Full Transcript for Nate Silver Predicts a ‘Momentous’ Midterm

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We are a week out from the midterm elections, and something that looked almost impossible a year ago has happened. There is a path for Democrats to win, not just the House, but the Senate. So a Senate majority for Democrats, to sort of recap this, they need to defend the competitive Senate seats that they currently hold, and then they need to flip at least four seats in states currently held by Republicans.

A couple of those states had always looked possible, Maine, North Carolina. But then came the hard one, states where Trump had won by double digits. People weren't really talking about Kansas, but now Kansas. And the remarkable thing about this cycle is that Democrats are polling competitively in all of them. And a handful of those races are actually far ahead.

And so I think the question is, Can we trust these polls? What can we really say about where the election stands just a week before the vote? To talk about all this, I want to have Nate Silver on the show. Nate, of course, is, you know, internationally famous elections nerd. These days, he edits a silver bulletin on Substack, which puts out a ton of great analysis, polling, and election forecasts.

He co-hosts a podcast, Still Counting, and he's the author of, most recently, On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. Nate joins me now.

Nate Silver, welcome back to the show. Hey, Ezra. How are you, man? I'm good. I wanted to ask, I didn't follow up when you said this to me a second ago because I want to do it on air. You said to me, looking a little far away in your eyes, that this election feels momentous to you. I've known you a long time. You don't usually say things like that.

So what feels momentous? If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era, I think. He'll still be president for two more years, but the minute the votes are counted, it might take a while because of Alaska and California and states like that. The 2028 election campaign begins, and if Trump has a bad night as polls show, then he's a super lame duck, right? You might draw an analogy to Bush after 2006.

And like part of what people understandably are having trouble believing in the polls, it kind of looks like a different regime, right? Where Kansas is competitive, Texas is competitive, potentially gains for Democrats deep into Republican territory. But maybe we're on the verge of something different between generational turnover, between Trump.

being three quarters of the way through his two constitutionally provided for terms, and with AI looming too. It's not quite clear to me how big an issue AI is in this election. I think maybe more than people assume, but it could be the biggest issue of 2028. I think you might expect it to be, along with the economy, the biggest issues of 2028.

I was thinking, as you said some of that, about the conversations I had about the election a year ago. Yeah. And a year ago, the conversation was Democrats will probably win the House, right? And the Senate, I mean, never say never, but no. And the reason was that to win back the Senate, Democrats were going to need to win in a number of places where Trump had won by more than 10 points.

And given everything we know about partisanship in modern America, that wasn't going to happen. So we're talking about two weeks before the election right now. It'll be less by the time this airs. Democrats are at a 70 plus percent chance of winning the Senate in your model and not just winning the Senate, but possibly winning like beyond that.

Yeah. Why? What happened? So, I think a couple of things happened, and some of them have to do with expectations maybe being miscalibrated. You know, after 2024, there was talk of a, I guess, permanent conservative vibe shift, that Democrats were on their back heels, and Biden had failed, and wokeness... I was dumb, the idea that it'd be permanent.

Yeah. And if you look at the history of American elections, then the most regular trend in American elections, one of the few things that survives for decades is there is a backlash against the president's party at the midterm, maybe a little bit bigger if a president's in his second kind of lame duck term. But, you know, we can recite the exceptions on one hand, 1998 after Monica Lewinsky, 2002 after September 11th.

That's about it. 2022, Biden had a relatively gentle thumping in the midterm compared to what you might expect based on his approval rating. So, you know, look, in the average midterm, the environment shifts by seven and a half points against the president's party versus the previous presidential year. This year, it looks more like 11 points.

But why is 11 points important? Well, there are all these states, like you said, that Trump won by 10, 11, 12, 13 points. Ohio, I think he won by 11 points. So if you have an 11 point swing and it's fairly uniform, all of a sudden, Ohio becomes a toss up. What I think wasn't so clear is that Democrats have actually nominated in most important races, pretty good candidates and were lucky enough to face weaker Republican candidates.

I'm not sure if James Tallarico is everybody's cup of tea, but he is able to take advantage of Ken Paxton's many sins, so forth, right? In North Carolina, Roy Cooper was a strong recruit from Schumer and company. Democrats have the strategy now of trying to nominate independence and kind of name only in states like Nebraska. I think both the candidates, Republican and the Democrat, are strong in Iowa, for example.

But, you know, I would say that probably the candidate intangibles, you know, they might move things by five points at most, but you kind of do the math and you're like, OK, well, Texas is a Trump plus 13 state. The parsing climate moves 11 points toward Democrats, so now it's R plus two. And then is Ken Paxton below average enough to turn R plus two into D plus two? Well, that's the math, right? And that's a logical enough story.

So one question that raises for me is Schumer and his team, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, it's under Kristen Gillibrand right now. They looked pretty bad a couple months ago. And they looked pretty bad primarily because the focus was on the fight that they waged and lost in Maine to make Janet Mills the nominee. And it said it was going to be Graham Plattner.

Graham Plattner imploded. Yeah. Troy Jackson, who's the Democratic nominee now, you know, is ahead of Susan Collins by a bit. I think people are nervous about that race because Collins tends to outperform her polling and it's not that wide of a gap. But if you're looking over the range of states, do they look pretty good? I mean, Turk in Iowa, Patola in Alaska, Roy Cooper, right? It seems like they're-

Look, yeah, you have these big fights in Maine and Michigan. I would share Democrats concern about Maine a little bit. I mean, that's based on

nothing but just the fact that Susan Collins beat her polls by like literally like nine points in the last election. There's a whole argument about how persistent polling error is. We tend to assume that it's not. But that's when race for the polls have gotten maybe closer by a point or two. There hasn't been a lot of polling in Maine yet.

Michigan, look, I'm one of those people who says that all the things held equal, a moderate can't be able to do better than a progressive, at least in a purple state like Michigan. And if you compare the governor's race there, where Jocelyn Benson is ahead by eight points, El-Sayed's ahead by three or three and a half or something, right? There is a four or four and a half point candidate quality gap that is, again, within that range of what we think candidates, how much they can matter in an environment like this one, right? But if you have enough wind at your back, then you can overcome some of those problems.

And by the way, in other ways, El-Sayed is a good candidate, right? He's very Michigan in certain ways, right? He, in kind of a Zoran-esque way, kind of is a bro, right? It's an interesting contrast to like Francesca Hong or somebody. And there are gendered parts to that comparison too, potentially. He's also raised a lot of money and money is helpful.

But yeah, I mean, Michigan and Maine, if Democrats were to lose... One of them, they'd still have a chance if they were to lose both, then probably game over for a Democratic Senate flip. One of the things that has been interesting to me looking at the polls, and people have commented on this, this is not my original observation, is that Democrats seem to be overperforming more in redder states.

Yes. So they look better than you would think in a Texas, a Kansas, an Iowa, maybe. A little bit less good in like a Michigan, a Minnesota. You know, it kind of goes on like in the blue states, right? Is there something to this? And if so, what do you make of it? Well, that's what... I think makes Democrats nervous because it's the red states, especially in the heartland where the polling over performance has been concentrated in some of these recent elections.

At the same time, the story does make sense on a couple of levels, right? Number one, gas and diesel prices. If you look at where diesel fuels are consumed, not usually by passenger vehicles, but by agriculture, trucking, petroleum, home heating oils, right? It's all kind of the colder Midwestern states where a lot of the battlegrounds are concentrated as it happens this year.

If you believe in kind of a last in, first out argument, like what if we are reverting somewhat out of the Trump era? Actually, in 2024...

for the first time in a while, you had very mild depolarization. Some of the worst states that Democrats had relative to 2020 were like New York and California. You know, younger voters of color, for example, and younger men in general kind of moved against Democrats. Whereas, you know, like relatively speaking, if you're really looking in the weeds, like Kansas is a state where Harris, I think, The PBI, we call it the gap between that and the national spread declined in Kansas a little bit.

So maybe you're having some last in first out where the people that join the Trump coalition, like Hispanics, working class whites, maybe just moving a little bit further. back in the other direction, or maybe just not voting, right? You know, one reason why Trump beat his polls in 24 was overperformance among, like, young men. The one group you do not want to rely on to turn out in the midterm is usually young men.

I think there's another story you could tell, and I'd be curious how this rates for you, which is that it actually has to do potentially with candidate quality on both sides. So in redder states... Democrats have been, I would say, more rigorously following a

view that they need more moderate candidates. So you think of like Adam Hamilton in Kansas, Sherrod Brown is like a longtime populist and, you know, very well, but Roy Cooper in North Carolina. I wouldn't say Georgia's a red state anymore, but John Ossoff is this like relentlessly disciplined figure. Nebraska with Osborne, who's actually running as an independent.

I wouldn't say Democrats chose him, but obviously Democrats are aligned, I think, and excited about his candidacy and didn't run a Democrat against him. And as you get more into the more traditionally purple or bluer states, you know, Maine, they have nominated like a more left candidate, you know, Jackson replacing Plattner, who is also more left candidate.

Obviously, Abdul-Sayed in Michigan, the more left candidate won in Minnesota, the more kind of left candidate won for the Democrats. And it seems like she's going to win, but is performing a little bit worse than people are comfortable with. So I feel like one way you could squint at this is to say in

redder states, Democrats have been very purposefully choosing candidates who just seem more independent. And that as you go down to where Democrats felt more comfortable and could take more risk, they're taking more risk and trading away some of the possible gains. Like that would be the moderation wins thesis of like what we're seeing. Well, in Florida is a state where you had a DSA candidate that isn't on anyone's map because, you know, she's now trailing by six or seven or eight points, which isn't that bad for Florida.

But like, you need a pretty conservative Democrat probably to win in Florida at this point. No, I think that's a lot of it. I think a lot of it also, if you look at a state like Minnesota, where Peggy Flanagan is... Ahead by three and a half or four points. Yeah, not by nine or ten. Yeah. You know, the states where you have these democratic trifectas and you have critiques of democratic governance is where you tend to see more problems potentially.

In Oregon, where you've had a lot of critiques of liberal governance, right? Tina Kotak, the incumbent, I think is only ahead by like one or two points in the polls. You know, Kathy Hochul. Certainly looks like she'll win reelection, but maybe by a relatively tepid margin. You haven't seen that as much in like Massachusetts, which is a classically well-governed state that's often had a Republican governor in the form of Charlie Baker.

Right. But, you know, I think people are there's an anti-incumbent mood. People, I think, are making this implicit calculation about who has kind of power over. Over my life. Right. But not against all incumbents. Right. Like also if it's incumbent in Georgia is going to stomp. I mean, from what we can tell in the polls, his challenger, Roy Cooper, is the incumbent governor in North Carolina.

Yeah. Or, you know, obviously was like he's going to like win in a walk. So like there are Democratic incumbents who are doing just fine here. I think Minnesota is the clearest example of this because Tim Walz's approval rating is 17 points underwater or something to the point where he was going to run for another term and didn't. So it's kind of like ground zero.

He's had a real fast fall and rise and fall in politics. The trajectory of losing vice presidential nominees, you know, John Edwards had a rough fall from grace, for example. Paul Ryan, no longer in Congress, right? It's pretty rough. That's a fair point. One more thing for these hypotheses about the heartland in the Midwest. The Economist had some data showing that, like, the closer that Trump voters live to data centers, the more likely they are to flip and vote Democratic in this election.

And in the Midwest in general, you have a lot of data centers, right? Because you want some space, but you don't want to be too far off the grid and too rural. And so that could be a hidden factor too. There's something I was thinking about while I was going through and trying to decide which of the candidates seemed to me to be overperforming the most.

I was thinking about how uncorrelated attention and performance is right now. So it's like if I go through the candidates who are all over my feeds and who are on big podcasts, and obviously some of this is also their choice of how to run, but Abdul Syed, like omnipresent, right? James Tallarico, omnipresent. John Ossoff, he's not going on many national podcasts at the moment, but his clips are absolutely everywhere.

You're not seeing Sherrod Brown. You're not seeing, you know, very much of Mary Patola, right? She does not do a lot of national press. You're not seeing a lot of Roy Cooper. But it's really like you look at it and there is almost no connection between who are the candidates who are everywhere on social media and my feeds and who are the candidates who are doing practically well or poorly, at least in polls.

Yeah, look, some candidates have different incentives. If you want to run for president in 2028, then you probably want a somewhat higher profile, potentially. I think in a case like Tallarico or El-Sayed, they kind of inescapably feel that they're going to get the maximum amount of attention anyway. But look, there's something to be said for kind of keeping a lower profile, too.

You know, maybe Ohio is an example of that. Maybe Iowa... I mean, look, in midterms, there are basically three big questions, right? Will your voters turn out? Will the other side's voters turn out? And then how much persuasion is taking place among the 15% of the electorate that's plausibly swing voters? And if Democrats were to come up short, in a couple of races like Iowa or Kansas might say, you know what, this race just got like a little bit too much on everybody's on everybody's radar.

And Republicans managed to drag some voters off the finish line. I mean, the persuasion part of this is done. I'd be shocked if Democratic turnout wasn't high by midterm standards. We don't know if Republicans are going to turn out, and that will determine the range between Republicans hold the Senate and keep Democrats to 10 seats in the House and complete 1994-style disaster.

Right now in the New York Times app. Right now, I mean, we're talking a little bit as if the thing Democrats are hoping will happen will happen. Yeah. But we often see polling error in midterms. I mean, we see polling error in general elections, too. So how resilient are Democratic hopes to polling error? And how are you thinking about...

where the polling error might be. Like when you're building things into the model and thinking about like what you're trying to correct for, you know, you've seen Trump underestimated many a time, seen Susan Collins underestimated many a time. On the other hand, the pollsters know that has happened, right? How do you think about the polling error dimension of this? Look, the first thing I always tell people is that whenever you're looking at a series of polls in a Senate race or in Senate races, plural, always ask yourself, what if they're off by three or four points in the same direction in every race? You know, Democrats have a lot of three point leads in races like

Ohio and Texas, more or less. If you had a three-point polling error, you would have a very long night where we might be waiting for ranked choice voting in Alaska. But it's, you know, the House is different. If Democrats were not to win the House, then

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. I think Democrats have the emotional feeling that that when there's a polling error, it is against them because Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and just in general polls actually have repeatedly underestimated Donald Trump.

But is that true? And is it perfectly true in midterms? Have polling errors been consistently against Democrats? It has not been true in the two midterms under in the Trump era. I guess 2018 was under Trump and their polls were one of the most accurate years for polling ever. 2022, similar. In fact, there were a couple of races that were high profile, like the Fetterman race in Pennsylvania, where polls showed Oz closing the gap after Fetterman's stroke, right? And then Fetterman won by a pretty solid, I think, four or five points or something like that, right? But overall, polls were quite accurate.

There are also elections that are held in odd-numbered years, runoffs, things like that. In New Jersey and Virginia last year, the polls were five to ten points low on Democrats, which is a... one of the biggest polling errors we've seen in a well-polled general election. So yeah, the critique I have of some of the people who say they'll say, well, you know, you're under sampling Republicans in these polls and Democrats are much more enthusiastic, much more likely to respond and trust the pollsters more.

Every single person in the industry is aware of that. Look, I think every pollster is aware that polls missed low on Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

The three presidential years was kind of the death nail for the gold standard of polling, which is like, we're just going to go and survey people and we'll wait to well-known census demographics and we'll just trust the data. The Ann Seltzer poll in Iowa, which, and bless her, I mean, she was literally the highest rated pollster. She and the New York Times were like, I think tied for number one or something, right? But that- Now we stand alone.

Yeah. Yeah. So say what happened to Ann Seltzer, because maybe some people are emotionally scarred and some people have no idea what we're talking about. Yeah, it was the weekend before the election, right? And I had like some dinner plans on Saturday and then I got like a text from a friend saying, have you heard about this Iowa poll? There's a rumor that like Ann Seltzer, the dame or don of Iowa polling, right, who had predicted Barack Obama's big win in the Iowa caucus in 2008, would have a poll coming out showing Kamala Harris winning, I think, by three points in Iowa.

Every other poll of Iowa had been Trump plus nine or something like that.

And our model was pretty skeptical. You don't usually want to bet against Ann Seltzer, but it kind of opened up this whole world. Like, what if everyone's just kind of way overcompensating for past elections? And it didn't make a lot of sense, but she had gotten very far before by just saying, I'm just going to trust my data. I'm not going to overly massage it, not make too many assumptions about it.

And the poll was off by, what was it, like... 13 or 14 or 15 points. And Trump insanely sued the paper as if like publishing a poll where he was losing was defamation. Yeah. Yeah, it's never clear what the incentives are supposed to be. Can I stop on this polling thing for a minute, though? Let's get in the weeds methodologically for a minute.

Because I find whenever we start discussing or I start thinking about how what is happening in polls to massage demographics to kind of answer all these problems of people don't pick up the phone or, you know, we're using online sampling and we don't know who will turn out. I feel very disoriented. Yeah. What do you do? Like, what are the pollsters doing? And I should say, I'm not a pollster.

I'm a forecaster, right? But that distinction in some ways is becoming blurrier. Yeah, that's what I mean. They feel like they're forecasting. I think the upshot of the Ancestor thing is that everyone knows that a poll is kind of almost like a mini model with polling-flavored inputs. And I'm not sure what the right metaphor is. People want to make it like it's some broken gauge that you know on your beat up old car that when it says 25% of fuel left, actually you have to refill because the gauge is broken, right? Instead, this is a more of an iterative process, right? You open a restaurant, the customers complain the food is too spicy.

You tamp it down a little bit. Now some of your customers say, no, I wanted the spice back in my food, right? And so, but it's more of an iterative process. And I think pollsters are now aware they'll be judged on their results in the final few weeks, at least. And as much as they might say, well, it's just a snapshot of public opinion. There are huge reputational stakes on the line for being right.

So, I mean, the pollsters are being wrong and for being wrong. So the pollsters have pretty good incentives to correct for these problems, potentially. But sometimes when... I know it sounds kind of tautological, right? When there are these big wave change elections or elections that are kind of unexpected, and sometimes pollsters lowball them.

In 1994, for example, it looked like a relatively bad year for Clinton that turned into a terrible year, right? You can also look at a year like... 2014 is a parallel that I'd be worried about if I were Republicans, because that's the year when the polls were never great for Obama, but you had a really, really big differential turnout where Democrats just weren't that enthusiastic.

At the time, Obama was relying on more of a multi-ethnic, younger coalition that traditionally does not turn out at the same rates in midterms. And that turned into a nine-seat loss, a total rout for Democrats in the Senate. I mean, this is, I think, what I'm asking you, that we know the midterm electorate is going to be different than the presidential electorate, that some people are going to be more motivated to vote than others.

I mean, are they just polling people and saying, do you think you're going to vote? And that's like the big screen. Just for somebody who does not, like I have read analyses of these, the upshot a while back, and Nick Cohen did a cool thing where they let you see like how different ways of moving the data around would give you a very different result on the same like underlying poll data.

But Is there like a kind of conventional thing they're doing to compose a midterm electorate that is going to be really different in 2026 than it was in 2022? Yeah. So one difference, if you ask people, are you going to vote? How enthusiastic are you about voting? That produces a very democratic sample.

Other pollsters try to predict whether people will vote based on other types of data. And those techniques tend to produce more modest results for Democrats. You know, one thing you can watch in the early voting data, which generally I advise people not to do, but who was winning among like lower propensity voters, right? People who have voted in no more than one out of the past three elections counting midterms, right? Those low propensity voters appear to be quite Democratic so far.

It may be, probably will to some extent, Republicans will cast their vote by Election Day anyway, and they'll catch up. But if not, if Democrats' low propensity voters turn out and the GOP doesn't, then that's where you might see a polling error that underestimates Democrats. So if Republicans end up having a better than expected night, what do you think will have ended up being the explanation for it? I mean, look, I think there are two versions of this.

Like, one is just Democrats lose all the toss-ups, right? Tallarico loses by a point. Jackson loses by a point. Maybe El Sayed wins by a recount. Sherrod Brown wins, but Turek loses by three points. Like, that's It's very feasible in the kind of thick part of the probability distribution. And then I think, you know, some questions about the polls, but that's kind of in line.

We'll say, okay, partisanship is still really strong. Maybe pollsters and Democrats are getting their hopes up a little bit too high to think you could win in these elections. r plus 12 states have been r plus eight then yeah but we just kind of reached the point where we ran out of like oxygen climbing up that that big red hill right let's say the house is kind of close right and democrats only pick up north carolina in the senate right i mean then

That's kind of hard to contemplate almost. Not because it's not theoretically possible based on the polls, right? Like, you know, we have these in our model, these like fat tails that say sometimes polls can be up by five or six or seven points or something crazy, right? But that would kind of like defy everything that we think we know about how midterms work.

There are, I think, a couple of races that feel to me like they have a lot of outsized narrative importance. Tallarico feels to me like it's got a lot of narrative importance to people, you know, the possibility of Democrats being competitive in Texas, a sort of return of a religious left. Abdullah Syed is going to be seen as a very important test of he's actually not a DSA guy, but sort of a more left populist, you know, unsparing candidate.

Like I was watching this video where he just like... absolutely annihilates this guy who comes to one of his town halls and is like, will you denounce the Muslim Brotherhood? And I mean, El-Sayed, who's a very, very, very smart guy, leaves this guy like a smoking crater on the floor. So it feels like there's going to be a lot of attention on how he specifically does.

You know, you've been very attentive to the factional divisions in the Democratic Party recently. I think you've cut Democrats into, what is it, the capital L left, the abundance libs, which I guess is me. Yeah, there you go. And then Richardsonism, which you've named for Heather Cox Richardson, who's, you know, the sub-stacker. And that's sort of the big resistance libs, no kings kind of thing.

But I'm curious how you think different forms of the election might end up being interpreted and shaping the Democratic Party and its strategies. So the two big, apart from who wins, right? The two big sub-storylines of November 3rd are one, how do progressives do relative to moderates? But then is there evidence of like an AI backlash? from the state-by-state results.

If people do these ecological analyses afterward, they find, hey, yeah, in states where there was a data center construction and Republicans underperformed by three points, I mean, that might be important as well. If LSA were to lose,

then win or lose the Senate, and that's a very bad narrative for progressives. I don't know what happens if, like... Let's say that Benson wins by nine points and I'll say I have wins by four, right? Maybe nerds like me are like, well, he had a below average wins of a replacement. That proves my thesis. But like, I think that wouldn't really carry the day in the democratic debate as much.

I think for any race, an important threshold question is, was the race called on election night? That shapes narratives quite a bit. People who weren't nerds tend not to pay much attention to the margin, as long as it seems unambiguous and clear.

I mean, look, people want to tell this oversupplied narrative of like the progressives like winning everywhere in the primary. And that wasn't entirely true. You know, Francesca Hong was ultimately rejected in Wisconsin. I don't know that Jasmine Proctor actually is more progressive than Tallarico. She's more of a partisan bomb thrower. And she lost that that race.

She wasn't a DSA person. That was not her profile in politics. But I think I think Democratic voters have exercised a fair amount of kind of rational discretion. Right. I mean, there's nothing that says that voters have to or necessarily should maximize everything based on. electability, right? You're allowed to say, well, I'm trying to calculate some like expected value score of what is the chance that this candidate wins times how much good would they do for the issues that I care about? Although I will tell you one thing, the amount of democratic infighting really dropped off after these races in maine michigan yes primaries just create a lot of i mean and it's going

to go up again when the 2028 primary is going to be the only thing everyone's talking about for a year and a half or something i would say and this is like a step back i have one narrative that i think is going to be true particularly if you have you know a bunch of these players win is the democrats are coming into an an era of like elder millennial talent

I apologize to my Democratic officeholder Gen X friends. I think like the late boomer and then the Gen X class and Democratic Party ended up like pretty caught between political eras and communication eras. But when I look at the Democratic talent right now and I think about, you know, on the left, people like Zoran Mamdani and Abdul Sayyed and AOC who are.

hugely talented. I think I'll say it'll be a pretty superstar U.S. senator if he wins. And then I look at people like Rob Sand, who looks like he's going to win the Iowa governor's race in a walk. We think about Tallarico, who is really a star. John Ossoff, who has become an absolute superstar. I think you're just sort of seeing the arrival of a Democratic class that is just more native to this era, like came in during Obama, that was shaped by Trump, understands communication now.

Just something to me seems to be changing 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. So it's kind of like a Steph Curry effect. With Obama as an analog where, like, he starts shooting three-pointers from where no one has before, and now kids are practicing that in high school, and they graduate and go to college and the NBA.

And who is Steph Curry in this analogy? Obama, yeah. I mean, El-Sayed and Asa, for instance, are very both influenced by Obama in different ways. Mayor Pete's got a little bit of a...

In some ways, what happened to Democrats after 2012 was kind of weird, right? Where Hillary lost to Obama and Bill Clinton became president in 1992, right? And for some reason, it's like, well, it's Hillary's turn now, right? And she had a very competitive primary against Bernie Sanders and Prevail. But like that, in some ways, felt like a return to a different Democratic Party than the party that Obama was trying to craft, right? And then Biden, who was kind of expressly chosen by Obama because he was old and not seen as a threat to the president himself, kind of won amid this like flight to safety.

And then but like, obviously, some of these were competitive nomination processes. Right. But it feels like some trajectory got interrupted in the Democratic Party. And maybe now it's being restored, I suppose, a little bit.

So we've been talking a lot about the Senate and the Senate is like the charismatic megaphone of midterms because there are only a couple races you have to pay attention to and you can keep the characters of them in mind. Obviously, the House is not a binary outcome. It really matters if Democrats end up with 228 members of the House, 235, 240, 250.

So tell me about what the modeling and the polling seems to suggest about where Democrats might end up and the kind of sensitivity of that in both directions. Yeah. So one of the big consequences of all this redistricting, as well as voter self-sorting, is that you have far fewer swing districts than you once did. Also, Democrats had a relatively good 2024 in the House.

I mean, there was still some doubt on election night whether Democrats might actually win the House in 24, despite Harris having lost. So even our model that has them with a 90% plus chance of winning the house that only translates, quote unquote, into 22 seats or something on average, which like we've seen, you know, wave elections that are like 40, 50 seats.

Right. I mean, 63 and in 2010, for example, which was like the big, the very big one. or 41 or something in 2018, Republicans did gain a few seats from the redistricting process, mostly one where they just cut out a majority minority district, right? So Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and some of those states, the Alabama district is actually kind of close in the polling, but that's like a clean three seats wiped out from Democrats.

In Texas and Florida, you were not seeing many Republican gains because in Texas, the theory was that like, oh, we can now take more risks because we now have a much firmer hold with lower income Hispanic voters. Well, if you believe the polls, those are the groups that are shifting most aggressively back toward Democrats. And in Florida...

DeSantis kind of drew a riskier map that was optimized more for presidential years and would have a lot of toss up to lean our districts in an environment like this one. Now in Florida, Republicans have, we talked before about like, well, what if Democrats win in Kansas or Texas? At this point, it would almost feel as remarkable if a Democrat won a statewide race in Florida.

I have never read what was to me a fully satisfying explanation of how Florida became so red. Florida has gone, as you say, from being a canonical swing state to more of a Republican readout than Texas. I mean, we're on the scent. It's barely one state. his first race for governor. How did Florida become so red? I think it's 75% migration and 25% kind of a death spiral for the Democratic Party that might be self-reinforcing.

I mean, with the migration, Florida is a unique place in offering blue state amenities, but without as many libs, you know what I mean? And that has always attracted older people. But yeah, I think you have a lot of political self-selection. In most states, if you look at voter registration data, people have begun to, again, register more as Democrats than Republicans, which was not true for four or five years in a row.

This year, you're seeing those comebacks for Democrats in the Midwest in particular, in Pennsylvania, but not in Florida. Florida just keeps getting redder at the registration level. Okay, so that's like the center of House polling, but we've talked about a two to three or four point polling error, like not being unusual. Given incumbency advantages in the House, given redistricting, is this a kind of thing where if you get a three point error and it turns out Democrats did better than expected by three points, where all of a sudden a bunch of the redistricting falls apart and Democrats like have this huge wave election and actually they are winning 40 seats in the House?

And they have this, like, huge majority under Speaker Hakeem Jeffries? Yeah. No, if the wave gets really big, then one thing that happens is it inundates candidates who have not been prepared for that type of disaster, potentially. I mean, I think the best example of this is, like, actually in the Senate with Roger Marshall, where I have...

In Kansas. In Kansas, right. I have a family that lives in Overland Park, Kansas, big in Kansas and Missouri politics, and like, boy, Roger Marshall's a really bad candidate, right? I'm like, you know, it's Kansas. I'm sorry, it doesn't matter. But if you're caught up in this tide, and like Kansas, you know, it's elected to Congress. Sorry, you saw the thing where Trump then went to defend Roger Marshall? Oh, no, yeah.

And was like, yeah, I mean, the reason he had to go after his patients for payment in that way, people trying to paint him, he used like an anti-Semitic slur. Roger. was given a real, I know the guy, he's one of the, he's a tough guy and all, but he's also high quality and he's a fine person. And he was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request strongly money owed from patients.

You're not allowed not to do it. You have to, by law, go after those people. And they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock type guy. There are times when I wonder whether Trump really cares where the GOP holds the center or not. Right. I mean, he hasn't done a whole lot through Congress. It's mostly been through executive power.

Right. And I think Cornyn would win Texas. Trump easily could have just ended that primary and made Cornyn the winner. That was completely within Trump's power. And Republicans would be in a stronger position in Texas and less likely to lose the Senate if that had happened. You know, Trump. has on the margin not wanted to lose the midterm election he did this weird midterm convention but his whole theory of why republicans might lose the midterm convention appears to be that he himself is not on the ballot and that if only people would act like he is on the ballot republicans would be fine then his other theory was to promise every american a five thousand dollar check

yeah if republicans win so like to bribe people It's like he's willing to win the midterm if he can win it in a way that is personally congratulatory of him. But if winning the midterm means giving Republicans space from him and, you know, backing people he doesn't really like, then no. Look, Republicans... are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place in elections where Trump himself is the dominant figure, but not himself on the ballot, right? That entire tranche of elections, so 2018, if you kind of want to count 2022 as well, where something prevented Biden from having the wipeout you might get with a 40% approval rating, typically, all the runoffs, including the

two in Georgia, all the special elections, Supreme Court races, ballot initiatives, all that kind of stuff, it's all gone really badly for Republicans, because the one magic trick that Trump has is to get a certain type of usually disengaged voter to kind of like crawl on glass to vote for him when he himself is on, on the ballot. And furthermore, these are the exact voters that aren't answering polls or that are incorrectly deemed to be unlikely voters or anything like that.

Those people are not going to crawl over glass to vote for Roger Marshall or Ken Paxton, I don't think. But I don't want to lose sight of the big picture here, right? I don't think we'd be talking about Democrats being favored in the Senate if Trump hadn't decided to go to war with Iran and spike gas prices into the mid $4 per gallon, more here in California and places like that, less than some other places.

You obviously keep a close track of Trump's approval rating. Yeah. What is the story of its decline? It's dropped quite a bit since he took office a second time. Has that dropped in steady or has it been like discontinuous around certain events? If you want to like model it statistically, then it's quite correlated with gas prices, frankly.

There's also a time trend, right? In general, you see it jut up and down a little bit based on gas prices and kind of economic anxiety. It dropped a lot during liberation day was at April, 2025 concern about tariffs, but it's been a pretty steady decline. And I think people kind of learn some incorrect lessons from the first Trump term. When voters felt like the economy was good, and objectively it was pretty good in the first three years of Trump, that just kind of serves as like a halo that allows you to say, oh, Democrats are complaining about democracy this and democracy that and race and xenophobia and whatever else, right? But you got more money in your paycheck.

You have a good job. The stock market's up. Your house is appreciating in value, right? And now that people question all those things, it makes the culture war stuff seem kind of desperate and silly, right? also just kind of fatigue. Trump likes to say it's his third term, but it kind of feels that way. He's been the dominant figure in American politics since whatever, mid-2015.

That's a really long time. He's also 80 years old. Like you, Ezra, you and I were both kind of early on that Biden is too fucking old. I don't know if you have to censor that bandwagon, but Biden began to develop more problems at roughly this point in his presidency in And it's like, okay, we've already mentioned the two things that are maybe not hard to explain, but why the war with Iran? And then why is Trump taking this very unpopular stance on data centers, which feels like kind of the perfect issue for a populist to do some...

mild demagoguing in the other direction, right? Like data centers are like a 80-20 issue against data centers now, roughly. And when you ask people, do you want to have AI accelerate or slow down? It's like 3% for accelerate and like 60% for slow down and 30% are not sure or whatever. Well, I could give two, you know, I could give a substantive and a less substantive reason for Trump.

I mean, one is that I think he actually is persuaded. We're in a military and geopolitical and economic race with China. I mean, as he likes to say, whoever wins AI wins. And the other is that...

If the AI boom, if something shifts sentiment, then the one economic indicator Trump has that is looking good for him, which is the stock market, collapses. And then he's got nothing, right? Then you've got high interest rates, you've got terrible debt, you've got, you know, anemic growth, you've got a weak stock market. And like the thing where all the investment is going is no longer maybe working out.

And also, and I think it's not... nothing here a bunch of ai execs have donated a ton of money to donald trump and elon musk personally and i want to talk about this too is like individually financing at this point the republican midterm campaign i mean what's he put in it's hundreds of millions of dollars like 400 some million yeah and it's hard even to know if we know everything that's gone in and so you know he may also not want to like alienate his tech right tech center constituency I think that's a lot of it.

It does seem like the one thing that consistently motivates him is that he doesn't like seeing red arrows on the stock market ticker. You know, you've seen increasing amounts of investor anxiety about... Maybe not. I think the AI bubble argument is getting more sophisticated, right? It's like...

How can we land this plane without instrumentation we've tested before, this kind of narrow strip of runway, right? You know, you've also had oil prices increase sharply again in the Middle East. I mean, if there were to be. A last week surprise. The most obvious surprise would be some kind of market downturn that would kind of further hurt Trump potentially.

Things can break a lot more. I mean, this is you are using the Bush 06 analogy a few minutes ago. Yeah. You know, you talked about sort of Bush is a super lame duck in one. And I was thinking, as you said that, though, that the final two years of Bush's term. were tremendously eventful leading up to a global financial meltdown at the end of it.

And I look at Trump and I look at the economy and I look at the geopolitical situation And what I see is risk everywhere. If you told me we were going to have a massive recession or stock market correction or correlated financial crisis, you know, next year's, I'd say, yeah, that totally tracks to me. If you were to tell me some like Russia, Ukraine crisis, or Iran, America, or Israel, Iran, or some combination of things like Gulf state, like that it like flies even more out of control than it already is.

Like that would seem totally plausible to me. Some kind of rogue AI behavior that attacks like an American AI swarm attacks China or a Chinese AI swarm attacks America. The world feels full of risk to me And we've seen lame duck presidents like that. Really, things begin to blow up in their face, and they have very little power or public credibility to then handle it.

And he'll be 82 years old by the end of the term, too. Look, in some ways, Trump was pretty... lucky in the first three years of his first term in the White House that kind of nothing kind of literally or figuratively blew up, right? It wasn't like Biden where Ukraine happened under Biden's watch and Gaza happened under Biden's watch, right? You know, if Republicans lose the Senate, probably one of the first people that should be blamed is Pete Hegseth, I think, right? I don't think there are very many people who would serve a Secretary of Defense that would have thought that going to war with Iran with this very ambiguous war plan and very ambiguous goals was a smart

idea. But it's the other way around. I'm not saying you're saying anything different here, but Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to go to war in Iran. And Donald Trump had named Pete Hegseth a Fox and Friends correspondent to be defense secretary because he wanted somebody in that position who would never under any circumstance say no to him.

Like, I think it's very likely Hegseth pretty quickly gets the ax after the midterms or at some point. Right. But he's very unlikely to be replaced by a thoughtful, commanding general who has the personal stature to say no to Donald Trump. Right. It's not going to be they're not going to bring back Jim Mattis. And you've seen this on tariffs.

Right. Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs head who is the NEC director, National Economics Council and Trump's first term, would not have presided over this tariffs regime. He just would not have. Right. Trump and his team wanted to come in and make sure Trump would be surrounded by people who always said yes. What does this all look like if the stock market goes into freefall because it turns out AI is not ready for primetime because it's actually too dangerous? Or, you know, what if we do end up in confrontation with China? The number of things that could go wrong and not just go wrong geopolitically, but in a way that would then correlate into the economy in like a

catastrophic fashion, potentiating some crazy meltdown to say nothing like the way Trump might act if he's really cornered in the last two years and begin like going into like high tilt strategies to use one of your poker turns and Trump older and surrounded by Pete Hegseths. Yeah. It makes me anxious to be honest. Right. I mean, the AI thing alone probably makes me anxious.

We're just like, okay, the future could look very different five years from now, three years from now. Right. If you're in middle age, right. You want to kind of think, oh, I can keep doing what I'm doing, do it for another 20 or 30 years, and then whatever, retire. And now it's like, oh, who the fuck knows what's going to, you know, but Trump is not the ideal president to have at the helm when you're on the verge of, I don't think we're necessarily on the verge of a singularity, right? But like with perhaps the most important technological advancement in decades, to put it modestly, right? I'm not sure that's the person that you'd want to have in charge as an 82-year-old

Donald Trump. Does the Musk money dump matter? Does money in general matter this late in the election? I think money is generally overrated in politics, or I qualify that by saying for any high-profile race. So Senate, governor, certainly president, where you encounter diminishing returns. If you were to look at the frontier of like the...

house map where maybe name recognition and visibility is an issue if you were to look at like state legislatures those are really important especially now that state legislatures and governors play into the now apparently every two years reduction that we have the other thing too is that like when you are buying ads with voter donated money you get better rates and also get better rates if you have that money raised earlier and lock that in when it's less competitive right so you hear about the republican financial advantage Because that's primarily corporate money and party money, it's probably translating to more like 50-50 in terms of actual ad impressions that voters

are seeing. Right before the 2024 election, you published a piece, you can correct me if I'm wrong about some part of this, where you basically said, my model says Kamala Harris is going to win. Yeah. And my gut says Donald Trump is going to win. Right? I think you did this pre-election. Yeah. It's a pre-registered take. Yeah. Is your gut in any way different than your model this year? Well, what I talked about in that piece is that like, It would be more embarrassing for the industry, meaning pollsters, forecasters, pundits, whatever, et cetera, if once again, Republicans beat their polls in the Midwest, right? So like emotionally, I feel some need to hedge against that.

And yeah, I'm a little skeptical of Kansas maybe and Iowa and that tier of states. What's different though is that like, so in 24, I had an exercise where I'm like, here are, I think it became like a list of like 21 reasons why Republicans The political environment favored Donald Trump. And I'm like, I'm going to do one to be fair for why it favors Harris.

But I can like only come up with like four or five things, right? This year that's the reverse. The fundamental conditions feel terrible for Republicans, right? You have the second term 80 year old president who had a bad midterm when he was younger and more popular and the economy was perceived as better in 2018.

Now you have Iran, you have 450 gas, you have Jeffrey Epstein, you have corruption in the White House, you have the strong batch of Democratic candidates. You know, in some ways,

you'd imagine that it would be a worse year for Republicans in 2018. Right. And if that's true, that means like Democrats win elections. the popular vote by the House by like 10 or 11 points or something. And so my gut's really contradictory, right? I worry more about the state polls being wrong than the national race being miscalibrated.

I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? Okay, Ezra, this is tough because I'm a frequent listener of the show and some of my recommendations have been taken by other recent guests. No, that's good. I feel like the audience takes it more seriously when there are repeat recommendations.

Well, I picked three slightly weird ones. Okay. The first one is The Rise and Fall of American Growth by the economic historian Robert Gordon. It was written in 2016. I remember kind of reading this book when I was in Paris at a poker tournament in Paris, as one does, right? And Paris is so timeless. And meanwhile, this was the week when the US went to war with Iran.

It was the week when the Department of Defense and Anthropic got in a big fight. Things just felt like they were accelerating. Oh, you read this book recently. Yeah, yeah. And the juxtaposition between the timelessness of Paris and this acceleration of AI and other things got me kind of like thinking a little bit about like economic history.

And like Gordon's book talks about a couple of things. One, the thesis, which is implied by the title, is that actually the huge gains that the United States made came between like roughly 1870 and 1970. It's also a reminder that like the Industrial Revolution, because this is kind of what the AI optimistic case is, right? Well, the Industrial Revolution worked out okay and wound up making people live longer and wealthier, right? For many years, the Industrial Revolution produced terrible living conditions for people, right? Where you had, like, Dickens and you had, like, child labor.

You know, the most vivid image I have is he talks about, like, how much, like, horse manure there was on American streets, right? And you didn't have, like, indoor plumbing. And so it's a fascinating book. It's very detailed. It's not like a beach read, but very compelling about all these massive changes that aren't well measured by GDP. And then I tied that to my France thing because, like, Europe has kind of opted for lower GDP growth, but arguably less.

higher quality of life. Maybe the best time to talk about France this week, but still.

Book number two is called You Can Just Do Things by Kate Hall. Kate is a former poker player and kind of fellow traveler. She was at one point the highest ranked female player in the world. She developed a drug addiction and kind of dropped off the map for a couple of years, but is now back to working in the Bay Area scene. And it's kind of a self-help book for a certain type of of nerd that emphasizes the importance of agency but a lot of it really is about like how to handle personal relationships better and how poor people are at communicating sometimes basic goals and needs and wants in relationships because they think it might feel weird or whatever else but like

she's like look just have honest conversations with people get honest feedback and that will that will go a long way in life so i recommend that book too

Last one is another oldie but goodie. So I read a lot of like poker strategy books, like probably not appropriate for the Esper Klein show for recommendations. Probably the best poker related book of all time is called The Biggest Game in Town. It was written by a guy named Al Alvarez in 1983. It's a short, compact read. So he was like a British...

literary critic and poet who did this thing where he kind of like went into the desert in Las Vegas when the world series of poker is coming into being and talks to like all these old time, like Texas roadhouse gamblers. It's very well written, a very, maybe slightly overwritten, like kind of magazine anyway, but like this part of the world is important to me.

Right. And it's one of the few books about gambling that doesn't fall into cliches and captures this part of the world that I'm fascinated by very well. That book sounds great. Nate Silver, thank you very much. Thank you.