B (1:49)

Series of strikes on Venezuela and captured.

A (1:51)

President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia.

B (1:54)

Flores, and brought them to New York, where Maduro was indicted in 2020 and where Flores was added to an updated indictment.

A (2:01)

In fact, as I record this, the.

B (2:02)

Couple are just 15 minutes away from me at the Metropolitan Detention Center. I'll say. Despite the repeated quips about going to.

A (2:10)

War with Venezuela that I made on.

B (2:11)

This podcast, I did not envision recording our first 2026 episode with Nicolas Maduro.

A (2:17)

As my actual neighbor. So, happy New Year, folks.

B (2:22)

It's an uncertain moment for Venezuela and.

A (2:24)

American policy towards the country.

B (2:27)

President Trump said in his Saturday press conference, quote, we're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.

A (2:36)

End quote.

B (2:37)

Without giving much more detail than that, he suggested that Maduro's Vice President, Delsey Rodriguez, would comply with US Demands under threat of further military action.

A (2:47)

Though Rodriguez subsequently referred to the US.

B (2:49)

Intervention as illegal armed aggression and stated that Maduro remains the president of Venezuela, there are plenty of questions about the legality of Trump's approach to Venezuela, the internal dynamics of the country, and how this compares to past American foreign intervention. We covered a good amount of that in our December 18 episode titled is Venezuela the Next Iraq?

A (3:09)

And I encourage folks to listen to.

B (3:10)

That if they haven't already. Today, we're going to focus on how this news is reverberating across the American political landscape. And in classic fashion, we also have some questionable uses of data that we're going to dissect. So joining me this Sunday afternoon is head of research at 50 plus one, Mary Radcliffe.

A (3:27)

Welcome to the podcast. Happy New Year.

C (3:29)

Happy New Year, Galen. I didn't expect to be back so soon.

A (3:32)

I. Well, you know, duty, duty calls. And managing editor of Vote Beat, Nathaniel Rakic. Welcome to the podcast and Happy New Year.

D (3:40)

Thank you. Happy New Year to both of you.

A (3:42)

So here we are. It's 2026. What a way to end 2025 and begin the new year. And I'll say that part of what I want to do here is, you know, we assess the American political landscape on a regular basis, how voters are reacting, how politicians are reacting. And I think people have probably heard a lot about what is going on in Venezuela and what the potential pitfalls and upsides could be and some of the things thinking of foreign policy and national security experts. But we're at a really interesting moment for American politics, too, because Donald Trump seemed to be something of a shift within the Republican Party away from neoconservative foreign policy thinking. And this is the moment that we find ourselves in. We can debate how involved we will get with Venezuela. And I think a lot of people, including potentially people in Washington, don't know, know quite at this moment. But I do want to talk about this as an American political story as well. And I'm sure we will do future episodes on what happens in Venezuela as we find out. But let's set the stage with some numbers. Those are always comforting, Mary, because at least they seem real. Do we have any surveys since Maduro's capture?

C (4:54)

Yes, I will say, like, generally, the only pollster that's really nimble enough to respond this quickly to breaking News events is YouGov, because they are constantly doing these, like, daily overnight surveys. So they ran a series of questions Saturday and into Sunday about Venezuela. So I'll give you some highlights first, just on Trump's Approval of handling Venezuela. That's the whole question is just do you approve of how Donald Trump is handling Venezuela? They found his approval underwater by 7 points, 39 to 46. Now I will say lucky for us, YouGov economist in their final survey of 2025 did a series of questions on Venezuela. So we have really direct comparisons with the exact same question warning from the same pollster in their final 2025 survey. And well, I get maybe it was their second to last 2025 survey and after the capture. So in that December survey, Trump's approval on Venezuela was also underwater by 18 points. So a slight improvement in his approval rating when it comes to handling Venezuela.

D (6:00)

In which direction? Or like cause the 39 to 46, that's a good number of undecideds. Was it like disapprovers coming onto undecided?

C (6:07)

So in the December survey it was 31 to 49 with 20% undecided. So you do see a bump up in the approval rating from 31 to 39. Interesting. And not too many fewer undecided. Right? There were 20% in December and there's 16% undecided in January. The other thing I would highlight, and I'll have more numbers as we go through this conversation, but the other thing I wanted to highlight is the difference in support for using the military force to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. So they asked exactly that question, do you support or oppose the US Using military force to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in December? Support 22% oppose 52%. So 30 points difference between support and opposition. In the survey conducted after the question wording is very slightly different. It's do you support or oppose the US Using military force to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and bring him and his wife to the US to face trial? So they added that little bit. Now that we know actually what happened in that survey from Saturday and Sunday this weekend. Support 36% opposed 39%. So three points. Yeah. And what's interesting is if you look by party, Republican, Democrat, Independent, all, all three groups shifted toward support between the December survey and the January survey. The GOP shifted the most. So in the December survey, Republican support for using the military to overthrow Venezuela Support was 44%. Opposition 28%. In the January survey, among GOP support, 66% opposed 13. So from 44% support up to 66% post facto. This is the kind of thing you generally expect to see when a president of your own party does a thing that even if prior to them doing that Thing you were like, I don't want them to. Once it's your guy doing the thing, you shift towards support. I do think it's interesting that both Dems and independents also shifted more towards support for this move. I mean, they both opposed it more than they supported it. But after it happened, both Dems and independents also shifted towards support.

D (8:19)

Yeah, that's interesting. You know, to the point about your own party moving the most, I think about the Hunter Biden pardon. I know it's kind of a weird analogy, but before Joe Biden pardoned Hunter, Democrats were saying, no, Biden shouldn't do this. But basically immediately afterward they were like, oh yeah, I approve of that. So I think that they're kind of unreliable narrators in that regard. It is interesting about the other, you know, the independents and the Democrats approving more. I wonder if there was perhaps before the survey some apprehension about, like, how are we going to do this? And like people assuming that it would require, you know, thousands of American troops, like landing on the beach and marching to Caracas. And this obviously turned out to be a fairly kind of like clean cut operation and maybe knowing that people were a little more okay with it. But obviously we don't know where things are going to go from here, which we'll talk about.

C (9:05)

But yeah, I mean, I want to say like Dem support is still really low. Like in the, in the December survey, 5% of Democrats said they would support using military force to overthrow Maduro. In the January survey, it's up to 14. So like, yes, that's a nine point shift and that, that's a, probably a significant number, but it's still 14, right?

A (9:25)

Yeah. I think in terms of looking for a comparison point in public opinion surveys, we might look to the strikes on Iran or even Trump's handling of the Israel Hamas conflict, because before the strikes on Iran, Americans were pretty opposed. And then when it seemed to go sort of fine and that it didn't lead to a wider war or conflict in the region with the US getting involved, support for those strikes went up. And we also saw, you know, I think this is to be expected and this is more the conclusion is of a conflict than the start of a new conflict. But Trump's approval on Israel, Hamas or Israel Gaza gets asked in different ways went up markedly after the ceasefire agreement, I mean, somewhere between 10 and 15 percentage points. And so Americans in some ways, you know, have a general sense of, okay, skepticism about getting involved globally, internationally, especially when it comes to the military. But if things go fine, then they're willing to adjust their views accordingly. I mean, the issue here is that this is the very beginning, this, or at least it seems like the very beginning. Now, we know so little about how this will go that it could be the case that Vice President of Venezuela Delzy Rodriguez takes power after a couple months. The US mostly forgets about it and sort of we send, I don't know, oil executives or whatever to the country along with American officials every so often and try to increase oil production. But otherwise very little changes in Venezuela. I think that's like the least big change path going forward. So let me ask a broader question. What is the goal here?

C (11:08)

Would that we knew.

D (11:11)

So you're asking what's the amer, what's the US's goal here?

A (11:14)

Yeah. And presumably some goals might be more popular than others with the American public. But as we know so far, what is the Trump administration trying to do?

D (11:23)

It's interesting because, Galen, you had your podcast on Venezuela a couple of weeks ago and you mentioned the role that that oil might play and you said something like, you know, oh, like talking about the role of oil in a foreign conflict by an American president feels very kind of like 2006 liberal at the farmer's market. And I would have the same react except for the fact that the President just has said openly like, you know, oh yeah, like, you know, this is great, we're going to be able to send an American oil companies and like get more oil and has basically explicitly said that like, you know, we hope that Delcio Rodriguez, the now acting president of Venezuela, like plays ball with American oil. So I think I probably start there. I mean, obviously the drug issue has also been, you know, that was the justification for bombing all of these boats and that's what the indictment is about and everything like that. I tend to think that the kind of the financial incentives of the oil, plus the fire that Trump has said that means that that's probably more of a, of a factor. There was a funny tweet floating around that was basically like back in my day, you know, people said that they overthrew governments for democratic reasons, but it was really about oil. And now that, you know, they're saying like it's actually about oil or like something like that, you will have the tweet probably all queued up.

A (12:34)

I can read it for you. It's Vass Erik Levitz, who writes, in my day, critics denounced US wars of choice as imperialist schemes to seize foreign oil, while the President insisted they were really attempts to spread democracy. Now critics denounce such wars as attempts to spread democracy, while the President insists they are really imperialist schemes to seize foreign oil.

D (12:55)

Right. So I thought that was kind of funny. But I do think that there is something like you can also very easily imagine Trump, because of his intense hatred of socialism, this actually being high minded and like democratically minded. And I think somebody like Marco Rubio, for instance, might have that aspiration. But I think that the fact that Trump seems okay with Delsey Rodriguez running the show as long as she cooperates on issues like oil, I think that kind of puts the lie to that.

A (13:22)

And he also markedly dismissed during that press conference Maria Machado, the opposition leader who organized the winning coalition against Nicolas Maduro in the 2024 election. Just saying, like, you know, she doesn't have enough support and like there's plenty of analysis you can do.

C (13:38)

Doesn't make any sense. Her movement won handily the last election.

A (13:41)

2 to 1, according to election watchers in the past election. Now, some people will, analysts, national security analysts, et cetera, will say, well, if she doesn't have the support of the military, it doesn't matter because sort of an all out war could start in between different factions of Venezuela, some that remain, you know, loyal to Maduro and some that back the opposition leader or what have you, and that, oh, you know, they're just trying to avoid what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. But nonetheless, supporting Dulcie Rodriguez makes it difficult to say that this is about democracy. And in fact, Donald Trump is not saying that it's about democracy. And he didn't say during his press conference that he was pursuing any kind of democratic reforms in the country and was very hazy about where this might go in terms of eventual transition or elections.

C (14:31)

Yeah, but I mean, we did get some more of that sort of like high minded, we hate socialism type of stuff from Marco Rubio. I mean, I, I watching that press conference, the thing that really impressed on me when Rubio started speaking is the tone he took was so different than everyone else. Everyone else has got like their prepared marks and they're reading what they wanted to say. You know, you've got General Raisin Cain talking about all the different kinds of Fs. They have your F12s and your F18s and all your Fs. And then Marco Rubio gets up and he gives this like impassioned speech. He's off the cuff. He doesn't have remarks, he's just talking about how much he hates Maduro and Castro. So I think that's, I Think you'll, you'll find some of that in the administration, but I don't think it's coming from Trump. On this point about oil, I was going to bring up one public opinion point here from that January survey. I thought this was really, really interesting. So YouGov asked whether people thought US companies should take control of Venezuela's oil fields, and they said, should they? No. 45% say no, 25% say yes. Then they asked, will U.S. companies take control of the oil? And 51% say yes, 12% say no. So American people don't think this should happen, although there is a lot of undecideds in that question. But, like, they're pretty sure it's going to. Anyways.

A (15:57)

I had actually written here this question.

B (16:00)

Would doing this for the sake of.

A (16:02)

Democracy be more or less popular than doing it for the sake of economic gain from oil? Just to lay out sort of some blunt options there.

C (16:11)

I think that depends on the future, unfortunately. Right. Like, if it turns into a complete mess, we've got boots on the ground and American soldiers fighting and dying. I think that's going to be significantly less popular if it's going to only redound to the benefit of US Oil magnates. The thing that I find really surprising, listening to Trump talk is when he's talking about oil, he's not talking about oil companies. He doesn't say that. He says us. He says we. Like, as if the American people as a whole somehow benefit from, like, Exxon getting to do more drilling. I don't understand that. Exactly.

D (16:53)

Maybe he's going to nationalize the oil industry.

A (16:54)

Yeah, like, maybe he's going to do, like, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He plans on taking a stake in U.S. oil companies.

C (17:03)

Well, last week, you guys, guys, pooh, poohed me when I proposed that taking a stake in American chip makers was, like, a significant shift in policy. And you didn't let me put it in the time capsule. And now I'm like, are we going to be taking a stake in, like, Exxon's ventures in Venezuela? I don't know. Maybe.

D (17:19)

I think. I think it's more about him viewing himself as, like, a businessman. And so when he says we, he means, like, me and all of my, like, rich friends. But, sure, your point is taken.

C (17:28)

Yeah, I just, I feel like that's a weird way to try to sell this to the American people. Because if you think about it for five seconds, it's like, oh, no, actually, like, oil guys getting richer does not materially benefit most people.

D (17:39)

Well, I think that he, I don't know, this is getting into like Trump psychology and stuff, but I'll indulge myself for a little bit. I don't think he's the most empathetic person. I just think that he like, is in pretty good touch with like the, the anger and grievance of a lot of Americans. And I, and I think that. So I don't think he's being super strategic in terms of like, you know, using the right pronouns, ha ha ha. But I, I do think that like there is probably also still an element of the MAGA base, America first, like the nationalist thing that does think about American companies interests are in line with my interests as well. It's almost like a rooting for your sports team type of thing. I see you wearing your Steelers jersey, Mary.

C (18:20)

Oh yeah. Anyway, when listeners hear this, they will know the fate of the Steelers post season, but I still live in the blissful before times where anything is possible.

A (18:32)

Yeah, because we're recording a Sunday podcast. We had to make sure for Mary's sake that we recorded after church and before the Steelers game. So a little insight into life with Mary Radcliffe.

D (18:44)

But to make a serious point for a minute, I think that Mary, you as a fan and the owner of the Steelers, your interests are aligned in terms of the Steelers winning, even though in many ways you do not have very much else in common. And so I think that's the connection there.

C (19:00)

Yeah, fair enough.

B (19:03)

Today's podcast is brought to you by you, the listeners. Without paid subscribers, GD Politics wouldn't exist. Your support means that we can continue making an independent podcast that's guided by curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, which I promise will be worth it in this midterm election year. You can also join the paid subscriber chat and connect your personal feed to your favorite podcast player so you get every episode right where you listen to podcasts. Becoming a paid subscriber to GD Politics is a great way to kick off 2026, so go check it out@gdpolitics.com I'll see you there.

A (19:44)

Let me quote Nahal Tusi from Politico to lay out maybe the different paths that this takes, she writes. Does the US Strike a deal on oil, drugs, migrants or more with the remaining regime in Venezuela and leave it in charge, no matter how corrupt and awful it is? Or does it truly bring pressure for it to hold elections and give Venezuelans a valid choice in their future? Someone such as Rubio, who in the past, before joining Trump's team, spoke frequently and eloquently of the need to promote freedom and democracy abroad may push for the latter. Others, such as senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, whose primary focus is deterring migration, could be content to declare the mission is over if what's left of the regime is cooperative with American demands. In that kind of a scenario where there are two different camps sort of pushing for two different things, is it clear from what we know about the movement and the administration which side wins out when they go head to head against each other or which one Americans even want to win out?

D (20:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting question. Right. And I think, you know, we, we talk more often in the electoral context about, you know, parties being coalitions. Right. But I think in the same way parties, and even this specific administration is a coalition of like different types of Republicans on foreign policy. And I think to Mary's point earlier, right, Marco Rubio is more of a Bush style, like neoconservative, is interested in an active role for the US and the US Military abroad for these high minded like democratic ideals. Whereas Trump, I mean, I would have thought that Trump was less interventionist and that's certainly how he ran and he, you know, claimed to be bringing the Republican Party toward a, you know, a non interventionist and America first party. And I think we've interestingly. Right. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who of course is on the outs with the Trump administration in general on pretty much everything nowadays, but she, she came out with a very critical statement. You've seen other Republicans like Thomas Massie, unsurprisingly given his libertarian leanings, being like, you know, this is unconstitutional. I'd be curious if there are any other more maga y Republicans like maybe like a Lauren Boebert, like I actually haven't seen if she had statement on this, but if they maybe feel like this is too interventiony. But anyway, so you have that and then you have like Trump who does seem to be interested in the intervention for its materialist sake. And I, I don't know which one is going to win out, but I think that it is, I think that does create tensions and that can probably, like ideally you would probably want to have a strategy. Your guest on the December 18th podcast also talked about how it seemed like the Venezuela strike boat strikes were more about tactics and they didn't have a coherent strategy to it. And I think ideally you would want to have an admin all on the same page about what our strategy is, what Our motivations and our values are and what we want the end game to be.

C (22:34)

Yeah. The other thing I would say is, I mean, based on the way that Trump talks about this, my suspicion is that he doesn't actually care all that much as long as they get the oil. So, like, if Rodriguez is going to play ball with the. I suspect he's fine with that. So then the question is really just like, how much sway does that, like, Marco Rubio wing have to influence Trump to push for the democracy? Because my suspicion is Trump doesn't care that much about holding a elections as long as he gets those material benefits.

D (23:04)

And a lot of it is up to Rodriguez as well. Right. I mean, we're assuming she is a huge wild card in this situation. You know, she has said publicly, you know, this was an illegal, you know, excursion, and she's been very defiant, but some of the reporting has been that kind of through, like, back channels, that the Trump administration feels like she's gonna be a more cooperative leader than Maduro was in terms of getting the oil. And, like, we don't know which of those is true. And, like, if she is defiant, there could be a second military incursion as Trump has threatened, and we could be left actually militarily occupying Venezuela, and it would become more of, like, an Iraq situation. And that maybe there's an opportunity for the Rubio wing to be like, all right, let's commit to this and set up a new democracy in Venezuela. But I don't think that would be popular. To your point, Caitlin.

A (23:47)

I mean, to that point or to that end, how popular is American foreign intervention today?

C (23:54)

Going back to the YouGov poll, they asked this really interesting question about whether or not Americans thought that US Military intervention would improve or worsen the situation in Venezuela. Now, with respect to Venezuela, voters were pretty. Or Americans were pretty split. 34% said they thought it would improve the situation. 35% said they they thought it would worsen the situation. Everyone else, and this is after it's happened. This is after it's happened. Everyone else is either neither improving or worsened or don't know. But then they also asked this really interesting question about whether, more generally, US Military intervention improves or worsens the situation in the country where it occurs. Like, so more drawing on history rather than the current situation. And Americans are much, much more pessimistic when they look back at history. So 29% said military invention generally improves the situation in the country where it occurs. 37% said it would worsen it. So as of Right now, it seems like Americans are a little more optimistic about the situation in Venezuela than in. Than history might suggest they ought to be based on their own opinion of American history. The other thing that's really interesting, you know, thinking about the current situation, is people literally, like, cannot figure out what is going on here. The. The YouGov survey asked people whether the US is at war with Venezuela, and people simply do not know. 36% said, yes, we are at war. 35% said, no, we're not at war. Like, split right in half there. Everyone else is like, I don't know, maybe like, Americans literally don't know what's going on.

A (25:28)

And respect to people who seemingly flipped a coin while they were on the phone with the pollster or in this case, taking an online survey, because if.

B (25:34)

You were like, Galen, gun to your.

A (25:35)

Head, are we at war with Venezuela? I'd be like, I don't flip a coin.

C (25:41)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's. I mean, at least at this point, Americans are a little more optimistic about improving conditions on the ground for Venezuelans than they have been based on past military interventions. But we'll see how that goes. I mean, there's many ways that this could turn into a mess.

A (25:59)

Nathaniel, I know you also looked at some polling from past interventions.

D (26:05)

Yeah. And I was trying to think about, you know, obviously what the domestic political implications of this would be, and specifically on Trump's approval rating. And I looked back at some kind of similar analogous interventions. So I. I looked at the Panama invasion in 1989 under George Bush. I looked at the Haiti invasion under Bill Clinton in 1994. And then, of course, I looked at Iraq under George W. Bush. And, you know, I think all of the points about, you know, a prolonged, you know, involvement that, you know, wastes American blood and treasure, I think would be unpopular. But in the immediate aftermath of those invasions, the President's approval rating went up in all three cases. Now, obviously, there could be other things going on, but, for instance, instance, George Bush's in 1989 went up from 71% on the daily invasion to 78% about a month later.

C (26:59)

Imagine a world.

D (27:01)

Yeah, this is a very different time. Bill Clinton's approval rating went from 41% to 47%, although it should be noted, this was, like, right before the 1994 midterm. So there was probably a lot of stuff going on. And of course, the Democrats ended up up losing that midterm. Pretty handily. So I'm not sure exactly what we should take out of that. And Then there was a pretty decent sized rally around the flag effect for George W. Bush after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was at 58% approval on the day of the invasion, but a month later he was up to 71%. So I wouldn't be shocked to see some kind of improvement in Trump's approval numbers based on this. Obviously, I think approval readings are a lot more static than they were back in those three instances, just because of partisanship. But even a movement of like a point or two, I think would be notable and you could possibly attribute to this. But again, I think the, the real question is the long term implications. And, you know, if we're still talking about this in several months when, for instance, Americans are going to the polls.

A (28:06)

I do want to bring in another element here, which is the Monroe Doctrine element, which, which Trump cited explicitly during that press conference, which is, yes, he's talking about the oil right now, but he also just seems to want sort of influence or control over the entire Western hemisphere for that sake. In and of itself. You know, we can maybe, if we really want to get to it, we can talk about the polling on American support for occupying Greenland, Canada and Panama, which we started Trump's first year talking about. But it seems like there's three camps in the Republican Party right now, which is the Marjorie Taylor Greene camp, which you just mentioned, and I'll, I'll read from her statement. She said Americans disgust with our own government's never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we were forced to pay for it. And both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going. This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong. So that's the anti interventionist OG America first position from 2016. There's the neoconservatives represented by Marco Rubio, who still believe in the sort of like Team America world police vision that the Bushes oversaw to greater and lesser success, largely Bush Sr. To more success and largely Bush Jr. To less success. And then there is like the Stephen Miller Monroe Doctrine part of the party, which is like, we just want to win, basically, and we want to have the most influence and the most power, especially close to home, but across the board. And we don't really care about, like, democracy or spreading American values per se. We have a more Machiavellian view of how the international order should function. And America has a really strong military, we might as well use it kind of thing. If you had asked me which side wins I don't know, like a few months ago, especially a few years ago, I would have said the part of the party that Marjorie Taylor Greene is representing now, I'm not so sure. Like Trump and Rubio both seem to be suggesting that Cuba and Iran could be next. You have Stephen Miller's wife. You know, again, this, it's like silly that maybe it's silly that I'm even talking about this, but, like posting a map of Greenland with the American flag overlaid on Greenland, saying soon, exclamation point. In addition, you had Trump speaking on Fox News saying, quote, something will have to be done about Mexico and that American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. He also, for what it's worth, during that press conference said that the Colombian president should, quote, watch his ass. So, like, this brings us back to 19th century stuff. You know, like we all kind of work off the Iraq war to make comparisons, but this brings us to a totally different century. Maybe you can work off of deposing dictators in south america in the 20th century if you'd like, in Panama, what have you. But is a paradigm shift towards a more Machiavellian Monroe Doctrine style foreign policy popular with much of America?

C (31:31)

Mary, I don't have like polling that's getting at exactly this yet. I bet by next week I will. But I did find one from February. So shortly after Trump, Trump started his term and he was talking a lot about Greenland and Panama and Canada and potentially expanding US territory. So this is a survey from YouGov in early February of 2025 that asked whether people thought the US should seek to expand its territory. So first of all, overall, no, they don't. Right. Like 48% said, no, we should not seek to expand the territory. And then they.

A (32:12)

How many people said yes?

C (32:13)

Oh, among those who said yes.

B (32:15)

Yes.

C (32:15)

They then asked them a follow up question. So how many said yes was 37%. And the follow up question was, should the US expand its territory if it requires the use of force? Right. So that's 37% overall said yes, but only 4% said yes if it involves the use of force.

A (32:34)

So what was, what are, what are the situations in which we expand our territory not using force?

D (32:40)

I mean, we buy Greenland. That's what we were talking about.

A (32:43)

Oh, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. I know it's Louisiana Purchase style stuff.

C (32:48)

And there's like something in, like a movement in Alberta where some Albertans want Alberta to become a US State. So there you could imagine a universe where like Alberta votes to become a US State. And somehow that works.

D (33:00)

Like, could we imagine that universe? I don't think I could.

C (33:04)

I'm just saying, like, there are ways territory could expand without the use of military.

A (33:10)

All of our imaginations need to get a lot bigger, a lot more far fetched.

D (33:14)

Yeah.

C (33:15)

But anyway, so only 4% said that they would want to see the use of military force to expand U.S. territory. And I suspect it might be a little bit higher to see the use of military force to like do what are we doing policing our neighbors. But I think overall, like, they're at least as close as I can get to this idea of the Monroe Doctrine. It looks like not much support, especially if it's going to rely on heavy use of our armed forces.

D (33:43)

Right. I think generally in a situation that is quite unclear, among the clearer things to me is that if this, anything that involves Americans occupying another country, a large military commitment that is going to be unpopular, if it is just this one time strike and Delsey Rodriguez suddenly, you know, does what Trump wants and that's all that comes of this, then it ultimately probably fades into the background. And we're not talking about this in a few weeks. But in terms of, you know, Galen, the three kind of branches of the Republican Party that you were talking about, I think that the most popular, both probably within, I mean, I think there's an element of the Republican base that's going to go along with whatever Trump does. But probably within the Republican base, if you act on their true feelings and among the American public writ large, it is the Marjorie Taylor Greene non interventionist approach.

C (34:43)

Can I throw a little wrench in that?

D (34:46)

Yes, please.

A (34:47)

This is Mary with her like pushing up her glasses being like, well, actually the Monroe Doctrine is quite popular.

C (34:52)

No, no, I just, I want to throw a little wrench in how we think about the buckets of ideology because I think it's maybe different among electeds than among regular folks.

D (35:06)

Yes, yes.

C (35:07)

So one thing I wanted to highlight was this CBS News poll from late November. They asked Republican voters if they identified as MAGA or did not identify as maga. And then they split off the responses based on, among just Republicans, based on their MAGA identification.

A (35:28)

And how big are both groups?

C (35:30)

This survey doesn't quite say, like what percent of Republicans are in each bucket. In similar sorts of surveys from YouGov in the past, we have like roughly 50% say they're MAGA, roughly a third say they're not MAGA, and the rest aren't sure with CBS News they're going to force you to choose an option. They don't allow undecideds in most of their surveys, but that's like, more or less the breakdown you should expect. Anyway, so. So in this survey, they asked about military action in Venezuela. And what was really interesting to me is that among the Republicans that identified as maga, they were much more favorable to military action in Venezuela than those that were not. So MAGA Republicans, 66% favored military action in Venezuela and 34% opposed. But in non MAGA, it was 47% favor, 53% opposed. So the non MAGA opposed intervention and the MAGAs supported it. Now, I think what's really going on here is that, like, when people are calling themselves maga, what they really mean is, I'm a Trump guy.

D (36:30)

Right.

C (36:32)

And so, like, what we hear expressed from Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, we might think of as, like, pundits and analysts as a real, like, America First MAGA type of position, whereas I'm not quite sure that the electorate that thinks of itself as America first and MAGA are. Are on board with that in. In the way that you might expect.

D (36:53)

Right.

A (36:53)

We are.

D (36:55)

We have in previous conversations too. Right. We're starting to get to the point where we're. We as pundits are starting to have to think about MAGA and America first as like, philosophies and not tied to Donald Trump because we are looking toward a future in which Donald Trump is no longer on the political stage, at least in. In holding office, but right. To a lot of voters, it's still just MAGA equals Trump. Trump.

C (37:16)

Yeah.

A (37:16)

Yeah. In many ways, Marjorie Taylor Greene has positioned herself more in an independent mold than a strictly Republican mold even. Right. Like, she's taken.

B (37:28)

She's basically doing what Trump did in.

A (37:30)

2016, which is criticize both parties, say that her own party is being hypocritical and take the more popular position. It's the Trump playbook.

D (37:40)

Right. And I think ideologically, she is the heir. You know, she, like, she's more of an, like an heir to the actual MAGA philosophy, to the extent that there is one, than Trump is right now.

B (37:51)

Okay.

A (37:52)

I want to talk about some good and bad data examples that this whole story has brought up. So the first is from a longtime fave, personal fave, the Pentagon Pizza Report account on X, which posts Google data about how busy locations near the Pentagon are in order to predict military action. This includes influxes at pizza joints and significant drops in activity at a gay bar near the Pentagon. This seemed to align with this summer's Strikes on Iran. We've talked about this before, but at 2:06am Eastern on Saturday, the account posted quote, pizzado Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic. Now, to be clear, explosions were reported in venezuela starting at 1:00am Eastern. So. So the explosion started before the pizza began being ordered. Maybe the Pentagon knows that this is like a thing. So they wait to order their pizza until the exercise has already begun.

D (38:49)

They definitely know this is a thing. If they didn't before, they definitely know now.

A (38:53)

Is this good data, bad data or not data? Does pizza delivery predict or confirm American foreign entanglements?

C (39:05)

Kaylin, you know I don't like this data. No, I think this is not, I want to say not data. The reason I want to say not data is no one ever mentions this pizza tweet except for when it's right.

D (39:20)

Right.

C (39:21)

How many times does pizza tweet tweet? I don't know. No one's paying attention to pizza tweet except for when something actually does happen. And I could. I mean. Nathaniel, you live in Washington D.C. right?

D (39:33)

I do.

C (39:33)

Hey, what time do bars close in Washington D.C. uh, it's all over the place. You don't have like a, A.

D (39:40)

No, it's not like Boston. Boston, everything shut down at 2am but no places. Some places are open late, but it's a. I would say it's still a fairly stodgy town.

C (39:48)

Yeah. Because like most places they little legally have to stop serving alcohol at 2 o' clock in the morning. So if it's closing time for the bars and then it's a Friday of a holiday weekend and people go get pizza after the bars close or get pizza delivered or whatever. Whatever. I'm not surprised by that at all.

D (40:04)

I will say DC is pretty. Biz has been pretty dead lately with everybody being out of town for the holidays. So like I wouldn't think it was not busy. I went out to dinner last night and it was not busy. So I'm not sure that's the reason. I don't know. I.

A (40:16)

It is true that like on December, did anything happen on December 7? On December 7, various pizzerias nearby the Pentagon are reporting high levels of activity as of 3:20pm Eastern.

B (40:27)

I don't know.

A (40:28)

Did we, did we do something on December 7th?

D (40:30)

Is that one of the days that we bombed one of the boats?

C (40:34)

I'm going to look it up.

D (40:35)

I think that this is. I don't think this is necessarily. I don't know, I don't know. What to make of this. I think we talked about this last time and the Washington Post and a couple other people actually tried to look into this and ask intelligence experts, is this a real thing? And apparently there is this history in the past in World War II of monitoring takeout areas and finding secrets, you know, safe rooms near there and things like that. But it seems like it could very easily be coincidence. Obviously in this case the fact that the bombing started at 1 and then the tweet is at 2, like it means it could very well, like, I don't know, it could very well be not real. But I want it to be real in my heart. So isn't that what really matters?

C (41:17)

Nothing happened at the Pentagon on December 7th. What happened on December 7th is it was really, really cold. So people ordered pizza instead of going out.

D (41:27)

Right, Makes sense.

A (41:31)

Mary's always throwing a wrench in our. I was just googling to find out.

C (41:34)

If it was correct on December 7th and it wasn't the news. I'm like what were the news headlines? And it was like Arctic blast.

D (41:42)

It's definitely a noisy signal if it is, if there is any, you know, signal to be found.

A (41:48)

Okay, our second good data, bad data or not data example is maybe a little less funny. So reports or suggestions of insider trading on embedding markets have been spreading across X. Tyson Brody writes, quote, some war related insider trading.

B (42:07)

A brand new account in polymarket only.

A (42:09)

Invested in two questions which are us going to war with Venezuela and Maduro out by January 31st up 13,000 so far was spending thousands on Maduro out at bargain prices as recently as four hours ago. Now it's at at 50%. So and then Joe Pompliano follows up.

B (42:29)

A newly created Poly Market account invested.

A (42:31)

Over $30,000 yesterday in Maduro's exit. The US then took Maduro into custody overnight and the trader profited $400,000 in less than 24 hours. Insider trading is not only allowed on prediction markets, it's encouraged. Is this good data, bad data or not data?

C (42:53)

Nathaniel, I went first on the pizza thing and I'm so mad about the pizza thing, so you get to go be mad about this.

D (43:00)

All right, look, prediction market people will tell you that it's good data because the insider trading is part of the point, right? They believe that if there is somebody who has inside knowledge who then participates in the betting market that pushes the price up and like gives you like tips you off before the rest of the world knows about something. So ironically this happened with the Nobel Peace Prize which was given to Maria Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, where it seemed like somebody like knew in advance that it was gonna go to her and they were betting on. I forget which betting market it was, but the price went up and then it was later revealed to be true. And it seems like the same thing happened in this case. So it seems quite plausible that it was somebody with, you know, insider knowledge who worked in the government or something like that who placed this bet.

A (43:51)

And I'll say, Nathaniel, both the New York Times and Washington Post were apparently tipped off about the military exercise or law enforcement exercise in Venezuela, but declined to publish it before the strikes began to, you know, for the sake of protecting American troops. So the fact that those two news organization knows suggests that there could be a very broad universe of people who could have been making a bet like this.

D (44:20)

Right. And we should mention that that is a widely accepted and long standing practice in American media that when like troops are in danger that they will hold back on information. But you know, what I would say is that to me, prediction markets occupy this strange in between space between representing the conventional wisdom and actually attempting to predict the outcome that they are trying to predict. Right. And I think that as a marker of conventional wisdom there would be usefulness in that. If you gave everybody a dollar and said, hey, bet using this dollar, what you think is going to happen in this thing, then you would actually be like measuring like what people like, you know, actually what conventional wisdom actually is the people who do, who are pro betting markets will tell you that like, oh, it's good when somebody has infinite inside information because it'll move the actual odds toward the real thing if the conventional wisdom is wrong, for instance. But to me that corrupts the conventional wisdom usefulness of the betting markets while also not making well but, but the prediction markets remain an imperfect measure of the actual probability of the thing because like, you know, we do elections, right? If I want to predict an election, I'm going to build a model like we had at 538 that uses polls and like actual data from the elections. I'm not going to like do this indirect weird thing of asking people to bet money on it based know they're what they think is going to happen. I don't trust randos, even, you know, people who may or may not have inside information. But like in this case you had make maybe one person with inside information who knew what the actual correct thing was and then you had the conventional wisdom and they were just kind of like all tied in together and like As a result the like odds on polymarket were probably not actually reflective of anything real. Like it was just this weird in between. So and that's setting aside all the ethical issues with you know, inside trading and you know, betting on politics in general and so, so I guess I would say bad use of data.

A (46:13)

Mary.

D (46:15)

Yeah.

A (46:16)

So longtime as our resident former online politics.

B (46:20)

Better.

C (46:21)

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say longtime listeners know that I used to be involved in prediction markets and no longer am for these exact sorts of ethical reasons. Right. I often have polling data before it is intended to be public because organizations will share that data so that people can prepare their articles and whatever once that data is made public. So for ethical reasons I no longer am involved with any of this stuff. And I think that is good. That's a choice I've made for myself like a rule I have invented for myself because I think that's the right thing to do. I suspect many newsrooms have similar such restrictions on their journalists because they often know information before it is made public.

D (47:03)

I would hope that they are flexible enough to have that though because like, I mean like at 5:38 we, we knew what prediction markets were. I feel like I don't know have.

C (47:11)

A policy at FiveThirtyEight until I insisted we have a policy.

D (47:14)

Exactly. So like older fashioned newsrooms, are they even thinking about this?

C (47:18)

I don't know but when I joined FiveThirtyEight, I mean I mentioned explicitly like this was when I, I left working on prediction markets and I mentioned this in my interview process, like this is where I'm coming from. This is like actually why I know about polling at all. When I started this job and then I, I insisted on developing a policy as the markets grew in popularity. I think there probably should be something done about this with respect to the government because it does not feel right in some sort of like fundamental way. Whether it's good or bad, I don't know in terms of a use of data, but it does not feel right.

A (48:02)

Okay, so we have an immoral use of data which is immoral use of data. And to that end, according to some new reporting, Congressman Richie Torres plans to introduce a bill called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction markets Act of 2026. The description of this bill is that it prohibits federal elected officials, political appointees and executive branch employees from engaging in certain transactions involving prediction market contracts when they either possess material non public information relevant to the transaction or could reasonably attain such information through their official duties. The restriction applies to buying, selling or exchanging prediction market contracts tied to government policy, government action or political outcomes on platforms engaged in interstate commerce.

C (48:49)

Congressman Torres, if you're listening, can you add legislative branch employees to this please?

D (48:56)

Oh, but that would. That would affect them.

A (49:01)

Okay, with that I think we are done for today. Somehow we always manage to do a lot of laughing, even when maybe especially when the news is unexpected. Thank you for laughing along with me today Mary and Nathaniel.

D (49:16)

Thanks Galen.

C (49:16)

Thanks Galen. Go Steelers.

A (49:20)

My name is Galen Drook. Remember to become a subscriber to this.

B (49:22)

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