Boom Boom where... No, I played... Yes.
I think he has depths that we're only just now getting to. We're only opening the doors of the inner sanctum.
That's what this podcast is about. Getting to the inner sanctum.
Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gayen Drew.
On today's show, it's wall-to-wall midterms coverage, including the latest in Nate's shock.
I know, right? Including the latest in Nate's Flipper election forecast.
People have been pointing out that it's sort of getting close to a horse, which I think might be true.
It is getting close to a horse.
Well, look at Flipper and the battle for control of the Senate, including a new New York Times Seattle poll. We're also going to discuss whether or not pollsters are hurting, look at the early votes and more. And we're going to be sprinkling listener questions in throughout the episode. This is a service journalism episode. But before we get to Flipper updates, we have some housekeeping. Still Counting will be dropping a special pre-election bonus episode next Monday, as well as our regular episode on Wednesday, which obviously will take in whatever has happened on Tuesday, which if you are living under a rock, is election day. Guys, what are your plans? What are you going to do on election day?
Anxiety, Max. There's not much to do on election day.
Do you vote in person on election day? Do you do it beforehand?
So, okay, full disclosure, my polling place is still at my previous address, which is next to my... I'm going to my trainer today and I will vote.
Is it the same congressional district? Otherwise, you're admitting to voter fraud on the Still Counting podcast.
For years, I voted in Ohio when I did not live there.
THIS IS FRAUD, GUYS. You can't just be saying this. This is like when Bill Simmons admitted that he had a proxy...
Better part of... I lived there for part of the year.
Oh boy. I don't know about this. Okay, Nate. I think that Claire's teeing us up to talk about what we're actually doing on election night, which is that we've got a live stream going over on Substack. We're teaming up with The Argument and Matty Glacius. You and I are going to be there and Claire is stopping by.
Yes, I'll also be on the Crooked live stream for a little bit. But yes, it's Nate and Gayen and all the people at The Argument are going to be doing some good stuff.
Yeah, there'll be a live stream and/or a live blog. Some of that will be free. Some of that will be privileged for paying subscribers of our respective news.
And I'll also say over at GD we just have like a ton of stuff going. We've got a pollster-off tomorrow between Republican Patrick Ruffini, who's been more bullish on Republicans, and Latcha Jane, who's been more bullish on Democrats. We got like an hour-by-hour guide coming up, some final looks at the polls, like we're going to, and a late night podcast on election night. So, you can basically like election Twitter come to life is what the next six days will be.
And we also want to remind you guys that Crooked Con is just over a week away. Crooked published the official schedule at crookedcon.com. It has over 25 sessions on November 7th at the Washington DC Convention Center. For example, our live show at 9:00 a.m. on stage two.
This is going to be a first for us. A live show at 9:00 a.m.
I'm a morning person. I was up at 6:45 today.
Nate, you have become a morning person. You were not a morning person.
We're all morning people now. What time did you wake up today, Gayen?
Uh, a little before 6:00. At 4:45.
Um, okay. Okay, let's talk about the midterms.
Get your tickets at crookedcon.com.
Okay. We are going to check in now with the latest from Flipper where Democrats' chances of controlling Congress are holding steady as of Tuesday. The model gives Democrats about a 75% chance of taking the Senate, which is a notch down from last week, 77%, and their chance of winning the House is hovering around 95%. Okay. This is our second to last chance to talk about this before election day. So, Nate...
Penultimate. Total layup for penultimate and you didn't go there.
I'm sorry, but I like using those round numbers. They've been stuck or consistent at 75 and 95 respectively if you round to the nearest whole number. I will say a bunch of new polls that were interesting this morning that we'll talk about, particularly in South Carolina and Minnesota, have not entered Flipper yet. And I'm curious what that will do. My sense is that despite some weirdness and some herding that we'll talk about, this latest round of polling, we finally are seeing a heavier volume of polling has been pretty good for Democrats. I wouldn't say any sign of like a last-minute Dem or Republican rebound nationally. You can debate some cases like Texas. I would also not say anything too crazy. But yeah, but you want to talk about some states or what do you want to do?
Well, yeah. Well, first let's start off with this. A Washington Post reporter tweeted on Monday about the Flipper forecast and I'm quoting here: 'Don't think I've talked to any Dem who thinks there's a three-quarter chance they win the Senate.' Well, Democrats are kind of... I was going to use a term that was inappropriate for our podcast, right?
Oh, well, like my job is to actually make a forecast, right? Democrats' job is to panic and/or spin. And probably both panicking and spinning would lead you to take a more moderate view of the race. I mean, look, I'm going to say I'm trying to figure out how not to get myself in too much trouble, right? People have been talking about this obvious case that, well, you have all these Democratic ties or leads in red states and what if there's a washout in the polling and they come up a seat or two short, right? Very possible that's what the 25% chance represents more or less, right? There's also a really obvious case that people are too scared to make that it would be a landslide because look...
Cue Fleetwood Mac and the Dixie Chicks.
Gas costs $4.30 a gallon. Trump has a 37% approval rating. Trump lost by eight and a half points in the US House midterm in 2018. Trump is 80 years old. Trump... I'm saying Trump a lot because he's the most important factor in the election. Trump is at war with Iran. Trump is out there campaigning and talking about men's butts when Republicans don't want to talk about him. Right? The number of campaign...
We talk about Nicki Minaj's butt too this weekend. Let's just be good. Bisexual here.
So I guess Trump is anal... and I believe that we will talk about early voting which is kind of like... I'm reluctant to do that, right? Like certainly among some groups, Democrats seem to be turning out low propensity voters. But look, people are too afraid to take this upside case seriously. And yeah, if it happens, there'll be plenty of evidence that like this is a really, really bad environment for Republicans and Trump.
Can I just say here like I think we are getting to full freakout over polls and everyone's tuning in and everyone has their own sort of suspicions and doubts and whatever. And at a moment like this I think it is helpful to put all of the horse race polling to the side. Like you can still look at other data but just put the horse race polling to the side. Donald Trump's approval rating is negative 23. That puts him on par with George W. Bush during his second midterms or worse, or around where Nixon was or worse. That's historically bad. When Gallup asks Americans which party do you think would do best addressing the issue that you think is most important plaguing the country, it is Democrats by a healthy margin. There's just... even if you're not pitting, you know, Josh Turk against Ashley Henson or whatever, there's a lot of data and we've all... we've talked about gas prices ad nauseam on this podcast. There's a lot of data that backs up the story that the horse race then suggests we're seeing.
Yes, very much so. Okay, before we even get to any listener questions, I just want to talk about some polling that came out today. But specifically, let's dive into a race that Ted Cruz recently said was neck-and-neck. And the Times poll, which came out this morning, seems to agree, and that's South Carolina. Trump has obviously visited there recently. In the Times poll, Annie Andrews and Lindsey Graham's sister, Darlene Graham, were basically tied. Annie Andrews recently got some key endorsements from a former Republican and former Democratic governor of the state.
You guys, how did this race become kind of the like surge? Do you mean Dr. Annie Andrews?
I do mean Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. Thank you. Thank you, Nate.
Why is it important that she's a doctor? Does this play in at all? Is this candidate quality? Is this... I've been thinking about titles? Yeah. I've been thinking about this race all morning. So, in some of the other states such as Ohio, people like, well, Ohio is a really red state. Now, if you actually look at this national environment that we've been talking about and shifted over 11 points from 2024, then Ohio should be a toss-up. And so if Sherrod Brown's a better candidate, then that's not that abnormal, right? You really would need a big Democratic overperformance in South Carolina. There are a couple of ways to do that. One is based on candidate quality. I don't think Andrews is any type of electoral superstar. She has kind of fairly typical progressive-moderate mix of positions, right? She tries to brand herself as a pediatrician, which she is. She has lots of photos of her with like Sheriff...
Well, okay, but like I think it's more about like Darlene Graham's weaknesses.
I agree with that. I mean, Darlene Graham has had some sort of embarrassing debate moments. You know, the other thing I have actually been thinking about, I'm writing a book about Maha. I think a lot about Maha. South Carolina, the Spartanburg area was the center of a measles outbreak. And I think one of Andrews's first ads back when Lindsey Graham was still alive and running, right, she brought up measles. And I think she's actually... I believe in the write-up of the Times poll they noted that she was doing like a bit better in the Spartanburg-Greenville area, which is sort of the area where it was all happening. I don't know if that's coincidence. I don't know, but it's... I was like, 'Oh, that's an interesting... it's interesting at this moment to have a Democratic pediatrician doing well in a state that's had that.' Just to note the little kind of like valence there.
That's also an area where Darlene Graham's primary opponent outran her as well. So, I think Darlene Graham may also not be a particularly good fit as a candidate there.
I have also been thinking about South Carolina a lot this morning and digging through the cross tabs of that New York Times poll. It's worth saying here, Trump won South Carolina by 18 points in 2024. I think Nate was getting at this, but it's not a state that under any normal circumstance is close. Remember all the excitement around Jamie Harrison and then he lost by 10 points. But looking at this poll, here's what caught my eye. Trump's approval rating in South Carolina right now is net negative 13. That's really bad. Going into the 2018 midterms, I looked this up. You know, there was a bunch of different polling, but one that I pulled from Winthre, Trump was five points underwater. So, he's significantly more underwater now in South Carolina than he was back in 2018.
The other thing I noticed is that Republicans have a healthy lead in the generic ballot polling in South Carolina. So, if you just ask South Carolinians, would you rather have a Republican or Democrat win for Congress? By eight points, they choose the Republican. But then you pit Annie Andrews and Darlene Graham against each other and it's 48-48, exactly tied. I mean, and where is a lot of that movement coming from? It's coming from... I mean, we are seeing like pretty healthy turnout amongst Black voters across the South so far in the early vote, which we'll get into, but you're seeing a pretty big shift amongst white college-educated voters. These are the swingier... You know, it's interesting. White college-educated voters in the South are much more Republican than white college-educated voters in the North because they tend to be more religious and that makes them less elastic, less swingy. But you are seeing that although on the generic ballot they prefer Republicans by 15 points, they're only supporting Darlene Graham by three points when you look at that head-to-head. That's a lot of numbers, but what I'm trying to say here is this is a unique situation. This is unexpected. And if this turns out to be either a neck-and-neck race in the end or Annie Andrews even winning, it's a big deal.
Oh, well, it's a unique situation or we're fitting a convenient story to polls that are too hot for Democrats. But look, you want hard data. Darlene Graham won her primary over Ralph Norman by only five points despite Trump's endorsement. So that's a story of dissatisfaction. And yeah, you have had across the South extremely high... and many of these states are required to track voter registration by race, by self-identified race. And like from Louisiana to Georgia and North Carolina, these seem to be unambiguously the strongest numbers for Democrats in the early vote, which we'll talk about more in a minute, I suppose. I kind of ran a little math and I asked, what if Black voters turned out at a presidential rate in South Carolina and non-Black voters turn out at regular midterm rates, right? And it's mostly a Black and white state, not a lot of Hispanic voters there. If you do that, then that produces about a nine-point swing based on turnout alone. It's not going to be that big a differential. Like that would be kind of unprecedented, right? You need three things, right? You need a candidate quality advantage, you need high Black turnout, and you need depressed white turnout, right? I can see all three happening. It's a parlay, though.
My barometer for where people's heads are is always my college group chat, shout out. One of whom submitted this South Carolina question. They also have thoughts about your hats, Nate, and are intrigued by your choice every week. But I want to skip forward since we're... No, I mean, in a good way, but just like curious about, you know, why the mood strikes you in certain...
Silver was feeling jealous of all the attention Flipper was getting, right? Silver is the successor to Fevy Fox and he feels like he should be more of a star in the...
I think I know what I'm getting you for Christmas: hats.
This episode is brought to you by the International Rescue Committee. You've seen the headlines. Wars, floods, and crises are forcing millions of families to flee their homes with nothing but what they can carry on their backs. Tonight, many of them are living in makeshift shelters in the cold, without enough food, without clean water, without the medicine their children need to survive. You can help. The International Rescue Committee is on the ground in more than 40 countries providing families with what they need to survive: food, clean water, medicine, safety. And right now, for a limited time, every gift you make will be matched. So, your donation makes an even bigger impact for the people who need it most: families who have lost everything. This is a moment to act. Please give now at rescue.org/rebuild. That's rescue.org/rebuild.
Still Counting is brought to you by Made In. If you're considering the pros and cons of different cookware brands, you should know that Made In has more of the pros. Pros like Tom Kicio and Brooke Williamson and many other professional chefs who all trust their cooking to Made In cookware. Fact is, Made In has a long-standing relationship with professional chefs. The company evolved from a 100-year-old kitchen supply business and works with multigenerational craftsmen to make each piece. They make exactly what demanding chefs are looking for, including a wide selection of curated products from carbon steel to stainless clad, plus plateware, glassware, and more. The three of us recently had the opportunity to select a piece of Made In cookware each. Does it say something different about each of us what we selected and/or our significant others? But our household went with a 12-inch stainless clad frying pan. I can imagine getting one of those nice like Japanese steaks. A little bit, little salt.
Do you know the trick, Nate? You got to turn the heat really high before you put anything in it. And put a little... Get a little splash of water. Make sure it... whatever Kobe beef, whatever. Then you can cook without it sticking on your stainless steel.
Absolutely.
But perhaps the biggest pro is that Made In is sold online and delivered to your door. If you want to take your cooking to the next level, invest in Made In cookware. Once you try it, you'll be pro-Made In 2. For full details, visit madeincookware.com. That's m-a-d-e-i-n-cookware.com.
I want to keep talking about the South for a second just because I think some of the most interesting, you know, last week of the election stuff is happening there. We had another surprising red state drawing the attention of GOP operatives and that's Mississippi where Democrat Scott Colom is challenging sitting Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Flipper, I mean, I guess pretty predictably rates Mississippi as solidly Republican, but Trump was there on Monday. You know, seems like they might be a little bit worried there. I have to say Scott Colom has really interesting, good ads. He was the one who did the pick your protein ad. Pick another protein.
Pick another protein. Rather, pick another senator.
We're talking about the inelasticity of white college-educated voters in the South. What's going on in Mississippi?
I just want to shout out the fact that both Darlene Graham and Cindy Hyde-Smith are appointed senators. And...
Well, no, she's won. She was originally... She's won the election. Cindy Hyde-Smith has won, but like she ultimately... I don't think either of these candidates are particularly high-quality candidates and they represent a certain... I think not curdling, but I don't think that the Republican Party has done the best job elevating candidates during the Trump era. And these are two examples of candidates who have been elevated during the Trump era that like, I mean, Darlene Graham seems way in over her head and those debate questions on, you know, basically saying I don't know a whole lot about national security and that kind of stuff. Cindy Hyde-Smith is, you know, even when she ran before did not perform particularly well.
The average right now in Silver Bulletin, this is, you know, Cindy Hyde-Smith is leading by five points. What's really interesting about Mississippi, which again is a, you know, I think it's a Trump plus 16 state, is that 40% of the electorate is Black. So, like it's really easy to get into the 40s as a Democrat in Mississippi, but the inelasticity of the rest of the electorate is where you run into trouble. And so, if what Nate is suggesting could happen, which is a really big differential in terms of Black turnout, then yeah, you get kind of close. But Nate, I'd be curious what you think about the rest of the electorate thing.
So, John, this is one of those Creole names. John Kuian, I probably am French to find that too much, but he's a data observer, longtime observer of Louisiana politics who is very versed in the early voting data there, right? And there the early voting turnout among Black voters is so strong that Kuian is saying, I'm pretty sure Republicans will win in Louisiana where there's been very little polling, but I'm not totally sure. And I think it's closer than typical, right? And so the argument is, you know, look, Flipper is very skeptical about Louisiana and Mississippi. We're actually lower than prediction markets there. The argument would be though that that would provide proof of concept for a slightly more purple state in the form of South Carolina.
Okay, here's where I want to bring in our first listener question from Andrew. And he asks, 'In your view, which races are not getting polled enough this cycle? Does anything stand out for you guys? You know, particularly in this environment where it feels like, oh, all of a sudden we've got a lot of stuff on the map.'
We assume Nate and I picked the same state.
Minnesota. I mean, the New York Times looks designed to remedy this, right? High-quality polls of South Carolina and Minnesota were... I mean, there has been other polling in South Carolina. Actually, the Times poll is not an outlier, but like that Minnesota poll is interesting, which is Peggy Flanigan plus 14.
14, which is a partisan benchmark. If you have a plus nine environment in a plus five state, it should be 14. So maybe all our contemplation about Minnesota a few weeks ago was also speculation based on incorrect polling. Yeah. Which, what states would you pick?
Kansas. There are only two public polls and they're from the first half of October. Both of them are from Insider Advantage and one shows Adam Hamilton up one point and the other one shows Roger Marshall up one point. And so I don't think we have a gut based on other states.
All the people I've been talking to seem really bullish for Democrats in Kansas and Republicans seem... I mean, I was talking to Jessica Taylor at Cook Political Report earlier this week on GD and she was saying, you know, she sees inside polling, which again we don't always put that much stock in, and she was talking to Republicans who are so pessimistic about Kansas that they could see a world in which they lose Kansas even if they're winning, you know, Michigan or Maine. I want to... can I say... and the other one I'd say is Nebraska. There are no public polls from October.
No. In Nebraska, we're calibrating based on party internal polls which both suggest a close race, right? It's really been remarkable how like even the Republican internal polls are like, 'Oh yeah, we're up ahead three points in this really red state.' Like that's not great, right? Yeah, but like I do want to... I don't want to abandon South Carolina because again it's unlikely to be the tipping point state. Probably if Democrats win it, they're having a really good night, right? But it does provide like what I'd call like Susan Collins insurance, right? Like let's say Democrats do really well among Black voters. Well, what races does that help in? North Carolina and Georgia. In fact, part of the reason those races aren't even on the radar is I think because of the Black vote, right? Texas a fair bit, Ohio a little bit, and then maybe South Carolina. What if these white states are fake in the polls, right? But the Black turnout surge is real. And what if Susan Collins wins? You could actually, if you pick up Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina... a weird, weird, but like that's four states.
Yeah. Which also brings us back to what you said about Minnesota. The New York Times published a poll showing again Peggy Finer got up 14 points in Minnesota. The reason that's so interesting to me is that there is no party registration in Minnesota and so pollsters can't use a lot of the tools that they have been using to try to get closer to the expected baseline of the electorate. In a state like that, it's closer to what, for example, Ann Selzer was doing in Iowa back in 2024 because there are just fewer things you have, less ability to weight in that race. That suggests that one of two things is happening. That either all of this fancy-schmancy stuff, whatever, I'm being a little flip, that pollsters have taken on during the Trump era to try to reach Trump voters is leading them in the wrong direction this time and actually is under-sampling some of the shifts that we're seeing. Okay, potentially possible. Or that poll is experiencing exactly what Ann Selzer experienced in 2024 and we should sort of put that to the side.
Nate, you were talking a little bit about, you know, what if we see a huge Black voter surge. Listener Ryan asks, what framework should we use to determine if results are a blue wave? Like, you know, turnout is, you know, increased turnout of certain demographics is one. How else are you thinking about that theoretical outcome?
Well, it's... unless polls are way off, it's a blue wave. The question is what's the magnitude of... I mean, the whole $64,000 question has been like this rock in the hard place where it's likely to be a very blue environment but how does that match up against these R plus 10 or R plus 1 or in this case South Carolina R plus 18 states, right? But like look, I mean look, if Democrats pick up the Senate and win Texas, no one's going to have a contrarian take that it wasn't a blue wave, right? If they pick up the Senate and win Kansas, if they win the Senate, it's a blue wave.
Let me ask an even more sort of particulate question about the actual night of election night and then the day or two after. And I, you know, if this had been 10 years ago, it would have been like, 'Oh, this is just for election nerds.' But I think we all know that the way results are reported, the way the television narrative goes as people metabolize the results often can affect the way races are written up or the way pundits are tweeting about them on Twitter. So, like can you say, you know, let's theorize, okay, it's like 9:00 next Tuesday. What states should people be watching to have an indication of, okay, wow, this might be a blue wave or are we really sort of saying, you know what, like you're not going to know what's happening, what's real, until like maybe Thursday, maybe later. Like do you guys have a sort of the smart person's guide to watching this election without being irresponsible and ill-informed?
I want Nate to zoom in on specific races here if he's watching them, but I just want to shout out that at 7:00 polls close in Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. Florida also counts pretty quickly. And at 7:30, polls close in North Carolina and Ohio. If things are going the way we expect them to go, I think we should be able to say who won the House by 8:00 and have some pretty... I mean, because of the... and look, Latino voters in South Florida and Florida in general have proven to vote differently from Latino voters across different parts of the country, namely Texas, Arizona, and the Northeast. So, I don't know that Florida is like... if Republicans are collapsing with Latino voters in Florida, then I would trust that they're also collapsing with Latino voters in Texas. But if they're holding their own with Latino voters in Florida, I would say we don't know enough yet. Like maybe they're still losing ground with Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley, etc. Latinos in South Florida and Latinos in South Texas are two of the most unique groups, and I think those are not things that I would take to extrapolate even one to the other necessarily.
Yeah. Look, there's a Kentucky district. The Lexington district is competitive even though it's fairly Trumpy, right? Like that would be a bad sign if the GOP loses it. North Carolina, I think Roy Cooper would expect to have that called fairly soon. If it's not, that's a bad night for Democrats, right? If Florida isn't called fairly soon for Ashley Moody, maybe a bad night for Republicans. But like people, I don't know, you know, when I do an election night, I just click F5 and refresh the needle and Polymarket. That's all I do. And then pretend to be smart. That's all I do.
Great. Pay for his live stream, everyone.
Humor, gallows and/or... Yeah, gallows humor to whom.
Let me get another couple reader questions in. This one is from Sean. And he asks, or she... I've known... It's a correct way... S-E-A-N. There's a correct way to spell Sean and it's not...
You know that I feel like those are totally different names. I have this intuition.
I went up to a guy. I was at a little poker charity event, right? And he's like, 'My name is Eric.' And I'm like, 'Eric with a K.' I just knew it's my savant-like skill.
Sean spelled correctly says, 'Is there any reason to suspect that there might be a coattails effect in states where gubernatorial and Senate elections are taking place? For example, in Iowa, Rob Sand is polling better than Josh Turk or the reverse in Georgia with John Oaf and Kesha Lance Bottoms.' Thoughts?
Can I give you a technical answer to that? There's not a coattails effect to the extent that isn't already priced into the polls. Okay, so the technical way I do this is say take the Senate polling average, take the gubernatorial polling average. Me and Eli at Silver Bulletin did an article on this just last week, right? Does the fact that Rob Sand is plus six or whatever he is in the governor's race mean that Turk will outperform his plus one? And the answer is basically no. That there's not additional information provided. But, you know, but if Sand's a popular candidate, then maybe that's already filtered in. It makes Turk easier to brand himself as kind of non-partisan, right? And if Sand has good turnout operations, maybe it helps a little bit, but like, but you know, we are forecasting relatively narrow governor versus Senate splits with some exceptions. We probably don't have time to talk about Vermont. Vermont's a really interesting race, for example.
You know, I think we should put a little respect on the name of split-ticket voting, right? Like a lot of people imagine, oh, you know, John Oaf is going to win Georgia by 9, 10 points. Of course he's going to, you know, pull Kesha Lance Bottoms over the finish line if you want to frame it that way. And yes, I think there are coattails effects. I think that, and sometimes, you know, two different candidates can help each other out. Maybe Kesha Lance Bottoms helps Black turnout and maybe John Oaf helps with maybe sort of like swingier affluent white suburban voters in, you know, around Atlanta, whatever. We can dig into all of that after the fact, but we're going to see, especially in a midterm environment where we don't pay like 95% of our attention to the presidential race, differences between candidates. There's going to be a huge split ticket in Maine. There's going to be a significant one in Michigan. There's probably going to be one in Texas. We are going to see one in Iowa and Georgia. And we're actually going to see a big one in Florida. And so, you know, there is that sort of 10 to 15% of the electorate that does tend to show up to vote more regularly, but changes their mind. They will, especially in a midterm environment like this, sometimes be voting for people of different parties for governor.
Nate, you just published a whole thing on this where you looked into whether split-ticket voting was declining. Were you going to say something about that? Because I'm curious about that number.
No, it is declining, but the degree of decline is kind of consistent with the polls. I mean, yeah, Georgia is the one example where because it's kind of a turnout-driven state and because like you can imagine Republican turnout being quite despondent in the Senate race, but then again, the Republican gubernatorial candidate is self-funded and has shitloads and shitloads of money, right? Yeah. Bottoms would be the one where if she wins and that race is very close in the polls where you might give an extra gold star to John Oaf.
Okay, Nate, I know you're gonna have stuff to say on this. On Tuesday, Marist put out a poll showing Troy Jackson up by two points in Maine among likely voters. However, among registered voters, the poll found Jackson has a nine-point advantage. What gives? What's going on here? Yeah, Silver Wolf has a question about that. 'Hey guys, what the fuck is up with that Marist poll?' That's Silver Wolf.
Is Silver Wolf like an ethnic white from the outer boroughs?
Yeah, he said New York, New Jersey. I mean, you said on Twitter some rough things and then you also said, I guess I should be, you know, I should give credit to Marist for pubbing this, like sticking with their kind of weird result, right? Or their consistency in this weirdness. What's going on in this poll?
So obviously the poll is incoherent and kind of indefensible in one way or another and you can aggregate that. I don't care. I'd love to hear the Marist people explain what the fuck is going on with their poll. So I'm going to focus on the gubernatorial race first because this is the far weirder result. Right. In our polling average, the Democrat Hannah Pingree... Am I saying that right or is that some weird French Acadian thing? Hannah Pingree has been leading by around 10 points in almost every poll. In the registered voter version of the Marist poll, Hannah Pingree was ahead by 11 points. In the likely voter version of that poll, she was tied. So they're showing an 11-point swing. They are also showing undecideds in that race jumping from 2% among registered voters to 6% among likely voters. That makes no fucking sense, right? No fucking sense. You can have like an enormous turnout differential and say, 'Well, what if Pingree gets only 60% of her vote and the Republican gets 70% of his?' Right? Even that doesn't close the gap, right? I think they're terrified to publish their actual result and are herding. I think it's simple. And they had to reverse-engineer some cockamamie way to do this that totally fucked up their gubernatorial poll which now is totally out of line with any other gubernatorial poll in the race and that nobody believes is... you know, it doesn't make sense.
Now, could it be that kind of this is really not a registered voter versus likely voter poll, but like two entirely different ways of processing the same inputs? Maybe, but like the fact that you increase the number of undecideds in a likely voter poll... Usually what happens if you take a likely voter poll, you have fewer undecided because people who are undecided at this point probably are not going to vote, right? I think there could easily be... well, there are two explanations, right? Either their algorithm is buggy and needs to be repaired or they're scared of their own shadow, right? There's not a flattering explanation. These polls make no fucking sense.
Stuff like this, like herding, has gotten worse over the decade of Trump. Has it always been bad and now more people are tuned into it?
I do want to point one thing out which is that Ann Selzer, who... you did the interview with, right? She was sued by the president... she was sued by the President of the United States for publishing an outlier poll that turned out to be wrong, right? You know, I don't know what kind of chilling effect that would have potentially, but possibly not zero, right? And there are some cases where this like... so in Maine there was also... excuse me. In South Carolina, there was a Citadel poll that showed Annie Andrews winning among registered voters and losing among likely voters. That kind of makes sense given the history of South Carolina, right? And South Carolina is a low turnout state. Turnout matters. Maine is a high turnout state. The Democratic early voting numbers look fine to good there. They often do, but a slightly wider spread than in the past. And like they weren't comfortable publishing Jackson plus nine or whatever their raw number was, right? Maybe they're not comfortable because they don't believe their turnout model and it's kind of a case of two rights making it wrong. But they did very weird things like the percentage of college-educated voters was lower in their likely voter sample than the registered voter sample, right? That does not happen in midterms.
I do think that herding can be a problem and people aren't straight up publishing fake polls that show, you know, 48-48 like a lot of the polls that we saw in the final stretch of 2024 because folks are weighting and putting likely voter models on the results. Like you can tinker with things a little bit that get you closer to where you feel like things might be. And sometimes that can also be subconscious, not you're doing it actively. It's just part of the process. And as we've talked about, this type of polling, especially now, is both a science and an art. I do want to play like devil's advocate here. I don't have a strong position on this Marist poll, and it sounds like Nate has dug into it a lot more than I have. Maine is a little bit of a unique state in that it's the oldest state in the country. And Susan Collins is also an old-school Republican. And so you might expect things to happen a little bit differently in Maine than they would elsewhere. So oldest state in the country means that the people who are likely to show up are... and older voters vote at higher rates than young voters. And so the people who are likelier to show up are these older voters who, you know, maybe Susan Collins fits as an old-school Republican. And when you, you know, get...
