Show full transcript 1:21 A couple of those states had always looked possible, Maine, North Carolina, but then came 1:26 the hard one, states where Trump had won by double digits. 1:29 People weren't really talking about Kansas, but now Kansas. 1:34 And the remarkable thing about this cycle is that Democrats are polling competitively 1:39 in all of them. 1:40 In a handful of those races are actually far ahead. 1:43 And so I think the question is, can we trust these polls? 1:49 What can we really say about where the election stands just a week before the vote? 1:55 To talk about all this, I want to have Nate Silver on the show. 1:59 Nate, of course, is, you know, internationally famous elections nerd. 2:02 These days, he edits a silver bulletin on Substack, which puts out a ton of great 2:06 analysis, polling, and election forecasts. He co-has a podcast still 2:11 counting and he's the author of most recently On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. 2:16 Anything. 2:16 Nate joins me now. 2:24 Nate Silver. 2:25 Welcome back to the show. 2:26 Hey, Ezra. 2:26 How are you, man? 2:27 I'm good. 2:28 I wanted to ask. 2:29 I didn't follow up when you said this to me a second ago, because I want to do it on 2:31 air. 2:33 You said to me, looking a little far away in your eyes, that this election feels momentous 2:38 to you. 2:38 I've known you a long time. 2:39 You don't usually say things like that. 2:41 So what feels momentous? 2:43 If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would 2:48 mark the end of the Trump era. I think he'll still be president for two more years. But 2:56 the minute the votes are counted might take a while because of Alaska and California and 3:00 states like that. The 2028 election campaign begins. And if Trump has a bad night as polls 3:04 show, then he's a super lame duck, right? You might draw an analogy to Bush after 3:11 2006. And like part of what people understandably are having trouble believing in the polls, 3:16 is that it kind of looks like a different regime, right, where Kansas is competitive, 3:20 Texas is competitive, potentially gains for Democrats deep into Republican territory, 3:24 but maybe we're on the verge of something different between generational turnover, between 3:29 Trump being three-quarters of the way through his two constitutionally provided four terms 3:33 and with AI looming two. 3:36 It's not quite clear to me how big an issue AI is in this election. 3:39 I think maybe more than people assume, but it could be the biggest issue of 2028. 3:42 I think you might expect it to be, along with the economy, the biggest issues of 2028. 3:46 I was thinking as you said, some of that about the conversations I had about the election a year 3:51 ago. Yeah. And a year ago, the conversation was Democrats will probably win the House. 3:58 And the Senate, I mean, never say never. Yeah. But no. And the reason was that to win back 4:06 the Senate, Democrats were going to need to win in a number of places where Trump had 4:12 won by more than 10 points. 4:13 And given everything we know about partisanship in modern America, that wasn't going to happen. 4:19 So we're talking, it's about two weeks before the election right now, it'll be less by 4:23 the time this airs. 4:25 Democrats are at a 70 plus percent chance of winning the Senate in your model and 4:30 not just winning the Senate, but possibly winning like beyond that. 4:34 with some of them just spent some time to spare. 4:37 Why, what happened? 4:39 So I think a couple of things happened 4:41 and some of them have to do with expectations 4:43 maybe being miscalibrated. 4:45 After 2024, there was talk of a, 4:48 I guess permanent conservative vibe shift 4:51 that Democrats who were on their back heels 4:53 and Biden had failed and Wokeness- 4:55 That was dumb, the idea to be permanent. 4:58 Yeah, and if you look at the history 4:59 of American elections, 5:00 then the most regular trend in American elections, 5:02 One of the few things that survives for decades as there is a backlash against the president's 5:07 party at the midterm, maybe a little bit bigger if a president's in his second kind of lame 5:11 duck term. 5:12 But, you know, we can recite the exceptions on one hand, 1998, after Monica Lewinsky 5:17 2002 after September 11th. 5:19 That's about it. 5:19 2022, Biden had a relatively gentle thumping in the midterm compared to what you might 5:24 expect based on his approval rating. 5:26 So, you know, look, in the average midterm, the environment shifts by seven and a half 5:31 points against the president's party versus the previous presidential year. 5:35 This year it looks more like 11 points, but why is 11 points important? 5:40 Well, there are all these states, like you said, that Trump won by 10, 11, 12, 13 points. 5:45 Ohio I think he won by 11 points. 5:48 So if you have an 11 point swing and it's fairly uniform, all of a sudden Ohio becomes 5:52 a toss-up. 5:54 What I think wasn't so clear is that Democrats have actually nominated in most important 5:58 races, pretty good candidates and were lucky enough to face weaker Republican candidates. 6:03 I'm not sure if James Talarico is everybody's cup of tea, but he is able to take advantage of 6:08 Ken Paxton's many sins, so forth, right? In North Carolina, Roy Cooper was a strong recruit 6:13 from Schumer and company. Democrats have the strategy now of trying to dominate 6:18 independence in kind of name only in states like Nebraska. I think both the candidates of 6:23 Republican and the Democratic strong in Iowa, for example. But, you know, I would say that 6:27 probably the candidate in tangibles, you know, they might move things by five points 6:32 at most. 6:33 But you kind of do the math, you know, like, okay, well, Texas is a Trump plus 13 state. 6:37 The Parson climate moves 11 points toward Democrats, so that's R plus two. 6:41 And then as Ken Paxton below average enough to turn R plus two into D plus two, well, 6:46 that's the math, right? 6:47 And that's a logical enough story. 6:50 So, one question that raises for me is Schumer and his team, the Democratic Senatoral Campaign 6:58 Committee, it's under Christian Gillibrand right now, they looked pretty bad a couple 7:04 months ago. 7:04 And they looked pretty bad primarily because a focus was on the fight that they waged and 7:09 lost in Maine to make Janet Mills the nominee and instead it was gonna be Grant Planner. 7:14 Grant Plattner imploded, Troy Jackson, who's the Democratic nominee now, you know, is ahead 7:22 of Susan Collins by bit. 7:23 I think people are nervous about that race because Collins tends to outperform her polling 7:26 and it's not that wide of a gap. 7:29 But if you're looking over the range of states, do they look pretty good? 7:34 I mean, Turk in Iowa, Petola in Alaska, Roy Cooper, right? 7:39 It seems like they're... 7:40 Toll is a big one. I'm not sure an average Democrat would be in a toss up or she's, you 7:44 know, a slight favorite in that race, actually. Yeah. Look, yeah, you have these big fights 7:48 in Maine and Michigan. I would share Democrats concern about Maine a little bit. I mean, 7:54 that's based on nothing but just the fact that Susan Collins beat her polls by like 7:58 literally like nine points in the last election. There's a whole argument about how persistent 8:02 polling error is. We tend to assume that it's not, but that's when race for 8:06 the polls have gotten maybe closer by a point or two. There hasn't been a lot 8:09 polling in Maine. Michigan, look, I'm one of those people who says that all the things held equal, 8:15 a moderate can't be able to do better than a progressive, at least in a purple state like 8:19 Michigan. And if you compare the governor's race there, where Jocelyn Benson is ahead by 8:24 eight points, I'll say it's ahead by three or three and a half or something, right? 8:28 There is a four or four and a half point candidate quality gap that is again, 8:32 within that range of what we think candidates, how much they can matter in an environment 8:36 like this one, right? But if you have enough wind at your back, then you can overcome some of those 8:41 problems. And by the way, in other ways, El Sayed is a, is a good candidate, right? He's very Michigan 8:47 in certain ways, right? He, in kind of a Zoran-esque way, kind of is a bro, right? It's an interesting 8:53 contrast to, like, Francesca Hung or somebody. And there are gendered parts of that comparison 8:58 too, potentially. He's also raised a lot of money and money is helpful. But yeah, I mean, 9:02 In Michigan and Maine, if Democrats were to lose one of them, they'd still have a chance 9:07 if they were to lose both, then probably game over for a Democratic Senate flip. 9:13 One of the things that has been interesting to me looking at the polls, and people have 9:17 commented on this, this is not my original observation, is it Democrats seem to be overperforming 9:22 more in redder states? 9:24 Yes. 9:24 So they look better than you would think in a Texas, a Kansas, an Iowa, maybe a little 9:32 bit less good than like a Michigan, a Minnesota, you know, it kind of goes on like in the blue 9:37 states. 9:38 Right. 9:39 Is there something to this? 9:40 And if so, what do you make of it? 9:41 Well, that's what I think makes Democrats nervous because it's the red states, especially 9:47 in the heartland where the polling over performance has been concentrated in some 9:51 of these recent elections. 9:52 At the same time, the story does make sense on a couple of levels, right? 9:58 Number one, gas and diesel prices. 10:02 If you look at where diesel fuels are consumed, not usually by passenger vehicles, but by agriculture, 10:08 trucking, petroleum, home heating oils, right? 10:11 It's all kind of the colder mid-western states where a lot of the battlegrounds are concentrated 10:14 as it happens this year. 10:16 If you believe in kind of a last in first doubt argument, like what if we are reverting 10:21 somewhat out of the Trump era. Actually in 2024, for the first time in a while, you had 10:29 very mild depolarization. Some of the worst states that Democrats had relative to 2020 10:36 were like New York and California, you know, younger voters of color, for example, and 10:42 younger men in general kind of moved against Democrats. Whereas, you know, like relatively 10:47 speaking, if you're really looking in the weeds, like Kansas is a state where Harris, 10:52 I think the PBI we call it, the gap between that and the national spread declined in Kansas 10:57 a little bit. So maybe you're having some last and first out where the people that joined 11:02 the Trump coalition, like Hispanics, working class whites, maybe just moving a little bit 11:08 back in the other direction, or maybe just not voting, right? You know, one reason why 11:12 Trump at his polls in 24 was overperformance among like young men, the one group you do 11:18 not want to rely on to turn out in the midterm is usually young men. 11:21 I think there's another story you can tell and I'm curious how this rates for you, which 11:25 is that it actually has to do potentially with candidate quality on both sides. 11:31 So in wetter states, Democrats have been, I would say more rigorously following a 11:40 View that they need more moderate candidates. So you think of like Adam Hamilton in Kansas 11:46 Sherrod Brown is like a longtime populist and you know, very well, but Roy Cooper in North Carolina 11:50 I wouldn't say George is a red state anymore 11:52 But John Austin visits like relentlessly disciplined figure 11:56 Nebraska with Osborne who's actually running as an independent. I wouldn't say Democrats chose him 12:00 but obviously Democrats are 12:02 Aligned I think and excited about his candidacy and didn't run a Democrat against him 12:07 And as you get more into the more traditionally purple or bluer states, you know, Maine, they 12:13 have nominated like a more left candidate, you know, Jackson replacing Platner, who is 12:17 also a more left candidate, obviously Abdul Sayed in Michigan, the more left candidate 12:20 one in Minnesota, the more kind of left candidate one for the Democrats. 12:25 And it seems like she's going to win, but is performing a little bit worse and people 12:29 are comfortable with. 12:30 So I feel like one way you could squint at this is to say, in redder states, Democrats 12:37 have been very purposefully choosing candidates who just seem more independent. 12:42 And that as you go down to where Democrats felt more comfortable and could take more 12:45 risk, they're taking more risk and trading away some of the possible gains, like that 12:49 would be the moderation wins thesis of like what we're seeing. 12:53 Well, in Florida as a state where you had a DSA candidate that isn't on anyone's 12:58 map because, you know, she's now trailing by six or seven or eight points, which isn't 13:02 that bad for Florida. But like, you need a pretty conservative Democrat probably to 13:05 win in Florida at this point. No, I think that's a lot of it. I think a lot of it also, 13:09 if you look at a state like Minnesota where Peggy Flanagan is ahead by three and a half 13:13 or four points. 13:14 Yeah, not by nine or 10, which, you know, the states where you have these democratic 13:18 trifectas and you have critiques of democratic governance is where you tend to see 13:21 more problems potentially. In Oregon, where you've had a lot of critiques of liberal 13:26 governance, right? Tina Koteck, the incumbent, I think is only ahead by like one or two points 13:30 in the polls. You know, Kathy Hockel, certainly looks like she'll win re-election, but maybe 13:35 by a relatively tepid margin. You haven't seen that as much in like Massachusetts, which is 13:39 a classically well-governed state that's often had a Republican governor in the form of Charlie 13:44 Baker, right? But you know, I think people are, there's an anti-incumbent mood. People, 13:49 I think, are making this implicit calculation about who has kind of power over my life, 13:53 But not against all incumbents, right? 13:55 Like, Ossifist incumbent in Georgia is going to stomp, I mean, from what we can tell in 13:58 the polls. 13:59 His challenger, Roy Cooper, is the incumbent governor in North Carolina, or, you know, 14:05 obviously was like, he's going to like win in a walk. 14:07 So it like there are democratic incumbents who are doing just fine here. 14:11 I think Minnesota is the clearest example of this because Tim Walz's approval rating 14:15 is 17 points underwater or something to the point where he was going to run for 14:19 another term and didn't. 14:21 So it's kind of like ground zero. 14:22 He's had a real fast fall and rise and fall in politics. 14:26 The trajectory of losing vice presidential nominees, you know, John Edwards had a rough 14:31 fall from grace, for example, Paul Ryan, no longer on Congress, right? 14:35 It's pretty rough. 14:36 That's a fair point. 14:37 One more thing for these hypotheses about the heartland in the Midwest. 14:41 The economists had some data showing that, like, the closer that Trump voters live 14:46 to data centers, the more likely they are to flip and vote Democratic in this election. 14:51 And in the Western general, you have a lot of data centers, right? 14:55 Because you want some space, but you don't want to be too far off the grid and too rural. 15:00 And so that could be a hidden factor too. 15:03 There's something I was thinking about while I was going through and trying to decide 15:06 which of the candidates seemed to me to be overperforming the most. 15:09 I was thinking about how uncorrelated attention and performance is right now. 15:15 So it's like, if I go through the candidates who are all over my feeds and who are 15:20 on big podcasts. And I mean, obviously, some of this is also their choice of how to run. But 15:24 Abdul said like omnipresent, right? James Tallarico omnipresent. John Asif, he's not going on many 15:29 national podcasts at the moment, but his clips are absolutely everywhere. You're not seeing 15:33 Sherrod Brown. You're not seeing, you know, very much of Mary Patala, right? She does not do a 15:37 lot of national press. You're not seeing a lot of Roy Cooper. But it's really like you 15:41 look at it and there is almost no connection between who are the candidates who are everywhere 15:47 wear on social media in my feeds and who are the candidates who are doing particularly well 15:52 or poorly, at least in polls. 15:54 Yeah, look, some candidates have different incentives. 15:56 If you want to run for president in 2028, then you probably want to somewhat higher 15:59 profile potentially, I think in a case like Tala Rico or El Sayed, they kind of inescapably 16:05 feel that they're going to get the maximum amount of attention anyway. 16:10 But look, there's something to be said for kind of keeping a lower profile too. 16:13 You know, maybe Ohio is an example of that, maybe Iowa a bit. 16:18 I mean, look, in midterms, there are basically three big questions, right? 16:21 Will your voters turn out, will the other side's voters turn out, and then how much persuasion 16:25 is taking place among the 15% of the electorates, possibly swing voters? 16:29 And you know, if Democrats were to come up short in a couple of races like Iowa 16:34 or Kansas, they might say, you know what, this race just got like a little bit too 16:37 much on everybody's, on everybody's radar, and Republicans managed to drag some voters 16:42 off the finish line. 16:43 I mean, the persuasion part of this is done. 16:46 I'd be shocked if Democratic turnout wasn't high by midterm standards. 16:51 We don't know if Republicans are going to turn out and that will determine the range 16:56 between Republicans hold the Senate and keep Democrats to 10 seats in the house and 17:01 complete 1994 style disaster. 17:14 This podcast is supported by Chevron. 17:18 We rely on energy every day. 17:20 But have you ever wondered what it takes to make sure it's there when we need it? 17:24 I'm Tanner Faust and the energy tailgate is back with straight talk about the energy our world depends on 17:32 33 presidents I called the president at 4 30 in the morning and he answered seven decades in space 17:37 We want to see what's beyond the next star 60 Super Sun days 17:41 They were probably the best team in the league every single year 53,500 puzzles 17:45 I use a different starting word every day 17:48 25,000 recipes. 17:50 And I love a one-pan recipe because I don't love washing pans. 17:54 The New York Times celebrating 175 years of helping you understand the world. 17:58 Subscribe now for a special offer at nytimes.com slash subscribe. 18:04 Right now, I mean, we're talking a little bit as if the thing Democrats are hoping 18:09 will happen will happen. 18:11 But we often see polling error in midterms and maybe we see polling error in general 18:14 elections too. 18:16 So, how resilient are democratic hopes to polling error? 18:22 And how are you thinking about where the polling error might be? 18:27 Like when you're building things into the model and thinking about what you're trying 18:30 to correct for, you've seen Trump underestimated many a time, seen Susan Collins underestimated 18:36 many a time. 18:36 On the other hand, the pollsters know that has happened, right? 18:38 How do you think about the polling error dimension of this? 18:41 Look, the first thing I always tell people is that whenever you're looking at a series 18:45 of polls in a Senate race or in Senate races, plural, always ask yourself, what if they're 18:50 off by three or four points in the same direction in every race? 18:54 You know, Democrats have a lot of three point leads in races like Ohio and Texas, more 18:59 or less. 19:00 If you had a three point polling area, you would have a very long night where we 19:05 might be waiting for ranked choice voting in Alaska. 19:08 But it's you know, the house is different if Democrats were not to win the house then 19:15 There would be profound questions about what's going on with the polling and in some ways what's going on with the country too 19:20 I think Democrats have the 19:23 Emotional feeling that when there's a polling error it is 19:28 Against them because it you know, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and just in general polls actually have repeatedly 19:35 really underestimated Donald Trump. But is that true? And is it particularly true in midterms? 19:40 Have polling errors been consistently against Democrats? 19:44 It has not been true in the two midterms under in the Trump era. I guess 2018 was under Trump 19:48 and their polls were, you know, one of the most accurate years for polling ever. 19:52 2022 similar. In fact, there were a couple of races that were high profile, like the 19:56 Federman race in Pennsylvania, where polls showed us closing the gap after Federman's 20:02 stroke, right? And then Fetterman won by a pretty solid, I think four or five points or something 20:06 like that, right? But overall polls were quite accurate. There are also elections that are held 20:10 in odd-numbered years, runoffs, things like that. In New Jersey and Virginia last year, 20:16 the polls were five to 10 points low on Democrats, which is one of the biggest polling 20:22 errors we've seen in a well-pulled general election. So yeah, the critique I have of 20:28 some of the people say, they'll say, well, you know, you're under-sampling Republicans 20:31 and these polls and Democrats are much more enthusiastic and much more likely to respond 20:34 and trust the pollsters more. Every single person in the industry is aware of that. Look, 20:41 I think every pollster is aware that polls missed low on Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. 20:48 You know, the three presidential years was kind of the death knell for the gold standard 20:54 of polling, which is like, we're just going to go and survey people and we'll wait to 20:58 well-known census demographics and we'll just trust the data. The Ann Seltzer poll in Iowa, 21:04 which, I mean, she was literally the highest rated pollster. She and the New York Times were 21:08 like, I think tied for number one or something, right? But that- 21:11 Now we stand alone. 21:12 Yeah. 21:13 So say what happened with Ann Seltzer because maybe some people are emotionally 21:17 scarred and some people have no idea what we're talking about. 21:19 Yeah. It was the weekend before the election, right? And I had like some dinner plans on 21:22 Saturday and then I got like a text from a friend saying, have you heard about this 21:25 Iowa poll, there's a rumor that like Ann Seltzer, the Dame or Don of Iowa polling, right, who had 21:30 predicted Barack Obama's big win, Iowa caucus in 2008, would have a poll coming out showing 21:36 Kamala Harris winning, I think by three points in Iowa. Every other poll of Iowa had been Trump 21:40 plus nine or something like that. And our model was pretty skeptical. You don't usually want 21:47 to bet against Ann Seltzer, but like it kind of opened up this whole world, like, what if 21:51 everyone's just kind of way overcompensating for past elections. And it didn't make a lot 21:55 of sense, but she had gotten very far before by just saying, I'm just going to trust my 21:59 data. I'm not going to overly massage it, not make too many assumptions about it. And 22:02 the poll was off by, what was it, like 13 or 14 or 15 points? 22:05 This is bad. And then Trump insanely sued the paper as if like publishing a poll where 22:10 he was losing was defamation. 22:13 Yeah, it's ever clear what the incentives are supposed to be. 22:15 Can I stop on this polling thing for a minute though to let's get in the weeds 22:19 methodologically for a minute, because I find whenever we start discussing or I start thinking 22:24 about how what is happening in polls to massage demographics to kind of answer all these problems 22:34 of people don't pick up the phone or, you know, we're using online sampling and we don't know 22:38 who will turn out. I feel very disoriented. What do you do? Like what are the pollsters doing? 22:44 And I should say, I'm not a pollster. I'm a forecaster, right? But I, that distinction 22:49 in some ways is becoming blurrier. 22:51 Yeah. That's what I mean. They feel like they're forecasting. 22:53 I think the upshot of the Anselster thing is that everyone knows that a poll is kind 22:58 of almost like a mini model with polling flavored inputs. And I'm not sure what the right 23:04 metaphor is. People want to make it like it's some broken gauge that you know 23:07 on your beautiful car that when it says 25% of fuel left actually have to be filled 23:12 because the gauge is broken, right? 23:14 Instead, this is a more of an iterative process, right? 23:17 You open a restaurant, the customers complain the food is too spicy. 23:22 You tamp it down a little bit, now some of your customers say, no, I wanted the spice 23:26 back in my food, right? 23:27 And so, but it's more of an iterative process. 23:29 And I think pollsters are now aware they'll be judged on their results in the final 23:34 few weeks at least. 23:35 And as much as they might say, well, it's just a snapshot of public opinion, 23:39 in, there are huge reputational stakes on the line for being right. 23:44 So I mean- 23:44 The pulses are being wrong. 23:45 And for being wrong. 23:47 So the pulses have pretty good incentives to correct for these problems potentially. 23:53 But sometimes when, I know it sounds kind of tautological, right? 23:57 When there are these big wave change elections or elections that are kind of unexpected, 24:03 and sometimes pulses lowball them in 1994, for example, it looked like a relatively 24:08 bad year for Clinton that turned into a terrible year, right? You can also look at a year like 24:14 2014 is a parallel that I'd be worried about if I were Republicans because that's the year when 24:18 the polls were never great for Obama, but you had a really, really big differential turnout 24:23 where Democrats just weren't that enthusiastic. At the time Obama was relying on more of a 24:28 multi-ethnic younger coalition that traditionally does not turn out at the same rates and midterms 24:33 and that turned into a nine seat loss, a total route for Democrats in the Senate. 24:38 I mean, this is, I think, what I'm asking you, that we know the midterm electorate is 24:42 going to be different than the presidential electorate, that some people are going to be 24:45 more motivated to vote than others. I mean, are they just polling people and saying, 24:49 do you think you're going to vote? And that's like the big screen. Just for somebody who does 24:54 not, like I have read analysis of these, the the upshot a while back and Nick Cohen did a 24:58 cool thing where they let you see like how different ways of moving the data around 25:02 would give you a very different result on the same like underlying poll data. 25:05 But is there like a kind of conventional thing they're doing to compose a midterm electorate 25:12 that is going to be really different in 2026 than it was in 2022? 25:16 Yeah. 25:16 So one difference, if you ask people, are you going to vote? 25:19 How enthusiastic are you about voting? 25:22 That produces a very democratic sample. 25:26 Other pollsters try to predict whether people will vote based on other types of data. 25:31 data. And those techniques tend to produce more modest results for Democrats. You know, 25:36 one thing you can watch in the early voting data, which generally I advise people not 25:39 to do, but who was winning among like lower propensity voters, right? People who have 25:44 voted in no more than one out of the past three elections counting midterms. Those 25:50 low propensity voters appear to be quite democratic so far. It may be probably will 25:57 to some extent, Republicans will cast their vote by election day anyway, and they'll catch 26:01 up. 26:01 But if not, if Democrats' low propensity voters turn out and the GOP doesn't, then that's 26:07 what you might see a polling error that underestimates Democrats. 26:09 So if Republicans end up having a better than expected night, what do you think will have 26:15 ended up being the explanation for it? 26:18 I mean, look, I think there are two versions of this, like one is just Democrats lose 26:23 all the toss-ups, right? Talarico loses by a point. Jackson loses by a point. Maybe I'll say I'd 26:28 win by a recount. Sherrod Brown wins, but Turek loses by three points. Like that's 26:34 very feasible in the kind of thick part of the probability distribution. And then, 26:39 and then I think, you know, with some questions about the polls, but that's kind of in line. 26:44 We'll say, okay, partisanship is still really strong. Maybe pollsters and Democrats 26:47 are getting their hopes up a little bit too high to think you could win in these 26:50 R plus 12 states have been R plus eight, then yeah, but we just kind of reached the point 26:55 where we ran out of like oxygen climbing up that, that big red hill, right? 26:59 Let's say the house is kind of close, right? 27:01 And Democrats only pick up North Carolina in the Senate, right? 27:05 I mean, then that's kind of hard to contemplate almost not because it's not theoretically 27:13 possible based on the polls, right? 27:14 Like, you know, we have these in our model, these like fat tails that say sometimes 27:19 polls going to be up by five or six or seven points or something crazy, right? But that would 27:23 kind of like defy everything that we think we know about how midterms work. 27:29 There are, I think, a couple of races that feel to me like they have a lot of outside narrative 27:33 importance. Talarico feels to me like it's got a lot of narrative importance to people. You know, 27:39 the possibility of Democrats being competitive in Texas, a sort of return of a religious left. 27:43 Abdul al-Sayed is going to be seen as a very important test of he's actually not a DSA guy 27:49 but sort of a more left populist, you know, unsparing candidate. Like I was watching this 27:54 video where he just like absolutely annihilates this guy who comes to one of his town halls 28:02 and is like, well, you've denounced the Muslim brotherhood. And I mean, 28:05 al-Sayed, who's a very, very, very smart guy, leaves this guy like a smoking 28:09 Like crater on the floor. So it feels like there's going to be a lot of attention on how he specifically does 28:15 You know, you've been very attentive to like the factional divisions in a bureaucratic party recently 28:20 I think you've cut Democrats into what is it the capital L left the abundance lives 28:24 Oh, yeah, this is me and then Richard sinism which you've named for Heather Cox Richardson 28:29 Who's you know the substacker and that's sort of the big? 28:32 Resistance libs no Kings kind of thing, but I'm curious how you think different forms of the election might end up 28:39 being interpreted and shaping the democratic party and its strategies. 28:43 So the two big, apart from who wins, right? The two big sub-story lines of November 3rd 28:47 are one, how do progressives do relative to moderates, but then is there evidence of like 28:52 an AI backlash from the state by state results? If people do these ecological analyses afterward, 28:59 they find, hey, yeah, in states where there was a data center construction, 29:01 then Republicans underperformed by three points. I mean, that might be important as well. 29:06 If Elsieb were to lose, then winner lose the Senate and that's a very bad narrative for 29:14 progressives. I don't know what happens if like, let's say that Benson wins by nine points and 29:19 Elsieb wins by four, right? Maybe nerds like me are like, well, he had a below average wins of a 29:24 replacement that proves my thesis. But like, I think that wouldn't really carry the day in 29:27 the democratic debate as much. I think for any race, an important threshold question is, 29:32 was the race called on election night. That shapes narratives quite a bit. People who weren't nerds 29:38 tend not to behave much attention to the margin, as long as it seems unambiguous and clear. 29:45 I mean, look, people wanted to tell this oversupplied narrative of like the progressives, 29:49 like winning everywhere in the primary. And that wasn't entirely true. You know, 29:55 Francesca Hong was ultimately rejected in Wisconsin. I don't know that 29:59 Jasmine Crockett actually is more progressive than Talarico. She's more of a partisan bomb 30:04 thrower and she lost that race. But she wasn't a DSA person. That was not her profile in politics. 30:12 I think Democratic voters have exercised a fair amount of kind of rational discretion, right? 30:20 I mean, there's nothing that says that voters have to or necessarily should maximize everything 30:27 based on electability, right? You're allowed to say, well, I'm trying to calculate some like 30:33 expected value score of what is the chance that candidate wins times how much good would they 30:37 do for the issues that I care about. Although I will tell you one thing, the amount of Democratic 30:43 infighting really dropped off after these races in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin. 30:48 Yeah, primaries just create a lot of, I mean, and it's going to go up again when the 30:51 2028 primary. It's going to be the only thing everyone's talking about for a year and a half 30:54 I would say, and this is like a step back I have, 30:58 one narrative that I think is going to be true, 31:01 particularly if you have a bunch of these players win, 31:04 is that Democrats are coming into an era 31:07 of like elder millennial talent. 31:10 That I apologize to my Democratic office holder, 31:13 Gen X friends, I think like the late boomer 31:16 and then the Gen X class and Democratic party 31:19 ended up like pretty caught between 31:21 political eras and communication eras. 31:23 But when I look at the democratic talent right now, and I think about, you know, on the left, 31:29 people like Zaron Omdani and Abdul Sayed and ABC, who are hugely talented. 31:34 Like, I think I'll say it'll be like a pretty superstar U.S. senator if he wins, you know, 31:40 and then I look at, you know, people like Rob Sand, who looks like he's going to win 31:44 the Iowa governor's race in a walk. 31:45 But you think about Talarico, who like is like really a star, John Ossoff, who has 31:49 become an absolute superstar. 31:52 Like I think you're just sort of seeing like the arrival of like a democratic class that is just more native to this 32:00 Era like came in during Obama the reshaped by Trump understands communication now 32:05 Just something to me seems to be changing 32:08 That is actually across a different faction like they all now have stars in a way that I wouldn't have said was true a few years ago 32:15 So that's kind of like a Steph Curry effect 32:18 with Obama as an analog, where he starts shooting three pointers from where no one has before 32:22 and now kids are practicing that in high school and they graduate and grow to college in the 32:26 NBA. 32:27 And who is Steph Curry in this analogy? 32:29 Obama. 32:30 I mean, El Sayed and Asa, for instance, are very both influenced by Obama in different 32:35 ways. 32:36 Maripi's got a little bit of- 32:36 Maripi, yeah. 32:37 Pete Buttigieg is another kind of elder millennial talent I would add to this. 32:41 In some ways, what happened to Democrats after 2012 was kind of weird, right? 32:46 where Hillary lost to Obama and Bill Clinton became president in 1992, right? And for some 32:52 reason, it's like, well, it's Hillary's turn now, right? And she had a very competitive 32:57 primary against Bernie Sanders and prevail. But like that in some ways felt like a return 33:03 to a different democratic party than the part that Obama was trying to craft, right? 33:06 And then Biden, who was kind of expressly chosen by Obama because he was old and 33:13 not seen as a threat to run for president himself kind of one amid this like flight to safety 33:19 and then but like obviously some of these were competitive nomination processes right but 33:23 it feels like some trajectory got interrupted in the Democratic Party and maybe now it's 33:30 being restored I suppose a little bit. 33:42 This podcast is supported by Chevron. 33:45 We rely on energy every day. 33:48 But have you ever wondered what it takes to make sure it's there when we need it? 33:51 I'm Tanner Faust, and the Energy Tailgate is back, with straight talk about the energy 33:56 our world depends on. 34:00 I'm Deborah Cayman. 34:01 I'm an investigative reporter for The New York Times. 34:03 One morning a few months ago, I got an email, and this person said to me, hey, I have some 34:07 documents that I think you want to see. 34:09 So I got on a plane that afternoon, and I met them in person, and I photographed the 34:12 documents, and we were able to tell a story that moved our reporting forward in a really 34:16 significant way. 34:17 When you subscribe to The New York Times, you're getting a whole team of reporters 34:20 who are willing to jump and go verify information and bring back documents and shine light on 34:26 things that other people would like to keep hidden. If you're a subscriber, thank you for being a 34:30 part of that. So we've been talking a lot about the Senate and the Senate is like the charismatic 34:36 megaphone of midterms because there are only a couple races you have to pay attention to and 34:40 you can keep the characters of them in mind. Obviously the House is not a binary outcome, 34:44 It really matters if Democrats end up with 228 members of the House, 235, 240, 250. 34:54 So tell me about what the modeling and the polling seems to suggest about where Democrats 34:59 might end up and the kind of sensitivity of that in both directions. 35:04 So one of the big consequences of all this redistricting as well as voter self-sorting 35:10 thing is that you have far fewer swing districts than you once did. Also, Democrats had a relatively 35:16 good 2024 in the House. I mean, there was still some doubt on election night whether 35:22 the Democrats might actually win the House in 2024 despite Harris having lost. So even 35:26 our model that has them with a 90% plus chance of winning the House that only translates 35:30 quote-unquote into 22 seats or something on average, which like we've seen, you 35:37 wave elections that are like 40, 50 seats. 35:40 Right. 35:40 I mean, 63 in 2010, for example. 35:43 Which was like the big, the very big one. 35:45 Or 41 or something in 2018. 35:48 Republicans did gain a few seats from the redistricting process, mostly one where they 35:53 just cut out a majority minority district. 35:56 So Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, in some of those states, the Alabama district is 36:01 actually kind of close in the polling, but that's like a clean three seats wiped 36:06 out from Democrats. In Texas and Florida, you are not seeing many Republican gains because 36:12 in Texas, the theory was that like, oh, we can now take more risks because we now have a much 36:17 firmer hold with lower income Hispanic voters. Well, if you believe the polls, those are the 36:21 groups that are shifting most aggressively back toward Democrats. And in Florida, DeSantis kind 36:27 of drew a riskier map that was optimized more for presidential years and would have a lot of 36:34 Toss up to lean our districts in an environment like this one now in Florida 36:41 Republicans have we talked before about like well what if Democrats win in Kansas 36:46 or Texas at this point it almost feels remarkable if a Democrat won a statewide 36:49 race in Florida. I have never read what was to me fully satisfying explanation 36:56 of how Florida became so red. Florida has gone as you say from being a 37:02 canonical swing state to more of a Republican readout than Texas. 37:08 I mean, Ron DeSantis barely won his first race for governor. 37:12 How did Florida become so red? 37:15 I think it's 75% migration and 25% kind of a despire 37:20 of the Democratic Party that might be self-reinforcing. 37:22 I mean, with the migration, Florida is a unique place 37:27 in offering blue state amenities, but without as many libs. You know what I mean? And that 37:34 has always attracted older people. But yeah, I think you have a lot of like political self-selection. 37:39 You know, in most states, if you look at like voter registration data, people have begun to 37:44 again register more as Democrats than Republicans, which was not true for like four or five years 37:49 in a row. This year, you're seeing those comebacks for Democrats in the Midwest in 37:53 particular in Pennsylvania, but not in Florida. Florida just keeps getting redder at the 37:56 registration level. 37:57 Okay, so that's like the center of house polling, 38:01 but we've talked about a two to three or four point 38:04 polling error, like not being unusual. 38:08 Given incumbency advantages in the house, 38:10 given redistricting, is this the kind of thing 38:13 where if you get a three point error, 38:15 and it turns out Democrats did better than expected 38:17 by three points, where all of a sudden, 38:20 a bunch of the redistricting falls apart 38:22 and Democrats like have this huge wave election 38:24 and actually they are winning 40 seats in the house. And they have this like huge majority 38:28 under speaker Hakeem Jeffries. 38:30 Yeah. No, if the wave gets really big, then one thing that happens is it inundates candidates 38:36 who have not been prepared for that type of disaster potentially. I mean, I think the 38:40 best example is like actually in, in the Senate with Roger Marshall, where I have 38:45 a- 38:45 In Kansas. 38:46 In Kansas, right? I have a family that lives in Overland Park, Kansas, big in Kansas 38:51 some Missouri politics and like, boy, Roger Marshall is a really bad candidate. 38:55 Right. 38:55 I'm like, you know, it's Kansas. 38:56 It's I'm sorry. 38:57 It doesn't matter. 38:57 But if you're caught up in this tide and like Kansas, you know, it's like to 39:00 treat Davis to Congress. 39:02 Sorry, you saw the thing where Trump then went to defend Roger Marshall. 39:05 Oh, no. 39:06 Yeah. 39:06 It was like, yeah. 39:08 I mean, the reason he had to go after his patients for payment in that way. 39:13 People are trying to paint him. 39:14 He used like an anti-Semitic slur. 39:17 Roger was given a real, I know the guy, he's one of the, he's a tough 39:21 guy at all, but he's also high quality and he's a fine person. And he was given a bum 39:26 wrap because he was mandated by law to request strongly money owed from patients. You're 39:33 not allowed not to do it. You have to by law go after those people. And they made it like, 39:38 oh, he was some kind of a Shylock type guy. 39:40 There are times when I wonder whether Trump really cares whether the GOP holds the 39:44 center or not, right? I mean, he hasn't done a whole lot through Congress. It's 39:47 mostly been through executive power, right? 39:50 And I think Cornyn would win Texas. 39:54 Trump easily could have just ended that primary 39:56 and made Cornyn the winner. 39:58 That was completely within Trump's power 39:59 and Republicans would be in a stronger position in Texas 40:03 and less likely lose the Senate if that had happened. 40:05 You know, Trump has on the margin 40:08 not wanted to lose the midterm election. 40:12 He did this weird midterm convention, 40:14 But his whole theory of why Republicans might lose the midterm convention appears to be that he himself is not on the ballot and 40:22 That if only people would act like he is on the ballot Republicans would be fine 40:26 Then his other theory was to promise every American a $5,000 check. Yeah, if Republicans win so like to bribe people 40:32 It's like he's willing to win the midterm if he can win it in a way that is personally congratulatory of him 40:41 But if winning the midterm means giving Republican space from him and, you know, backing people 40:46 he doesn't really like, then no. 40:48 Look, Republicans are kind of caught between Iraq and the hard place in elections where 40:54 Trump himself is the dominant figure, but not himself on the ballot, right? 40:58 That entire tranche of elections, so 2018, if you kind of want to count 2022 as well 41:04 where something prevented Biden from having the wipeout you might get with the 40 percent 41:08 approval rating, typically all the runoffs, including the two in Georgia, all the special 41:14 elections, Supreme Court races, ballot initiatives, all that kind of stuff. It's all gone really badly 41:19 for Republicans because the one magic trick that Trump has is to get a certain type of 41:27 usually disengaged voter to kind of like crawl on glass to vote for him when he himself is on 41:32 the ballot. And furthermore, these are the exact voters that aren't answering polls or 41:38 that are incorrectly deemed to be unlikely voters or anything like that. Those people 41:43 are not going to crawl over glass to vote for Roger Marshall or Ken Paxton, I don't 41:50 think. But I don't want to lose the side of the big picture here, right? I don't think 41:54 we'd be talking about Democrats being favored in the Senate if Trump hadn't decided to 41:58 go to war with Iran and spike gas prices into the mid $4 per gallon, more here in 42:04 California in places like that, less than some other places. 42:07 You obviously keep a close track of Trump's approval rating. 42:11 What is the story of its decline? 42:13 It's dropped quite a bit since he took office a second time. 42:17 Has that dropped in steady or has it been like discontinuous around certain events? 42:22 If you want to like model it statistically, then it's quite correlated with gas prices, 42:28 frankly. 42:28 There's also a time trend, right? 42:30 In general, you see it jut up and down a little bit based on gas prices and kind of economic 42:35 anxiety. It dropped a lot during Liberation Day. It was at April 2025, concern about tariffs. 42:42 But it's been a pretty steady decline. And I think people kind of learned some incorrect 42:48 lessons from the first Trump term. When voters felt like the economy was good, and objectively 42:54 it was pretty good in the first three years of Trump, that just kind of serves as like a 42:57 a halo that allows you to say, 43:01 oh, Democrats are complaining about democracy this 43:02 and democracy that, and race, and xenophobia, 43:06 and whatever else. 43:06 But you got more money in your paycheck, 43:08 you have a good job, the stock market's up, 43:10 your house is appreciating in value, right? 43:11 And now that people question all those things, 43:13 it makes the culture worst of seem kind of desperate 43:16 and silly. 43:17 Also just kind of fatigue. 43:20 Trump likes to say it's his third term, 43:22 but it kind of feels that way. 43:23 He's been the dominant figure in American politics 43:25 since whatever mid 2015. That's a really long time. He's also 80 years old, you know, like 43:31 you Ezra, you and I were both kind of early on. The Biden is too fucking old. I don't know if you 43:34 have to censor that bandwagon. But Biden began to develop more problems at roughly this point in 43:40 his presidency, you know, and it's like, okay, we've already mentioned the two things that are 43:45 maybe not hard to explain, but like why the war with Iran? And then why is Trump taking this 43:51 very unpopular stance on data centers, which feels like kind of the perfect issue for a populist to do some 43:59 mild demagoguing in the other direction, right? Like data centers are like a 80-20 issue 44:04 against data centers now, roughly. And when you ask people, do you want to have LAI accelerate or slow down? 44:10 It's like 3% for accelerate and like 60% for slow down and 30% are not sure or whatever. 44:16 Well, I can give two, you know, I can give a substantive and less substantive reason 44:20 for Trump. 44:20 I mean, one is that I think he actually is persuaded we're in a military and geopolitical 44:29 and economic race with China. 44:30 I mean, he likes to say whoever wins AI wins. 44:33 And the other is that if the AI boom, if something shifts sentiment, then the one 44:43 Then the economic indicator Trump has that is looking good for him, which is the stock 44:49 market collapses, and then he's got nothing, right? 44:54 Then you've got high interest rates, you've got terrible debt, you've got anemic growth, 44:57 you've got a weak stock market, and like the thing where all the investment is going 45:00 is no longer maybe working out. 45:02 And also, and I think it's not nothing here, a bunch of AI execs have donated 45:08 a ton of money to Donald Trump and Elon Musk personally, and I want to talk about 45:12 this too is like individually financing at this point, the Republican midterm campaign. 45:19 I mean, what's he put in? 45:20 It's hundreds of millions of dollars. 45:22 That's for like 400 some million. 45:23 Yeah. 45:23 And it's hard even to know if we know everything that's gone in and so, you know, he may also 45:28 not want to like alienate his tech right tech center constituency. 45:33 I think that's a lot of it. 45:34 It does seem like the one thing that consistently motivates him is that he doesn't like 45:38 seeing red arrows on the stock market ticker. 45:41 You know, you've seen increasing amounts of investor anxiety about maybe not, I think 45:47 the AI bubble argument is getting more sophisticated, right? 45:50 It's like, how can we land this plane without instrumentation we've tested before on this 45:58 kind of narrow strip of runway, right? 46:01 You know, you've also had oil prices increase sharply again in the Middle East. 46:06 I mean, if there were to be a last week surprise, the most obvious surprise would be some kind 46:13 of market downturn that would kind of further her Trump potentially. 46:17 Things can break a lot more. 46:18 I mean, this is, you were using the Bush 06 analogy a few minutes ago. 46:22 Yeah. 46:22 You know, you talked about sort of Bush as a super lame duck and one, and I was 46:26 thinking as you said that though, that the final two years of Bush's term were 46:30 tremendously eventful, leading up to a global financial meltdown at the end of it. And yeah, 46:38 I look at Trump, and I look at the economy and I look at the geopolitical situation. 46:46 And what I see is risk everywhere. If you told me we were going to have a massive 46:52 recession or stock market correction, or correlated financial crisis, you know, next 46:58 years, I'd say, yeah, that totally tracks to me. If you were to tell me some like Russia, Ukraine, 47:05 or Iran, America, or Israel, Iran, or some combination of things like Gulf state, like 47:11 that it like flies even more out of control than it already is, like that would seem totally 47:15 plausible to me. Some kind of rogue AI behavior that attacks like an American AI swarm attacks 47:24 China or Chinese AIs from attacks America, the world feels full of risk to me. 47:31 And like we've seen, you know, lame duck presidents like that, really things begin to blow up in their face, 47:37 and they have very little power or public credibility to then handle it. 47:40 And he'll be 82 years old by the end of the term too. 47:45 Look, in some ways, Trump was pretty lucky in the first three years of his first term in the White House 47:51 that kind of nothing kind of literally or figuratively blew up, right? It wasn't like 47:57 Biden where Ukraine happened under Biden's watch and Gaza happened under Biden's watch, right? 48:02 You know, if Republicans lose the Senate, probably one of the first people that should be blamed 48:07 is Pete Hegseth, I think, right? I don't think there are very many people who would serve as 48:12 Secretary of Defense that would have thought that going to war with Iran with this very 48:17 ambiguous war plan and very ambiguous goals was a smart idea. 48:21 But, but it's the other way around. 48:22 I'm not saying you're saying anything different here, but Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu 48:26 wanted to go to war in Iran. 48:27 And Donald Trump had named Pete Hegseth a Fox and Friends Correspondent to be Defense 48:34 Secretary because he wanted somebody in that position who would never under any circumstance 48:38 say no to him. 48:39 Like, I think it's very likely Hegseth pretty quickly gets the axe after the midterms 48:44 or at some point. 48:45 But he's very unlikely to be replaced by a thoughtful commanding general who has a personal 48:53 stature to say no to Donald Trump, right? 48:56 It's not going to be, they're not going to bring back Jim Mattis. 48:59 And you've seen this on tariffs, right? 49:02 Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs head who is the NEC director, National Economics Council 49:07 and Trump's first term, would not have presided over this tariffs regime. 49:11 He just would not have. 49:12 Trump and his team wanted to come in 49:14 and make sure Trump would be surrounded by people 49:17 who always said yes. 49:18 What does this all look like 49:20 if the stock market goes into free fall? 49:22 Because it turns out AI is not ready for prime time 49:25 because it's actually too dangerous. 49:27 Or what if we do end up in confrontation with China? 49:31 The number of things that could go wrong 49:33 and not just go wrong geopolitically 49:35 but in a way that would then correlate 49:36 into the economy in like a catastrophic fashion, 49:40 potentiating some crazy meltdown to say nothing like the way Trump might act if 49:45 he's really cornered in the last two years and begin like going into like 49:49 high-tilt strategies to use one of your poker turns and Trump older and 49:54 surrounded by Pete Hegseth's. Yeah it makes me anxious to be honest right I 50:02 mean the AI thing alone probably makes me anxious we're just like okay the 50:07 future could look very different five years from now three years from now 50:10 right? If you're in middle age, right, you want to kind of think, oh, I can keep doing 50:14 what I'm doing, do it for another 20 or 30 years, and then whatever, retire right now. 50:18 It's like, oh, who the fuck knows what's gonna, you know, but Trump is not the ideal 50:20 president to have at the helm when you're on the verge of, I don't think we're necessarily 50:26 on the verge of a singularity, right? But like, with perhaps the most important technological 50:31 advancement in decades to put it modestly, right? I'm not sure that's the person 50:35 that you want to have in charge is an 82-year-old Donald Trump. 50:37 Does the musk money dump matter? Does money in general matter this late in the election? 50:43 I think money is generally overrated in politics, or I can qualify that by saying for any high 50:49 profile race. So Senate governor, certainly president, where you encounter diminishing 50:54 returns. If you were to look at the frontier of like the house map, where maybe name, 51:01 recognition, invisibility is an issue. If you were to look at like state legislatures, 51:05 Those are really important, especially now that state legislatures and governors play 51:09 into the now apparently every two years, redistricting that we have. 51:13 The other thing too is that like when you are buying ads with voter donated money, you 51:18 get better rates and also get better rates if you had that money raised earlier and 51:22 lock it in when it's less competitive, right? 51:23 So you hear about the Republican financial advantage because that's primarily corporate 51:30 money and party money. 51:31 It's probably translating to more like 50-50 in terms of actual ad impressions that 51:35 voters are seeing right before the 2024 election, you published 51:39 a piece, you can correct me if I'm wrong about some part of 51:41 this, where you basically said, my model says Kamala Harris is 51:45 going to win. Yeah. And my gut says Donald Trump is going to 51:48 win. Right. I think you did this pre election. Yeah, is a 51:51 pre registered take. Yeah. Is your gut in any way different 51:54 than your model this year? Well, what I talked about in that 51:57 piece is that like, it would be more embarrassing for the 52:02 industry, meaning pollsters, forecasters, pundits, whatever, etc. If once again, Republicans beat 52:09 their polls in the Midwest, right? So like, emotionally, I feel some need to hedge against 52:14 that. And yeah, I'm a little skeptical of Kansas, maybe in Iowa and that tier of states. 52:20 What's different though, is that like, so in 24, I had an exercise room like here are, 52:24 I think it became like a list of like 21 reasons why the political environment favored 52:30 Donald Trump. And I'm like, I'm going to do one to be fair for why it favors Harris, but 52:35 I can only come up with like four or five things, right? This year, that's the reverse. 52:40 The fundamental conditions feel terrible for Republicans, right? You have the second term, 52:45 80 year old president who had a bad midterm when he was younger and more popular and 52:51 the economy was perceived as better in 2018. And now you have Iran, you have 450 gas, 52:57 you have Jeffrey Epstein, you have corruption in the White House, you have the strong batch 53:02 of Democratic candidates. You know, in some ways, you'd imagine that it would be a worse year for 53:08 Republicans than 2018, right? And if that's true, that means like Democrats win the popular vote by 53:13 the House by like 10 or 11 points or something. And so my gut's really contradictory, right? 53:18 I worry more about the state polls being wrong than the national race being miscalibrated. 53:26 I think that's a good place to end. 53:27 Always a final question. 53:28 What are three books you recommend to the audience? 53:30 Okay, Ezra, this is tough because I'm a frequent listener of the show and some of my recommendations 53:34 have been taken by other recent guests. 53:36 I feel like the audience takes them more seriously when there are repeat recommendations. 53:40 Well, I picked three slightly weird ones. 53:42 The first one is The Rise and Fall of American Growth by the economic historian Robert Gordon. 53:47 It was written in 2016. 53:50 I remember kind of reading this book when I was in Paris at a poker tournament in Paris 53:54 as one does, right? 53:55 And like Paris is so timeless and meanwhile, this was like the week when the US went to 54:00 war with Iran. 54:01 It was the week when the Department of Defense and Anthropic got in a big fight. 54:03 Things just felt like they were accelerating. 54:05 Oh, you read this book recently. 54:06 Yeah. 54:06 Yeah. 54:07 And the kind of juxtaposition between like the timelessness of Paris and this acceleration 54:12 to the AN and the things got me kind of like thinking a little bit about like 54:15 economic history and like Gordon's book talks about a couple of things. 54:19 One, the thesis, which is implied by the title, is that actually the huge gains 54:23 that the United States made came between like roughly 1870 and 1970. It's also reminded that like 54:30 the Industrial Revolution, because this is kind of what the AI optimistic case is, right? Well, 54:33 the Industrial Revolution worked out okay and wound up making people live longer and wealthier, 54:37 right? For many years, the Industrial Revolution produced terrible living conditions for people, 54:43 right? Where you had like Dickens and you had like child labor, you know, the most vivid 54:47 image I have is he talks about like how much like horse manure there was on American streets, 54:52 And you didn't have like indoor plumbing. 54:54 And so it's a fascinating book. 54:55 It's very detailed. 54:56 It's not like a beach read, but very compelling about all these massive changes that aren't 55:01 well measured by GDP. 55:03 And then I tied that to my France thing because it's like, Europe has kind of opted
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