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- [00:00]
A
I still don't understand why people live in New York City.
- [00:04]
B
I understand why people don't understand why people live in New York City in the sense of like, I would leave. I mean, like I'm not about to leave, but I would leave. I would happily leave. Yeah, there's no great self actualization that comes from living in New York City.
- [00:21]
A
Yeah. Good.
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B
You heard it here first or you heard it here in a chorus of many. On the topic of self actualization in New York City, has anyone read Lena Dunham's memoir Other Than Me?
- [00:34]
A
No. I have no intention of doing that.
- [00:47]
B
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouke. By a slim margin, Virginia voters approved a gerrymander of their congressional map on Tuesday. The new map could result in electing 10 Democrats and just one Republican this fall, replacing the current delegation of six Democrats and five Republicans. We discussed this on Monday in case you want to dig deeper into the issue of gerrymandering this cycle. It's a dramatic development in the mid decade redistricting saga that began with Texas's Republican gerrymander last summer. As things stand now, Democrats could be the net beneficiaries of what was originally an effort led by President Trump. We're going to dig into those results today and we otherwise have a mailbag episode for you. We've been getting lots of great questions in the paid subscriber chat on substackdpolitics.com so a reminder to paid subscribers to take advantage of that. I'll start a new thread there and you can drop in questions whenever you like. We got questions about the California governor's race, including one about how candidate attractiveness shapes elections. One listener wants to know about that poll suggesting the Democratic Party is less popular with Americans. And then ICE and the gop. Also a question about whether MAGA identification has declined amongst Americans. And we got plenty of questions about the midterms, in particular the Senate. We might even dig into the Nebraska Senate race that one listener argues has not been getting enough attention. Here with me to do it all is head of research at 50 plus one, Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary.
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A
Hey Galen. Great to be here.
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B
Great to have you. Also here with us is senior data scientist at the Washington Post, Lenny Brauner. Welcome to the podcast, Lenny.
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C
Thank you so much for having us.
- [02:24]
B
Likewise. It is my pleasure. So we we talked quite a bit about gerrymandering on the Monday podcast, but we now have the actual results in Virginia. Virginians voted yes by about 3 percentage points, which is truly a pretty close race as far as these things go. Lenny, was there anything in those results to dig into other than that gerrymandering isn't particularly popular, but Democrats still somehow convinced Virginians to do it?
- [02:54]
C
Yeah. So on the surface level, the map in Virginia kind of looks like every map in Virginia since around the 2004 election. I mean, you know, we often sort of talk about the fact that American elections are stuck in the. In like 2016 or 2020 or whatever, but in reality, American elections are stuck in 2004. Like, the maps basically coalesced around that time. And we still are looking at most states that haven't really shifted that much since. Obviously, what's happening under the hood has shifted a lot of. But in terms of like, you know, results looking the same, maps looking the same 2004, sort of, I think, the pivotal election, but under that.
- [03:25]
B
And that's because that's when the geographic sort settled a bit. Is that why?
- [03:31]
C
It seems so, yeah. Or at least it moved strongly enough in the direction such that the sorting that's been happening since just hasn't really affected anything on, like, a high level. But my point was actually going to be, like, under the hood, the results actually are a little different, which is that, you know, obviously we would have expected some shift towards no compared to the 2024 election, and that is what we saw. And in fact, most counties did swing towards no. And in fact, you know, if you would have taken only those counties and their swing towards no from the Republican side to now, like, no probably would have won. But a few counties in the. In the sort of north of the state, close to D.C. the D.C. suburbs swung so hard to the yes from Democrats, which are obviously the counties that, you know, have a lot of Democrats in them already and were particularly affected by a lot of the Doge cuts that happened earlier in the Trump second term. Those counties shifted so much from Democrats towards yes that it basically made sure that, you know, yes ended up winning.
- [04:25]
B
Wait, and you said that we would have expected a shift towards no from a baseline of 2024. Are you saying that because just gerrymandering is unpopular, or why would we expect a shift towards no that we did end up seeing in the rest of the state?
- [04:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think sort of without any additional information, we just know that gerrymandering is unpopular. And then we, you know, based on the polls, we saw the exp. Expected difference.
- [04:49]
B
Mary, what did you notice in the results in Virginia?
- [04:52]
A
Well, I just want to shout that the polls did A pretty good job on this, which is, I mean, it's hard to do a good job on an election like this as a pollster because it's really difficult to determine who is actually going to vote in. In these sorts of like, special referenda, the electorate can look really different than a typical election year. So, like shout out polls, not just because an organization I work for State Navigate, which focuses on state government and state legislatures, put out in the race that had yes, winning by five, it's on track to win by a little over three. So. But ours wasn't the only poll. All right, we see NAVIGATE poll that nailed it. The George Mason University poll with Washington Post also did quite well. So I would caution listeners not to take like too, too much away from the, these results in terms of what will happen in November. Right. These kinds of referenda are usually their very own contained thing. You know, think back to when Kansas voted by 30 points to enshrine abort abortion rights into the state constitution. That did not portend anything about the Kansas election to come in 2022 or 2024. So, like, these sorts of special referenda are special referenda. I wouldn't, I wouldn't read too deeply into it, mind you.
- [06:09]
C
I will take this and use this to predict that Democrats are going to win Virginia in the next presidential election.
- [06:15]
B
Well, I mean, what we can take from it is that there's a portion of Virginians that's like mad as hell and will probably turn out at high come this fall. But yeah, I mean, it doesn't pretend anything in the sense that if you were to take a statewide tally of the votes this fall in the 2026 midterms, I would expect Democrats to do much better in the popular vote in Virginia than three points. Right.
- [06:40]
A
Yeah, but I mean, I would have told you, I would have said that three days ago.
- [06:43]
B
Yeah.
- [06:44]
A
Independent of the results of this referendum. Right. Like, I think this referendum itself is not necessarily as much signal as what we saw in 2025, for example, in Virginia.
- [06:55]
B
What it portends more than anything for the midterms is four seats potentially added to Democrats roster. But I think what Democrats are trying to use this election to say is if you're just going to play hardball all the time, we're like, we're finally at the point where when you go low, we'll kick you in the balls or whatever. It's no longer the Michelle Obama's like when they go low, we go high kind of thing. Although I think Republicans would argue that that was never actually the case. But certainly Democrats have played since August of 2025 on the gerrymandering question. And as it stands now, again, we talked about this on Monday. We'll see where Florida goes. But Democrats are the net beneficiaries at this point in time of the mid decade.
- [07:38]
A
Redistricting for 2026. For 2026. I mean, one of the things about this Virginia map that I have my eye on is if we see a redder electorate in 2028 or 2030 because they have this map not just for the 2026 election, like this map could actually put the Democrats in a worse position in a year where we have a significantly redder electorate. So, you know, a dummy, a dummy might say, yeah.
- [08:04]
C
One thing that I'm curious about to see going forward is, you know, based on these results, there are clearly a chunk of Democrats who are unhappy with this move by the Democrats or at least who they voted. They voted no. I mean, if we sort of know the turnout dynamics of these sort of off cycle elections, we know the Democrats are more likely to turn out. That is true in areas that Trump won also. And you know, there's not a single county that Trump won that swung towards. Yes. And so there are obviously Democrats there. Or it is very likely that there are Democrats there who voted no here. And it'll be interesting to see if that changes anything about their relationship with Democratic Party going forward.
- [08:35]
B
Some would argue that it's changed their relationship a little bit with Abigail Spanberger in terms of her running as a pragmatic governor and immediately getting embroiled in a highly partisan debate on a topic gerrymandering that's ultimately not that popular with the broad public.
- [08:53]
A
Yeah. And you, and you can see that in her approval rating. You know, I shouted earlier that we had several polls that did a really good job on this race. And in those polls she's pretty much dead even on approval, which is fairly unusual for a Virginia governor early in their term.
- [09:07]
B
Yeah, we talked about this before and you're like, let's slow our roll. You know, we haven't gotten that many polls looking at Abigail Spanberger's popularity yet. We, of course, we got a lot of polls in the run up to this vote and it looks like that Washington Post poll was. That result was repeated in various other polls. She's not popular.
- [09:25]
A
Yeah, well, about even.
- [09:26]
B
So about even.
- [09:27]
C
Washington Post poll. Not an outlier.
- [09:31]
B
There you go. Okay, let's open up the mailbag. Our first question comes from Hila. Hila. Says, okay, just tell me straight out, can Katie Porter win? I don't care what they stand for. I only want a Democrat to win in California, so I am voting for the one who can win. Plus, Steyer is a rich, arrogant person who I don't want. Okay, Hila. Hila goes on to say after engaging with some other folks in the paid subscriber chat, Hila says, what's wrong with Porter other than she isn't particularly physically attractive? I hate to sound shallow as I'm not affected by her looks, but voters tend toward the better looking candidate. Steyer's style is off putting for regular people like me. There's a lot in that, Hila, but thank you for, you know, asking some of those blunt questions. So let's start with this one. Tell me straight out, can Katie Porter
- [10:24]
A
win the primary or the general?
- [10:28]
B
I think, I think Hela means the general in this instance because I think she's trying to figure out how she wants to vote strategically, but I'm not really sure.
- [10:38]
C
Well, I think she also means the primary because, like, the question is, like, is there any chance that she will become one of the two candidates that moves forward? So I think it's sort of a combined.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:46]
A
Listen, Hila, if Katie Porter is the Democrat who makes it through this primary, she will win the governorship of California, because I anticipate the other candidate will be Steve Hilton, Republican endorsed by Donald Trump. And I find it very unlikely that California will elect a Republican governor in the current political environment. With respect to the primary, I mean, her polling does not seem to look all that great. If you look at the polling in the wake of Swalwell's exit, it looks like the candidates that have gained the most are Javier Becerra, who went from polling at around 4% to double digits and leading in at least one survey. And a little bit of a bump for Tom Steyer, not so much for Katie Porter. I think, honestly, Katie Porter was damaged very early in this race. She had in October of last year some hit pieces about her treatment of her staff came out. Some video of her yelling at a staffer and a reporter. Yeah, exactly. Blowing up on a reporter. I think that early damage, she never really recovered from that. I don't know that it's necessarily about her physical appearance so much as, you know, coming with some baggage.
- [11:58]
C
But, like, the question is slightly different, Right? The question is, if you vote for Katie Porter, does that mean that it's more likely that two Republicans end up winning the primary and therefore Democrats get locked Out. Right. So like, I would say that if you are purely a person who wants to vote strategically on this, like, yeah, you should probably vote for Tom Steyer because that decreases the chances that this happens. But like, I don't know. Strategic voting is stupid. I don't know. Don't vote strategically.
- [12:24]
B
Does anyone want to take a position on whether attractiveness matters in elections?
- [12:29]
C
Oh, I mean, I think the political science is pretty clear there. Yes, it does matter. Candidates that are more attractive generally do slightly better, all else being equal. This is usually the thing.
- [12:39]
A
The thing is, it's so rare that all else is equal.
- [12:42]
C
Oh yeah, no, that's true. It's usually attributed to like the halo effect. I mean, there is some discussion about whether there's a gender difference here, whether like attractive women are actually penalized because they're assigned like more stereotypically feminine traits which maybe hurt them in more male dominated fields like politics. But the evidence for that is actually significantly weaker than the evidence for the fact that just being more attractive helps.
- [13:03]
B
And there's also some literature on whether looking competent, quote unquote, is just as valuable or more valuable than looking attractive. And whatever we say competent looks like is, I guess, pretty socially learned. It can mean all kinds of different things, can probably take on different meanings in different cultures. The literature that I've looked at looks across many different countries, and in all of the different countries that it looks at, there's a benefit to being either attractive or competent for looking. But it also matters most, from what I can tell, in environments where the candidates are not highly differentiated and voters themselves have relatively little information about the election, the candidates themselves. So the minute, you know, the partisanship of the person or the policies that they support or what actions they've taken, what scandals might be associated with them, attractiveness matters a lot less. And actually, I would almost relate this to the way that we analyze politics as pertains to scandals. The penalty for being a scandalous candidate has declined as America has become more polarized because people know which party you belong to and are more inclined, not exclusively inclined, but more inclined to pull the red or blue lever in the voting booth. And so, you know, they won't penalize you for being ugly as much as they might have penalized you 30 years ago because they just want a Democrat or a Republican. So if you've noticed, dear listeners, the politicians have gotten uglier over the past 30 years, it might be because we have gotten more polarized.
- [14:45]
A
Anyway, Hila, what I would say is if you don't Like Tom Steyer or Katie Porter, Javier Becerra is there for you or any of like 30 other Democrats?
- [14:56]
B
Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. All right, we'll have plenty more time to talk about the California governor's race in the weeks and months to come. Next question comes from Nirad, which is, is the current media cycle about Trump's low polling and other challenges being somewhat skewed by wishful thinking among generally left leaning pundits and pollsters? It feels all too familiar. I'm gonna throw this to you first, Mary, because as we were joining this recording session, you were like, there's so many polls coming out about presidential approval. You were like, I'm going to be five minutes late because there's even more polls coming out now. So you have the freshest data into Trump's low polling, as Neerad describes it. Are you questioning it?
- [15:42]
A
Oh, no, it's really, it's really bad for the President here since Sunday. So, uh, it, we're recording on Wednesday. So let's just say this week We've had 13 polls so far. In those 13 polls, he is at an all time low approval rating, including his first term, including post January 6th, he's at an all time low approval rating in six of those polls and he's at a second term low in 11 of those 13 polls. It's like really bad for the president. Um, when you look at his issue approval rating, he's pulling in the low 30s on handling the economy, which voters say is the most important issue they are considering when it comes to choosing a candidate for the midterms. It's like top of voters minds, low 30s is atrocious on that issue. So I don't think that the analysis is being skewed by wishful thinking. The President's numbers are pretty bad. He's blown past what we thought was his floor.
- [16:43]
B
I think that Neerad is maybe thinking back to say 2020, when Trump looked like he was doing poorly and he was unpopular, but he wasn't as unpopular as polls suggested that he was. 2016 is a little bit complicated because there were a lot of people who viewed Trump negatively, but also a lot of people who viewed Hillary negatively and they had to sort of decide between the two. And so you couldn't just figure out who was going to win based on popularity alone. Do you think there's a, there's less of a chance this time around that his unpopularity is being exaggerated?
- [17:22]
A
Yes, for one really key reason. It is not a presidential election year, it's a midterm. Election year. So the electorate looks a little bit different. And you are less likely to see a low propensity, like soft Trump supporter show up in a midterm year than in a presidential year. And it's the same thing for a low propensity Democratic voter. But because we have a Republican in office, you're going to get a little more turnout among Democratic and Democratically inclined voters than you will among republically inclined voters.
- [17:55]
C
I want to take a slight issue with what the framing that you just gave Gillen, which is like, that he ended up being slightly less unpopular than we thought. Like, we're asking about whether a candidate is popular, not whether someone will vote for them. And there's a lot of people who vote for candidates that they don't like and feel that are unpopular with. And so, like, we just have to take the question for what it is, whether he's popular amongst these people and he's not, but that doesn't mean they won't vote for him. And so I think the act, the question in and of itself confuses those two things. Like when, when the question asks, like, oh, you know, feel like I've had this, seen this story before. It's like, Donald Trump has always been quite unpopular. Maybe he's now particularly unpopular, but he's just very good at channeling people to end up voting for him who might not like him.
- [18:34]
B
But hold on, because in 2020, the national polls missed by about 5 percentage points on the question of who are you going to vote for for president? Because you have that benchmark that's like a flag in the ground of how Americans actually feel that election result. Can you look back and say, well, then probably some of the other polling was off, too, in that it was overestimating how negative people felt or how unlikely they were to vote for him.
- [19:04]
A
Yeah, but we don't have that same kind of polling error in midterm years in the Trump era.
- [19:09]
B
No, you're right. I totally agree with that. But as pertains to Lenny's analysis, like, because the polls were wrong on the top of the ballot question, do you think you can infer that the polls were also wrong on the popularity question?
- [19:24]
C
Like, maybe, but it's actually not entirely obvious.
- [19:27]
B
Okay, all right, I'll take it. Let's move on to a question from Justin, who says, I'm curious about speaking of popularity, the Democratic Party's unpopularity at the moment, as of writing this Real Clear Politics has them at net negative 20. And the new York Post ran a headline claiming the party is less popular than both ICE and the gop. Now, I'm not that interested in where the Democrats line up with other institutions, but instead what this unpopularity tells us about what people particularly particularly those inclined to vote Democratic, want from the party. Is there any indication in the data of which voters seem to be driving these negative favorabilities? Is it people on the left who think the party is too centrist or conservative, or is it people in the center who think it's too liberal or left?
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C
I assume Mary took a look at
- [20:13]
A
the cross tabs here.
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B
The million Dollar question
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A
I am going
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B
that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full episode. We chatted for an hour and answered lots of your questions. We got into the weeds on who exactly disapproves of the Democratic Party and what they want from it. Instead, we talked about whether the number of people who identify as MAGA has shrunk, whether we're on track for a record number of congressional retirements, and we dove into the race for the Senate. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. It's 8 bucks a month or 80 bucks a year. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, ensure that we can continue making an independent podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. Free episodes, paid episodes, all in the same place. There's a link in the show notes explaining how. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com, see you there.