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- [00:00]
A
Hey there, listeners.
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B
Today's episode is from our live show at the Comedy Cellar on Wednesday night. It was an absolute blast. So I want to say a big thank you to everyone who came out, played games with us, asked questions, laughed along. It really felt like a community. What you're about to hear is a preview. Paid subscribers get access to the full hour and a half long show and the video as well. If you're not already a paid subscriber, this is your moment. We we've got a 20% off discount running right now on annual subscriptions. That means just five bucks a month to get twice the number of episodes, access to live shows like this one, and more. And the discount runs in perpetuity. So as long as you stay subscribed, you'll lock in that five bucks a month rate. To take advantage of that, head over to GDPolitics.com again. That's GDPolitics.com. hope to see you there. All right, here's the show.
- [00:53]
A
Welcome, welcome. Got a great show for you tonight.
- [00:56]
B
Please first hand me.
- [00:57]
A
Welcome to the stage Galen, Drew, Claire, and Nate Silver. Hi, guys. I wanted to talk about hantavirus, but I'm afraid that the last time we. We made jokes about a pandemic together in person. It was our last FiveThirtyEight politics podcast that we ever did together in real life on Super Tuesday of 2020. So I'm afraid of what might happen if we go down that road.
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C
We did shut down the office a day before Disney guidance. I'll have you know, we were totally on top of it.
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A
You were really. Yeah. You were really leadership.
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D
I remember sending slack messages telling people not to eat the communal cheese that had been left out.
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A
That's my Lysol at first. You know, you gotta wipe it down that in the mail. All right, all right, all right. Hello and welcome to tonight's live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. I'm Galen Drook. How's everyone enjoying spring in New York City? Yeah. Yeah. How's everyone? And the Knicks. And the Knicks. And how's everyone enjoying the fact that Zoron just announced he's not raising property taxes? Oh, we got some booze. It sounds like we have some property owners in the audience. Congratulations. That's a big deal. Okay. Okay. There you go. Well, we've got a big show for you this evening, and joining me to do it is New Yorker staff writer Claire Malone. Give Claire a big round of applause. And founder of Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver. Yeah, Nate,
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C
I wooed myself.
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A
Bad karma and Most importantly, we have a sold out crowd at the Village Underground at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Give yourselves a round of applause. Yeah, I think I lost track, but this is the sixth or seventh one of these that we've done and it's a lot of fun for us. Hopefully it's also fun for you. And so we just wanna say a big thank you for coming out and making this all happen. It's been a blast. The first one we did was about a year ago. A year ago? Yeah, a year ago now. And this is also the moment I'm going to take to say if you ended up in the audience tonight expecting a comedy show. This is a live taping of a politics podcast. All jokes that you see on stage tonight are incidental. They are not promised. You are welcome to stay, but just be warned, I'm sure you can get a refund if you came thinking you might see, I don't know, Louis CK or something like that tonight. So on the docket tonight, we're going to kick things off with Hot take hat. We will choose some topics at random, some buzzy topics at random. I'm thinking Trump in China, Deep plain facelifts. Ozempic.
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D
That's right, things like that. Ozempic's not hot anymore.
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Yeah, I know. That's so two years ago. We're thinking gas at 450. We're thinking that Billion Dollar Ballroom. And also the World cup is coming to New York City, actually. Sorry, guys. It's coming through. Yeah. MetLife Stadium, baby. Next we've got election updates. You might have heard that after rulings in the U.S. and Virginia supreme courts, it's looking like Republicans are going to be the net winners of the redistricting wars after all. Maybe Nate will even give us a preview of his midterm forecast. How's it coming? How's it coming along?
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C
You know, I can give you a preview of the World cup forecast.
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A
Yeah, okay. All right, we'll take it. And lastly, we have a brand new game for you this evening which is True or false? Cross tab Diving edition. So, for example, non college educated men are more likely than college educated women to identify as bisexual. Audience true or false? False. I promise the actual ones will be hard. You know, bisexuality hates to see a college educated woman coming. Truly, they've like made it so that there's this like fear of a social contagion. They're like, oh my God, 20% of America is LGBTQ and it's all bisexual, college educated women who date men in Real life. I. Identity erasure. Sorry. So how's that? Shall we dive in?
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D
Yeah, let's do it.
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A
And then, of course, we will have audience questions at the end. So to start, I think we're going to need some audience participation. I have the hot take hat topics in this. I should put GD politics.
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D
Never miss a brand opportunity.
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A
Dad cap. You know, you can't actually get them right now. They're not on sale. But they'll go back on sale, you know, around the midterms. Yeah, the fall. But subscribe, like and subscribe. Okay. What's your name? Rohan. Rohan, would you like to participate? Okay, here you go. Labor rebels against Keir Starmer. Labor rebels against Keir Starmer. Ooh, a really spicy one to begin with.
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D
Are we time limiting these?
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A
Yes.
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D
Okay.
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A
Should we. Okay, let's do it.
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D
Yeah. Yeah.
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C
We thought about bringing yellow cards and red cards for violations, but we're not quite on the world cup moment yet.
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D
But in toto, we all get 90
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A
seconds, so it's 90 seconds. Who wants to start?
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D
I do. My take is that no one gives a shit about the uk. That's my. Okay, I know you have a more nuanced take.
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A
You've got 80 seconds to spare. Nate, would you like to steal?
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C
No, I give a shit. To the extent that, like, it's an interesting comp for the United States, apart from our friends in north Canada, probably the most similar country. Right. And like, it's nice to have a friend who's even more fucked up than you are.
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A
Right.
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C
How many prime ministers is gonna be. I mean, he's not gonna remain. Right. How many prime ministers is gonna be within like a six year span?
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It's gonna be. I mean, they've already had four and four, so it's gonna be five and four.
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D
How actually important is the uk, Nate? Like, if this were Germany, it would be more important.
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Oh, no. Yeah, I'm gonna say it.
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D
If it were a couple other European nations, I think it would be more important.
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When was the last time you heard much about Germany? Germany's, like, declined in impact.
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I like.
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I like Germany, but like, like, France is ascendant relative to Germany. And like, I think culture and other things.
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D
I mean, the UK is a. Is a state that's, like, made itself a little bit of a. Open arms for dirty money. And I think we should treat it with a lot more skepticism than we actually do.
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This is the Irish woman on the
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stage talking Irish American. But yeah, two ethnicities that are working against some. Some British, but look I, I think
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C
the constant tilt against whoever's in charge in the UK is like at least mildly informative for the United States. You know, if we ping pong, I'm still mistake from a friend. If we ping pong back and forth between different parties for five or six elections in a row, it wouldn't shock me. That's what's happened in the even we
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D
need to take too much pride out of Flaxen.
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It needs to be like, okay, I have a. Like, finish your point.
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C
No, but like the fact that like it's. People don't realize that like there's no such thing anymore as like an incumbency advantage really. Right. In a world of perpetually high inflation and perpetual dissatisfaction with the status quo and social media and AI, it's like an incumbency disadvantage, really.
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A
Yeah, I mean, to me it's just kind of Biden 2.0. You look at the issues in the UK right now, it's immigration, cost of living and perceived weak leadership. I mean, it's kind of exactly what happened to the Biden administration. And I think that if Democrats are in this moment talking about how they want to get back into power, they should be considering that post 2020 there has been a significant penalty for being the incumbents, in particular when it feels like the world is out of control and in particular when the cost of living is rising. I think that sort of this idea of we just need to get into power and that's going to solve all of our problems because, you know, the, the far right or whatever will have been defeated is wrong. Because if you want to know why Keir Stromer is imperiled right now, it's because of local elections last week. And the Labour Party in England lost about 1500 local seats and the Reform Party won almost 1500 local seats. And that's a party that has eight members in parliament. Right. And the reform, for those uninitiated, is the sort of right wing nationalist populists in the uk and so I think this idea of we just need to vanquish the opponent and that is sort of our goal in totality is wrong.
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C
Well, but if you know you're not gonna be in power very long, you might as well do as much as you can in the two years that you have.
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Right.
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C
I mean, that's how Biden behaved. It's certainly how Trump has behaved. Right. None of this is terribly popular or durable.
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We're really throwing the 90 second limit to the wind at this point. But I think that that's a great strategy if your underlying argument is not. Democracy is imperiled. If your underlying argument, like Joe Biden's, was that if Republicans win the next election, we may not have a democracy anymore, throwing caution to the wind and legislating like you might never have power again is a pretty crazy thing to do. And it makes your central argument of like, were trying to save democracy totally unbelievable to the masses.
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D
Or you see did that we no longer have a democracy and you're playing by the new rules.
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I mean, perhaps. Although I would.
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D
That's the cynics take. It's like Hakeem Jeffries is in some ways leaning into this by saying, like, we're gonna fight. What did he say? Total warfare? Or like, we're gonna fight the Republican redistricting with total warfare. That's like, you know, not a particular. Neither side has a particularly Democratic ideal, Claire.
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C
It's the game theory, equilibrium.
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Well, I think maybe we get further into this later on in the show, but, like, people will be unsurprised to hear that. For me, it probably means building as broad a coalition as possible and not sort of throwing firebombs. Anyway, Rohan, can we use your help again? Hantavirus Bad is that we got Cheers for hantavirus. Clap for hantavirus. Who has a take against.
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D
Yeah, I am also against. It has been interesting to watch from a media perspective, the way everyone has covered it. I was not freaking out about hantavirus until every media outlet was like, don't freak out about Hantavirus. It's not Covid. And I was like, was this a problem or did we kind of create this mania? And I kind of think we created this mania. It's a pretty. It seems like it's, you know, not that many people are cruising along the remote coast of South America. It's obviously. It's obviously a tragedy. It's weirdly been in the news over the past year because what's his face died of. His wife died of hantavirus in New Mexico.
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Yeah.
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D
Gene Hackman.
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Yeah.
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D
But I wasn't really worried about hantavirus. And then every single media outlet was like, content, content, content. And I kind of think they created a little bit of a panic. It's like how I now think that, like, all weather systems where they're like, it's the. It's.
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A
What is it, like the dump super El Nino.
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Yeah, the dump tornado snowstorm. And it's like, it's all manufactured content to like, make us just worried about a blizzard. And I kind of felt that Way about hantavirus crazy.
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I don't know.
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D
That's my hot take.
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There we go.
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I mean, it seems like we should just probably ban cruises.
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A
Okay. All right, we'll take it.
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C
Rohan, it wasn't even 90 seconds. Galen.
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A
Iran, war stalemate. Iran war, stalemate. Bad for, for or against?
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C
I guess I'm for a stalemate versus outright war. I. I don't know. Look, I'm not a foreign policy take guy. I do think this has been the biggest inflection point in either of Trump's two terms as far as his approval rating goes. Right. Like, he really seems to be crashing through a floor and like, you know, usually you have a decline in a rebound and like every day it like gets. Not every day, but like every two weeks it like declines by another point or something like that. Right. There's a lot of dissent within the Republican Party. Very much. I mean, it's like, it's so canonically fucking stupid. Right? Like never get in like a land war in Asia and never get. Never fucking like.
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A
And never get into an air war in Persia. Yeah.
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C
And the fact that like, J.D. vance is like, openly. No, not openly, but like, in contrast to Kamala Harris. Right. You know, everyone knows that J.D. vance is like, trying to position himself as like, anti Iran war. And the fact that all these Republican influencers. I hate that term. Right.
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D
But there was a really, I mean, interestingly sourced article yesterday in the Times that was basically like, hey, we do not. It was. It was written by like Adam Entus, who covers intelligence, and then Maggie Haberman and I think Jonathan Swan, which indicates intelligence sources and also political sources, maybe J.D. vance, who knows? But it was basically like, actually the Iranians missile capacity is. Has not actually been hurt by the war.
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And to the degree claimed.
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To the degree, yeah. They. They don't have access to three missile launcher sites, they have access to 30. And I found it actually pretty stunning. Like, and it was basically just like. I mean, they didn't use the word lying, but that the administration has really been lying in their public proclamations about the war. And I did feel like it had a little vancy and valence on it. You know, just putting on my sort of like detective hat of who would leak that kind of stuff. It's. I mean, so I guess, yeah, a stalemate is better than what did Trump say on Easter Sunday?
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Annihilate a civilization.
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Correct.
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To me, this is. This has changed this year's politics. Like when Venezuela happened right after we got back from the holidays, it was one of Those things where we're like, whoa, this is a big deal, but will we be talking about this by the midterms? And this is one of those things where it provides Democrats just two big openings. One is the personal finances piece, which we've learned voters care first and foremost. You know, like, if prices are rising faster than wages, which they just started doing last month, you're going to have hell to pay as the incumbent party. And people haven't gotten over the degree to which prices rose over the past five years already. And now we've reversed the trend again into prices rising faster than wages. The other one is like, this is kind of what people hate about politics, which is when we talked about this last time, it was a few days into the war, and Megyn Kelly had sort of launched into the MAGA civil war against Trump and saying that, you know, this is hypocritical. He said that he wasn't gonna do this kind of stuff. And for the marginal voter, for the voter who thinks, like, all politicians are the same, they all sort of feed us a bunch of bullshit while they're campaigning, and then they have the same foreign policy and they just help the rich people and they all go to war. Like, those were the voters that Trump got to turn out for him and involved in politics in 2016 that. That were new for the Republican Party. And he's kind of, with this move, like, flipped them the bird a little bit. Like, I think it's more than anything to the hypocrisy. And I know people are used to, like, calling Trump a hypocrite and whatever, but I think this cuts deeper.
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C
It's like, what is this accomplishing, even for, like, the MAGA coalition in particular? Right? It's like old. Old neocon goals. He explicitly promised, like, gas prices are going to come down, no more Middle Eastern wars. It's just very strange. As, like, an early adopter of Biden, John Bolton's. Well, no, like, as an early adopter,
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D
like, Biden, John Bolton's dream.
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But, like, also, like, I don't know. I don't know if he's, like, losing his command. I don't know if he ever had his command. Right. As, like, an early adopter of, like, Biden was too old, which he was. Right. Like, I do wonder a little bit. Like, you know, one thing that you get when you get older is that you get. It's harder to push back effectively against bad advice. Right. You get really cranky.
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D
Do you find that you get cranky, Claire?
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I'm My fucking peak here. You're talking about the Tom Brady of Cisco Modeling right here,
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all right?
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D
Nate does not eat strawberries or tomatoes.
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Rojo, you're have to break this up for us. When will Nate Silver become a. A better poker player? Oh, no, wait. Rohan came to.
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D
Rohan comes throwing heat.
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The Trump Ballroom. The Trump Ballroom.
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D
I think reprehensible that he turned an assassination attempt into a discourse about the ballroom. And it's bad that private donors are contributing to the ballroom in sort of an explicit pay to play. But like, I'm not against a ballroom.
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B
That's my take.
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A
I'm all for. I'm all for beautification.
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C
Right?
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D
But then is it going to be beautiful? I mean, I mean, I mean, in matters of taste, there's no accounting, but like, let's account for it. He doesn't have good taste. Right. So it's not gonna. I mean, I'm worried about the.
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A
Yeah, I mean, will it be proportionally sized?
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D
But theoretically, what's wrong with the ballroom?
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Nothing.
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D
Nothing.
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And also, there's nothing wrong with making D.C. beautiful. I like, I wish somebody would come to New York and be like, let's
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D
clean this shit up again. Is he making.
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A
Let's make this place beautiful?
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D
Is he making D.C. beautiful? I don't know. Nate, you have to be for. You have to be against the ballroom. Now, are you against the ballroom?
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C
I'm for. It's to have a large event space on the White House grounds. Probably makes sense. Look, I'm against it in the sense that, like, anytime someone talks about the ballroom, I'm like, what the fuck? Aren't there supposed to be important things?
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A
Right.
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C
Aren't you seeing it like fucking democracy? That's why I'm a fucking sports fan. Right. I know that whether the New York Knicks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers or Jerry Pistons is utterly fucking irrelevant to the long term future of civilization, but it's probably like a million times more relevant than the Trump fucking Ballroom. Right? That's why I'm a sports fan. I have hobbies and interests that aren't politics. Thank God.
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A
I do want to say, because we've shared our opinions. Our opinions don't align with Americans on this. They say, no, the ballroom has been 30 points under. It was 30 points underwater when they first broke ground last fall. And the Washington Post, ABC went back to voters after the assassination attempt, and it was still. Exactly.
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D
I mean, there's no reason to build it. Right, Exactly.
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Americans are not convinced. They're not interested.
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C
Easter feels like a dirty little secret about no Fucking normal person cares about the ballroom. Right? Polls over sample on people who are politically engaged and informed. And like when you ask like some complicated, complicated worded question about like some obscure piece of policy. Right. Like polls are like a little bit more opt in than people want to acknowledge.
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A
Okay, so now we're going to go. Audience picks for the final three. We've got Trump goes to China. Applaud if you want us to talk about this smattering.
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D
It's pronounced China.
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A
China. The World cup comes to America.
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D
They seem about the same.
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A
Inflation rises to 3.8% gas at 450. Wow, people, we have a really pro inflation crowd this evening.
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C
I'm telling you, in a month all you're gonna be thinking about is the World cup and subscribing to Silver bulletins World cup forecast. But like we got time. I'm gonna play the slow game here.
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A
So who wants. I think inflation is the. Is the choice.
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B
And that's the end of today's preview. Like I mentioned, the show lasted for about an hour and a half. We did talk about affordability. We also talked about the midterms, the recent gerrymandering cases, and what that all means for the fall and beyond.
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A
We played true or false crosst diving
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B
edition as promised, which, if I do say so myself, was a hit. The audience got to play as well. So who won? Was it Nate? Claire? The wisdom of the crowds. Go to gdpolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and find out. And of course, we also finished with some very smart questions from that crowd. To catch the full episode and the video, head to gdpolitics.com as I mentioned, we've got a 20% off discount running right now on annual subscriptions. That's just five bucks a month and you can lock in that rate as long as you stay subscribed. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com and become a paid subscriber to access twice the number of episodes and more. See you there.