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- [00:00]
A
Wait. Nathaniel Galen, I have a bone to pick with you.
- [00:04]
B
Okay.
- [00:05]
A
You purchased GD Politics merch?
- [00:08]
B
Yeah. So I thought I was supposed to do it.
- [00:10]
A
I was going to give it to you for free.
- [00:11]
B
I'm trying to support you. No, I'm trying to support you.
- [00:14]
A
What? No. Come on.
- [00:17]
B
You sent me. Okay, okay.
- [00:20]
C
Let.
- [00:20]
B
Let me be the judge of this. Galen sent me the link before it was live and was like, oh, like, you know, exciting news, which is like, clearly, like, hint, hint, buy stuff, please.
- [00:31]
C
All this means is that you're a better friend because he sent me that link, too. And I just assume they'll be getting something for free.
- [00:36]
A
Yeah. And he goes. He goes. Amazing. Exclamation point. That's what I was. That's what I was looking for. It was more of, like, affirmation.
- [00:43]
B
Of like, the words of affirmation, not.
- [00:45]
A
The I exist in the world and I'm doing something. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Droock, and election day 2025 is just about upon us. We're recording this on Sunday, November 2nd. That's how much we love you guys. Working on a Sunday. And New York City Marathon day of all days, which, by the way, is the best day of the year. Sometimes people get confused when I say that. But just imagine, basically, there's a party on every block. There's hot people showing off how far they can run, lots of cheering. On a day like today, the weather's perfect and everyone's in a good mood. But in any case, in just a matter of hours, New York City will elect a new mayor. In fact, they're plenty.
- [01:37]
B
They're saying they're going to go from a marathon to a mayor. A thon.
- [01:40]
A
Galen, Nathaniel. I don't think a better pun could have been made. Indeed they will. And in fact, along the marathon route, because, like, I don't know, I was in a liberal part of town, you could see signs such as run like a democratic socialist or let's get Zoran across the finish line. And the Epstein files will be released at the finish line, I guess in case any runners were really excited for the release of the Epstein files. Lots of motivation to run. And of course, there will also be statewide races in New Jersey and Virginia that will come to a close on Tuesday, lest we get too carried away with New York City. Although, for what it's worth, New York City, Virginia and New Jersey all have approximately the same population sizes. And there's the redistricting initiative in California and many other races. And issues on the ballot around the country. We have a lot cooking on the GD Politics pod in the coming days. So let me run through what it's going to look like today. We're going to give you all a TikTok of what to expect on election night, what time the polls close, what races we'll be watching in those states, if there are particular parts of those states that we're going to keep an eye on. Also, what questions we'll be asking broadly of the results on Tuesday night. We're going to try to keep it brief, but, you know, we'll, we'll see. Monday night we have an election eve live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. It's officially sold out and I look forward to seeing some of you there in person. Paid subscribers can expect that recording in their feeds Tuesday morning. So go become a paid subscriber to GD politicsbpolitics.com and then Tuesday night, election night, I'll be live streaming@gdpolitics.com alongside your GD politics faves. Starting at 7pm Eastern Time, we'll have Lenny Brauner, Nathaniel Rakic, Mary Radcliffe, Jacob Robashkin, along with some other guests stopping by. And then Wednesday morning, we're going to have a reaction podcast to all of that. So content on content on content. And in fact, Lenny and Nathaniel are here with me right now, so let's introduce them. Nathaniel Rakic, you already heard his voice, dear friend of the PodC podcast. Welcome, my friend.
- [03:52]
B
Hi, Galen. Happy marathon day. Happy post Halloween. Happy almost birthday. Ooh, the big three five.
- [04:00]
A
Wow.
- [04:01]
B
I was really gonna vote for president soon.
- [04:03]
A
I mean, now that I'm getting up there, I was gonna start hiding my age from listeners, but I guess, I guess I can't do that.
- [04:09]
B
You're a public figure, my friend. That is, that is on your Wikipedia page.
- [04:13]
A
And also if people tune into the live stream on Tuesday night and stick around long enough, or if the results take long enough either on the livestream or on the podcast, I will turn 35 officially. So maybe people can expect birthday shots or at least a birthday glass of wine. We don't work for a, you know, a major news organization anymore. We can, we can get as drunk as we want on election night. Nathaniel.
- [04:37]
C
Some of us still do, though.
- [04:40]
A
And that, my friends, is Lenny Brauner, data scientist at the Washington Post, who, yes, I guess, does still work at a major news organization. So you will be our sober sister on election night. Although maybe we'll say semi sober sister. Lenny Brauner, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:56]
C
It's great to be here.
- [04:58]
A
Okay, so I've already started talking about it, but let's give folks a little bit of a taste of what they can expect on the live stream on election night. I know there are lots of places to get information as the results come in. So what are we going to be offering? I would say think of this as the most fun election nerds on the Internet. A zoom together, talking through the night as it happens. We'll be able to share our screens so you know, we're going to be sharing results charts, funny tweets, our beverages of choice. Think of this as something like the FiveThirtyEight Live vlog come to life. Or at least that's the hope. Maybe, maybe it doesn't go as planned and then we won't do it again. But hopefully it will be fun. And like I said, if you stick around long enough, we might be celebrating my birthday. Uh, Nathaniel, how are you going into election night?
- [05:49]
B
Yeah, no, like you said, Galen, this is the first November election since 2017 for me that I haven't been doing a fivethree live blog and in fact that there has been no that there will be no FiveThirtyEight live blog. So yeah, I don't really know what to do with myself. I'm not going into an office obviously. I think I'm gonna be actually hanging out in person with Jacob and some other election nerds here in D.C. we're gonna do a little election night watch party, which of course wouldn't normally be possible, although of course always a party watching with, with you guys at 5:38. But yeah, we're going to be watching the elections and then popping on to your live stream and yeah, hopefully it's not a hot mess. We'll see.
- [06:29]
A
And Lenny, you've been, you've been hard at work gathering data for election night. Talk about what you've been up to.
- [06:37]
C
Yeah, in some ways this feels like, you know, for me it's more like a normal election night though. Unlike previous nights, I will be hanging out with friends which will be make it maybe more fun than sitting in an office until 1 or 2am nearly by myself. Yeah, I've been prepping some data. I've been prepping data for like the states that we're going to be looking at sort of most closely the degree that, you know, that data is public and we're able to take a look at it, obviously share with people that are watching and listening what might be happening and sort of give them A first like glance into, you know, what is driving the election once we start seeing results.
- [07:04]
B
Lenny, are you saying you're going to be building your own personal needle?
- [07:09]
C
I. Well, maybe we'll have some kind of forecast on election night. We'll see. It depends on how much, how much time I actually have between now and election night. In all likelihood we're just going to be looking at sort of fixed results that are coming in. I don't really expect that we're actually going to need a needle in any of these races. I mean, sort of, you know, none.
- [07:25]
B
Of these races are looking maybe, I guess New Jersey.
- [07:27]
A
But yeah, yeah, the polls have been really all over the place. I mean, whether or not we need a needle is one thing, whether or not there will be surprises in terms of margins is another. I mean there hasn't been for a while a poll in New Jersey that's shown Jack Ciarrelli leading. But, but the Atlas intel poll that just came out showed it basically tied, I mean, with Mikey Sherrill at a half percentage point lead while other pollsters are showing a double digit lead. So the variation amongst the polls in all three of these big contests is pretty significant. Maybe the only place where there hasn't been a lot of variation is the California ballot initiative. And you know, that won't happen until much later in the night anyway. So we'll already be knees deep in Lenny's demographic data by then. But let's kind of go through election night starting at 7 o' clock and that's when polls close in Virginia. Just as a preview, it's seven o' clock polls close in Virginia. Eight o' clock polls close in New Jersey. Nine. These are all eastern time. Nine o' clock polls close in New York city and then 11pm Eastern polls close in California, which is 8pm local time if you are a California voter listening to this. So 7pm polls close in Virginia. Nathaniel, how fast are our friends in Virginia counting those votes?
- [08:47]
B
They're, I don't know, I would say regular speed. They're not Florida, but they're not California either. For the uninitiated, Florida counts extremely fast and California counts extremely slow. But yeah, we should have a pretty good sense of things certainly within an hour or two. I think also the Virginia governor's race, which of course is kind of the headline race in that commonwealth, I was about to say state, but it's a commonwealth is probably not going to be competitive.
- [09:13]
C
Right.
- [09:14]
B
That's a race that Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat leads in polls by about 10 percentage points on average. And I don't think there's going to be too much suspense. I wouldn't be surprised to see a call or projection there within a few minutes of polls closing. As soon as you kind of have a critical mass to make sure that nothing crazy is happening. But the really intriguing races are going to be further down the ballot. The Attorney General's race. I'll also be watching the House of Delegates specifically, because I think that to the extent you can draw any kind of national conclusions from the races, I like it to A, for there to be a larger sample size and B, to look at races that are kind of a little bit more genericized, for lack of a better term. Right. A governor's race can be very, you know, dependent on the candidates and, you know, for instance, win some Earl Sears bad campaign or in New Jersey, the unpopularity of the outgoing Democratic governor. But if you look at the hundred races in the Virginia House of Delegates and kind of look on average at how well Democrats or Republicans are doing compared to a presidential baseline, you can get a sense of whether we are in kind of the blue wave environment that special elections have been indicating and that obviously Democrats hope that we are in come the actual midterm elections next year.
- [10:24]
A
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Lenny, what is the data picture like in Virginia? Have you been able to scrape a lot of demographic and geographic data there?
- [10:36]
C
Virginia is actually great at making data public. One of the best states, actually. And they're also very quick at sort of updating data throughout the night. Even if maybe they don't have full precincts or counties reporting, they are sort of like very, you know, open about what they do have and what has been counted. So Virginia, you know, Virginia has precinct level results available on election night. So, you know, we'll be able to take a look at those results. They actually break out their results by different early vote types or, you know, election day vote, which is also great. That's actually something that has changed over the last couple years in Virginia that they sort of make that available for any precinct in particular. They used to sort of maybe aggregate those in a little bit more complicated ways. So we'll be able to look, look at precinct results that are coming in, comparing those to precinct results, the last governor's election to the presidential election in 2024 to the presidential election in 2020, if we wanted to, and then also to demographic data, like you said. I mean, we'll have demographic data by precinct, and so we'll be able to take a look at, you know, areas that have shifted a lot in between the last election, maybe shifted back for Democrats between 2024 and this election, that kind of thing.
- [11:35]
A
What specifically are we going to be looking at in Virginia when it comes to areas of the state or demographics?
- [11:44]
C
Obviously one thing that we will be looking out for is to what degree Northern Virginia sort of continues shifting towards Democrats, if that happens at all. Or maybe, you know, shifts a little bit back towards Republicans like we saw in the last election, though it was one of the few areas that actually, you know, Democrats continue to do well in that are more urban. But obviously a lot of things have happened in Northern Virginia since the last election, including Doge and a government shutdown which affect those areas in particular. And so it'll be interesting to see to what extent those have a particular effect on the election results. I'll also add that there are some precincts in Northern Virginia with a high proportion of Asian American voters, which is actually a demographic group that is, it's relatively small compared to the other demographic groups that we talk about. And so it's often hard to find areas with a particularly high concentration of voters. So if you want to say anything based on, you know, election results of Asian American voters, Virginia is one of the good ones for us to be able to look at. And so that's another thing that, you know, I'll be keeping my eye on.
- [12:37]
B
Yeah, I'd just add to Lenny's point that the government shutdown in particular, which presumably will still be happening when the election takes place, does make it harder to generalize the results in Virginia. And that goes for the House of Delegates races that I mentioned before. Those could be thrown off by the shutdown because of course, Virginia is a state, especially Northern Virginia, is an area that is heavily affected by the federal government. That said, I think I would be looking, I would. If you had gotten asked me this question like maybe two weeks ago, I would have said I'd be at the results within the boundaries of Virginia's like first and second Congressional districts. The first District is a Republican held seat that is normally pretty safe for Republicans, but did move toward Democrats in 2024 to the extent that it might be vulnerable in 2026. And then the 2nd District is a district that has been competitive for a long time, but Virginia looks like it's going to redraw its congressional districts, joining basically every other state under the sun. So TBD what those new maps are going to look like. But yeah, I think I'm personally going to be more interest of the kind of sub surface level patterns in New Jersey rather than in Virginia.
- [13:46]
A
Yeah. And we'll also have the opportunity to maybe make some conclusions about how much scandals matter in the year of My Lord 2025, with Jay Jones and Jason Meyer going head to head in the ag race. Democrat J. Jones's scandal involves sending text messages to a colleague basically promoting violence. And we have seen a significant gap between the sort of top of the ticket in the governor's race and the ag race there. To what extent does that materialize on election night? We'll see. And how close is it? I should say I looked back at call times in 2021 and the governor's race in 2021 was a two point race. So pretty close. And we still got a call at half past midnight on election night.
- [14:29]
C
I will add though that in 2021 we basically saw a uniform shift, which makes the call particularly easy to make. There are ways in which a 2 percentage point difference makes a call harder. So I'll just add like it was, it was an easier sort of call given what we were seeing in 2021.
- [14:45]
A
This could potentially drag on. Yeah, no, true. And also if there is a lot of split ticket voting, maybe it will be harder to project exactly sort of which ballots we'll see split ticket voting on. So maybe, maybe if that's a close race, it'll get dragged.
- [14:58]
C
Now there's one more thing I can add which is maybe a little bit, you know, more in the weeds, but something that I'm looking out for, which is Obviously since the 2020 election, we've been seeing particular partisan differences in how people vote. Democrats are more likely to vote early and Republicans are more likely to vote in person on election day. That difference has sort of evened out a little bit since the 2020 election. It's become sort of more similar. And because Virginia's data is so good on this, it'll be a particularly interesting test case for us to see whether this normalization continues. The normalization, you know, I mean, there's upsides and downsides for election analysts, there's upsides and downsides from a democracy perspective. Whether it's, you know, probably not great if there's a partisan divide in how people vote. And so that's something that we can, you know, we'll be able to take a look at and see whether it continues moving in the direction that I think we should all hope for, which is a sort of evening out.
- [15:47]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really good point. Today's podcast is brought to you by you, the listeners. Without paid subscribers, GD Politics wouldn't be possible. Your support means we can continue making an independent podcast guided by curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. In particular, we can have conversations like the one we're having today. We're quickly approaching the first election day since 2011, when I was a senior in college that I haven't covered from the cocoon of a mainstream newsroom. And I couldn't be more thrilled about it. So first, I want to say thank you for making that possible. And to anyone considering subscribing, head over to GDPolitics.com and join the community. Today you get about twice the number of episodes. You can join the paid subscriber chat where you can pass along questions for us to discuss on the show, and you can connect your personal feed to your favorite podcast players so you get every episode right where you already listen to podcasts. Again, that's gdpolitics. Com. See you there. Okay, so next we're moving on to New Jersey where Polls close at 8pm Nathaniel, how does Jersey do and does it have its act together and counting those votes?
- [16:55]
B
Uh, yeah, it's also, I would say it's a little bit slower than Virginia. Um, but it's still, I think, well within the acceptable range. New Jersey is going to be a really interesting one. I think this is the state to watch on election night, both because the governor's race looks like it is the, the closest of the major races that we are tracking. Uh, I think Democrats are still favored. But as you mentioned, Galen, there are some polls that have indicated a very close race and it would not be like it's well within the normal range of polling error for it to be a, like a, a real nail biter or even a Republican win. Um, even though Micah Sherrill, the Democrat, is, is up of polls. But on a deeper level, let's put.
- [17:35]
A
A finer point on that. So she's currently up by four and a half points and the average polling error in gubernatorial races is five, I believe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So she is. She's just within that average error. Yes.
- [17:49]
B
And I should note, although longtime listeners to this podcast and its predecessor will know that you cannot try to predict polling errors direction in advance, you will always end up with egg on your face. Or at least half the time. The.
- [18:04]
A
Not lately, but sure. Unfortunately not lately. Sure.
- [18:08]
B
But I mean in individual races, you know, we've, we've seen Senate races where polls polling like overestimated Republicans, for instance.
- [18:16]
A
And Also, this is, this is a round of elections where Trump's not on the ballot. And famously during the Trump era elections when he's not on the ballot have actually seen very accurate polling, very accurate polls.
- [18:28]
B
But just to put it out there, in 2021, the last governor's race in New Jersey, it looked like Phil Murphy, the Democrat, was, he was, had a comfortable lead in the poll in the high single digits and it ended up being a very close race. And that, that basically five point polling error in favor of Republicans ended up materializing. So we'll definitely be watching that one closely just to see who wins. But also I'm just very curious about kind of the patterns of support that we see in New Jersey. So as folks might also know at this point, New Jersey shifted the second most of any state between the 2020 and 2024 presidential election. It shifted quite dramatically toward Trump, and Trump or Harris ended up winning the state by only six points. And that was due in large part among voters of color, in particular Latinos. So you saw in places like Patterson, a very heavily Latino city, Jersey City, these more urban areas of New Jersey really, really move toward Trump by, by massive, like double digit margins. And I'm really curious to see if that pattern holds in the gubernatorial race, which of course would suggest that maybe this is more durable shift versus maybe something that was specific to Trump or specific to the conditions in 2024. So basically, when everything is said and done, I'm going to be looking at the precinct map, or at least the county map of New J, comparing it to both 2024 presidential and 2020 presidential results and seeing which one kind of might be more similar to the state going forward.
- [19:49]
A
Yeah. All right, Lenny, what kind of data do we have in New Jersey? I got an inkling that it's not as bright of a picture as it is in Virginia.
- [19:57]
C
Yeah, it is a little unfortunate because I totally agree with Nathaniel that it is in some ways the more interesting race to watch. I mean, in many ways the more interesting race to watch than the Virginia one, partially because it's closer and partially because it'll tell us a lot more about the state of the electorate and what it might tell us for future elections. In New Jersey, we get election results by town township. That being said, we don't really get those in one place that we can just sort of take a look at on election night. They are sort of delivered to us by the counties themselves. And so we're not going to be able to take a look at sort of all town results simultaneously and compare them to previous results. We will be doing that with county results. That being said, for a state that has, you know, a lot of people living in it, New Jersey has 21 counties. And you know, those are very big counties. Those are very big. You know, there's some very big counties. In particular, the ones that are sort of close to New York City are, have a lot of people living in them. It'll take a while until those are fully reported and it makes the, you know, granular analysis of demographic groups that make up a sort of small proportion of those people, like, quite difficult. So, you know, obviously we'll be doing a little bit of that. Like Nathaniel said, we'll be comparing to the 2020 election, 2024 election, 2021 election to the degree that we think that's all that is interesting. I do also think though that we'll be taking a look at particular towns that we know are interesting and are sort of useful indicators of what we're trying to look at. Nathaniel mentioned a few, then there's obviously you talked about this in a podcast earlier this week, but I'm going to be taking a look at some of the Jewish towns that's sort of also close to New York City, Orthodox towns around there and to see what, but you know, whether those are also continuing to swing towards Republicans, whether that holds. And so we'll be taking a look at those towns and you know, we'll be able to say things on what we see there, but we're not going to be able to take a sort of more general approach and take a step back and you know, compare them all against previous results, unfortunately.
- [21:44]
A
Yeah. And I should say when we're talking about how quickly this race might get called, looking back at 2021, it was close. It was a three point race. As Nathaniel mentioned, Phil Murphy did not have end up with the comfortable margin that the polls predicted and it wasn't called until 6:30pm on Nov. 3, which was the day after election day. So if this does come down to the wire, we may not even have a call on election night itself in New Jersey. Just as a heads up there, we won't be keeping the livestream running for 24 hours. You know, I got other things to do on my birthday. Thank you very much. No, I, I, in fact I will be editing our reaction podcast until 3:00 clock in the morning on my birthday. That that is how much I love you guys and how I will be spending the beginning of my 36th year, I guess is how that works. Anything else we want to say about New Jersey before we move to New York City?
- [22:40]
B
The other thing I would say is that I remember New Jersey nowadays. New Jersey counts perfectly on time, but it really struggled during the pandemic. And I actually don't remember the extent to which that was still an issue in 2021. But that may also have had something to do with the delayed call there. I think Generally speaking, a three point race should not take until 24 hours after polls close to call.
- [23:04]
C
Unless you're in California, where it would take three weeks.
- [23:07]
B
That is right, exactly. California is, is not a general case.
- [23:12]
A
Okay, so let's move to New York City or polls close at 9pm Eastern. And we have a cornucopia of different demographic groups by class, race, ethnicity, and even political belief. Some people think of cities as big blue dots. In New York City, a third of New Yorkers are Republicans. And so we will have. And we've got almost what, close to 9 million people in New York City. So you're going to have large populations of people voting in all different ways. Nathaniel, is there any trend in particular amongst all of those that you'll be watching?
- [23:51]
B
You had Michael Lange on the podcast the other day. He's obviously an expert in New York City politics. And if people haven't listened to that episode yet, I'd encourage them to check that out to learn about the many unique corners of New York City. But yeah, in general, it's very likely that Zoran Mamdani is going to win. We'll obviously be watching to see what the exact margin is and whether he over or underperforms expectations. This is a race that I in particular don't think is very generalizable to the nation as a whole, just because of how unique New York is, the fact that it's a Democrat versus an independent essentially in Andrew Cuomo and, you know, lots of unique personalities and scandals there. But I think personally as a non New Yorker, and maybe actually New Yorkers are gonna feel the same way, what I'm looking for coming out of this race is more what happens in the aftermath of it and kind of how the rest of the nation responds, if at all, to Zoran Mamdani's mayoralty. You know, whether he ends up being kind of taking the Michelle Wu path in Boston of being a, a popular progressive mayor, or whether he goes down Brendan Johnson's path in Chicago of really the bed. I think those are really interesting questions going forward, but in terms of the, the actual results, well, I'll Let Lenny talk about, you know, what, what data is available. And it, it, it's a, New York is a, it's a place where you do get a lot of rich data.
- [25:12]
A
Yeah. And I think to your point, people are probably sick of hearing about a mayoral race in a city that they don't live in, if they don't live in New York City, which is the majority of people listening to this podcast. But as far as Democratic Party politics are concerned, having such a high profile figure be a Democratic socialist is going to give, provide a lot of talking points heading into, for example, the next Democratic presidential primary. Right. Like if Zoran Mandani the bed that could maybe make it harder for somebody in that political lane to make a bid for the nomination for president in 2028. Really getting ahead of ourselves here. Or if he amazingly well, perhaps it gives that part of the party more credibility amongst voters. And so I think that assuming he does win, right now the average is somewhere around 13 points. But again, there's a lot of variability in the polls ranging from straight up, you know, like a 50% majority win to something much smaller, like low 30s. I mean really a range there. But I think the conversations, like you said, that are going to happen surrounding a likely Zoran Ramdani Meralti are gonna be pretty fascinating and I'm sure will be all very rigorous and evidence based.
- [26:38]
B
No, I'll do. On the point though, about the polling era, I should actually also mention that. Right. Mayoral election. So generally speaking, the, the pattern is that the further down the ballot you go, the more polling error there is. So to your point, you know, there is the potential for some more higher than average polling error in a mayor. Probably not enough to have Cuomo actually win, but this is why they count the votes.
- [27:01]
A
And the reason we have so much polling error in primaries is because it's less difficult to get over the hump of voting for one candidate versus another because they don't belong to different parties. And for a lot of people, Cuomo and Mandani don't belong to different parties.
- [27:14]
B
True.
- [27:15]
A
Because for a lot of voters, you know, Cuomo was the longtime Democratic governor of New York State. And so not just for a lot.
- [27:22]
C
Of voters, he was in fact that.
- [27:24]
A
Well, I mean, yes, I guess for everybody who is legally allowed to vote today, as in over the age of 18, I'm on a US citizen. He was, yes, he was indeed. For all. But Lenny, as we talked about data rigor, what do we got?
- [27:42]
C
Yeah, so New York City makes also a lot of Data available. You know, there we're going to be getting like Virginia, we're going to be getting results by precinct, though they call them election districts in New York City, but they're are effectively precincts. And you know, we have data prepared, we've data prepared going back a number of elections past. We have the 2024 presidential election, the 2020 presidential election, and the 2021 mayoral election to compare against. We also have the primary. You know, I think a lot of, there's a lot of indications to suggest that we may see a little bit of a rerun of the primary. I mean, obviously different setting, higher turnout, all that, but you know, we'd expect neighborhoods to broadly vote similarly and so we'll be able to make that comparison. That being said, you know, New York City does change their precinct boundaries or the election district boundaries relatively regularly. That's not a huge problem for recent elections like 2024 presidential or the primary. There's been a small change since the primary. It's not been huge. But if we want to go back to 2020, you know, we'll have to see on election night exactly how comparable those data sets are. We also have demographic data prepared. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, New York City is incredibly diverse and we'll be able to zone in on, you know, number of different neighborhoods, all the different neighborhoods that we have data for and you know, see how these try, try and infer how different groups voted depending on, you know, what we're seeking for the results. So I think New York City, you know, assuming that everything works in terms of the results coming in on election night and that, you know, the scraper that I will have set up will work at all that I think we'll be able to say a lot about what's happening in New York City.
- [29:02]
A
Are there particular parts of the city that you're going to be focused on on election night?
- [29:08]
C
Yeah, so quite similar to New Jersey, I think I'm going to be looking toward. I mean, I think the big question that I think a lot of us are asking ourselves, people who analyze elections, is to what extent are Republicans able to build on the particular coalition that Trump built for the 2024 election? To what extent is this a Trump phenomenon or to what extent is this sort of a more permanent, I mean, you, you keep on asking us whether something's a realignment or not, but like a more permanent realignment. And obviously, you know, these off off year elections are not the best place to answer that kind of question, but they are one place that we can try and answer that question. And so, you know, we'll be looking at, at places that swung in particular towards Trump between 20 and 2024. Nathaniel made the point that New Jersey was a state that swung the most. There are pockets in New York City and obviously because we have precinct level results, we're able to say a lot about those areas that swung even more than New Jersey did as a whole. And so we'll be able to see whether what the movement is in those places. But obviously the turnout is so low in these, you know, in these off of your elections that the inference we can draw is a weak one at best.
- [30:10]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I want to remind folks for a second that after the 2020 election we were asking the same questions, right? Like will the Latino electorate continue to shift towards Trump and Republicans? And after the 2022 midterm, the analysis was it seems to have stabilized. Right. Looking at the data, Latino voters swung to the right by six points from 16 to 20 and then in 2022. So Democrats didn't really like make up a lot of ground, but that it seemed pretty stable. And I think people maybe read too much into that election because then after 2024 we saw that there was an even bigger swing than there was from 16 to 20. So people who are liable to vote in an off year election like a midterm or an off off year election like a New York City mayoral race, are not your marginal voter, your low propensity voter, the sort of like majority of which seem to have made up.
- [31:09]
B
That significant swing in New Jersey. I'd feel a little bit better about using, about making inferences based on the voting patterns because it is a straightforward D versus R race. And as you mentioned, Galen, this is kind of New York City mayoral race, it's technically a general election, but it's also kind of just like round two of the Democratic primary. And I think that areas maybe, I would absolutely expect those areas that shifted toward Trump to be very pro pro Cuomo. But I don't think that necessarily tells you about whether they'll vote for a Republican in the future because to your point, many of those voters might still see Cuomo as a Democrat.
- [31:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think it will tell us something if they turn out for Zoran Mamdani. Right?
- [31:47]
B
That's true.
- [31:47]
C
That's true in particular because Zoran Mamdani made a particular play towards those voters. I mean, in particular the non white voters who maybe switched to Donald Trump between 2020 and 2024 or decided to stay home. So if we see high turnout and Mandani doing well in those areas, I do think that'll, you know, be interesting. But I totally agree that, you know, window, as always, we have to be very careful with any inferences we draw and in particular here because the comparison is more fraught.
- [32:12]
A
Okay, so next we move. And oh, I will also say this, I don't know that this is the best Benchmark, but in 2021, the New York City mayoral race was called at 9:10pm, ten minutes after the polls closed, but Eric Adams won with a 40 point margin. So that won't be happening this time around. But I don't know it. Depending on how large the margin is, it may not take all that long to call the race. We will see. But let's move on.
- [32:39]
B
We should also note that there's no ranked choice voting in the general election.
- [32:42]
A
Yes. Which not everyone knew because I've talked to people who showed up to the polls expecting to be able to rank Cuomo, Madani and Sliwa, and they were not able to. You gotta pick one. Okay, let's move to California where polls close, as I mentioned, at 11:00pm Eastern. Let's, let's do the reverse this time. Lenny, what kind of data should we expect to have from California on election night?
- [33:05]
C
No, no data at all.
- [33:07]
A
All right, that was easy.
- [33:09]
B
Just a blank page.
- [33:11]
C
Exactly. No, so California obviously has a lot of people living in it, the most people of any state in the United States, but it only has 58 counties. So some of those counties are humongous. I mean, in particular, LA county is bigger than a lot of states, states in the, in the union. And so that means the granularity of the results that we have is particularly bad in California. I mean, they have very small counties also Alpine county, for example. But that just makes things even harder that we have tiny, tiny counties like Alpine county and humongous counties like LA County. So we're going to have to wait a. And then, and then the other aspect is that California, because it is a vote by mail state that allows ballots to come in, you know, if they've been postmarked by election night. But for a long time after election night, it'll take a long time until we have full results. And so drawing any comparisons to previous election results are always very difficult in California. It'll take us a few weeks at least. And so, I mean, I think we're. Depending on the margin here, we're probably going to. I think, I wouldn't be surprised if we do get a call for this on election night, but, you know, the actual comparison on results, I don't think we'll be able to do much of that on election night.
- [34:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, I looked back at a proposition that saw a 60:40 margin in, in 2024 in California, and it was called a little after midnight on election night. So if it, if the polls are accurate and you know, this is like a 60, 40 sort of 60 in favor of 40 against issue proposition, then we may well get a call on election night, even if we can't say anything much deeper about what the patterns look like.
- [34:43]
C
The one, one more thing I will say though here is that when you ask with patterns, I think the pattern we will see is basically the 2024 presidential election result pattern, plus, minus a little bit on the margins. I mean, partisanship is very strong across the state, also across the country, also in California. And so, like, yes, we won't be able to draw the nice scatter plot, you know, showing the 2024 presidential results against the results of the ballot initiative. But like, we could probably all imagine it right now or already whether things are above the line or below the line, like, you know, we kind of know what it'll look like.
- [35:13]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:14]
B
This was a race that folks might remember. I thought, I thought this ballot measure might lose, and it has very much not turned out that way. Galen kind of alluded to the polls, but according to the average that DDHQ is keeping, the ballot measure is leading 57% to 37%, which is obviously a 20 point margin. So basically, yeah, if that kind of carris forward, it would be 60, 40, although, you know, still TBD. But yeah, it, that is, you know, basically the margin by which Kamala Harris carried the state in 2024. And I think that we can. Yeah, I think that essentially the, the path was obvious to, to them winning and they really have been able to nationalize the race by turning it into a referendum on Trump. And it looks like it's going to be successful for that reason. And congrats to Democrats on getting those.
- [35:59]
A
Extra House seats and the redistricting wars continue well beyond Tuesday night as well.
- [36:07]
C
Yep.
- [36:08]
A
Are there any other races that we want to call out? I sort of asked this at the end of a bunch of podcasts recently, but any other races we want to call out that we're going to have our eyes on on Tuesday night as results come in?
- [36:21]
B
I guess I'd just give a shout out to the state Supreme Court retention elections in Pennsylvania. I know that Mary Radcliffe was on the podcast recently and gave a good overview of that. So folks should give that a listen and I'm sure we'll talk about it more on Tuesday with her. But the close at 8pm There for folks who are interested in in that race.
- [36:39]
A
All right, Lenny, there are no other.
- [36:41]
C
Races I care about.
- [36:43]
A
How about, you know, as our European correspondent.
- [36:48]
B
Is Finland holding any elections on Tuesday?
- [36:51]
A
Oh, that would be fun.
- [36:52]
B
Double header.
- [36:53]
A
Let me. I'm going to do this right now. Let's, let's pull out our. Our favorite AI Chatbot.
- [36:59]
B
Claude.
- [37:00]
A
Here we go. I couldn't find any major national level elections scheduled outside the US for Tuesday, November 4th. It's America first and America Only. If you'd like, I can check regional or sub national elections. Yes, please, let's. Yes, yes, please think. I'm always very polite with ChatGPT. I want everyone to know Denmark has.
- [37:20]
C
Four regional elections in November on November 18th. So that's kind of close.
- [37:24]
A
All right, Denmark. Actually I kind of knew that cause I know somebody who's running for city council in Copenhagen. Okay, so sub regional. No, still nothing. Only the United states on Tuesday, November 4th. Although we got municipal elections in Quebec and Canada on November 2, in Yukon on November 3. And then the Kosovo mayoral runoffs on November 9, 2025. And then the Iraq parliamentary elections on November 11. So you know, big. Oh wait. And then the Chile general election on November 16th. Wow.
- [37:58]
C
Kosovo's a. They have a mayor.
- [38:00]
B
I mean, I assume it's like mayoral elections in Kosovo, like for Pristine.
- [38:05]
C
Yeah. The mayor of Pristine is.
- [38:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. Local elections for mayors in Kosovo. Okay. So our friends in Chile, Iraq, Quebec, you will have your nights, but Tuesday night is our night. And with that, are we ready to say goodbye? Any other final thoughts before we take our leap of faith Into Election Day 2025?
- [38:27]
B
Join the live stream on Tuesday night.
- [38:29]
A
Yeah.
- [38:30]
B
GDPolitics.com Pretty fun. If nothing else. It's going to be unpredictable. I don't know what's going to happen.
- [38:38]
A
It'll be. Hopefully it'll be entertaining because we're doing really good analysis. But it could be entertaining because we're doing really bad analysis or just like.
- [38:46]
B
You know, the technical. I've been talking to Galen about the behind the scenes of putting this thing together and it has not been easy. He is doing a lot of work for you guys on his birthday week. Hopefully substack does not crash. We don't take down the entire Internet.
- [39:01]
A
Everyone and their like sister is going to be live streaming on election night. Anyway, Lenny Nathaniel, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [39:07]
C
It's always great to be here.
- [39:08]
B
Thanks Galen. See you soon.
- [39:10]
A
My name is Galen Druke. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and can join the paid subscriber chat to pass along along questions for us to discuss on the show. Also, be a friend of the POD and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.